This article explores communicative aspects of preparing others, by studying prenatal education classes in which midwives prepare expectant parents for delivery. Data include documentation from classes and interviews with the presenters. This twofold dataset enables investigation into how ideologies of communication figure into the production of discourse. A dominant idea is that discourse can stand in for lived experience in the endeavor to decrease nervousness and fear in the expectant parents. The observation data are therefore analyzed by paying attention to (...) how the expectant parents’ future deliveries are discursively represented. Drawing on the conceptual framework for analyzing anticipatory discourse, the study shows how the midwives largely frame this future as predictable and the mother as highly agentive. When addressing unexpected turbulence, however, the midwives use the opportunity to stress the agency of medical professionals to maintain a representation of the delivery event as generally predictable. (shrink)

A realist view of numbers often rests on the following thesis: statements like ‘The number of moons of Jupiter is four’ are identity statements in which the copula is flanked by singular terms whose semantic function consists in referring to a number (henceforth: Identity). On the basis of Identity the realists argue that the assertive use of such statements commits us to numbers. Recently, some anti-realists have disputed this argument. According to them, Identity is false, and, thus, we may deny (...) that the relevant statements commit us to numbers. The present paper argues that the correct linguistic analysis of the relevant number statements supports the anti-realist view that Identity is false. However, as will further be shown, pace the anti-realist, this analysis does not establish that such statements do not commit us to numbers after all. (shrink)

What exactly is rape? And how is it embedded in society? -/- Hilkje Charlotte Hänel offers a philosophical exploration of the often misrepresented concept of rape in everyday life, systematically mapping out and elucidating this atrocious phenomenon. Hänel proposes a theory of rape as a social practice facilitated by ubiquitous sexist ideologies. Arguing for a normative cluster model for the concept of rape, this timely intervention improves our understanding of lived experiences of sexual violence and social relations within sexist ideologies.

Miranda Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and remedies for this injustice are widely debated. This article adds to the existing debate by arguing that theories of recog- nition can fruitfully contribute to Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and can provide a framework for structural remedy. By pairing Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice with theories of recognition, I bring forward a modest claim and a more radical claim. The first concerns a shift in our vocabulary; recognition theory can give a name (...) to the seriousness of the long-term effects of hermeneutical injustice. The second claim is more radical: thinking of hermeneutical injustice as preventing what I call “self-recogni- tion” provides a structural remedy to the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice. Because hermeneutical injustice is first and foremost a structural injustice, I contend that every virtue theory of hermeneutical justice should be complemented by structural remedies in terms of recognition. Finally, what I argue sheds light on the seriousness of cases of exclusion of and discrimination against women in academia and helps to draw our attention to new ways to combat such problems. (shrink)

As the pre-eminent Enlightenment philosopher, Kant famously calls on all humans to make up their own minds, independently from the constraints imposed on them by others. Kant's focus, however, is on universal human reason, and he tells us little about what makes us individual persons. In this book, Katharina T. Kraus explores Kant's distinctive account of psychological personhood by unfolding how, according to Kant, we come to know ourselves as such persons. Drawing on Kant's Critical works and on his (...) Lectures and Reflections, Kraus develops the first textually comprehensive and systematically coherent account of our capacity for what Kant calls 'inner experience'. The novel view of self-knowledge and self-formation in Kant that she offers addresses present-day issues in philosophy of mind and will be relevant for contemporary philosophical debates. It will be of interest to scholars of the history of philosophy, as well as of philosophy of mind and psychology. (shrink)

Is argumentation essentially adversarial? The concept of a devil's advocate—a cooperative arguer who assumes the role of an opponent for the sake of the argument—serves as a lens to bring into clearer focus the ways that adversarial arguers can be virtuous and adversariality itself can contribute to argumentation's goals. It also shows the different ways arguments can be adversarial and the different ways that argumentation can be said to be "essentially" adversarial.

Intellectual humility, which entails openness to other views and a willingness to listen and engage with them, is crucial for facilitating civil dialogue and progress in debate between opposing sides. In the present research, we tested whether intellectual humility can be reliably detected in discourse and experimentally increased by a prior self-affirmation task. Three-hundred and three participants took part in 116 audio and video-recorded group discussions. Blind to condition, linguists coded participants’ discourse to create an intellectual humility score. As expected, (...) the self-affirmation task increased the coded intellectual humility, as well as participants’ self-rated prosocial affect (e.g., empathy). Unexpectedly, the effect on prosocial affect did not mediate the link between experimental condition and intellectual humility in debate. Self-reported intellectual humility and other personality variables were uncorrelated with expert-coded intellectual humility. Implications of these findings for understanding the social psychological mechanisms underpinning intellectual humility are considered. (shrink)

Testimony of oppression is testimony that something constitutes or contributes to a form of oppression, such as, for example, “The stranger’s comment was sexist.” Testimony of oppression that is given by members of the relevant oppressed group has the potential to play an important role in fostering a shared understanding of oppression. Yet, it is frequently dismissed out of hand. Against the background of a recent debate on moral testimony, this paper discusses the following question: How should privileged hearers approach (...) testimony of oppression if they aim to do so in an ethically and epistemically sound way? Should they defer or try to understand? Both strategies constitute ways of learning from testimony of oppression. However, they differ in important respects and exclude each other. Because testimony of oppression is often based on personal experience, empathizing with the speaker can play an important role in trying to understand testimony of oppression. While the fact that empathy can change your mind and the advantages of understanding over knowledge support trying to understand as the right approach to testimony of oppression, considerations of the “limits of empathy” and the value of deference support deferring. I argue that, on balance, these contrasting arguments allow for a limited defense of the role of empathy in learning from testimony of oppression. We should try to understand testimony of oppression by empathizing with the speaker, but not treat our ability to understand as a condition on accepting a speaker’s claim. (shrink)

Problems arise when applying the current procedural conceptualization of decision-making capacity to paediatric healthcare: Its emphasis on content-neutrality and rational cognition as well as its implicit assumption that capacity is an ability that resides within a person jeopardizes children’s position in decision-making. The purpose of the paper is to challenge this dominant account of capacity and provide an alternative for how capacity should be understood in paediatric care. First, the influence of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget upon the notion of capacity (...) is discussed, followed by an examination of Vygostky’s contextualist view on children’s development, which emphasizes social interactions and learning for decision-making capacity. In drawing parallels between autonomy and capacity, substantive approaches to relational autonomy are presented that underline the importance of the content of a decision. The authors then provide a relational reconceptualization of capacity that leads the focus away from the individual to include important social others such as parents and physicians. Within this new approach, the outcome of adults’ decision-making processes is accepted as a guiding factor for a good decision for the child. If the child makes a choice that is not approved by adults, the new conceptualization emphasizes mutual exchange and engagement by both parties. (shrink)

Purpose: To explain physical activity behavior, social-cognitive theories were most commonly used in the past. Besides conscious processes, the approach of dual processes additionally incorporates non-conscious regulatory processes into physical activity behavior theories. Habits are one of various non-conscious variables that can influence behavior and thus play an important role in terms of behavior change. The aim of this review was to examine the relationship between habit strength and physical activity behavior in longitudinal studies.Methods: According to the PRISMA guidelines, a (...) systematic search was conducted in three databases. Only peer-reviewed articles using a longitudinal study design were included. Both, habit and physical activity were measured at least once, and habit was related to physical activity behavior. Study quality was evaluated by assessment tools of the NHLBI.Results: Of 3.382 identified publications between 2016 and 2019, fifteen studies with different study designs were included. Most studies supported that positive correlations between habit and physical activity exist. Some positive direct and indirect effects of habit on physical activity were detected and only a minority of studies showed the influence of physical activity on habit strength. Studies differentiating between instigation and execution habit found positive correlations and revealed instigation habit as a stronger predictor of physical activity. The quality of studies was rated as reasonable using assessment tools of the NHLBI.Conclusion: This review revealed a bidirectional relationship between habit and physical activity. Whether habit predicts physical activity or vice versa is still unclear. The observation of habit influencing physical activity may be most appropriate in studies fostering physical activity maintenance while the influence of physical activity on habit may be reasonable in experimental studies with physical activity as intervention content to form a habit. Future investigations should differentiate between habit formation and physical activity maintenance studies depending on the research objective. Long-term study designs addressing the complexity of habitual behavior would be beneficial for establishing cue-behavior associations for the formation of habits. Furthermore, studies should differentiate between instigation and execution habit in order to investigate the influence of both variables on physical activity behavior independently. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 6, Page 833-859, July 2022. Two decades ago, Tarana Burke started using the phrase ‘me too’ to release victims of sexual abuse and rape from their shame and to empower girls from minority communities. In 2017, actress Alyssa Milano made the hashtag #MeToo go viral. This article’s concern is with the role of testimonial practices in the context of sexual violence. While many feminists have claimed that the word of those who claim to (...) being sexually violated by others have political and/or epistemic priority, others have failed to recognize the harm and injury of instances of sexual violence that are not yet acknowledged as such and failed to listen to victims from marginalized social groups. In fact, some feminists have attacked #MeToo for mingling accounts of ‘proper’ sexual violence and accounts that are not ‘proper’ experiences of sexual violence. My aim in this article is to show why this critique is problematic and find a philosophically fruitful way to understand the #MeToo-movement as a movement that strives for moral and conceptual progress. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to investigate how sexist ideology distorts our conceptions of sexual violence and the hermeneutical gaps such an ideology yields. I propose that we can understand the problematic issue of hermeneutical gaps about sexual violence with the help of Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice. By distinguishing between hermeneutical injustice and hermeneutical misfire, we can distinguish between the hermeneutical gap and its consequences for the victim of sexual violence and those of the perpetrator of such (...) violence. I then argue that perpetrators are both morally responsible and accountable for their acts, even if they are the result of a hermeneutical misfire. Ultimately, I show that with regard to sexual violence, we should opt for accountability to change the behaviour of the perpetrator and the social structure. Content warning: The paper discusses sexual violence and difficulties conceptualising experiences of such violence. (shrink)

Although moral relativists often appeal to cases of apparent moral disagreement between members of different communities to motivate their view, accounting for these exchanges as evincing genuine disagreements constitutes a challenge to the coherence of moral relativism. While many moral relativists acknowledge this problem, attempts to solve it so far have been wanting. In response, moral relativists either give up the claim that there can be moral disagreement between members of different communities or end up with a view on which (...) these disagreements have no “epistemic significance” because they are always faultless. This paper introduces an alternative strategy: accounting for disagreement in terms of “metalinguistic negotiation”. It argues that this strategy constitutes a better solution to the challenge disagreement poses for moral relativists because it leads to a nuanced understanding of the epistemic significance of moral disagreement between members of different communities. The upshot is a novel account of disagreement for moral relativists that has consequences for how moral relativism should be understood. (shrink)

Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that undermines a target’s confidence in their own cognitive faculties. Different forms of gaslighting can be distinguished according to whether they undermine a target’s confidence in their emotional reactions, perceptions, memory, or reasoning abilities. I focus on ‘emotional gaslighting’, which undermines a target’s confidence in their emotional reactions and corresponding evaluative judgments. While emotional gaslighting rarely occurs in isolation, it is often an important part of an overall gaslighting strategy. This is because emotions can (...) help us to understand the evaluative aspects of our situation and thus put us in a position to protest wrongs, which is a context in which gaslighting frequently occurs. I argue that affective empathy constitutes an important antidote to emotional gaslighting. Affective empathy can lead to endorsement of a target’s emotional reaction as appropriate to their situation and agreement with the corresponding evaluative judgment. When it leads to endorsement, affective empathy can counteract the effects of emotional gaslighting because it reassures a target in their ability to make evaluative judgments based on their emotional reactions. Because of its opposing effects, affective empathy with the victim thus constitutes an important intervention to emotional gaslighting on the part of third parties. (shrink)

Hume's explanation of our tendency to confuse calm passions with reason due to lack of feeling appears to present a tension with his claim that we cannot be mistaken about our own impressions. I argue that the calm/violent distinction cannot be understood in terms of presence/absence of feeling. Rather, for Hume the presence or absence of disruption and disordering of natural and/or customary modes of thought is the key distinction between the calm and violent passions. This reading provides new explanations (...) of our confusion of calm passions with reason, and the potential for calm passions to prevail over violent. (shrink)

A child’s age in comparison to the age of her or his classmates (relative age) has been found to be an influential factor on academic achievement, particularly but not exclusively at the beginning of formal schooling. However, few studies have focused on the generalizability of relative age effects. To close this gap, the present study analyzes the generalizability across students with and without immigrant backgrounds, across three student cohorts that entered school under a changing law of school enrollment, and across (...) classes. To this end, we capitalized on representative large-scale data sets from three student cohorts attending public schools in Berlin, the capital of Germany. We analyzed the data using a multilevel framework. Our results for the overall student sample indicate relative age effects for reading and mathematics in favor of the relatively older students in Grade 2 that become somewhat smaller in size in Grade 3. By Grade 8, relative age effects had vanished in reading and had even reversed in favor of the relatively young in mathematics. Furthermore, relative age effects were not found to be systematically different among students with and without immigrant backgrounds, student cohorts, or across classes. Taken together, these results empirically underscore the broad generalizability of the findings as found for the overall student population and replicate the pattern of findings on relative effects as identified by the majority of previous studies. (shrink)

One night in 2017, ‘Grace’ went on a date with actor Aziz Ansari. She later described the date as “the worst experience with a man I’ve ever had,” and accused him of sexual assault. In a statement, he responded by saying that the sexual activity was completely consensual. While Grace felt pressured, uncomfortable, and violated, he was convinced that the sexual acts were consensual. How is it possible that a man who describes himself as an ally to the feminist cause (...) engages in such unacceptable actions and seems incapable of understanding them for what they are, that is, acts of sexual violence? And how is it possible that a woman who feels uncomfortable is still incapable of resisting further advances? In this paper, I argue that such cases have to be understood within the framework of a ‘sexist ideology,’ that is, a social structure that constrains our actions and epistemic tools of interpretation. What hinders Ansari from understanding the act as sexual violence and what hinders Grace from resisting Ansari is the complex set of interconnected sexist practices which determine who owes what to whom based on different gendered roles. (shrink)

Two decades ago, Tarana Burke started using the phrase ‘me too’ to release victims of sexual abuse and rape from their shame and to empower girls from minority communities. In 2017, actress Alyssa Milano made the hashtag #MeToo go viral. This article’s concern is with the role of testimonial practices in the context of sexual violence. While many feminists have claimed that the word of those who claim to being sexually violated by others have political and/or epistemic priority, others have (...) failed to recognize the harm and injury of instances of sexual violence that are not yet acknowledged as such and failed to listen to victims from marginalized social groups. In fact, some feminists have attacked #MeToo for mingling accounts of ‘proper’ sexual violence and accounts that are not ‘proper’ experiences of sexual violence. My aim in this article is to show why this critique is problematic and find a philosophically fruitful way to understand the #MeToo-movement as a movement that strives for moral and conceptual progress. (shrink)

In the debate on epistemic injustice, it is generally assumed that testimonial injustice as one form of epistemic injustice cannot be committed (fully) deliberately or intentionally because it involves unconscious identity prejudices. Drawing on the case of sexual violence against refugees in European refugee camps, this paper argues that there is a form of testimonial injustice—willful testimonial injustice—that is deliberate. To do so, the paper argues (a) that the hearer intentionally utilizes negative identity prejudices for a particular purpose and (b) (...) that the hearer is aware of the fact that the intentionally used prejudices are in fact prejudices. Furthermore, the paper shows how testimonial injustice relates to recognition failures both in terms of a causal as well as a constitutive claim. In fact, introducing willful testimonial injustice can support the constitutive claim of such a relation that has so far received little attention. Besides arguing for a novel form of testimonial injustice and contributing to the recent debate on the relation between epistemic injustice and recognition failures, this paper is also motivated by the attempt to draw attention to the inhumane conditions for refugees at the border of Europe as well as elsewhere. (shrink)

During gestation, fetomaternal exchange occurs in the villous tree (labyrinth) of the placenta. Development of this structure depends on tightly coordinated cellular processes of branching morphogenesis and differentiation of specialized trophoblast cells. The basal chorionic trophoblast (BCT) cell layer that localizes next to the chorioallantoic interface is of critical importance for labyrinth morphogenesis in rodents. Gcm1‐positive cell clusters within this layer initiate branching morphogenesis thereby guiding allantoic fetal blood vessels towards maternal blood sinuses. Later these cells differentiate and contribute to (...) the syncytiotrophoblast of the fetomaternal barrier. Additional cells within the BCT layer sustain continued morphogenesis, possibly through a repopulating progenitor population. Several mouse mutants highlight the importance of a structurally intact BCT epithelium, and a growing number of studies addresses its patterning and epithelial architecture. Here, we review and discuss emerging concepts in labyrinth development focussing on the biology of the BCT cell layer. (shrink)

Developmental psychology currently faces a deep puzzle: most children before 4 years of age fail elicited-response false-belief tasks, but preverbal infants demonstrate spontaneous false-belief understanding. Two main strategies are available: cultural constructivism and early-belief understanding. The latter view assumes that failure at elicited-response false-belief tasks need not reflect the inability to understand false beliefs. The burden of early-belief understanding is to explain why elicited-response false-belief tasks are so challenging for most children under 4 years of age. The goal of this (...) article is to offer a pragmatic framework whose purpose is to discharge this burden. (shrink)

Katharina D. Giesel befasst sich mit den Fragen, was in den verschiedensten Sozialwissenschaften unter Leitbildern verstanden wird, wie diese Kategorie konzeptionell in Forschungs- und Handlungskonzepte eingebunden wird und inwiefern ...

Social scientists have observed a sharp rise in affective polar­ization in many societies, particularly the United States. Since it is widely agreed that this poses a threat to democracy, finding solutions to this predicament is essential. One prominent proposal to depolarize the electorate holds that citizens need to exercise their capacities for empathy with the political opposition. However, defenders of the empathy response to affective polarization have yet to fully specify the range of mechanisms through which empathy can counteract polarization. (...) Recent proposals focus on empathy’s role in finding common ground and humanizing others. Drawing on the wider empathy literature, we identify several additional ways empathy might counter affective polarization. We show that the resultant account has important implications for the sorts of empathetic engagement with cross-partisans that is likely to reduce polarization. Our aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the potential of different kinds of empathetic engagement to counter polarization as well as the limits of empathy as a response to polarization. (shrink)

In this paper, I use the example of rape myths to argue that certain real-life phenomena compel us to adjust our philosophical methods such that we explicitly endorse feminist commitments and strive for democratic practices in our philosophical thinking. The concept of rape has evolved significantly over the past few decades both in law and common usage. But despite decades of work to dispel rape myths, they persist and interfere with the proper application of the concept. This paper aims to (...) account for this problem and propose a solution. First, I consider three examples that show how rape myths and other problematic schemas can distort our dominant working understanding of phenomena. All three examples are cases of grave injustices to the victims. I suggest that a revisionary project of conceptual amelioration can help counter injustices like these. In a second step, I argue that problematic schemas (such as rape myths) not only distort our working understanding or the accurate application of an existing concept, but can furthermore interfere with our philosophical analyses—even in cases of amelioration. As a solution, taking clues from theories of epistemologies of ignorance, I propose a more democratic and progressive method for engaging in conceptual amelioration. (shrink)

Many legal, social, and medical theorists and practitioners, as well as lay people, seem to be concerned with the harmfulness of discriminative practices. However, the philosophical literature on the moral wrongness of discrimination, with a few exceptions, does not focus on harm. In this paper, I examine, and improve, a recent account of wrongful discrimination, which divides into a definition of group discrimination, and a characterisation of its moral wrong-making feature in terms of harm. The resulting account analyses the wrongness (...) of discrimination in terms of intrapersonal comparisons of the discriminatee’s actual, and relevantly counterfactual, well-being levels. I show that the account faces problems from counterfactuals, which can be traced back specifically to the orthodox - comparative, counterfactual, welfarist - concept of harm. I argue that non-counterfactual and non-comparative harm concepts face problems of their own, and don’t fit easily with our best understanding of discrimination; hence they are unsuitable to replace the orthodox concept here. I then propose a non-orthodox - comparative, counterfactual, hybrid - concept of harm, which relies on counterfactual comparisons of ways of being treated. I suggest how such a concept can help us handle the problems from counterfactuals, at least for my account of discrimination. I also show that there are similar proposals in other harm-related debates. An upshot of the paper is thus to corroborate the case for a non-orthodox, hybrid concept of harm, which seems better able to fulfil its functional roles in a variety of contexts. (shrink)

A powerful objection against moral conventionalism says that it gives the wrong reasons for individual rights and duties. The reason why I must not break my promise to you, for example, should lie in the damage to you—rather than to the practice of promising or to all other participants in that practice. Common targets of this objection include the theories of Hobbes, Gauthier, Hooker, Binmore, and Rawls. I argue that the conventionalism of these theories is superficial; genuinely conventionalist theories are (...) not vulnerable to the objection; and genuine moral conventionalism is independently plausible. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that ‘good care’ in residential nursing homes is enacted through different care practices that are either inspired by a ‘professional logic of care’ that aims for justice and non-maleficence in the professional treatment of residents, or by a ‘relational logic of care’, which attends to the relational quality and the meaning of interpersonal connectedness in people’s lives. Rather than favoring one care logic over the other, this paper indicates how important aspects of care are constantly (...) negotiated between different care practices. Based on the intricate everyday negotiations observed during an ethnographic field study at an elderly nursing home in Germany, the paper puts forth the argument that care is always a matter of tinkering with different, sometimes competing ‘goods’. This tinkering process, which unfolds through ‘intuitive deliberation’, ‘situated assessment’ and ‘affective juggling’ is then theorized along the conceptualization of a ‘practical ethics of care’: an ethics which makes no a priori judgments of what may be considered as good or bad care, but instead calls for momentary judgments that are pliable across changing situations. (shrink)

Arguers sometimes cite a decision made in an earlier situation as a reason for making the equivalent decision in a later situation. I argue that there are two kinds of “case-to-case arguments”. First, there are arguments by precedent, which cite the mere existence of the past decision as a reason to decide in the same way again now, independent of the past decision’s merits. Second, there are case-to-case arguments from parralel reasoning which presuppose that the past decision was justified and (...) are used to show that an equivalent present decision would also be justified. Both arguments are a type of argument by analogy. They differ in their structures and conditions of cogency, even though they often look the same in presentation. Their similar appearance poses a risk of miss-evaluation and fallacious use. Therefore a clearly theorized distinction is important. (shrink)

When evaluating the arguer instead of the argument, we soon find ourselves confronted with a puzzling situation: what seems to be a virtue in one argumentative situation could very well be called a vice in another. This paper will present the idea that there are in fact two sets of virtues an arguer has to master—and with them four sometimes very different roles.

If circumstances were always simple and all arguers were always exclusively concerned with cognitive improvement, arguments would probably always be cooperative. However, we have other goals and there are other arguers, so in practice the default seems to be adversarial argumentation. We naturally inhabit the heuristically helpful but cooperation-inhibiting roles of proponents and opponents. We can, however, opt for more cooperative roles. The resources of virtue argumentation theory are used to explain when proactive cooperation is permissible, advisable, and even mandatory (...) – and also when it is not. (shrink)

This paper draws some bold conclusions from modest premises. My topic is an old one, the Neohumean view of practical rationality. First, I show that this view consists of two independent claims, instrumentalism and subjectivism. Most critics run these together. Instrumentalism is entailed by many theories beyond Neohumeanism, viz. by any theory that says rational actions maximize something. Second, I give a new argument against instrumentalism, using simple counterexamples. This argument systematically undermines consequentialism and rational choice theory, I show, using (...) detailed examples of their many social science applications. There is no obvious fix. (shrink)

Summary In this contribution, I discuss the relevance of epistemological models for psychotherapy. Despite its importance epistemology is seldom explicitly dealt with in the psychotherapeutic landscape. Based on the presentation of “Critical Realism (CR),” the epistemological position of Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy (GTP), I intend to show to which extent this explanatory model supports a differentiated understanding of problems between human beings, arising from the differences in experiencing “reality.” The presentation deals explicitly with some conclusions that can be drawn from the (...) CR model for practical psychotherapeutic work. In particular, the aspects of basic therapeutic attitude, therapeutic relationship, and praxeology are highlighted. (shrink)

Bioethicists tend to focus on the individual as the relevant moral subject. Yet, in highly complex and socially differentiated healthcare systems a number of social groups, each committed to a common cause, are involved in medical decisions and sometimes even try to influence bioethical discourses according to their own agenda. We argue that the significance of these collective actors is unjustifiably neglected in bioethics. The growing influence of collective actors in the fields of biopolitics and bioethics leads us to pursue (...) the question as to how collective moral claims can be characterized and justified. We pay particular attention to elaborating the circumstances under which collective actors can claim ‘collective agency.’ Specifically, we develop four normative-practical criteria for collective agency in order to determine the conditions that must be given to reasonably speak of ‘collective autonomy’. For this purpose, we analyze patient organizations and families, which represent two quite different kinds of groups and can both be conceived as collective actors of high relevance for bioethical practice. Finally, we discuss some practical implications and explain why the existence of a shared practice of trust is of immediate normative relevance in this respect. (shrink)