As someone diagnosed with severe chronic mental illness early in my adolescence, I have spent over half of my life feeling out of step with the rest of the world due to hospitalizations, treatment programs, and the disruptions caused by anxiety, anorexia, depression, and obsessive–compulsive disorder. The effect of my mental health conditions compounded by these treatment environments means I often feel that I experience time passing differently, which results in sensations of removal and isolation from those around me. The (...) global shutdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic seemed a way for normative bodies to experience the passing of time the way I always have. In this paper, I extend Dr. Sara Wasson’s analysis of the ways in which chronic pain resists narrative coherence to my own temporal experience of chronic mental illness, specifically my embodied experience of the pandemic. I use that embodied experience as a case study for examining how the reciprocal nature of time and narrativity, as outlined by Dr. Paul Ricoeur, can create isolation for those struggling with their temporality due to chronic mental illness. To acknowledge and grapple with the ramifications of discursive and material privilege involved in such situations, I include an analysis of Robert Desjarlais’s 1994 article “Struggling Along: The Possibilities for Experience among the Homeless Mentally Ill,” in which he investigates a similar phenomenon of being outside of structured sequential narrative time in the residents of a Boston shelter for the mentally ill. (shrink)

In the Politics of Black Joy, Lindsey Stewart develops Hurston's contributions to political theory and philosophy of race by introducing the politics of joy as a refusal of neoabolitionism, a political tradition that reduces southern Black life to tragedy or social death.

In Moral Passages, Kathryn Pyne Addelson presents an original moral theory suited for contemporary life and its moral problems. Her basic principle is that knowledge and morality are generated in collective action, and she develops it through a critical examination of theories in philosophy, sociology and women's studies, most of which hide the collective nature and as a result hide the lives and knowledge of many people. At issue are the questions of what morality is, and how moral theories (...) (whether traditional or feminist) are implemented. Addelson takes up a large number of historical cases and contemporary social problems, including teen pregnancy, contraception and abortion, and gay rights. These cases allow her to see how the knowledge and lives of some people are declared deviant or immoral, while those of others appear to show the public consensus. One case she uses throughout the book is Margaret Sanger's early work on birth control with the anarcho-syndicalist movement--a revisionist history that reveals rather than hides the collective nature of morality and knowledge. Addelson shows how the usual individualist philosophies promote theories which hide the authority of the professionals who make them. A collectivist approach, she argues, must show the part professionals play in collective action. Her aim is to allow professional knowledge makers to be morally and intellectually responsible. Based on Addelson's twenty years of work in feminist philosophy and interactionist sociology as well as her long-standing involvement in women's community organization, Moral Passages investigates how morality and knowledge are collectively enacted in today's world. (shrink)

In “Post‐Liberation Feminism,” Ladelle McWhorter raises the question of what practices will be helpful to further feminist goals if we are no longer in a state of domination, but are still oppressed. McWhorter finds resources in Michel Foucault's concept of “practices of freedom” to begin to answer this question. I build upon McWhorter's insight while recalling Angela Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: namely, that sexual love, as conceived in hoodoo and the blues, became a terrain upon which newly emancipated (...) blacks worked out what their newfound freedom meant. In this essay, I consider what practices of freedom would look like within a life‐giving nexus of hoodoo, blues, and sexual love. Not only does the image of the hoodoo woman, prevalent within the blues, emerge through an interaction of race, class, region, gender, sexuality, and spiritualty, but analyzing sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling will help us track how sexual love was transformed into a practice of freedom. I will argue that sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling reveals an important dimension of emancipatory work that both defies categorization as resistance and is crucial to the development of capacities for resistance. (shrink)

How Doctors Think defines the nature and importance of clinical judgment. Although physicians make use of science, this book argues that medicine is not itself a science but rather an interpretive practice that relies on clinical reasoning. A physician looks at the patient's history along with the presenting physical signs and symptoms and juxtaposes these with clinical experience and empirical studies to construct a tentative account of the illness. How Doctors Think is divided into four parts. Part one introduces the (...) concept of medicine as a practice rather than a science; part two discusses the idea of causation; part three delves into the process of forming clinical judgment; and part four considers clinical judgment within the uncertain nature of medicine itself. In How Doctors Think, Montgomery contends that assuming medicine is strictly a science can have adverse side effects, and suggests reducing these by recognizing the vital role of clinical judgment. (shrink)

This article highlights the extent to which finding a job without actively searching sustains workplace sex segregation. We suspect that unsolicited information from job informants that prompts fortuitous job changes is susceptible to bias about gender “fit” and segregates workers. Results from analyses of 1,119 respondents to the 1996 and 1998 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth are generally consistent with this expectation. Gender “misfits”—individuals employed in gender-atypical work groups— are more likely to move into gender-typical work groups (...) than neutral ones. Women misfits are more likely to move into male-dominated than neutral work groups without a job search, but they join mostly desegregated occupations and receive lower job rewards than men misfits who change jobs without searching. We conclude that the nonsearch process serves as an important mechanism that sustains sex segregation and workplace inequality. (shrink)

Many critics of the legalization of physician‐assisted death oppose it in part because they fear it will further disadvantage those who are already economically disadvantaged. This argument points to a serious problem of how economic considerations can influence medical decisions, but in the context of PAD, the concern is not borne out. We will provide empirical evidence suggesting that concerns about money influence medical decisions throughout the full course of illness, but at the end of life, financial pressure is much (...) more likely to influence a decision to pursue or reject aggressive life‐extending care than it is to influence a request for PAD. We will also address the question of whether financial pressure as a result of being poor—particularly in the context of an inadequate social safety net—robs people of their autonomy, rendering their informed request and consent invalid. We argue that it does not. We will emphasize the impracticality and injustice of rejecting the role of poverty as a legitimate factor in decision‐making, the irrational distinction between PAD and withdrawal of life‐sustaining care, and the more appropriate focus on the great flaws in the American health care system. (shrink)

In “Post-Liberation Feminism,” Ladelle McWhorter raises the question of what practices will be helpful to further feminist goals if we are no longer in a state of domination, but are still oppressed. McWhorter finds resources in Michel Foucault's concept of “practices of freedom” to begin to answer this question. I build upon McWhorter's insight while recalling Angela Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: namely, that sexual love, as conceived in hoodoo and the blues, became a terrain upon which newly emancipated (...) blacks worked out what their newfound freedom meant. In this essay, I consider what practices of freedom would look like within a life-giving nexus of hoodoo, blues, and sexual love. Not only does the image of the hoodoo woman, prevalent within the blues, emerge through an interaction of race, class, region, gender, sexuality, and spiritualty, but analyzing sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling will help us track how sexual love was transformed into a practice of freedom. I will argue that sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling reveals an important dimension of emancipatory work that both defies categorization as resistance and is crucial to the development of capacities for resistance. (shrink)

Emerging research suggests that an organization’s ability to sustain a competitive advantage is increasingly linked to its successful pursuit of a business strategy that generates mutual benefit where the business is both profitable and functional for the common good. The question remains, however: What are the attributes of decision makers that enable them to realize mutually beneficial outcomes? This dissertation argues that one critical key to solving this question is a better understanding of moral imagination in organizational decision making. To (...) test this hypothesis, a new vignette-based cognitive measure for moral imagination in organizational decision making was created to explore empirically the relationship between moral imagination and mutually beneficial decision making. Overall, findings from 180 respondents supported the hypothesis that individuals, who exercise moral imagination, including the ability for discerning moral issues and developing a range of possible outcomes during the decision-making process, are indeed more likely to generate a mutually beneficial outcome for a situation compared to those who do not exercise moral imagination. Implications and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

abstract It is standardly taken for granted in the literature on the morality of abortion that adoption is almost always an available and morally preferable alternative to abortion — one that does the same thing so far as parenthood is concerned. This assumption pushes proponents of a woman's right to choose into giving arguments that are based almost exclusively around the physicality of pregnancy and childbirth. On the other side of the debate, the assumption that adoption is a real alternative (...) seems to strengthen the contention that a woman who wishes to abort is morally deficient, whatever the status of the foetus: that she is selfish or short‐sighted in her refusal to bear the temporary physical burden of pregnancy. In this article, I will argue that adoption is not a genuine alternative to abortion. It does not ‘do the same thing’, even setting aside the physicality of pregnancy. I will show that on the most successful model of parental obligation — a causal account that formalises the distinction between parent: progenitor, and parent: carer — birth mothers and fathers remain obliged, life‐long, to their birth children even when the child is adopted out. (shrink)

As a result of globalization, the number of people living outside of their countries of origin is on the rise. Among them are children of primary and secondary school age of varying socio-economic backgrounds. This article addresses the education-related challenges that children in such circumstances face. I first identify two principles – an educational adequacy principle and a presumption of responsibility on the part of a host country for meeting children’s educationalneeds – which are widely employed to guide national policy (...) decisions on educational content and the distribution of educational resources. I then discuss a number of problems that students living abroad face which, I argue, policies devised on the basis of these principles either systematically overlook or, in some cases, exacerbate. Finally, I offer two alternative principles – a cosmopolitan revision of the first and a replacement for the second with a focus on collective responsibility – designed to promote education policies better suited to a globalized world which might help to alleviate the barriers to success commonly encountered by children learning abroad. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christology and EthicsLindsey EsbensenChristology and Ethics Edited by F. Leron Shults and Brent Waters Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 231 pp. $28.00.This collection of essays is a welcome venture into the often-neglected relationship between Christology and ethics. The book stresses that the reciprocal relationship between Christology and Christian moral discernment needs greater attention as well as creative reformulation. The essays produce a variety of models of how other (...) disciplines provide the critical and constructive developments that can strengthen the bond between Christology and the Christian moral life. Rather than a definitive resolution to the “problem” of these Christian disciplines, the book is an invitation to further inquiry, an offer to join the conversation.Although the contributors to this anthology present disparate analyses, they share the goal of integrating interdisciplinary developments in the engagement of Christology and ethics. While each author shares similar departure points for these essays, the conclusions are vastly diverse for each contributor. This is in part because the essays draw from a broad range of sources, from the theological to the scientific. One chapter incorporates developments in the field of psychoanalysis in a discussion of the Christian emphasis on participation in the “new creation” through Jesus Christ, who is akin to the psychoanalytic “third” (121). Another chapter applies evolutionary epistemology and evolutionary ethics to a discussion of the ongoing social mediation and cultural reinterpretation of what it means to “do as Jesus did” (178). Underlying all the expositions is an affirmation that ethics and Christology mutually instruct and challenge each other (98). [End Page 211]Despite the integral connection among the essays, some underlying tensions remain. For instance, Brent Waters’s “The Incarnation and the Moral Life” strongly emphasizes the distinction between the civil community and the church, between the City of Man and the City of God (30). The church is the body of Christ that ministers to the world; therefore, “the singular ministry of the baptized engages, evangelizes, and orders the world in the name and under the authority of Jesus Christ” (21). All moral discernment outside of that with Christological foundations falls short of its goal. Conversely, Jan-Olav Henriksen’s “The Surprise of Judgment and Justice” suggests a much more inclusive view of non-Christian (and non-Christological) contributions to ethics in his interpretation of Matthew 25. Using the imago Dei as the springboard for his analysis, the world is envisioned as God’s gift, and the other (the neighbor) is the imago Dei who calls for recognition. Henriksen contends, “Because Christ is the true image of God, all of humanity is related to him, and is in some sense represented in him.... Christ is the face of every other human—as the one who calls us to mercy, compassion, and love” (142). Christian moral action, then, “is not only determined by you, it is determined by them and their calling of you” (141). In this sense, then, the church does not minister to the world, but the world ministers to the church in helping her to recognize the world as God’s gift and to see the image of God in the neighbor.While the emphases of the various proposals in this collection of essays may produce tensions, the strain is actually a positive contribution to the overall project. The anthology seeks to examine the most significant issues in the relationship between Christology and ethics without necessarily providing a conclusive resolution to how these disciplines mutually inform and reinforce each other. This collection of essays begins a conversation and invites further investigation of the various lines of inquiry.As with any anthology, each essay will have a greater or lesser appeal to the reader according to his interests. Nonetheless, this collection of essays is a unique contribution to systematic and moral theology, and it is an indispensable anthology for those pursuing Christology or ethics for their future endeavors. [End Page 212]Lindsey EsbensenUniversity of Notre DameCopyright © 2012 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received encouragement at every step of the way. You on the o...

Constitutivist accounts in metaethics explain the normative standards in a domain by appealing to the constitutive features of its members. The success of these accounts turns on whether they can explain the connection between normative standards and the nature of individuals they authoritatively govern. Many such explanations presuppose that any member of a norm-governed kind must minimally satisfy the norms governing its kind. I call this the Threshold Commitment, and argue that constitutivists should reject it. First, it requires constitutivists to (...) restrict the scope of their explanatory ambitions, because it is not plausibly true of social kinds. Second, despite the frequent reliance on physical artifacts in constitutivists’ illustrations of the Threshold Commitment, it counter-intuitively entails that physical artifacts can cease to exist without being physically destroyed. Third, it misconstrues the normative force of authoritative norms on very defective kind-members because it locates this force not in the norm, but in the threat of non-existence. Fortunately, constitutivism can be decoupled from the Threshold Commitment, and I close by sketching a promising alternative account. (shrink)

There is conflicting experimental evidence about whether the “stakes” or importance of being wrong affect judgments about whether a subject knows a proposition. To date, judgments about stakes effects on knowledge have been investigated using binary paradigms: responses to “low” stakes cases are compared with responses to “high stakes” cases. However, stakes or importance are not binary properties—they are scalar: whether a situation is “high” or “low” stakes is a matter of degree. So far, no experimental work has investigated the (...) scalar nature of stakes effects on knowledge: do stakes effects increase as the stakes get higher? Do stakes effects only appear once a certain threshold of stakes has been crossed? Does the effect plateau at a certain point? To address these questions, we conducted experiments that probe for the scalarity of stakes effects using several experimental approaches. We found evidence of scalar stakes effects using an “evidence seeking” experimental design, but no evidence of scalar effects using a traditional “evidence-fixed” experimental design. In addition, using the evidence-seeking design, we uncovered a large, but previously unnoticed framing effect on whether participants are skeptical about whether someone can know something, no matter how much evidence they have. The rate of skeptical responses and the rate at which participants were willing to attribute “lazy knowledge”—that someone can know something without having to check—were themselves subject to a stakes effect: participants were more skeptical when the stakes were higher, and more prone to attribute lazy knowledge when the stakes were lower. We argue that the novel skeptical stakes effect provides resources to respond to criticisms of the evidence-seeking approach that argue that it does not target knowledge. (shrink)

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has raised deserved concern regarding adverse impacts on parents’ and children’s mental health, regulations like “sheltering-in-place” may have afforded parents novel opportunities to foster positive family connections, thereby bolstering well-being. Using latent profile analysis, we distinguished family thriving during shelter-in-place from other patterns of family functioning, tested potential predictors of family functioning profiles, and examined if family thriving predicted subsequent child adjustment. 449 parents in two-parent U.S. families with children aged 2–18 years completed online surveys assessing (...) parent–child relationship quality, parents’ positive psychological adjustment, children’s emotional well-being, and parenting efficacy and satisfaction as family functioning indicators, financial, marital, parental psychosocial assets, and child predictors of family functioning, and child adjustment. LPA identified four family functioning profiles: Thriving, Managing, Struggling, and Distressed. Thriving families evinced higher scores on all functioning indicators. Logistic regressions revealed that parents in Thriving families reported significantly lower financial anxiety, less dissatisfaction with partner’s help, less child emotionality, and greater use of cognitive reappraisal, as well as more positive child adjustment in Fall 2020. These findings underscore the multidimensional nature of coping and well-being during COVID-19. Utilizing these levers to promote mental health in families languishing during comparable future crises could promote resilience, thereby protecting children’s well-being. (shrink)

Audio features such as inharmonicity, noisiness, and spectral roll-off have been identified as correlates of “noisy” sounds. However, such features are likely involved in the experience of multiple semantic timbre categories of varied meaning and valence. This paper examines the relationships of stimulus properties and audio features with the semantic timbre categories raspy/grainy/rough, harsh/noisy, and airy/breathy. Participants rated a random subset of 52 stimuli from a set of 156 approximately 2-s orchestral instrument sounds representing varied instrument families, registers, and both (...) traditional and extended playing techniques. Stimuli were rated on the three semantic categories of interest, as well as on perceived playing exertion and emotional valence. Correlational analyses demonstrated a strong negative relationship between positive valence and perceived physical exertion. Exploratory linear mixed models revealed significant effects of extended technique and pitch register on valence, the perception of physical exertion, raspy/grainy/rough, and harsh/noisy. Instrument family was significantly related to ratings of airy/breathy. With an updated version of the Timbre Toolbox, we used 44 summary audio features, extracted from the stimuli using spectral and harmonic representations, as input for various models built to predict mean semantic ratings for each sound on the three semantic categories, on perceived exertion, and on valence. Random Forest models predicting semantic ratings from audio features outperformed Partial Least-Squares Regression models, consistent with previous results suggesting that non-linear methods are advantageous in timbre semantic predictions using audio features. Relative Variable Importance measures from the models among the three semantic categories demonstrate that although these related semantic categories are associated in part with overlapping features, they can be differentiated through individual patterns of audio feature relationships. (shrink)

The nature of moral action versus moral judgment has been extensively debated in numerous disciplines. We introduce Virtual Reality (VR) moral paradigms examining the action individuals take in a high emotionally arousing, direct action-focused, moral scenario. In two studies involving qualitatively different populations, we found a greater endorsement of utilitarian responses–killing one in order to save many others–when action was required in moral virtual dilemmas compared to their judgment counterparts. Heart rate in virtual moral dilemmas was significantly increased when compared (...) to both judgment counterparts and control virtual tasks. Our research suggests that moral action may be viewed as an independent construct to moral judgment, with VR methods delivering new prospects for investigating and assessing moral behaviour. (shrink)

In ‘After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?’, Giubilini and Minerva argue that infanticide should be permitted for the same reasons as abortion. In particular, they argue that infanticide should be permitted even for reasons that do not primarily serve the interests (or would-be best interests) of the newborn. They claim that abortion is permissible for reasons that do not primarily serve the interests (or would-be interests) of the fetus because fetuses lack a right to life. They argue that newborns (...) also lack a right to life, and they conclude that therefore, the same reasons that justify abortion can justify infanticide. This conclusion does not follow. The lack of a right to life is not decisive. Furthermore, the justificatory power of a given reason is a function of moral context. Generalisations about reasons across dissimilar moral contexts are invalid. However, a similar conclusion does follow—that fetus-killing and newborn-killing are morally identical in identical moral contexts—but this conclusion is trivial, since fetuses and newborns are never in identical moral contexts. (shrink)

Sometimes form-meaning mappings in language are not arbitrary, but iconic: they depict what they represent. Incorporating iconic elements of language into a compositional semantics faces a number of challenges in formal frameworks as evidenced by the lengthy literature in linguistics and philosophy on quotation/direct speech, which iconically portrays the words of another in the form that they were used. This paper compares the well-studied type of iconicity found with verbs of quotation with another form of iconicity common in sign languages: (...) classifier predicates. I argue that these two types of verbal iconicity can, and should, incorporate their iconic elements in the same way using event modification via the notion of a context dependent demonstration. This unified formal account of quotation and classifier predicates predicts that a language might use the same strategy for conveying both, and I argue that this is the case with role shift in American Sign Language. Role shift is used to report others’ language and thoughts as well as their actions, and recently has been argued to provide evidence in favor of Kaplanian “monstrous” indexical expressions. By reimagining role shift as involving either quotation for language demonstrations or “body classifier” predicates for action demonstrations, the proposed account eliminates one major argument for these monsters coming from sign languages. Throughout this paper, sign languages provide a fruitful perspective for studying quotation and other forms of iconicity in natural language due to their lack of a commonly used writing system which is otherwise often mistaken as primary data instead of speech, the rich existing literature on iconicity within sign language linguistics, and the ability of role shift to overtly mark the scope of a language report. In this view, written language is merely a special case of a more general phenomenon of sign and speech demonstration, which accounts more accurately for natural language data by permitting more strict or loose verbatim interpretations of demonstrations through the context dependent pragmatics. (shrink)

This paper provides an argument for a more socially relevant philosophy of science (SRPOS). Our aims in this paper are to characterize this body of work in philosophy of science, to argue for its importance, and to demonstrate that there are significant opportunities for philosophy of science to engage with and support this type of research. The impetus of this project was a keen sense of missed opportunities for philosophy of science to have a broader social impact. We illustrate various (...) ways in which SRPOS can provide social benefits, as well as benefits to scientific practice and philosophy itself. Also, SRPOS is consistent with some historical and contemporary goals of philosophy of science. We’re calling for an expansion of philosophy of science to include more of this type of work. In order to support this expansion, we characterize philosophy of science as an epistemic community and examine the culture and practices of philosophy of science that can help or hinder research in this area. (shrink)

As in other fields, scholarly publication in sociology is not only the key to career success but also the route by which feminist analyses and perspectives become known to others in the discipline. A growing literature has analyzed women's and men's rates of publication, but the gender politics of the prepublication production of research and gender differences in reputation building after publication remain underexplored. This report reviews the current state of knowledge about sociological publishing at three phases: prepublication, the publication-seeking (...) phase, and postpublication. It concludes with critical questions to be addressed in developing a comprehensive model of gender effects on sociological publishing. (shrink)

The increasing complexity of human subjects research and its oversight has prompted researchers, as well as institutional review boards, to have a forum in which to discuss challenging or novel ethical issues not fully addressed by regulations. Research ethics consultation services provide such a forum. In this article, we rely on the experiences of a national Research Ethics Consultation Collaborative that collected more than 350 research ethics consultations in a repository and published 18 challenging cases with accompanying ethical commentaries to (...) highlight four contexts in which REC can be a valuable resource. REC assists: 1) investigators before and after the regulatory review; 2) investigators, IRBs, and other research administrators facing challenging and novel ethical issues; 3) IRBs and investigators with the increasing challenges of informed consent and risk/benefit analysis; and 4) in providing flexible and collaborative assistance to overcome study hurdles, mediate conflicts within a team, or directly engage with research participants. Institutions that have established, or plan to establish, REC services should work to raise the visibility of their service and engage in open communication with existing clinical ethics consult services as well as the IRB. While the IRB system remains the foundation for the ethical review of research, REC can be a valuable service for investigators, regulators, and research participants aligned with the goal of supporting ethical research. (shrink)