Context: Participatory arts-based methods such as photovoice, drama and music have increasingly been used to engage young people who are exposed to psychosocial risks. These methods have the potential to empower youth and provide them with an accessible and welcoming environment to express and manage difficult feelings and experiences. These effects are, however, dependent on the way these methods are implemented and how potential ethical concerns are handled. Objective: Using the current literature on arts-based health research as a foundation, this (...) paper examines ethical issues emerging from participatory arts methods with young people with traumatic experiences. Results: We present a typology covering relevant issues such as power, accessibility, communication, trust and ownership, across the domains of partnership working, project entry, participation and dissemination. Drawing on our extensive clinical and research experiences, existing research and novel in-practice examples, we offer guidance for ethical dilemmas that might arise at different phases of research. Conclusion: Adequate anticipation and consideration of ethical issues, together with the involvement of young people, will help ensure that arts methods are implemented in research and practice with young people in a fair, meaningful and empowering way. Patient or Public Contribution: The issues reviewed are largely based on the authors' experience conducting participatory research. Each of the projects referenced has its own systems for PPI including, variously, consultations with advisory groups, coproduction, youth ambassadors and mentor schemes. One of the coauthors, Josita Kavitha Thirumalai, is a young person trained in peer support and has provided extensive input across all stages. (shrink)

I have no comment to make on the aesthetic merits of these verses. I have put them at the head of my discussion because they happen to introduce a cluster of concepts connected with forgiveness: pride, love, hate, God, friendship, goodwill, eternity, offence, condemnation, resentment, blame. We may think that some, but not all, of these have essential connections with the concept in which we are interested. And we may, of course, think that the list is incomplete. Other obvious candidates (...) spring to mind: pity, for example, repentance, compassion, punishment and pardoning. (shrink)

Brian O'Shaughnessy puts forward a bold and original theory of consciousness, one of the most fascinating but puzzling aspects of human existence. He analyses consciousness into purely psychological constituents, according pre-eminence to its epistemological power; the result is an integrated picture of the conscious mind in its natural physical setting. Consciousness and the World is a rich and exciting book, a major contribution to our understanding of the mind.

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of (...) awareness in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

What makes humans moral beings? This question can be understood either as a proximate question or as an ultimate question. The question is about the mental and social mechanisms that produce moral judgments and interactions, and has been investigated by psychologists and social scientists. The question is about the fitness consequences that explain why humans have morality, and has been discussed by evolutionary biologists in the context of the evolution of cooperation. Our goal here is to contribute to a fruitful (...) articulation of such proximate and ultimate explanations of human morality. We develop an approach to morality as an adaptation to an environment in which individuals were in competition to be chosen and recruited in mutually advantageous cooperative interactions. In this environment, the best strategy is to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation equally. Those who offer less than others will be left out of cooperation; conversely, those who offer more will be exploited by their partners. In line with this mutualistic approach, the study of a range of economic games involving property rights, collective actions, mutual help and punishment shows that participants' distributions aim at sharing the costs and benefits of interactions in an impartial way. In particular, the distribution of resources is influenced by effort and talent, and the perception of each participant's rights on the resources to be distributed. (shrink)

This article defends a relational account of personhood. I argue that the structure of personhood consists of dyadic relations between persons who can wrong or be wronged by one another, even if some of them lack moral competence. I draw on recent work on directed duties to outline the structure of moral communities of persons. The upshot is that we can construct an inclusive theory of personhood that can accommodate nonhuman persons based on shared community membership. I argue that, once (...) we unpack the internal relation between directed duties, moral status, and flourishing, relations can ground personhood and include nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Most people believe that suffering is intrinsically bad. In conjunction with facts about our world and plausible moral principles, this yields a pro tanto obligation to reduce suffering. This is the intuitive starting point for the moral argument in favor of interventions to prevent wild animal suffering. If we accept the moral principle that we ought, pro tanto, to reduce the suffering of all sentient creatures, and we recognize the prevalence of suffering in the wild, then we seem committed to (...) the existence of such a pro tanto obligation. Of course, competing values such as the aesthetic, scientific or moral values of species, biodiversity, naturalness or wildness, might be relevant to the all-things-considered case for or against intervention. Still, many argue that, even if we were to give some weight to such values, no plausible theory could resist the conclusion that WAS is overridingly important. This article is concerned with large-scale interventions to prevent WAS and their tractability and the deep epistemic problem they raise. We concede that suffering gives us a reason to prevent it where it occurs, but we argue that the nature of ecosystems leaves us with no reason to predict that interventions would reduce, rather than exacerbate, suffering. We consider two interventions, based on gene editing technology, proposed as holding promise to prevent WAS; raise epistemic concerns about them; discuss their potential moral costs; and conclude by proposing a way forward: to justify interventions to prevent WAS, we need to develop models that predict the effects of interventions on biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and animals’ well-being. (shrink)

F. Enriques and G. de Santillana have begun in collaboration the composition of a general history of scientific thought. The first volume of this work, which has been recently published, is concerned with the science of antiquity,1 and to a large extent covers the same ground as the history of ancient philosophy, as the frontiers of philosophy and natural science, at any rate until the time of Aristotle, were not yet clearly differentiated. But the two historians are interested in bringing (...) into prominence a great many problems and personalities that the history of philosophy generally leaves on one side, although they help to complete and vivify the picture of the mentality of the ancients. Mathematics, medicine, geography, astronomy, applied mechanics, and physics, in short all the particular scientific studies that were just beginning to detach themselves from the parent trunk of general philosophy are studied by the authors in their individual developments and through the personalities of their cultivators. The explanations are clear and simple and can be followed even by readers unversed in science; the information is at first hand and is supplemented by a careful discussion of sources. The scientific questions are not isolated from the historical setting of the civilization of antiquity, but are shown in relation to matters of philosophy, religion, art, and moral and political life. The bibliography, intended for the more purely scientific and technical departments of philosophy, forms a very useful and timely completion of the bibliography of philosophic thought in general. (shrink)

About a year ago some important philosophical works were published in Italy which, both in the agreement and in the divergence of the trends they indicate, may be useful for characterizing the present situation of Italian philosophy. I think it opportune, therefore, for the information of the English reader, to give a fuller notice of these books than usual. One of them is by Ugo Spirito, La vita come amore , with the subtitle “The downfall of Christian civilization ”. Ugo (...) Spirito, who was one of the most intelligent and restless pupils of Giovanni Gentile, announced his secession from idealism in 1937.In that year he published a book entitled La vita come ricerca , in which, as sole alternative to idealistic philosophy, henceforth considered untenable, he pointed to a philosophy of never concluded enquiry, which, while positing numerous problems, never solves them. The intention of the book was to conclude in the impossibility of philosophy as “system” or as “metaphysics”, on the supposition that all the possibilities of metaphysics had been exhausted in the course of its historical development, culminating in Gentile. In a certain sense this presupposition remains in the book now under examination; but here it is a question of defining positively the way that philosophy, and with it human life, ought to take, which is, according to Spirito, the way of love. (shrink)

About a year ago some important philosophical works were published in Italy which, both in the agreement and in the divergence of the trends they indicate, may be useful for characterizing the present situation of Italian philosophy. I think it opportune, therefore, for the information of the English reader, to give a fuller notice of these books than usual. One of them is by Ugo Spirito, La vita come amore, with the subtitle “The downfall of Christian civilization ”. Ugo Spirito, (...) who was one of the most intelligent and restless pupils of Giovanni Gentile, announced his secession from idealism in 1937.In that year he published a book entitled La vita come ricerca, in which, as sole alternative to idealistic philosophy, henceforth considered untenable, he pointed to a philosophy of never concluded enquiry, which, while positing numerous problems, never solves them. The intention of the book was to conclude in the impossibility of philosophy as “system” or as “metaphysics”, on the supposition that all the possibilities of metaphysics had been exhausted in the course of its historical development, culminating in Gentile. In a certain sense this presupposition remains in the book now under examination; but here it is a question of defining positively the way that philosophy, and with it human life, ought to take, which is, according to Spirito, the way of love. (shrink)

In the series Collezione di Filosofia published by Taylor of Turin since 1947, some of the most significant works on Italian existentialism have appeared. The series was inaugurated by two books by the writer of this article: Introduzione all esistenzialismo, second edition, 1947 ; and Filosofia religione scienza, 1947. These were followed by Pietro Chiodi, L'esistenzialismo di Heidegger, 1947; Armando Vedaldi, Essere gli altri, 1948; Uberto Scarpelli, Esistenzialismo e marxismo, 1949; Enzo Paci, II nulla e il problema dell'uomo, 1950; Luigi (...) Pareyson, Esistenza e persona, 1950; and Armando Vedaldi, Struttura della proprietà, 1951. (shrink)

L'ŒIL, Observatoire d'Ethique Interculturelle de Lyon, a pour objectif de préserver la dimension éthique de notre société démocratique et pluraliste dans son approche de l'homme. De nouveaux savoirs et techniques, le dynamisme de la recherche scientifique, les forces du marché, le souci de juste allocation des ressources, ainsi que les demandes de la société, mettent les acteurs des systèmes de santé dans des situations confuses. Cet ouvrage est le premier témoignage des rencontres et des recherches décidées par ces auteurs venus (...) d'horizons divers, engagés dans l'ensemble du monde francophone à partir de Lyon où se sont tenues les Premières Journées internationales francophones d'Ethique interculturelle, en 2004. Pour les auteurs de cet ouvrage, l'humanité peut mieux se constituer en s'ouvrant sur le différent, sur le multiple. Par regards croisés, ils questionnent la place relative du progrès, abandonnant le mythe simpliste selon lequel seul le progrès techno-économique entraîne les progrès sociaux, politiques et moraux... Au contraire, ils adoptent les principes d'incertitude et de complexité. Ils s'interrogent sur l'éthique interculturelle résultant d'une interaction à géométrie variable entre nos appartenances à différents groupes humains - culturels, sociaux, professionnels... sur le bon usage de la vie qui peut présupposer d'avoir en tête un archétype de la vie humaine, une vie exprimée dans sa plénitude. Certaines cultures ont exalté le héros, le chevalier ou le saint, avant de mettre en avant l'homme engagé ou l'entrepreneur accompli. Ils partagent la conviction que l'univers, la vie en général et la vie humaine en particulier ne sont pas des réalités monolithiques, mais résultent de l'interaction entre des polarités apparemment opposées, mais complémentaires. En effet, chaque être humain résulte des relations tissées avec l'Autre, s'enrichissant personnellement à travers chacune d'entre elles, s'ouvrant ainsi progressivement à toute l'humanité dans sa diversité. Nous construisons notre singularité en fonction de notre ouverture sur l'universel. Ce livre multidisciplinaire intéressera médecins et autres soignants, philosophes, spécialistes des sciences humaines et de l'éducation, des sciences exactes, voire responsables politiques. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the social value of health research should be conceptualized as a function of both the expected benefits of the research and the priority that the beneficiaries deserve. People deserve greater priority the worse off they are. This conception of social value can be applied for at least two important purposes: in health research priority setting when research funders, policy-makers, or researchers decide between alternative research projects; and in evaluating the ethics of proposed research proposals (...) when research ethics committees assess whether the social value of the research is sufficient to justify the risks and burdens to research participants and others. In assessing how far a proposed research project will advance the interests of people who are more disadvantaged, research priority setters and RECs should examine the diseases that the research targets and the type of research. Just as certain diseases impose a greater burden on people who are more disadvantaged, so certain types of intervention and forms of research are more likely to benefit people who are more disadvantaged. We outline which populations are likely to be representative of the global worst off and identify what types of health research, and which disease categories, are priorities for these populations. (shrink)

This book details the discovery and significance of the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi, the Wangjiatai Gui cang, and the Fuyang Zhou Yi, including full translations of the texts and additional evidence that constructs a new narrative of the Yi ...

In order to describe the logic of morality, "contractualist" philosophers have studied how individuals behave when they choose to follow their moral intuitions. These individuals, contractualists note, often act as if they have bargained and thus reached an agreement with others about how to distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation. Using this observation, such philosophers argue that the purpose of morality is to maximize the benefits of human interaction. The resulting "contract" analogy is both insightful and puzzling. On (...) one hand, it captures the pattern of moral intuitions, thus answering questions about human cooperation: why do humans cooperate? Why should the distribution of benefits be proportionate to each person's contribution? Why should the punishment be proportionate to the crime? Why should the rights be proportionate to the duties? On the other hand, the analogy provides a mere as-if explanation for human cooperation, saying that cooperation is "as if" people have passed a contract-but since they didn't, why should it be so? To evolutionary thinkers, the puzzle of the missing contract is immediately reminiscent of the puzzle of the missing "designer" of life-forms, a puzzle that Darwin's theory of natural selection essentially resolved. Evolutionary and contractualist theory originally intersected at the work of philosophers John Rawls and David Gauthier, who argued that moral judgments are based on a sense of fairness that has been naturally selected. In this book, Nicolas Baumard further explores the theory that morality was originally an adaptation to the biological market of cooperation, an arena in which individuals competed to be selected for cooperative interactions. In this environment, Baumard suggests, the best strategy was to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation in a fair way, so that those who offered less than others were left out of cooperation while those who offered more were exploited by their partners. It is with this evolutionary approach that Baumard ultimately accounts for the specific structure of human morality. (shrink)

Urban animals can benefit from living in cities, but this also makes them vulnerable as they increasingly depend on the advantages of urban life. This article has two aims. First, I provide a detailed analysis of the concept of captivity and explain why it matters to nonhuman animals—because and insofar as many of them have a (non-substitutable) interest in freedom. Second, I defend a surprising implication of the account—pushing the boundaries of the concept while the boundaries of cities and human (...) activities expand. I argue for the existence of the neglected problem of pervasive captivity, of which urban wildlife is an illustration. Many urban animals are confined, controlled and dependent, therefore often captive of expanding urban areas. While I argue that captivity per se is value-neutral, I draw the ethical and policy implications of harmful pervasive captivity. (shrink)

Can animals be agents? Do they want to be free? Can they have meaningful lives? If so, should we change the way we treat them? This paper offers an account of animal agency and of two continuums: between human and nonhuman agency, and between wildness and captivity. It describes how a wide range of human activities impede on animals’ freedom and argues that, in doing so, we deprive a wide range of animals of opportunities to exercise their agency in ways (...) that can give meaning to their lives. (shrink)

The contemporary discussion of modesty has focused on whether or not modest people are accurate about their own good qualities. This essay argues that this way of framing the debate is unhelpful and offers examples to show that neither ignorance nor accuracy about the good qualities related to oneself is necessary for modesty. It then offers an attention-based account, claiming that what is necessary for modesty is to direct one’s attention in certain ways. By analyzing modesty in this way, we (...) can best explain the distinct features of modesty, keep much of what is intuitive in contemporary accounts, and better understand why modesty is a virtue at all. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a morally good person? It can be tempting to think that it is simply a matter of performing certain actions and avoiding others. And yet there is much more to moral character than our outward actions. We expect a good person to not only behave in certain ways but also to experience the world in certain ways within.

In recent years much research has been undertaken regarding the feasibility of the human uterine transplant as a treatment for absolute uterine factor infertility. Should it reach clinical application this procedure would allow such individuals what is often a much-desired opportunity to become not only social mothers, or genetic and social mothers but mothers in a social, genetic and gestational sense. Like many experimental transplantation procedures such as face, hand, corneal and larynx transplants, UTx as a therapeutic option falls firmly (...) into the camp of the quality of life transplant, undertaken with the aim, not to save a life, but to enrich one. However, unlike most of these novel procedures – where one would be unlikely to find a willing living donor or an ethics committee that would sanction such a donation – the organs to be transplanted in UTx are potentially available from both living and deceased donors. In this article, in the light of the recent nine-case research trial in Sweden which used uteri obtained from living donors, and the assertions on the part of a number of other research teams currently preparing trials that they will only be using deceased donors, I explore the question of whether, in the case of UTx, there exist compelling moral reasons to prefer the use of deceased donors despite the benefits that may be associated with the use of organs obtained from the living. (shrink)

Michael Walzer is currently at the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey. Professor Walzer has written Just and Unjust Wars; The Revolution of the Saints and has edited Toward A Global Civil Society. In this interview, he discusses some of the current concerns about education, political theory and the current state of the art of toleration, and acceptance and accommodation of different racial, ethnic, social and minority groups. He has published extensively and his work (...) has been translated in several other languages. In this interview, he responds to questions about his work, his writings and his current concerns. (shrink)

Punitive behaviours are often assumed to be the result of an instinct for punishment. This instinct would have evolved to punish wrongdoers and it would be the evidence that cooperation has evolved by group selection. Here, I propose an alternative theory according to which punishment is a not an adaptation and that there was no specific selective pressure to inflict costs on wrongdoers in the ancestral environment. In this theory, cooperation evolved through partner choice for mutual advantage. In the ancestral (...) environment, individuals were in competition to be recruited in cooperative ventures and it was vital to share the benefits of cooperation in a mutually advantageous manner. If individuals took a bigger share of the benefits, their partners would leave them for more interesting partners. If they took a smaller share, they would be exploited by their partners who would receive more than what they had contributed to produce. This competition led to the selection of a sense of fairness, a cognitive adaptation aiming to share equally the benefits of cooperation in order to attract partners. In this theory, punishment is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation. Punitive behaviours are only a way to restore fairness by compensating the victim or penalizing the culprit. Drawing on behavioural economics, legal anthropology, and cognitive psychology, I show that empirical data fit better with this framework than with the theory of group selection. When people punish, they do so to restore fairness rather than to help the group. (shrink)

To become more broadly applicable, positions on AI ethics require perspectives from non-Western regions and cultures such as China and Japan. In this paper, we propose that the addition of the concept of harmony to the discussion on ethical AI would be highly beneficial due to its centrality in East Asian cultures and its applicability to the challenge of designing AI for social good. We first present a synopsis of different definitions of harmony in multiple contexts, such as music and (...) society, which reveals that the concept is, at its core, about well-balanced relationships and appropriate actions which give rise to order, balance, and aesthetically pleasing phenomena. The mediator for these well-balanced relationships isTaktwhich is an ability to act thoughtfully and sensibly according to the specific situation and to put things into proportion and order. We propose that the central challenge of building harmonizing AI is to make intelligent systems tactful and also to design and use them tactfully. For an AI system to become tactful, it needs to be able to have an advanced sensitivity to the specific contexts which it is in and their social and ethical implications and have the capability of approximately inferring the emotional and cognitive states of people with whom it is interacting. (shrink)

Has the time come to put to bed the concept of a harm threshold when discussing the ethics of reproductive decision making and the legal limits that should be placed upon it? In this commentary, we defend the claim that there exist good moral reasons, despite the conclusions of the non-identity problem, based on the interests of those we might create, to refrain from bringing to birth individuals whose lives are often described in the philosophical literature as ‘less than worth (...) living’. (shrink)

The capacity to attribute beliefs to others in order to understand action is one of the mainstays of human cognition. Yet it is debatable whether children attribute beliefs in the same way to all agents. In this paper, we present the results of a false-belief task concerning humans and God run with a sample of Maya children aged 4–7, and place them in the context of several psychological theories of cognitive development. Children were found to attribute beliefs in different ways (...) to humans and God. The evidence also speaks to the debate concerning the universality and uniformity of the development of folk-psychological reasoning. (shrink)

This book is the first extensive treatment of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness. Nicolas de Warren uses detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, some only recently published in German, to examine Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity. He traces the development of Husserl's thinking on the problem of time from Franz Brentano's descriptive psychology, and situates it in the framework of his transcendental project as a whole. Particular discussions include the significance of time-consciousness for other (...) phenomenological themes: perceptual experience, the imagination, remembrance, self-consciousness, embodiment, and the consciousness of others. The result is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart was born in Yorkshire in 1907 to second generation Jewish immigrants. Having won a scholarship to Oxford University, he went on to become the most famous legal philosopher of the twentieth century. From 1932-40 H.L.A Hart practised as a barrister in London. He was pronounced physically unfit for military service in 1940, and was recruited by MI5, where he worked until 1945. During his time at the Bar he had continued to study philosophy and at M15 (...) his interest was further stimulated by his philosopher colleagues in M16, Stuart Hampshire and Gilbert Ryle. After the war, Hart returned to Oxford to take up a philosophy fellowship, later to become Professor of Jurisprudence. H.L.A Hart single-handedly reinvented the philosophy of law and influenced the nation's thinking in the 1960s on abortion, the legalization of homosexuality, and on capital punishment. Hart's approach to legal philosophy was at once disarmingly simple and breathtakingly ambitious, combining as it did the insights of Austin and Bentham and the new linguistic philosophy of J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He sought to elucidate a concept of law which would be of relevance to all forms of law, wherever or whenever they arose: his bestselling book, The Concept of Law, has sold tens of thousands of copies worldwide. In 1941, he married Jenifer Williams (a high-ranking civil servant, later an Oxford academic) with whom he had four children. Their relationship was an enduring if unconventional one. In the early 1950s, Jenifer was rumoured to be having a long-standing affair with Isaiah Berlin, one of Hart's closest friends. She was also, falsely, accused by the Sunday Times of having been a Russian spy, an allegation which was all the more scandalous given Hart's position at MI5 during the War. Nicola Lacey draws on Hart's previously unpublished diaries and letters to reveal a complex inner life. Outwardly successful, Hart was in fact tormented by doubts about his intellectual abilities, his sexual identity and his capacity to form close relationships. Her biography also sheds fascinating light on the origins of his ideas, and assesses his overall contribution. Above all, it chronicles of a life which had a depth ands impact far greater than many of Hart's readers have realized. (shrink)

Ackrill’s Problem is a tension between Aristotle’s alleged view that the matter of a living being is a body that is essentially ensouled, and his view that the matter of a substance preexists its generation. Most interpreters solve the tension by claiming that the subject of substantial generation is not the organic body of the living being, but its non-organic matter. I defend a different solution by showing that the embryological theory ofOn the Generation of Animalsimplies that the organic body (...) of a living being already exists before acquiring the soul in actuality. (shrink)

Preface -- Introduction -- The wisdom -- Family -- Education -- Warfare -- The Dao -- Government -- Sagehood -- Death.