This article proposes that cosmetic minimally-invasive procedures – Botox injections, soft-tissue fillers, microdermabrasion, chemical peels and laser treatments – are an under-researched area and provide a number of promising paths for skin studies research. I argue that cosmetic minimally-invasive procedures collapse the difference between the surfaces of the photograph and the skin – the primary surfaces of cosmetic surgery – more successfully than cosmetic surgical procedures. More precisely, I maintain that the difference between photograph and skin is collapsed in two (...) ways: first, through narrating the transformation of the skin’s surface in a way that more closely matches the photographic promises of the cosmetic surgery industry; and, second, by depicting the surgical penetration of the skin through advertising photography. The article concludes by suggesting that further investigation into cosmetic minimally-invasive procedures could offer a new way to think about relationships between ‘normative’ and ‘non-normative’ skin modification practices. (shrink)

Respect for autonomy is a central value in reproductive ethics, but it can be a challenge to fulfill and is sometimes an outright puzzle to understand. If a woman requests the transfer of two, three, or four embryos during fertility treatment, is that request truly autonomous, and do clinicians disrespect her if they question that decision or refuse to carry it out? Add a commitment to justice to the mix, and the challenge can become more complex still. Is it unfair (...) for insurance policies to exclude from coverage the costs of giving fertility to those who lack it or restoring fertility in those who have lost it? What does “just reproduction” look like in the face of multifarious understandings of both justice and autonomy and in light of increasingly complex and costly reproductive technologies? In today's dialogue about reproduction, medicine, and ethics in the United States, old ethical issues—such as whether women ought to be allowed to access pregnancy termination—are more contested than they have been in decades, while new technologies—like those used to edit the genes of human embryos—suggest that our species could face unprecedented questions about who should exist. As we considered the discussions accompanying these issues and contemplated a special report responding to them, we found ourselves consistently circling back to two ethical commitments: respect for autonomy and the pursuit of justice. As one of the nine essays in this collection asks, why should certain women receive help to establish a pregnancy while others are thrown in jail when they miscarry or their child is stillborn? Respect for autonomy is required where individuals have the ability to make fully informed and voluntary choices. Yet does respecting autonomy require acceding to all the choices of patients or consumers of medical care? We consider these and related questions in this special report from the Hastings Center Report. (shrink)

In a project The Hastings Center is now running on the future of prenatal testing, we are encountering clear examples, both in established law and in the practices of individual providers, of failures to respect women's reproductive autonomy: when testing is not offered to certain demographics of women, for instance, or when the choices of women to terminate or continue pregnancies are prohibited or otherwise not supported. But this project also raises puzzles for reproductive autonomy. We have learned that some (...) clinicians and patients do not discuss the fact that prenatal testing can lead to a decision about whether to terminate a pregnancy—they just don't talk about it. And while the decision whether to agree to prenatal screening and diagnostic testing is to be made with women's free and informed consent, many screening tests have been routinized in such a way that some women do not even recall agreeing to testing, while others feel that agreeing to testing is what their clinicians expect of them or that the testing is necessary to protect themselves and their families from the significant financial hardship of raising a child with a disability. In the face of these pressures, can one really say that women are freely choosing to undergo testing or are freely choosing to continue or terminate a pregnancy following receipt of test results? The reality of these pressures is requiring us to consider expanding the scope of our investigation beyond the clinical encounter to the broader context—to think harder about what reproductive autonomy means and how best to enhance it. (shrink)

The paper describes the conservation and interpretation project directed by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer at the Port Arthur penal settlement in Tasmania. Focused on the 1849 Separate Prison, the physical and ideological centrepiece of the Port Arthur settlement, TZG’s brief was to provide a masterplan for the conservation, reconstruction and interpretation of the remaining built fabric.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface At a time when access to safe abortions is being curtailed in the United States under the pretext of a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this Feminist Studies issue focuses on abortion and women’s embodiment. The essays by Melissa Oliver-Powell, Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, and Jennifer L. Holland each contribute new approaches to the stillvexed topic of abortion, positioning movements for abortion access in (...) relation to historical and ecological change. Two collaboratively written essays, by South American authors María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra and Tania Pérez-Bustos, and by North American and European authors Laura Bisaillon with six colleagues, both center the body within feminist labor, exploring how the embodied experience of work can also be a site of knowledge-making. Other authors push us to move beyond humanistic understandings of affect and the body in feminist work, as Nathan Snaza shows in a review essay of four recent books engaging “Biopolitics without Bodies.” Poems by Rosetta Marantz Cohen, Darlene Taylor, and Abby Minor also feature experiences of bodily violence and bodily pleasure, while Ellyn Weiss discusses the distinctive representations of bodies in the visual art of Swedish-American artist Anna U. Davis. To close the issue, two News and Views pieces by Pang Laikwan and Sealing Cheng on the recent protest movement in Hong Kong provide two complementary perspectives on living through tumultuous political times. Our next issue will include content directly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first essay, Melissa Oliver-Powell’s “Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France” addresses the complexities of anti-​ abortion 8 rhetoric in France. Placing Varda’s 1977 film in the historical context of French nationalistic anxiety about low birthrates in the twentieth century, Oliver-Powell argues that the film deconstructs polarized narratives about abortion. While dominant cultural representations of abortion typically depicted it as the result of female irresponsibility or traumatic victimization, Varda’s film rejects the binary concepts of villain and victim and questions the presumption that women always suffer when exercising their reproductive choice. Oliver-Powell situates Varda alongside the 343 eminent French female cultural leaders who composed a famous 1971 Manifesto publicly declaring themselves criminals for having had illegal abortions and presents simultaneous histories of French feminism and French cinema. Varda’s film constructs a feminist representation of abortion that avoids foregrounding women ’s suffering and instead emphasizes empowerment and solidarity. Its narrative features two women friends, both treated unjustly by France’s abortion laws, who participate in the movement for reform over a fourteen -year span. Varda represents the interplay of motherhood with women ’s lives as a continuum, not a disruptive episode, and she blends documentary -style devices with imaginative musical interludes: she shows actual women seeking abortions in Holland and includes songs about abortion, pregnancy, and motherhood. Oliver-Powell claims that Varda dramatizes unprecedented representations “of female friendship without pathology, of abortion without guilt, death or persecution, of motherhood without objectification....” A second essay, Rachel Hurst’s “Abortion as a Feminist Pedagogy of Grief in Marianne Apostolides’s Deep Salt Water,” proposes that the championing of women’s reproductive rights could better account for the context of difficult emotions and an imperfect world. Hurst uses reproductive justice approaches to critique simplistic rights-based arguments for abortion, premised on liberal concepts of choice and autonomy, which fail to understand the material conditions of poor women and especially women of color. Such analyses emphasize the necessity of rights discourses that include the right to bear and parent one’s own children free from violence and economic hardship, and they advocate the transformative possibilities of acknowledging rather than suppressing women’s ambivalence about their own abortions as well as others’ choices. Hurst describes a collaboration between two contemporary Canadian feminists, writer Marianne Apostolides and visual artist  9 Catherine Mellinger, in their mixed-media text, Deep Salt Water, which is organized according to the weeks of a pregnancy and the aftermath of its termination. Rather than falling back into familiar polarizations for and against “choice,” they use the story of Apostolides’s abortion seventeen years earlier... (shrink)

Human vision supports prediction for moving stimuli. Here we take an individual differences approach to investigate whether there could be a common processing rate for motion-based visual prediction across diverse motion phenomena. Motion Induced Spatial Conflict refers to an incongruity arising from two edges of a combined stimulus, moving rigidly, but with different apparent speeds. This discrepancy induces an illusory jitter that has been attributed to conflict within a motion prediction mechanism. Its apparent frequency has been shown to correlate with (...) the frequency of alpha oscillations in the brain. We asked what other psychophysical measures might correlate positively with MISC frequency. We measured the correlation between MISC jitter frequency and another three measures that might be linked to motion-based spatial prediction. We demonstrate that the illusory jitter frequency in MISC correlates significantly with the accrual rate of the Motion Induced Position Shift effect - the well-established observation that a carrier movement in a static envelope of a Gabor target leads to an apparent position shift of the envelope in the direction of motion. We did not observe significant correlations with the other two measures – the Adaptation Induced Spatial Shift accrual rate and the Smooth Motion Threshold. These results suggest a shared perceptual rate between MISC and MIPS, implying a common periodic mechanism for motion-based visual prediction. (shrink)

Background: Ethics support services are growing in Europe to help doctors in dealing with ethical difficulties. Currently, insufficient attention has been focused on the experiences of doctors who have faced ethical difficulties in these countries to provide an evidence base for the development of these services.Methods: A survey instrument was adapted to explore the types of ethical dilemma faced by European doctors, how they ranked the difficulty of these dilemmas, their satisfaction with the resolution of a recent ethically difficult case (...) and the types of help they would consider useful. The questionnaire was translated and given to general internists in Norway, Switzerland, Italy and the UK.Results: Survey respondents ranged in age from 28 to 82 years, and averaged 25 years in practice. Only a minority reported having access to ethics consultation in individual cases. The ethical difficulties most often reported as being encountered were uncertain or impaired decision-making capacity , disagreement among caregivers and limitation of treatment at the end of life . The frequency of most ethical difficulties varied among countries, as did the type of issue considered most difficult. The types of help most often identified as potentially useful were professional reassurance about the decision being correct , someone capable of providing specific advice , help in weighing outcomes and clarification of the issues . Few of the types of help expected to be useful varied among countries.Conclusion: Cultural differences may indeed influence how doctors perceive ethical difficulties. The type of help needed, however, did not vary markedly. The general structure of ethics support services would not have to be radically altered to suit cultural variations among the surveyed countries. (shrink)

Next SectionBackground: Physicians face ethical difficulties daily, yet they seek ethics consultation infrequently. To date, no systematic data have been collected on the strategies they use to resolve such difficulties when they do so without the help of ethics consultation. Thus, our understanding of ethical decision making in day to day medical practice is poor. We report findings from the qualitative analysis of 310 ethically difficult situations described to us by physicians who encountered them in their practice. When facing such (...) situations, the physicians sought to avoid conflict, obtain assistance, and protect the integrity of their conscience and reputation, as well as the integrity of the group of people who participated in the decisions. These goals could conflict with each other, or with ethical goals, in problematic ways. Being aware of these potentially conflicting goals may help physicians to resolve ethical difficulties more effectively. This awareness should also contribute to informing the practice of ethics consultation. Objective: To identify strategies used by physicians in dealing with ethical difficulties in their practice. Design, setting, and participants: National survey of internists, oncologists, and intensive care specialists by computer assisted telephone interviews (n = 344, response rate = 64%). As part of this survey, we asked physicians to tell us about a recent ethical dilemma they had encountered in their medical practice. Transcripts of their open-ended responses were analysed using coding and analytical elements of the grounded theory approach. Main measurements: Strategies and approaches reported by respondents as part of their account of a recent ethical difficulty they had encountered in their practice. Results: When faced with ethical difficulties, the physicians avoided conflict and looked for assistance, which contributed to protecting, or attempting to protect, the integrity of their conscience and reputation, as well as the integrity of the group of people who participated in the decisions. These efforts sometimes reinforced ethical goals, such as following patients’ wishes or their best interests, but they sometimes competed with them. The goals of avoiding conflict, obtaining assistance, and protecting the respondent’s integrity and that of the group of decision makers could also compete with each other. Conclusion: In resolving ethical difficulties in medical practice, internists entertained competing goals that they did not always successfully achieve. Additionally, the means employed were not always the most likely to achieve those aims. Understanding these aspects of ethical decision making in medical practice is important both for physicians themselves as they struggle with ethical difficulties and for the ethics consultants who wish to help them in this process. (shrink)

In an international survey of rationing we have found that European physicians encounter scarcity-related ethical difficulties, and are dissatified with the resolution of many of these cases. Here we further examine survey results to explore whether ethics support services would be potentially useful in addressing scarcity related ethical dilemmas. Results indicate that while the type of help offered by ethics support services was considered helpful by physicians, they rarely referred difficulties regarding scarcity to ethics consultation. We propose that ethics consultants (...) could assist physicians by making the process less difficult, and by contributing to decisions being more ethically justifiable. Expertise in bringing considerations of justice to bear on real cases could also be useful in recognising an unjust limit, as opposed to a merely frustrating limit. Though these situations are unlikely to be among the most frequently referred to ethics support services, ethics consultants should be prepared to address them. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1 Introduction 1 -- 2 Central themes and critical issues 10 -- Introduction 10 -- Core themes 11 -- Differences which have surfaced in the move from -- margins to mainstream 15 -- The claims of restorative justice: a brief examination 21 -- Some limitations of restorative justice 25 -- Some dangers of restorative justice 29 -- Debunking restorative justice 32 -- 3 Reviving restorative justice traditions 36 -- The rebirth of an ancient practice 36 -- (...) Pre-modem criminal justice 37 -- The renaissance of native justice traditions 43 -- Navajo peacemaking 44 -- Can one characterise ancient and indigenous -- justice as restorative? 47 -- Can one revive restorative justice traditions? 49 -- Conclusion: did restorative justice ever die? 59 -- 4 Healing the victim 62 -- Introduction 62 -- The experiences and needs of victims 64 -- The inadequacy of punitive justice for the victim 67 -- Victim reforms 70 -- Restitution from the offender 74 -- Beyond restitution: restoring victims 76 -- Restorative justice or 'clubbing together'? 78 -- Using victims to rehabilitate offenders 81 -- Paternalism towards victims 83 -- Balancing the needs of the victim with those of society 84 -- 5 A restorative approach to offenders 87 -- Introduction 87 -- Restorative justice as an alternative to retributive justice 88 -- Restorative justice as an alternative to treatment 94 -- The goals and methods of restorative justice in relation -- to offenders 95 -- An alternative to punishment or an alternative form of -- punishment? 106 -- An alternative to treatment? 111 -- 6 Shame, apology and forgiveness 114 -- Introduction 114 -- Restorative cautioning 115 -- The psychological routes of restorative conferencing 116 -- The idea of reintegrative shaming 118 -- Some questions about shaming 123 -- Apology and forgiveness 132 -- 7 Mediation, participation and the role of community 136 -- Introduction: handling criminal conflicts 136 -- The rationale for the restorative justice process 140 -- Achieving restorative goals 141 -- Moral development and the strengthening of community 144 -- The role of community 151 -- 8 The future of restorative justice 161 -- Introduction 161 -- Implementing restorative justice: the paths less likely 163 -- The implementation of restorative techniques 166 -- Restorative justice and the pattern of penal control 169 -- The future of restorative justice research 170 -- Appendix to chapter 3: the theological roots of judicial -- punishment 172. (shrink)

Background Although methods proposed for the conduct of ethics consultation tend to be viewed as competing approaches, they may in fact function in a complementary manner. Methods We describe the experience of ethics consultation in two ethics committees at the University Hospitals of Geneva, Switzerland. Results Both committees provide case consultation by a multi-disciplinary team of committee members, but with different processes. These differences in process do not necessarily lead to differences in outcome. Discussion Different methods of ethics consultation are (...) not mutually exclusive, and can co-exist within the same institution. The practical application of one method of ethics consultation can lead to substantial variations in process between different groups of consultants. Conclusion Despite the importance of clarifying theoretical groundings, and consultation and deliberation processes, in ethics consultation, choosing between different processes may not be pressing. To assist these choices, exploration of the practical strengths and weaknesses of different methods will be necessary to assist clinical ethicists, and clinical ethics committees, in acquiring a flexible and evidence-based set of approaches to their work. (shrink)

Anthology of readings in moral philosophy.

Theological engagement with quantum mechanics has been dominated by the Copenhagen interpretation, failing to reflect the fact that philosophers and physicists alike are increasingly moving away from the Copenhagen interpretation in favor of other approaches. One such approach, Hugh Everett's so-called Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI), is being taken increasingly seriously. As the MWI's credibility grows, it is imperative that metaphysicians, theologians, and philosophers of religion engage with its ideas and their implications. This article does just that, setting out some implications (...) of Everettian Quantum Mechanics that are particularly relevant to theism. It argues that taking seriously the radical consequences of the Everett interpretation means facing at least three major worries for theism pertaining to personal identity, the problem of evil, and salvation. The article concludes by calling on theologians and philosophers of religion to address these worries, in order that these matters of religious significance remain both coherent and credible if the MWI turns out to be correct. (shrink)

A joke is amusing if and only if it’s fitting to be amused by it; an act is regrettable if and only if it’s fitting to regret it. Many philosophers accept these biconditionals and hold that analogous ones obtain between a wide range of additional evaluative properties and the fittingness of corresponding responses. Call these the _fit–value biconditionals_. The biconditionals give us a systematic way of recognizing the role of fit in our ethical practices; they also serve as the bedrock (...) of various metaethical projects, such as fitting-attitude analysis of value and the ‘fittingness first’ approach. Yet despite the importance of the biconditionals, there is very little discussion of their proper interpretation. This paper argues that any plausible interpretation of the fit_–_value biconditionals must disarm several kinds of apparent counterexample. For instance, that an achievement is pride-worthy doesn’t imply it is fitting for me to take pride in it because the achievement might not be mine or that of anyone close to me; that a joke is amusing doesn’t imply it is fitting for me to be amused by it for six straight months; and that a person is loveable doesn’t imply it is fitting for me to love him romantically because that person might be my sibling. We consider possible responses to such counterexamples and develop what we consider the most promising interpretation of the biconditionals. The upshot is that certain widespread assumptions about fit and its relation to value and reasons should be reconsidered. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics has recently indicated that, at the fundamental level, temporal order is not fixed. This phenomenon, termed Indefinite Causal Order, is yet to receive metaphysical or theological engagement. We examine Indefinite Causal Order, particularly as it emerges in a 2018 photonic experiment. In this experiment, two operations A and B were shown to be in a superposition with regard to their causal order. Essentially, time, intuitively understood as fixed, flowing, and fundamental, becomes fuzzy. We argue that if Indefinite Causal (...) Order is true, this is good evidence in favor of a B‐theory of time, though such a B‐theory requires modification. We then turn to theology, suggesting that a B‐theoretic temporal ontology invites serious reconsideration of the doctrine of salvation. This paper concludes that the best explanation for salvation given a B‐theory is mind‐dependent salvific becoming, a type of psychological soteriological change that occurs through downward causation. (shrink)

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or adding brand new (...) word-meaning pairs (as with 'sexual harassment'). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that's a feature, not a bug of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can be further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language. (shrink)

This Element presents a philosophical exploration of the concept of the 'model organism' in contemporary biology. Thinking about model organisms enables us to examine how living organisms have been brought into the laboratory and used to gain a better understanding of biology, and to explore the research practices, commitments, and norms underlying this understanding. We contend that model organisms are key components of a distinctive way of doing research. We focus on what makes model organisms an important type of model, (...) and how the use of these models has shaped biological knowledge, including how model organisms represent, how they are used as tools for intervention, and how the representational commitments linked to their use as models affect the research practices associated with them. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

This expanded second edition carries forward the initial insights into the biological and existential significances of animation by taking contemporary research findings in cognitive science and philosophy and in neuroscience into critical and constructive account. It first takes affectivity as its focal point, elucidating it within both an enactive and qualitative affective-kinetic dynamic. It follows through with a thoroughgoing interdisciplinary inquiry into movement from three perspectives: mind, brain, and the conceptually reciprocal realities of receptivity and responsivity as set forth in (...) phenomenology and evolutionary biology, respectively. It ends with a substantive afterword on kinesthesia, pointing up the incontrovertible significance of the faculty to cognition and affectivity. Series A. (shrink)

Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand Irigaray's original contribution to philosophical and feminist thought.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

We offer an interpretation of the mental files framework that eliminates the metaphor of files, information being contained in files, etc. The guiding question is whether, once we move beyond the metaphors, there is any theoretical role for files. We claim not. We replace the file-metaphor with two theses: the semantic thesis that there are irreducibly relational representational facts (viz. facts about the coordination of representations); and the metasemantic thesis that processes tied to information-relations ground those facts. In its canonical (...) statement, the ‘file’-theory makes reference to a certain kind of relational representational feature, and a certain kind of mental activity. Mental files need not come into it. In short, we posit mental filing without mental files. Our interpretation avoids awkward problems that arise on the standard interpretation and clarifies the explanatory commitments of the theory. (shrink)

Classifying Madness (Springer, 2005) concerns philosophical problems with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, more commonly known as the D.S.M. The D.S.M. is published by the American Psychiatric Association and aims to list and describe all mental disorders. The first half of Classifying Madness asks whether the project of constructing a classification of mental disorders that reflects natural distinctions makes sense. Chapters examine the nature of mental illness, and also consider whether mental disorders fall into natural kinds. The (...) second half of the book addresses epistemic worries. Even supposing a natural classification system to be possible in principle, there may be reasons to be suspicious of the categories included in the D.S.M. I examine the extent to which the D.S.M. depends on psychiatric theory, and look at how it has been shaped by social and financial factors. I aim to be critical of the D.S.M. without being antagonistic towards it. Ultimately, however, I am forced to conclude that although the D.S.M. is of immense practical importance, it is unlikely to come to reflect the natural structure of mental disorders. (shrink)

In this volume, Rachel Giora explores how the salient meanings of words - the meanings that stand out as most prominent and accessible in our minds - shape how we think and how we speak. For Giora, salient meanings display interesting effects in both figurative and literal language. In both domains, speakers and writers creatively exploit the possibilities inherent in the fact that, while words have multiple meanings, some meanings are more accessible than others. Of the various meanings weencode (...) in our mental lexicon for a given word or expression, we ascribe greater cognitive priority to some over others. Interestingly, the most salient meaning is not always the literal meaning. Giora argues that it is cognitively prominent salient meanings, rather than literal meanings, that play the most important role in the comprehension and production of language. She shows that even though context begins to affect comprehension immediately, it does so without obstructing the early accessing of salient meanings. Thus, the meaning we first attend to is the salient word meaning, regardless of contextual bias. Knowledge of salient meanings turns out to play a major role, perhaps the most important role, in the process of using and understanding of language. Going beyond the familiar effects of literal meaning and context, the Graded Salience Hypothesis presents the most comprehensive explanation for how we use language for meaning. In this volume, Giora presents her new model for the first time in a book-length treatment, with original and illuminating perspectives that will be of interest to linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and all who want to know more about just how we understand what we mean. (shrink)

This article employs Foucauldian and feminist analytics to advance a critical approach to wearable digital health- and activity-tracking devices. Following Foucault’s insight that the growth of individual capabilities coincides with the intensification of power relations, I argue that digital self-tracking devices (DSTDs) expand individuals’ capacity for self-knowledge and self-care at the same time that they facilitate unprecedented levels of biometric surveillance, extend the regulatory mechanisms of both public health and fashion/beauty authorities, and enable increasingly rigorous body projects devoted to the (...) attainment of normative femininity. These technologies of surveillance, normalization, and discipline thus function to augment, and facilitate the cooperation of, neoliberal-era biopower and post-feminist patriarchal power. My analysis of digital self-tracking devices’ instrumentality to biopower and patriarchy contributes to the emergent field of critical digital health studies and builds new connections between political, social, and feminist theories of embodiment; biopower studies; fat studies; and trans-disciplinary body studies. (shrink)

This paper offers three objections to Leslie’s recent and already influential theory of generics :375–403, 2007a, Philos Rev 117:1–47, 2008): her proposed metaphysical truth-conditions are subject to systematic counter-examples, the proposed disquotational semantics fails, and there is evidence that generics do not express cognitively primitive generalisations.

There's been a great deal of interest in epistemology regarding what it takes for a hearer to come to know on the basis of a speaker's say-so. That is, there's been much work on the epistemology of testimony. However, what about when hearers don't believe speakers when they should? In other words, what are we to make of when testimony goes wrong? A recent topic of interest in epistemology and feminist philosophy is how we sometimes fail to believe speakers due (...) to inappropriate prejudices – implicit or explicit. This is known as epistemic injustice. In this article, I discuss Miranda Fricker's groundbreaking work on epistemic injustice, as well as more recent developments that both offer critique and expansion on the nature and extent of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Rachel Cohon offers an original interpretation of the moral philosophy of David Hume, focusing on two areas.

This book is about the norms of the speech act of assertion. This is a topic of lively contemporary debate primarily carried out in epistemology and philosophy of language. Suppose that you ask me what time an upcoming meeting starts, and I say, “4 p.m.” I’ve just asserted that the meeting starts at 4 p.m. Whenever we make claims like this, we’re asserting. The central question here is whether we need to know what we say, and, relatedly, whether what we (...) assert must be true. If the meeting is really at 3:30 p.m., you’ll be late, and probably rather upset that I told you the wrong time. In some sense, it seems like I’m on the hook for having said something false. This sense that I’ve done something wrong suggests that there are certain standards of evaluating assertions: a way of distinguishing between good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate. We call these standards norms. And so the debate about what, if any, norms govern the linguistic practice of assertion is known as the norms of assertion debate. When one’s assertion satisfies the norm, we say that the assertion is warranted. -/- Various philosophers have typically focused their views of the norms of assertion on articulating the level of epistemic support required for properly asserting. Some argue, for example, that one must know what one asserts. Others argue that one merely needs to justifiably believe what one asserts–an epistemic standing weaker than knowledge. The purpose of this book is to defend what I propose as the central norm governing our practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm. Here’s what it looks like: -/- One may assert that p only if: One has supportive reasons for p, The relevant conventional and pragmatic elements of the context are present, and One asserts that p at least in part because the assertion that p satisfies and. -/- In rough outline, the standards for warrantedly asserting shift with changes in context, although knowledge is never required for warrantedly asserting. In fact, in some special contexts, speakers may warrantedly lie. This latter feature particularly sets apart my view from others in the debate. This also means that truth, knowledge, and even belief aren’t necessary conditions for warrantedly asserting. (shrink)

It is tempting to hold that guilt‐tripping is morally wrong, either because it is objectionably manipulative, or because it involves gratuitously aiming to make another person suffer, or both. In this article, I develop a picture of guilt according to which guilt is a type of pain that incorporates a commitment to its own justification on the basis of the subject's wrongdoing. This picture supports the hypothesis that feeling guilty is an especially efficient means for a wrongdoer to come to (...) more deeply understand why her behavior was wrong; it is precisely because guilt is painful and involves a self‐reflexive justificatory element that it is able to play this role. Such a picture, moreover, preserves the possibility that deliberately making others feel guilty needn't involve aiming gratuitously to harm them and needn't be objectionably manipulative. It follows that we should be surprisingly sanguine about the practice of inducing guilt in wrongdoers as a means of facilitating their moral edification. (shrink)

What happens when we consider transformative experiences from the perspective of gender transitions? In this paper I suggest that at least two insights emerge. First, trans* persons’ experiences of gender transitions show some limitations to L.A. Paul’s (forthcoming) decision theoretic account of transformative decisions. This will involve exploring some of the phenomenology of coming to know that one is trans, and in coming to decide to transition. Second, what epistemological effects are there to undergoing a transformative experience? By connecting some (...) experiences of gender transitions to feminist standpoint epistemology, I argue that radical changes in one’s identity and social location also radically affects one’s access to knowledge in ways not widely appreciated in contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

Sex: Nagel, T. Sexual perversion. Ruddick, S. On sexual morality.--Abortion: Ramsey, P. The morality of abortion. Foot, P. The problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect. Wertheimer, R. Understanding the abortion argument. Thomson, J. J. A defense of abortion.--Prejudice and discrimination: Wasserstrom, R. Rights, human rights, and racial discrimination. Roszak, B. Women's liberation. Lucas, J. R. Because you are a woman. Thomson, J. J. Preferential hiring. Singer, P. Animal liberation.--Civil disobedience: Rawls, J. The justification of civil disobedience. (...) Singer, P. Rawls on civil disobedience. Dworkin, R. M. Law and civil disobedience.--Punishment: Downie, R. S. The justification of punishment. Kneale, W. The responsibility of criminals. Hart, H. L. A. Murder and the principles of punishment: England and the United States.--War: Anscombe, G. E. M. War and murder. Wasserstrom, R. On the morality of war: a preliminary inquiry. Lackey, D. Ethics and nuclear deterrence. Narveson, J. Pacifism: a philosophical analysis.--Suicide and death: Brandt, R. B. The morality and rationality of suicide. Holland, R. F. Suicide. Nagel, T. Death. Williams, B. The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality.--Selected bibliography (p. 432-437). (shrink)