This volume examines comparatively the views and principles of seven prominent ethical traditions on one of the most pressing issues of modern politics - the making and unmaking of state and national boundaries. The traditions represented are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, natural law, Confucianism, liberalism and international law. Each contributor, an expert within one of these traditions, shows how that tradition can handle the five dominant methods of altering state and national boundaries: conquest, settlement, purchase, inheritance and secession. Written by a (...) distinguished group of international specialists this volume is unique in providing both in-depth normative and comparative perspectives on a troubling question that will offer readers real insight into inter-tradition conflict. Those readers will range from upper-level undergraduates to scholars in such fields as philosophy, political science, international relations and comparative religion. (shrink)

Though much progress has been made on inclusion of non-pregnant women in research, thoughtful discussion about including pregnant women has lagged behind. We outline resulting knowledge gaps and their costs and then highlight four reasons why ethically we are obliged to confront the challenges of including pregnant women in clinical research. These are: the need for effective treatment for women during pregnancy, fetal safety, harm from the reticence to prescribe potentially beneficial medication, and the broader issues of justice and access (...) to benefits of research participation. Going forward requires shifting the burden of justification from inclusion to exclusion and developing an adequate ethical framework that specifies suitable justifications for excluding pregnant women from research. (shrink)

U.S. researchers and scholars often point to two legal factors as significant obstacles to the inclusion of pregnant women in clinical research: the Department of Health and Human Services’ regulatory limitations specific to pregnant women's research participation and the fear of liability for potential harm to children born following a pregnant woman's research participation. This article offers a more nuanced view of the potential legal complexities that can impede research with pregnant women than has previously been reflected in the literature. (...) It reveals new insights into the role of legal professionals throughout the research pathway, from product conception to market, and it highlights a variety of legal factors influencing decision-making that may slow or halt research involving pregnant women. Our conclusion is that closing the evidence gap created by the underrepresentation and exclusion of pregnant women in research will require targeted attention to the role of legal professionals and the legal factors that influence their decisions. (shrink)

On August 28, 2008, Michael Marmot, Chair of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health, formally handed over the Commission’s Final Report to Margaret Chan, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. It was a significant moment. Dr. Chan addressed a hall packed with representatives of the world’s communications media in a speech that was remarkably direct. Dr. Chan reiterated the Commission’s position that to improve health and health equity action needs to (...) be taken not just across the health sector but across all social and economic policy areas, and stated, “Social deprivation is not a matter of fate. It is a marker of policy failure.” This was a bold statement from one of the world’s leading diplomats. Policy failure! The phrase echoes the Commission’s assertion that “a toxic combination of poor social policies, unfair economic arrangements and bad politics is killing people on a grand scale.” The Commission’s messages are far reaching. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article raises three concerns about Buchanan's argument related to the individualist description of ideology and psychological description of the obstacles to justice, as well as the way in which he separates empirical and normative beliefs, which, the article argues, are much more closely connected in all the examples that he raises. In the end, however, it agrees with Buchanan's central contention concerning the cognitive biases that interfere with progress towards justice, but, it argues, these operate at (...) a more sub‐conscious level than described by Buchanan. (shrink)

Ruth Boeker’s Locke on Persons and Personal Identity is a tightly argued and illuminating account, containing much to ponder. The presence of both terms, ‘persons’ and ‘personal identity’, in the t...

Stewart Duncan’s excellent book Materialism from Hobbes to Locke offers an insightful study of the debates concerning materialism during the seventeenth century. When we hear the expression ‘materialism’, we often associate with it the question of whether the human mind is an entirely material entity. Although the question of whether the human mind is material plays an important role throughout the seventeenth-century debates examined in this book, Duncan offers a broader understanding of materialism that is not restricted to the human (...) mind. According to Duncan, materialism is ‘a view about some object or a group of objects. Often that object is the human mind’ (2), but materialism can also concern other objects such as animal minds or God. This leads Duncan to introduce materialism as ‘the view that the thing in question is wholly material, and has no immaterial part’ (2). He deliberately leaves open what it means to be material, because different philosophers featured in his book disagree about this question. (shrink)

Margaret Whitford's study provides the ideal introduction to Irigaray's thought, offering a sustained interpretation of her whole corpus, including previously untranslated French texts. Whitford suggests that Irigaray's work should be seen as "philosophy in the feminine," actively opposing the complicity of philosophy with other social practices which exclude or marginalize women.

This article considers two arguments that purport to show that inductive reasoning is unjustified: the argument adduced by Sextus Empiricus and the (better known and more formidable) argument given by Hume in the Treatise. While Sextus’ argument can quite easily be rebutted, a close examination of the premises of Hume’s argument shows that they are seemingly cogent. Because the sceptical claim is very unintuitive, the sceptical argument constitutes a paradox. And since attributions of justification are theoretical, and the claim that (...) they are never (or seldom) true isn’t preposterous, the correct response to the paradox may well be to admit that the sceptic has exposed our error in making them. (shrink)

This book articulates a systematic vision of an international legal system grounded in the commitment to justice for all persons. It provides a probing exploration of the moral issues involved in disputes about secession, ethno-national conflict, "the right of self-determination of peoples," human rights, and the legitimacy of the international legal system itself. Buchanan advances vigorous criticisms of the central dogmas of international relations and international law, arguing that the international legal system should make justice, not simply peace among (...) states, a primary goal, and rejecting the view that it is permissible for a state to conduct its foreign policies exclusively according to what is in the "national interest." He also shows that the only alternatives are not rigid adherence to existing international law or lawless chaos in which the world's one superpower pursues its own interests without constraints. This book not only criticizes the existing international legal order, but also offers morally defensible and practicable principles for reforming it. Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination will find a broad readership in political science, international law, and political philosophy. (shrink)

:In 2012, Despret published an abecedary entitled What Would Animals Say, If … They Were Asked the Right Questions? Covering a range of subjects, themes, authors, and animals, Despret carefully and playfully demonstrates the ability of animals to continuously force us to re-examine our most basic and arrived at human conceptions, understandings, and biases. Excerpted from this book are two chapters on art and gender. “O for Œuvres” looks at the question of animal agency and intentionality in the making of (...) a work of art. Drawing from Alfred Gell, Étienne Souriau, and bower-birds, Despret expands the notion of agency in art and questions the tendency towards human exceptionalism. In “Q for Queer,” king penguins come out of the closet to reveal and question certain preconceived human ideas about gender, sexuality, and cultures of heteronormativity within animal worlds. (shrink)

For those open to the possibility that philosophical thought can improve life, David Hume's Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary have something to say. In the first comprehensive study of the Essays, Margaret Watkins engages closely with these neglected texts and shows how they provide important insights into Hume's perspective on the breadth and depth of human life, arguing that the Essays reveal his continued commitment to philosophy as a discipline that can promote both social and individual progress. Addressing topics (...) such as politics, war, slavery, the priesthood, the development of industry, aesthetics, emotional disorders, egoism, friendship, sexuality, gender relations, and the nature of philosophy itself, the volume examines Hume's purposes and aims against the backdrop of the eighteenth century society in which he lived. It will be of interest to scholars of modern thought in philosophy, politics, history, and economics. (shrink)

Through the use of particular pedagogies and the adoption of new modes of thinking, physical literacy promises more realistic models of physical competence and ...

The conviction that Gilles Deleuze is doing something radical in his work has been accompanied by a corresponding anxiety as to how to read it. In this rigorous and lucid work, Ian Buchanan takes up the challenge by answering the following questions: How should we read Deleuze? How should we read _with_ Deleuze? To show us how Deleuze’s philosophy works, Buchanan begins with Melville’s notion that “a great book is always the inverse of another book that could only (...) be written in the soul, with silence and blood.” Buchanan demonstrates that the figure of two books—one written in ink and the other written in blood—lies at the center of Deleuze’s hermeneutics and that a special relation must be established in order to read the second book from the first. This relation is Deleuzism. By explicating elemental concepts in Deleuze—desire, flow, the nomad—Buchanan finds that, despite Deleuze’s self-declared moratorium on dialectics, he was in several important respects a dialectician. In essays that address the “prehistory” of Deleuze’s philosophy, his methodology, and the utopic dimensions of his thought, Buchanan extracts an apparatus of social critique that arises from the philosopher’s utopian impulse. _Deleuzism_ is a work that will engage all those with an interest in the twentieth-century’s most original philosopher. (shrink)

Ethical guidelines for conducting clinical trials have historically been based on a perceived therapeutic obligation to treat and benefit the patient-participants. The origins of this ethical framework can be traced to the Hippocratic oath originally written to guide doctors in caring for their patients, where the overriding moral obligation of doctors is strictly to do what is best for the individual patient, irrespective of other social considerations. In contrast, although medicine focuses on the health of the person, public health is (...) concerned with the health of the entire population, and thus, public health ethics is founded on the societal responsibility to protect and promote the health of the population as a whole. From a public health perspective, research ethics should be guided by giving due consideration to the risks and benefits to society in addition to the individual research participants. On the basis of a duty to protect the population as a whole, a fiduciary obligation to realise the social value of the research and the moral responsibility to distribute the benefits and burdens of research fairly across society, how a public health perspective on research ethics results in fundamental re-assessments of the proper course of action for two salient topical issues in research ethics is shown: stopping trials early for reasons of efficacy and the conduct of research on less expensive yet less effective interventions. (shrink)

Propositions are the things we believe, intend, desire, and so on, but discussions are often less precise than they could be and an important driver of this deficiency has been a focus on the objects but a neglect of the attitudinal relations we bear to them. In what follows, we will offer some thoughts on what it means for a proposition to be the object of an attitude and we will argue that an important part of the story lies with (...) the attitude relations rather than the propositions. As we will see there are infinitely many relations we might bear to a proposition, but the propositional attitude relations are special amongst them. Accounting for what makes them special will be an important component in the discussion that follows. We will argue that once one appreciates certain facts about propositional attitude relations, various claims that metaphysicians often make regarding propositions themselves begin to look undermotivated. In fact, many views on the metaphysical nature of propositions come to look like plausible candidates for being that to which our propositional attitudes relate us. As will emerge, we will see that the principle role of propositions in the theory of mind is simply to keep track of how our attitudinal states represent things as being. But, we argue, in order to do this work, very few constraints must be placed on the nature of propositions themselves. In particular, contra much of the recent work on the metaphysics of propositions, they need not represent nor must they be structured. In light of these observations, we conclude by sketching our own favored minimalist view of propositions. (shrink)

Work on representing women's voices in ethics has produced a vision of moral understanding profoundly subversive of the traditional philosophical conception of moral knowledge. 1 explicate this alternative moral “epistemology,” identify how it challenges the prevailing view, and indicate some of its resources for a liberatory feminist critique of philosophical ethics.

Ruth Garrett Millikan presents a strikingly original account of how we get to grips with the world in thought. Her question is Kant's 'How is knowledge possible?', answered from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. We begin with an understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, then develop a theory of cognition within that world.

This article argues that Hume's brief essay, "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion," offers resources for three claims: (1) Delicate taste correlates with self-sufficiency and thus with a particularly Humean form of Magnanimity -- greatness of mind; (2) Delicate taste improves the capacity for profound friendships, characterized by mutual admiration and true compassion; and (3) magnanimity and compassion are thus not necessarily in tension with one another and may even proceed from and support harmony of character. These claims, in (...) turn, provide reasons to take seriously Hume's view that moral character depends, in part, on aesthetic character. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt by Tim MilnesMargaret WatkinsTim Milnes. The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 278. Hardback. ISBN: 9780198812739. $91.00.In his brief autobiography, “My Own Life,” Hume reports that “almost all [his] life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations” (E-MOL: xxxi). This is one (...) of at least ten places in this brief work in which he associates himself with “letters” or “literature”—as compared to at most four associations with philosophy. The moral to be inferred is not that Hume considered himself not to be a philosopher. Rather, he conceived of philosophy as a kind of literature. The Treatise was itself a “literary attempt.” Indeed, opposition between the “literary” and “philosophical” aspects of a text would have been foreign to Hume and his contemporaries—a notion for a later age, despite his occasional loose distinction between the relevant genres, as in his list of writings “historical, philosophical, or literary” in “My Own Life” (E-MOL: xxxvi).Yet despite Hume’s own understanding of the continuity between philosophy and literature, broadly conceived, it is still common for contemporary philosophers to ignore literary questions in their examination of Hume’s work, or to presume that one can easily distinguish the “philosophical” parts from the “literary” ones. Tim Milnes’s The Testimony of Sense is therefore a welcome addition to the Hume literature (pun intended). With a particular focus on the essay—a genre of great importance to Hume—Milnes contributes to the small set of engagements with Hume from the disciplinary perspective of English literature. With training in both philosophy and literature, as well as established expertise on Romanticism and its own essays, Milnes is well-qualified for the task. The Testimony of Sense includes sustained engagement with Hume’s contemporaries and successors, but for the purposes of this review, I engage the book primarily as a Hume scholar for Hume scholars.Milnes’s story plays out in three acts. The first establishes the need for public trust created by a skeptical crisis, itself a product of Hume’s criticism of the epistemic program of thinkers in the Cartesian and Lockean traditions. The second explains how the essays of the long eighteenth century constitute a response to that need in various ways. The third reveals in detail how the Romantic essayists, particularly William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, both respond to and deviate from the “neoclassical” essayists, typified by Hume and Samuel Johnson.The first chapter, “Self and Intersubjectivity,” lays the groundwork by articulating how Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart identify the need for what we now call intersubjectivity. Milnes describes the common thread as a kind of “natural transcendentalism.” In what sense are these thinkers properly understood as [End Page 175] transcendentalists? The central idea seems to be that all posit things other than reason as “conditions of meaningful thought” (72). For Hume, it is the social, linguistic experience of a community of virtuous judges. The intricate relations between self and other essential to such a community get “internalized within the specular drama of the impartial spectator” (72) in Smith’s writing, which itself takes part in the drama through his “halting, qualified syntax” that mimics “everyday speech” (44). Reid posits a “prescience” of trust, which grounds our reliance on both human testimony and the uniformity of nature, itself undergirded by the design of a benevolent God. Stewart, who posits axiomatic truths that help constitute the “stamina of intellect,” goes furthest, actually calling these truths transcendental (55). This chapter also puts these eighteenth-century thinkers in conversation with twentieth-century theorists, including Habermas, Davidson, and Rorty.Chapter 2, “The Subject of Trust,” deepens the analysis by situating these “natural transcendentalisms” in the broader enlightenment context. In contrast to Descartes, Bacon, and Locke, who were suspicious of our reliance on the opinions of others, the eighteenth-century thinkers understand trust as prior to reason in various ways—though not prior to solidarity. The particulars in each case depend on their responses to skepticism and their accounts of the relation between... (shrink)

_Examines the significance of animal environments in contemporary continental thought._.

Appeals to the idea of human nature are frequent in the voluminous literature on the ethics of enhancing human beings through biotechnology. Two chief concerns about the impact of enhancements on human nature have been voiced. The first is that enhancement may alter or destroy human nature. The second is that if enhancement alters or destroys human nature, this will undercut our ability to ascertain the good because, for us, the good is determined by our nature. The first concern assumes (...) that altering or destroying human nature is in itself a bad thing. The second concern assumes that human nature provides a standard without which we cannot make coherent, defensible judgments about what is good.I will argue (1) that there is nothing wrong, per se, with altering or destroying human nature, because, on a plausible understanding of what human nature is, it contains bad as well as good characteristics and there is no reason to believe that eliminating some of the bad would so imperil the good as to make the elimination of the bad impermissible, and (2) that altering or destroying human nature need not result in the loss of our ability to make judgments about the good, because we possess a conception of the good by which we can and do evaluate human nature. I will argue that appeals to human nature tend to obscure rather than illuminate the debate over the ethics of enhancement and can be eliminated in favor of more cogent considerations. (shrink)

Traditional conservative arguments against the possibility of moral progress relied on underevidenced assumptions about the limitations of human nature. Contemporary thinkers have attempted to fill this empirical gap in the conservative argument by appealing to evolutionary science. Such “evoconservative” arguments fail because they overstate the explanatory reach of evolutionary theory. We maintain that no adequate evolutionary explanation has been given for important features of human morality, namely cosmopolitan and other “inclusivist” moral commitments. We attribute these evolutionarily anomalous features to a (...) capacity for open-ended normativity, which presents a serious obstacle to theorists who wish to draw substantive moral and political lessons from human evolutionary history. (shrink)

This interview deals with the major themes in the work of Ruth Millikan. Her most fundamental idea is that the intentionality of inner and outer representations can be understood in analogy to biological functions. Another innovative feature is the view that thought and language stand parallel to each other. Thirdly, the basic ideas concerning the ontology and the epistemology of concepts are explained. Millikan aims at clarifying her position by contrasting it with Dretske, Fodor, Sellars, and Brandom. Finally, the (...) interview addresses topics that pose problems for her account as well as questions she does not treat in her work. (shrink)

A list of groceries, Professor Anscombe once suggested, might be used as a shopping list, telling what to buy, or it might be used as an inventory list, telling what has been bought (Anscombe 1957). If used as a shopping list, the world is supposed to conform to the representation: if the list does not match what is in the grocery bag, it is what is in the bag that is at fault. But if used as an inventory list, the (...) representation is supposed to conform to the world: if the list does not match what is in the bag, it is the list that is at fault. The first kind of representation, where the world is supposed to conform to the list, can be called "directive"; it represents or directs what is to be done. The second, where the list is supposed to conform to the world, can be called "descriptive"; it represents or describes what is the case. I wish to propose that there exist representations that face both these ways at once. With apologies to Dr. Doolittle, I call them pushmi-pullyu representations or PPRs. (shrink)

This article explores the characteristics of narratives told by women and men about the birth of children. The comparison focuses on the way speakers use evaluation devices to structure their experiences and to negotiate a relationship with their audience. Findings indicate that, while there are subtle contrasts between the narratives that suggest that male speakers emphasize informative meaning and women provoke an affectual response related to the disclosure of internalized expectations, there are significant macro-level similarities with both women and men (...) making use of anecodotal structures. It is argued that understanding these similarities and dissimilarities in terms of gender difference alone is overly simplistic and that gender should be understood as interacting in complex ways with a range of further potential variables connected with context. (shrink)

The distinctive aim of applied ethics is to provide guidance as to how we ought to act, as individuals and as shapers of social policies. In this essay, I argue that applied ethics as currently practiced is inadequate and ought to be transformed to incorporate what I shall call social moral epistemology. This is a branch of social epistemology, the study of the social practices and institutions that promote the formation, preservation, and transmission of true beliefs. For example, social epistemologists (...) critically evaluate the comparative advantages of adversarial versus inquisitorial criminal proceedings as mechanisms for the discovery of truth. (shrink)

A cross-section of the writings of Dominique Lestel, Vinciane Despret and Roberto Marchesini is presented here in translation across three special issues on philosophical ethology. These thinkers, relatively unknown in anglophone scholarship, offer important contributions to contemporary debates in posthumanism and animal studies. Particularly in so far as they scrutinise our often awkward attempts to understand the behaviour of animals in labs and fields – to know what animal bodies can do – they share in the rethinking of interspecies forms (...) of life, as domains of both empirical knowledge and zoo-political performance, and thereby take important steps towards a new philosophical ethology. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of a wide range of thinkers, the authors offer a program for organizing and leading human activity in all types of organizations, based a ...