Today is dedicated to the remembrance of the Holy Innocents, who were victims of a state sponsored terrorist attack at the very beginning of the Christian era. We believe this is an appropriate spiritual time to review and question the moral judgement of the Catholic Bishops of the United States of America that our nation's war on the people of Afghanistan is just. We do this in a spirit of fidelity to the teachings of the Catholic Church (...) and to the charism bequeathed to us as Catholic Workers by our founders, the Servants of God Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day of New York. Our statements, questions, and conclusions may seem startling to you, they may make you uncomfortable. This is because we come to you, not as the rich and powerful, but as the weak, poor, and powerless. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Walking the Bodhisattva Path/Walking the Christ PathU.S. Conference of Catholic BishopsCatholics and Buddhists brought together by Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, the San Francisco Zen Center, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) met 20-23 March 2003 in the first of an anticipated series of four annual dialogues. Abbot Heng Lyu, the monks and nuns, and members of the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association hosted the (...) dialogue at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Talmage, California. The community had transformed their Confucius Hall into a chapel, with a large, newly constructed wooden cross on a wall above an altar facing out from a raised platform, so the Catholic delegation would have a space for worship. A special poster announcing the theme of the conference, "Walking the Bodhisattva Path/Walking the Christ Path," showing a Buddhist dharma wheel at one foot of a bridge and a Celtic cross at the other foot, had been created by the hosting community.The daily schedule for the dialogue did not interfere with the monastic routine at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, which included early morning chanting (4:00-5:00 am), daily rituals in the Buddha Hall, and the single large meal for monastics before noon to which all participants were invited. Catholics and Buddhists meeting in the dialogue began each day with an optional forty-five minutes of quiet sitting together in the monastery meditation hall, each following their own form of meditation and prayer. There was a Eucharist on Friday and Saturday evenings for the Catholics and to which the Buddhists were invited, and additional meals of breakfast and supper throughout the meeting at the City's Jyun Kang Restaurant.Fourteen Buddhists and fourteen Catholics participated in the formal discussions. Each participant spoke on what it means to them to follow Christ or the way of the Bodhisattvas or enlightened beings. In addition to speaking, each participant distributed a short passage, usually from a traditional text, on this topic. Several passages from Master Dogen's Shobogenzo and the Gospel of John were among those shared by the group. Other passages shared were taken from the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Shurangama Sutra and from the other gospels and the writings of Zen master HakuinZenji, the Dalai Lama, Korean Zen Master I-sahn Hye-yeon, the teachings of Master [End Page 247] Hsuan Hua, Shantideva, Origen, St. Ignatius, St. Benedict, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, St. John of the Cross, and Chiara Lubich. A minute of silence separated the fifteen-minute segments for each presentation. With so large a group, most of the time in the formal sessions involved listening to series of presentations; however, during discussion periods the participants asked several challenging questions of one another.Some participants noted the tension they felt between belonging to a particular religious group and the need to let go of any consequential narrowness. The goal of the discussion was to promote understanding of the differences and similarities between Christianity and Buddhism. At one point, the participants noted several concerns about mutual enrichment: whether Buddhist methods can be separated from Buddhism and Christian methods from Christianity, and what specific aspects of Christian practice truly enrich Buddhists and which Buddhist practices likewise enrich Christians. Several times participants discussed their understanding of terms such as transformation, grace, the incarnation and the passion of Jesus, discernment of spirits, prayer, Buddha-nature, and related terms. There was consensus that Buddhists and Catholics can practically help one another regarding mental cultivation and religious precepts. They expressed this consensus in their choice of the topic forthe next dialogue, "Transformation of Hearts and Minds: Chan/Zen-Catholic Approaches to Precepts."The group agreed to reconvene in 2004 to respond to six presentations, three from each side, on different aspects of this topic.Chairing the sessions were Rev. Heng Sure for the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, Rev. Taigen Dan Leighton for the San Francisco Zen Center, and Bishop John Webster for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Their three organizations are the sponsors of the Northern California Chan/Zen-Catholic Dialogue. Chan and Zen are respectively the Chinese and Japanese terms for the meditation school... (shrink)

Bishop James T. McHugh; Building a Culture of Life: A Catholic Perspective, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, Volume 7, Issue 3.

Voluntary active euthanasia and physician assisted suicide should not be legalised because too much that is important about living and dying will be lostIn the first of this two part series, I unpack the historical philosophical distinction between killing and allowing a patient to die in order to clear up the confusion that exists. Historically speaking the two kinds of actions are morally distinct because of older notions of causality and human agency. We no longer understand that distinction primarily because (...) we have shifted our notions of causality from a traditional formulation to a modern formulation of causality and thus of moral assessment that focuses on the effects of an action. In this essay, I prepare the ground for a companion essay by showing that the traditional formulation allows us to maintain notions of meaning and purpose to human living and dying that are precluded in the efficiency paradigm of modernity. Taken together with the companion essay, I am claiming that voluntary active euthanasia and physician assisted suicide should not be legalised because too much that is important about dying and living will be lost.TWO LIESIt would be naïve to think that euthanasia, in either the VAE sense, or in the more passive sense of PAS, does not happen. It would even be naïve to think that it does not occur in a non-voluntary form. It would be equally naïve, however, to think it could be controlled through governmental regulation. The real question with regard to PAS/VAE, put so eloquently by Martha Minow, is which lie do you countenance: the lie that euthanasia does not already happen, or the lie that it can be controlled without having repercussions well beyond the limits of procedural mastery?1 With this two part paper series, I will argue that the …. (shrink)

Sally Gadow influenced our work when we first began exploring the meaning of nursing philosophically. In this article, we discuss two major themes of Gadow's work that have influenced us: existential advocacy and treating the body objectively without reducing the patient to the moral status of an object. Our treatment of these issues is appreciative but not uncritical. We argue that existential advocacy makes an important contribution to the meaning of nursing but that it cannot be its essential meaning. We (...) contend that Gadow, by making self‐direction the essence of care, tends to diminish the intersubjective nature of care. Then we show how Gadow recovers the intersubjective nature of care by disclosing how nurses and patients both become subjects in personal relationships, even when tending to the body objectively. We show how hermeneutic phenomenology, which we favour, can contribute to Gadow's existential phenomenology by using examples from nursing practice to disclose the meaning of nursing. Gadow's major contribution to our work has been in the ways her work has evoked creative thought from us concerning the meaning of nursing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Catholic Theological Ethics Past, Present, and Future: The Trento Conference Edited by James F. Keenan, and: The Social Mission of the US Catholic Church: A Theological Perspective by Charles E. CurranDaniel CosacchiCatholic Theological Ethics Past, Present, and Future: The Trento Conference EDITED BY JAMES F. KEENAN Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. 337 pp. $40.00The Social Mission of the US Catholic Church: A Theological Perspective CHARLES (...) E. CURRAN Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011. 196 pp. $29.95To read both Catholic Theological Ethics Past, Present, and Future and The Social Mission of the US Catholic Church is to take a whirlwind tour—theological, historical, and geographical—through the Roman Catholic ethical tradition. Both volumes present wonderfully rich material and invaluable resources for the study of Christian ethics. Charles Curran and James Keenan are two of the foremost Catholic ethicists in the United States today. Keenan’s case is to be applauded for convening the 2010 conference in Trento, which brought together some six hundred Roman Catholic ethicists from around the world. His book, which assembles that conference’s thirty-one plenary addresses, does justice to this tremendous feat. Curran, for his part, has produced a text that focuses acutely on the Church in the United States and will benefit ethicists for years to come.Keenan uses the introduction to Catholic Theological Ethics Past, Present, and Future to provide an overview of the Trento conference and its attendees and proceedings. Keenan expertly identifies a common theme among the 240 diverse papers at the conference, noting that ethicists “always begin with the premise that there is a deficit in our location, and, therefore, we need to work together to find a way to remedy it” (6). What follows in the remainder of the book boldly moves toward remedies for many of the world’s ills. A few of these essays deserve particular mention.The conference and the collection of essays share the basic organizational principle of looking to the past, the present, and the future of Catholic theological ethics. Unsurprisingly, the Council of Trent played a foundational role in understanding the “past” of Catholic moral theology. Laurenti Magesa [End Page 216] (Kenya) explains that the African experience of the Council of Trent has remained largely unchanged since the conclusion of that council: “The Catholic Church in Africa is essentially a Tridentine church” (57). This essay makes clear that in Africa, the dominant voices are Western males. The missing voices, then, are given attention by Antônio Moser (Brazil), Anne Nasimiyu-Wasike (Kenya), and Bryan Massingale (United States). Massingale’s essay was most impressive, addressing the role of racism in our culture and concluding that Catholic ethicists “need to lament, mourn, and grieve our history” (121). This, he claims, is both a fruitful way to act in the present and a hopeful way to look toward the future.In focusing on the present, the strongest subsection of the book attended to political ethics. Here David Kaulemu’s (Zimbabwe) essay, “Catholic Social Teaching at a Crossroad,” has the potential to open the eyes of any reader. He writes, “It is frustrating and discouraging to the lay faithful to be inspired by Catholic social teaching and yet receive no recognition or support by ‘official’ church structures” (177). This highlights a serious problem to which all Catholic ethicists must attend. As for the future, Julie Hanlon Rubio (United States) points to a tripartite vision for marriage in the twenty-first century that sets high standards not only within the marital unit itself but also for the impact of the spouses on the larger society. Julie Clague (Scotland) presents a wonderful essay on the burgeoning relationship between moral theology and gender.Among the wealth of positive features of this collection is the great geographical diversity of the authors. This affirms that Catholic theological ethics is very healthy throughout the entire world and that on each continent there are voices of women and men willing to contribute fresh ideas to the discipline. In a time when there is so much tension between theologians and bishops, we should also be grateful that there are two essays from members of the episcopacy (Archbishop Bruno... (shrink)

Death cannot be mastered through a metaphysics of efficiency that interprets all actions in terms only of cause and effect, but it can be transcended if we leave the frame open to death’s ambiguityIn the second of this two part series, I describe how in shifting our frames from one of human purpose and meaning to one of efficiency, we shift the possible answers we get to our questions about voluntary active euthanasia and physician assisted suicide . Thus, by placing (...) VAE/PAS within the frame of efficiency, we narrow our focus to the final effect in the world of cause and effect—namely death. Thus, in ensconcing euthanasia within a legal framework meant to instrumentally and efficiently control euthanasia, we are in fact narrowing our focus on death. Thus, in legalising VAE/PAS we are not just adding one choice to a panoply of other choices, we are in fact changing the nature of all choices, for each choice conditions all others. We should therefore live with the lie that VAE/PAS do not happen as opposed to living with the lie that through efficient legal control we protect patients from medical dominance.AN ANECDOTESeveral years ago an acquaintance told me about a terrible situation in which he found himself during the Vietnam war. He was Green Beret—one of the elite special forces corps of the US army. He was in an area that was officially off limits to the US. His unit came under heavy fire and a buddy was shot in several places but was still alive. His comrade was in serious pain, but what scared him the most was that he might die in the jungle, be eaten by a wild animal, or be captured by the enemy. There was no way to get him out. The wounded soldier …. (shrink)

Epistemic responsibility involves at least two central ideas. (V) To be epistemically responsible is to display the virtue(s) epistemic internalists take to be central to justification (e.g., coherence, having good reasons, fitting the evidence). (C) In normal (non-skeptical)circumstances and in thelong run, epistemic responsibility is strongly positively correlated with reliability. Sections 1 and 2 review evidence showing that for a wide range of real-world problems, the most reliable, tractable reasoning strategies audaciously flout the internalist''s epistemic virtues. In Section 3, I (...) argue that these results force us to give up either (V), our current conception of what it is to be epistemically responsible, or (C) the responsibility-reliability connection. I will argue that we should relinquish (V). This is likely to reshape our epistemic practices. It will force us to alter our epistemic judgments about certain instances of reasoning, to endorse some counterintuitive epistemic prescriptions, and to rethink what it is for cognitive agents to be epistemically responsible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 16.4 (2006) 379-396MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Pharmacists and Conscientious Objection *In March 2005, a Wisconsin pharmacist's act of conscience garnered headlines across the United States. After a married woman with four children submitted a prescription for the morning-after pill, the pharmacist, Neil Noesen, not only refused to fill it, but also refused to transfer the prescription to another pharmacist or to return the prescription (...) to the customer. As more such incidents occurred, many states "... decided to consider and enact laws setting the bounds of pharmacists' and other health care workers' professional obligations" (III, Grady 2006, p. 327). Discussions of objector legislation, also referred to as "conscience clauses," "refusal clauses," and "abandonment laws" (III, Appel 2005, p. 279), are not limited to professional ethics, but also draw from philosophical, theological, and legal perspectives. The purpose of this Scope Note is to present a wide variety of viewpoints on the health provider's right to conscience.More than 40 years ago the development of "The Pill" as the first reliable method of birth control not only ushered in a feminist revolution, but also provided a new focus for concerns of conscience for those who were part of the anti-abortion movement based on religious belief in the sanctity of life. Similarly, in the past ten years, worldwide, and seven years (1999) since the emergency contraception "morning after" pill first became available as a prescription item, there has been an upsurge in the number of medical personnel who refuse to prescribe or dispense it on grounds of personal conscience, whether for religious reasons or not. Their actions bring into play issues of power and control for health care personnel and for patients—in this case women, which also raises women's rights issues. Ironically, studies in France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have shown that emergency contraception does not reduce the abortion rate—it is too infrequently used (II, Glasier 2006).It is important to underline the difference between the "morning-after" pill or "Plan B," which is made up of two progestin pills containing levonorgestrel (a synthetic derivative of the female hormone progesterone), and RU-486 (Mifiprex [End Page 379] or mifipristone with misoprostol). Plan B, if taken within 72 hours post-coitus prevents implantation, and therefore pregnancy, by suppressing the output of luteinizing hormone, the hormone that triggers the ovulation process. Scientists have been unable to determine whether this action could destroy already fertilized eggs, but even if it does, it uses the same mechanism as occurs with the birth-control pill, that was developed some 45 years ago. By contrast, RU-486 acts up to 49 days after implantation by blocking the action of progesterone in order to terminate the pregnancy and as such is an abortifacient (II, US FDA 1).On 24 August 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced approval of the Plan B pill for over-the-counter (OTC ) sales (II, US FDA 2). Although this action makes the drug more widely available, it remains to be seen whether pharmacists who are conscientious objectors and who refuse to dispense it also will refuse to provide it OTC.A survey article by Rebecca Dresser (II, 2005, p. 9) succinctly sums up the problem for conscientious objectors: "Because emergency contraception can act to block implantation of a fertilized egg, people who believe in protection of human life after conception find it morally objectionable."When conscientious objections are raised over abortion or birth control services performed, prescribed, or dispensed, they affect not only the health professionals—physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and health technicians—who may object, as well as their colleagues and/or managers, but also the consumers: the female patients who are then forced to reconsider or to seek an alternative supplier, as well as their spouses or partners. Alta Charo (II, 2005, p. 2473) makes the point that the patient needs to have access to a system of counseling and referral "so... (shrink)

A growing number of scholars have suggested that there is a unique I-You relation that obtains between persons in face-to-face encounters, but while the increased attention paid to the second-person has led to many important insights regarding the nature of this relation, there is still much work to be done to clarify what makes the second-person relation distinct. In this paper we wish to develop recent scholarship on the second-person by means of a phenomenological analysis of a doctor-patient interaction. In (...) such an interaction the doctor and patient continuously shift between the observational I-It and the interactive I-You, and recognizing the difference between observation and interaction not only helps to defend the claim that this relation is sui generis, but also uncovers the co-constitution of experience from within this relation. As we argue, engaging another second-personally involves a shared experience that is a result of incorporating the other’s mental states into one’s own while standing in the second-person relation. (shrink)

A growing number of scholars have suggested that there is a unique I-You relation that obtains between persons in face-to-face encounters, but while the increased attention paid to the second-person has led to many important insights regarding the nature of this relation, there is still much work to be done to clarify what makes the second-person relation distinct. In this paper we wish to develop recent scholarship on the second-person by means of a phenomenological analysis of a doctor-patient interaction. In (...) such an interaction the doctor and patient continuously shift between the observational I-It and the interactive I-You, and recognizing the difference between observation and interaction not only helps to defend the claim that this relation is sui generis, but also uncovers the co-constitution of experience from within this relation. As we argue, engaging another second-personally involves a shared experience that is a result of incorporating the other’s mental states into one’s own while standing in the second-person relation. (shrink)

A ‘doxastic venture’ model of faith – according to which having faith involves believing beyond what is rationally justifiable – can be defended only on condition that such venturesome believing is both possible and ethically acceptable. I show how a development of the position argued by William James in ‘The will to believe’ can succeed in meeting these conditions. A Jamesian defence of doxastic venture is, however, open to the objection that decision theory teaches us that there can be no (...) circumstances in which ‘the evidence does not decide’, so a fortiori no occasion to permit belief on a ‘passional’ basis. I argue that this objection does not apply to certain ‘framework principles’ such as those presupposed by the framework of theistic belief and practice, and that there are good grounds for preferring a doxastic venture model of faith over a more austere alternative (advocated by Richard Swinburne) according to which reasonable faith cannot be more than the commitment to act on the assumption, with any (non-negligible) degree of confidence, that God exists and is to be trusted. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The extension of human rights obligations to corporations raises questions about whose rights and which rights corporations are responsible for. This paper gives a partial answer by asking what legal rights corporations would need to have to fulfil various sorts of human rights obligations. We should compare the chances of human rights fulfilment (and violations) that are likely to result from assigning human rights obligations to corporations with the chances of human rights fulfilment (and violations) that are likely to result (...) from giving corporations the legal rights needed to undertake those human rights obligations. Corporations should respect basic human rights of all people. Non-complicity in human rights violations requires that corporations have the right to political freedom of speech. To actively protect people from human rights violations, corporations need the right to hire armed security personnel; such obligations should be limited to protecting corporate property and narrowly defined stakeholders. Obligations to spend corporate resources on human rights fulfilment are confined to contributing to specific projects. Corporations have no obligation to ensure a society in which human rights are fulfilled. This principle helps us understand why corporate obligations are substantially different from those of governments. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to bring the woefully neglected literature on predictive modeling to bear on some central questions in the philosophy of science. The lesson of this literature is straightforward: For a very wide range of prediction problems, statistical prediction rules (SPRs), often rules that are very easy to implement, make predictions than are as reliable as, and typically more reliable than, human experts. We will argue that the success of SPRs forces us to reconsider our views (...) about what is involved in understanding, explanation, good reasoning, and about how we ought to do philosophy of science. (shrink)

For several years now, early cinema historians have developed certain notions that can help us define, in a much broader context, the axes of research in intermedial studies. Even though I’ll be giving it a slightly different importance, the notion I will be borrowing from these historians here is that of the “parameter.” Work by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion on the emergence of the cinematographic medium relies on the idea that the medium appears as the result of a choice (...) made by the historian. To write the history of any given medium and separate it into periods, one must also select the components “that gathered together as a way of giving ‘birth’ to that medium at.. (shrink)

In presenting John Wyclif, Professor Hall takes us into the varied settings and struggles of fourteenth-century England. He gives a picture of the farm life at Wycliffe Manor with the stern and loving care under which John was raised. Life at Oxford, the Black Death of 1348–49, the struggles between the monastic orders and the so-called “secular” clergy, the conditions of the Church, and the recurring conflicts between the bishops and the civil authorities—all of these are woven with skill (...) into this moving biography. (shrink)

Technology tends toward perpetual innovation. Technology, enabled by both political and economic structures, propels society forward in a kind of technological evolution. The moment a novel piece of technology is in place, immediately innovations are attempted in a process of unending betterment. Bernard Stiegler suggests that, contra Heidegger, it is not being-toward-death that shapes human perception of time, life, death, and meaning. Rather, it is technological innovation that shapes human perception of time, life, death, and meaning. In fact, for Stiegler, (...) human evolution has always been part of technological evolution. While one can quibble with the notion of human-technology co-evolution, there is something to be said for the way in which human perception of time, of ageing, and of death seems to be judged against the horizon of perpetual evolution of technological innovation. In this technological imaginary, of which modern medicine is constituent, ageing and death seemingly may be infinitely deferred, and it is this innovating deferral that shapes the contemporary social imaginary around ageing and death in modern medicine. Yet, the reality of living and dying always manifests itself differently than the scripts given to us by the technological imaginary with its myth of endless innovation. In fact, I shall argue that, where the Church created an ars moriendi, the technological imaginary gives us an ars ad mortem when it becomes clear that ageing and death cannot be infinitely deferred. And further, I shall argue that the Church must revivify its ars vivendi—that is to say, its liturgies, its arts, its technics—as a counter narrative to the myth of perpetual innovation that shapes the technological imaginary. (shrink)

This article and the following ones by Slife and Westerman represent a coordinated effort on the authors' part to begin to mine the resources of what has been termed the "practice turn in contemporary theory" for psychology. The liberal approach tends to focus on a fear of power and how it can corrupt our best ideals, while the postmodernist tends to focus on a fascination with power flowing through the social and institutional expressions of these very ideals. Given modern Western (...) culture's deep antiauthoritarian tenor, these two responses can be seen as reflecting what might be termed an underlying "control or be controlled" dilemma. We suggest the practice turn and hermeneutics offer an avenue for effectively getting past this basic dilemma. They make it clear that in everyday life, we are both profoundly shaped and influenced by the world and other people and influence them, in turn, by the way we interpret them and adjust to them as we engage in the fields of practices in which we find ourselves. Personal and social influences at play in the everyday business of human living create a continuum rather than a dichotomy regarding issues of control and power, leading to a dissolution of our taxing "control or be controlled" dilemma. Such an ontology clearly entails rethinking some prominent cultural ideals, leading us perhaps to think as much or more in terms of character than achievement, of cooperation than competition, of patience than striving restlessly to get somewhere. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Compelled by recent public and politicized cases in which withdrawal of nutrition and hydration were at issue, this essay examines recent Church statements and argues that the distinction between private and public forms of human life is being lost. Effacing the distinction between the sphere of the home (oikos), where the maintenance of life (zoē) occurs, and the city (polis), where political and public life (bios) occurs, may have unforeseen and unwanted consequences. Through their well-intentioned efforts to preserve the sanctity (...) of life, certain bishops and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have unfortunately brought political considerations into the home, taking decision-making authority away from those most intimately related to the patient. Thus, the question of removing nutrition and hydration in the case of patients such as Schiavo and Englaro becomes politicized and abstract, in contrast with the Church's previous positions on the importance of proportionate means in the maintenance of life, local decision making, and its recognition of life as a penultimate end. (shrink)

It is commonly held that Christian ethics generally and Christian bioethics particularly is the application of Christian moral systems to novel problems engaged by contemporary culture and created by contemporary technology. On this view, Christianity adds its moral vision to a technology, baptizing it for use. In this essay, I show that modern technology is a metaphysical moral worldview that enacts its own moral vision, shaping a moral imaginary, shaping our moral perception, creating moral subjects, and shaping what we imagine (...) as moral intentions. In fact, modern technics has its own liturgics, which is foreign to Christian Divine Liturgy. Divine Liturgy is world forming, showing us a different world than the one that comes into relief in the ersatz liturgy of modern medical technics. (shrink)

I, along with others, have been critical of the social construction of brain death and the various social factors that led to redefining death from cardiopulmonary failure to irreversible loss of brain functioning, or brain death. Yet this does not mean that brain death is not the best threshold to permit organ harvesting—or, as people today prefer to call it, organ procurement. Here I defend whole-brain death as a morally legitimate line that, once crossed, is grounds for families to give (...) permission for organ donation. I do so in five moves. First, I make the case that whole-brain death is a social construction that transformed one thing, coma dépassé, into another thing, brain death, as a result of social pressures. Second, I explore the way that the 1981 President’s Commission tried to establish the epistemological certainty of brain death, hoping to avoid making arcane metaphysical claims and yet still utilizing metaphysical claims about human beings. Third, I explore the moral meaning of the social construction of a definition that cannot offer metaphysical certainty about the point at which somebody becomes just some body. Fourth, I describe how two moral communities—Jewish and Catholic—actually ground their metaphysical positions with regard to brain death in the normativity of prior social relations. Finally, I conclude with a reflection on the aesthetic-moral enterprise of the metaphysical-epistemological apparatus of brain death, concluding that only such an aesthetic-moral approach is sufficiently strong to stave off the utility-maximizing tendencies of late-modern Western cultures. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Benjamin Page's thoughtful critique of my book, The Illusion of Public Opinion, strives to reassure readers that all is well—despite the book's extensive documentation of measurement‐error artifacts in numerous public opinion surveys. Page's own careful polling practices are not followed outside of elite academic survey centers. Moreover, even in such well‐run surveys, the respondents are often ignorant of the issues being probed. The fact that nonrandom reasons of some sort must be determining on‐the‐spot survey responses may allow us to (...) call the respondents “rational” in a loose sense. But the responses still don't represent actual opinions about the specific policy issues being probed—let alone well‐informed answers. Finally, while Page argues that measurement errors are most likely random, and should cancel out in the aggregate, the “miracle of aggregation” doesn't occur when the form, wording, and context of questions varies from survey to survey. And even when wording and context are held constant, the respondents' understanding of the same words can vary dramatically or subtly over time, due to new political events and their changing interpretation. (shrink)

Viewed in the light of the remarkable performance of ‘Watson’ - IBMs proprietary artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language - on the US general knowledge quiz show ‘Jeopardy’, we review two experiments on formal systems - one in the domain of quantum physics, the other involving a pictographic languaging game - whereby behaviour seemingly characteristic of domain understanding is generated by the mere mechanical application of simple rules. By re-examining both experiments in the context (...) of Searle’s Chinese Room Argument, we suggest their results merely endorse Searle’s core intuition: that ‘syntactical manipulation of symbols is not sufficient for semantics’. Although, pace Watson, some artificial intelligence practitioners have suggested that more complex, higher-level operations on formal symbols are required to instantiate understanding in computational systems, we show that even high-level calls to Google translate would not enable a computer qua ‘formal symbol processor’ to understand the language it processes. We thus conclude that even the most recent developments in ‘quantum linguistics’ will not enable computational systems to genuinely understand natural language. (shrink)

E. Haavi Morreim's book, Holding Health Care Accountable , insightfully describes several features of the current crisis in malpractice in relation to the health care marketplace. In this essay, I delineate the key and eminently practical guide for reform that she lays out. I argue that her insights bring us to more fundamental aspects than immanent medical economy and accountability - aspects that are ignored at present. I describe the features of immanent economy and how they tend to cover over (...) epistemological and existential finitude in medicine, show how economy can in fact create new medical knowledge, and show that necessary error is a real feature of day-to-day medical practice. The current system, even with Morreim's reforms, remains at the level of immanent economy, but with modifications may point to the features of medicine that transcend medical knowledge and economy. The gifts of medicine cannot be reduced to the immanent medical economy, and any attempt to do so results in crisis. A health care that points to finitude and fallibility is one that points to the mystery of human existence and mortality. Any health care financing system that helps to delineate finitude - both epistemological and existential - is one that will give patients a new lease on living and dying. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre described the late modern West as driven by two moral values: efficiency and effectiveness. Regardless of whether you accept MacIntyre's overarching story, it seems clear that efficiency and effectiveness have achieved a zenith in institutional health care structures, such that these two aspects of care become the final arbiters of what counts as “good” care. At the very least, they are dominant in many clinical contexts and act as the interpretative lens for the judgments of successful health care (...) managers. The drive of efficiency can also be seen in “lean” management methods (originally imported from the automotive manufacturing industry) increasingly deployed in the intensive care unit. This drive gives us pause. The high stress of the ICU is exacerbated by the enormous complexity of technological interventions designed to maintain physiological functioning as the body heals, as well as the ever‐present concerns related to cost, effectiveness, and efficiency. The ICU, therefore, provides an illustrative view of the challenges facing clinicians, as well as resource managers, in terms of delivering care. In short, the goal of technocratic efficiency often ends up at odds with humane purposes. To better understand these contemporary health care dynamics, we conducted a limited series of focus group discussions and interviews with residents experienced in the challenges of delivering care in the ICU environment. In what follows, we highlight some narrative observations drawn from these focus groups. We found a recurrent and disconcerting refrain among our informants that has not been adequately described or addressed in the literature: technocratic management techniques have crept into and bifurcated clinical care strategies in the ICU. Specifically, we highlight the influence of concerns around efficiency and effectiveness and the ways in which these foci have contributed to a bifurcation in care in the ICU along two trajectories: either compassionate care or curative care. (shrink)

A person making normative judgments can do so from the perspective of a Judge or a Coach. If you're a Judge, you seek to assign responsibility. If you're a Coach, you seek to improve an agent's performance. While there is a place for being sometimes a Judge and sometimes a Coach, no one should always be a Judge. It is a small and mean person who only wags a finger and never lends a hand. The same is true for a (...) normative discipline like epistemology. A good coach gives useful advice. Advice is useful when it suggests that you modify something you can directly control. And because we are typically unable to directly control our beliefs, a good epistemological coach will have no use for a theory that tells us what an epistemologically good belief is, such as a theory of knowledge or justification. But we are capable of changing many of the ways we reason about the world. Otherwise, what's an education good for? And so a good epistemological coach needs a theory of what makes reasoning epistemically good. What sort of theory of good reasoning would a good epistemological coach employ in order to provide useful guidance for real people? We argue for a middle path between a pure reliablist theory of good reasoning and a pure pragmatic theory of good reasoning. The best theory for an epistemological coach, the theory that will yield the most effective advice, is a mongrel theory that identifies good reasoning with reasoning that achieves an adroit combination of reliabilist accuracy and pragmatic efficiency. (shrink)

The main object of this thesis is to explain in a systematic fashion Francis Hutcheson's moral theory. Such an attempt will necessarily involve a discussion of the various philosophical problems which are inherent in his theory. For example, I discuss the issue of whether Hutcheson's theory of the moral sense is to be interpreted in an intuitionist or an emotivist fashion. It is argued that some aspects of his moral sense theory favour the former and some the latter interpretation, Hutcheson's (...) theory of benevolence is outlined and his' arguments against the psychological egoists are discussed. Perhaps the most important problem with Hutcheson's moral sense theory is the problem of motivation. Any moral theory which locates the virtue of virtuous actions in the motive from which they are done, as Hutcheson's does, will encounter problems in explaining how knowledge of right and wrong can influence us to be virtuous. Hutcheson's ingenious solution to this problem and his theory of moral motivation, which I suggest have not been adequately discussed previously to this thesis, are explicated at length. Hutcheson's criticisms of the moral rationalists are considered, as are Price's criticisms of Hutcheson. A final chapter attempts to show how the development of Hutcheson's thinking was the result of his realizing the implications of his own theories, especially his theory of moral motivation. (shrink)

A century and a half after the Kulturkampf in Germany, and three decades after James Davison Hunter’s account of the “culture warriors,” this book review examines what Nietzsche might have to say to us today about our understanding of the past and our relation to the future. It considers two studies of the four essays of Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen taken as a whole, one study of Nietzsche’s second essay on history, one on Nietzsche’s general conception of decadence and culture, and (...) a collection of essays on Nietzsche’s views of history and memory. Taken together, these studies not only complement each other in respect of their readings of the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen and the question of culture, they also throw light on other aspects of Nietzsche by reminding us of the rootedness of Nietzsche’s thought in the outlook of Weimar classicism and highlighting the vitalist aspects of Nietzsche’s thought. The review concludes that Nietzsche is more timely than ever, not least because of his critique of education, as well as his attention to such key themes as identity politics, Erinnerungskultur, and museumization; it is still possible to agree with Nietzsche’s sentiments as expressed in a motto from an early notebook of July 1862: “I prefer the past to the present; but I believe in a better future.”. (shrink)

Normative apriorist philosophers of science build purely normative a priori reconstructions of science, whereas descriptive naturalists eliminate the normative elements of the philosophy of science in favor of purely descriptive endeavors. I hope to exhibit the virtues of an alternative approach that appreciates both the normative and the natural in the philosophy of science. ;Theory ladenness. Some philosophers claim that a plausible view about how our visual systems work either undermines or facilitates our ability to rationally adjudicate between competing theories (...) on the basis of a theory-neutral observation language. I argue that these psychological premises do not support the epistemological conclusions drawn. ;Scientific theories. I argue for a psychological plausibility constraint: An account of scientific theories should tell us how a theory is mentally represented. I tentatively advance an account that satisfies the constraint. Finally, I criticize the traditional view of theories and the semantic view of theories . ;Conceptual clarity. Philosophers often offer classical accounts of terms ; then others adduce alleged counterexamples. The success conditions on these accounts must include either preserving or revising the original term's extension. Given recent psychological theorizing, the probability that we can find an extension-preserving classical account of a term is very low. Furthermore, it provides no benefits over the empirical effort to find the non-classical conditions we actually use in applying our terms. If the aim of counterexample philosophy is to non-arbitrarily revise the extension of the original term, I argue that we should choose a particular account of a term on the basis of how it performs in our best available theory on the subject. ;Conclusion. I argue that normative apriorists unwittingly make defeasible empirical assumptions that, if false, would undermine their normative claims. Against descriptive naturalism I argue that the cost of ignoring normative issues is exorbitant. Finally, I defend a version of normative naturalism, a style of philosophy of science that is informed--but not engulfed--by empirical assumptions. (shrink)

The import of underground facilities in military strategy in the US grew exponentially after the Gulf War. The success of precision-guided conventional missiles meant that any above-ground building or complex could be accurately targeted and destroyed, thus driving states with less sophisticated weapons to go underground to secure space for covert weapons development and the protection of command and control centres for military and governmental functions. Underground facilities have thus become the main challenge to objects of detection and targeting practices (...) for US military research and development. This article provides a meditation on the underground in relation to military planning and technology, the limits of aerial visual control of terrain, the plans by the US military to counter underground defensive moves, the efficacy of tele-technologies to detect and destroy such installations at a distance, and an oblique genealogy of aerial and subterrestrial strategies in relation to technologies to overcome the limitations of each. In so doing, the article argues a deeply connected relationship between the imaginary and the material in attempts to realize a mastery of space and populations essential to military operations, thus posing questions about sensory perception, the status of the subject with regard to agency and control, and the prosthetic outfitting of the subject that both supports and blunts agency and control. (shrink)

The design office of Charles and Ray Eames was a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multimedia affair linking Hollywood, the State Department, universities, the corporate sector and international fairs during the height of the Cold War. Bringing together design, furniture, cutting-edge technology and experimental, avant-garde informed-multiscreen projections, the Eames Office operated as a humanities/IT/media/arts lab. For the 1964 World’s Fair, the Eameses created ‘The Information Machine’ for IBM. The techniques of display and experimental juxtaposition of images, sound and new media capacities later migrated (...) to the many ‘happenings’ following in the wake of Allan Kaprow’s medial and performative experiments. The Eames Office crafted for the 1964 World’s Fair a vision of global change and possibility grounded in avant-garde visual techniques and aesthetics that continue to constitute a specific globe crafted by the US Cold War military-industrial-university-entertainment complex that remains the grounds for our current collective nomos. (shrink)

The famous story of the choice of Hercules became one frequently depicted in Western art and, as Ernst Panofsky showed, the various treatments of this theme demonstrate the significance of cultural continuity through the centuries. At the same time, the motif of Hercules and his choice presents us with a challenge to current theoretical approaches to culture. We can either take the easy path and accept the current hermeneutic orthodoxies of popular cultural studies, or we can choose a harder but, (...) ultimately, more rewarding path: the philosophy of culture articulated by Ernst Cassirer. This volume brings together a collection of papers which reflects the broad sweep, both historical and theoretical, of Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms. They range from language-theory to myth and religion; and all are set, with varying degrees of emphasis, in a comparative context. (shrink)

This book adds to a realist account of laws of nature the framework for a related realist understanding of causation. It has two main parts: the first is concerned with laws, the second with causation. In the first main part, Tooley surveys sophisticated regularity accounts of laws and argues that none is successful. One of his central themes is that regularity accounts fail to meet the intuition that there can be underived laws which lack relevant instances--an intuition which Tooley supports (...) by appeal to two crucial examples. Tooley's diagnosis is that the reductionist assumption that the truth-makers for laws of nature are facts about particulars must be abandoned, and that laws must therefore be facts about universals. What kinds of facts? Tooley sets out a careful specification of the theoretical concept of a nomological relation. But he grants a need to go beyond this in order to make his account illuminating: Just how much has been explicated by the claim that what makes it a law that whatever has property P also has property Q is that the universals P and Q stand in a certain "nomic" relation? To answer this, and to dispel other doubts, Tooley offers the speculative suggestion that for it to be a law that whatever is P is also Q is for the conjunctive universal P-and-Q to exist, and for the universal P to exist, but only "dependently," as part of the conjunctive universal P-and-Q. Tooley argues that his specification of nomic relations can be extended to cover the case of probabilistic laws. It is unclear, however, how his speculative metaphysics could be extended to cover the probabilistic case: Can the universal P exist only to some degree as part of the conjunctive universal P-and-Q, and at the same time to another degree as part of the universal P-and-R? (shrink)