Competent patients have considerable legal authority to control life‐and‐death care. They may refuse medical life support, including medically delivered food and fluids. Even when they are not in need of any life‐saving care, they may expedite death by refusing food and water by mouth—voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, or VSED. Neither right is limited to terminal illness. In addition, in four U.S. states, competent patients, if terminally ill, may obtain lethal drugs for aid‐in‐dying.For people who have dementia and are no (...) longer competent, however, control over the end of life is much less extensive. They may have written a clear advance directive for refusing life‐saving care in specified circumstances yet subsequently find themselves living for years in severe dementia with no need for life‐saving care that could be refused. Chronic progressive dementia is not itself life threatening until its very final stage. Even in jurisdictions that permit active aid‐in‐dying, individuals with advanced dementia are not eligible; they lack the required current competence, and they are seldom deemed terminally ill. As for the right to VSED, its very name—voluntarily stopping eating and drinking—is seen as excluding noncompetent persons.One option for ensuring that one does not live years in severe dementia is to use advance directives to withhold food and water by mouth. The driving element behind VSED is that forcing people to ingest food is as objectionable an intrusion on bodily integrity, privacy, and liberty as imposing unwanted medical treatment. Thus, if incompetent people do not lose their rights to refuse life‐saving treatment, and if people when competent have just as strong a right to VSED as they do to refuse life‐saving treatment, then people do not lose their right to VSED when incompetent either. They only have to exercise it by AD. (shrink)

A decision-tree model of an indigenous forest management system centered around shamu (Cunninghamia lanceolata),an important timber species in China, was constructed from extensive interviews with peasants in two villages in Fujian Province, China. From this model additional interviews were conducted to elicit from these peasants their reasons for selecting among decision alternatives. Those reasons that were of an ecological nature were discussed in detail with the peasants to elicit indigenous interpretations of ecological processes in order to test an hypothesis that (...) a strong analogy exists between traditional indigenous and scientific knowledge of ecological processes.Three cases are presented that test this hypothesis. These three cases concern the effect of intercrops on the growth of shamu,the relative merits of seedlings and root collar sprout cuttings for forest regeneration, and the effects of repeated plantings of shamuon soil chemistry. All three cases provide strong support for the research hypothesis and suggest that, even in the absence of a formalized scientific method, humans exercise mental processes typical of scientific thinking. This phenomenon is called proto-science. (shrink)

Antithetical desires displayed throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship indicate the disjunctive assumption that the individual exists either in a state of increasing autonomy, expressed negatively as striving for freedom from divine constraint, or in a state of self-annihilating submission, expressed positively in terms of kenotic unification. Proximity to the divine thereby entails forfeiture of individuality, contrary to the explicit aim of Kierkegaard’s authorial project, and aversion to materiality. This essay enunciates the conflict (I), traces the crescendo of loss that births the pseudonymous (...) authorship and ends in realized longing for death (II), and approaches a more holistic vision of psycho-spiritual development (III). (shrink)

In a recent paper in JME, Shelton and Geppert use an approach by Menzel and Chandler-Cramer to sort out ethical dilemmas about the oral feeding of patients in advanced dementia, ultimately arguing that the usefulness of advance directives about such feeding is highly limited. They misunderstand central aspects of Menzel’s and Chandler-Cramer’s approach, and in making their larger claim that such directives are much less useful than typically presumed, they fail to account for five important elements in writing (...) good directives for dementia and implementing them properly: (1) Directives should be paired with appointment of trusted agents. (2) Appointed agents’ authority can be greatly weakened without advance directives to guide them. (3) Directives’ implementation does not require clinically precise assessment of dementia’s stage. (4) Palliative support is typically required for withholding of oral feeding to be compassionate. (5) The central purpose of stopping feeding is often not the avoidance of suffering but not prolonging unwanted life. (shrink)

This article seeks to analyse the rise of ‘resilience ethics’, in terms of the shift in ethical approaches away from the hierarchical liberal internationalist constructions of the 1990s and towards broader and more inclusive understandings of ethical responsibility for global problems. This shift in ethical attention away from the formal international politics of inter-state relations and towards the unintended consequences of both institutional structures and the informal market choices of individuals has diversified understandings of global ethical responsibilities. It is argued (...) that the recasting of ethical responsibility in the increasingly sociological terms of unintended and indirect consequences of socio-material embeddedness constructs new ethical differentials and hierarchies of responsibility. These framings have facilitated new policy practices, recasting interventionist policy-making in terms of the growing self-awareness and reflexivity of Western actors, reframing ethical foreign policy as starting with the choices of individual citizens, and, at the same time, operating to reify the relations of the market. (shrink)

Most Liberals hold that public policies ought always be justifiable by reference to public reasons; that citizens should also refrain from advocacy in the absence of such reasons; and that exclusively religious reasons cannot be public reasons. This is challenged by Paul Weithman and Christopher Eberle. Both argue that basic liberal principles permit citizens in some circumstances to advance exclusively religious reasons, and in particular that Rawls's notions of reasonableness (Weithman) and the strains of commitment (Eberle) can be used (...) in defence of this position. I argue that neither makes out his case, and that no plausible case has been made against the standard Liberal view. (shrink)

In this issue, Paul Menzel and M. Colette Chandler‐Cramer propose a novel advance directive. Besides giving competent people the opportunity to refuse future life‐prolonging medical interventions, they say, advance directives should give people the opportunity to refuse ordinary food and water if they later experience severe dementia.This proposal is both appealing and unsettling. It is appealing because it offers some relief to people seeking to avoid the prolonged decline and extreme incapacity they have witnessed in relatives and friends (...) with advanced dementia. But does it sufficiently protect patients? Menzel and Chandler‐Cramer want to empower competent persons to impose potential discomfort and distress on a later self who cannot understand the reasons for that choice. In this situation, the price of respecting autonomy is paid by a frail incapacitated patient who has no idea why food and water are no longer offered to her. (shrink)

This entry introduces the Lockean Thesis and sketches the ways in which the lottery paradox, the preface paradox, and the problem of merely statistical evidence can be used to put pressure on the Lockean Thesis.

Why do people persist in commitments that threaten their happiness, security, and comfort? Why do some of our most central, identity-defining commitments resist the effects of reasoning and critical reflection? Drawing on real-life examples, empirical psychology, and philosophical reflection, this book argues that these commitments involve an ethical stance called devotion, which plays a pervasive—but often hidden—role in human life. Devotion typically involves sacralizing certain values, goals, or relationships. To sacralize a value is to treat it as inviolable (trade-offs with (...) ordinary values are forbidden), incontestable (even contemplating such trade-offs is prohibited), and dialectically invulnerable (no rational considerations can disrupt the agent’s commitment to the value). Philosophy of Devotion offers a detailed philosophical account and defense of these features. Devotion and the sacralization of values can be reasonable; indeed, a life involving meaningful, sustained commitment depends on these stances. Without devotion, we risk an existential condition called normative dissipation, in which all of our commitments become etiolated. Yet devotion can easily go wrong, deforming into the individual and group fanaticism that have become pervasive features of modern social life. The book provides an alternative to fanaticism, investigating the way in which we can express non-pathological forms of devotion. We can be devoted through affirmation and through what is termed the deepening move, which treats the agent’s central commitments as systematically inchoate. Each stance enables a wholehearted form of devotion that nevertheless preserves flexibility and openness, avoiding the dangers of fanaticism on the one hand and normative dissipation on the other. -/- (The attached file contains the introductory chapter.). (shrink)

The Gamer’s Dilemma challenges us to justify the moral difference between enacting virtual murder and virtual child molestation in video games. The Dilemma relies for its argumentative force on the claim that there is an intuitive moral difference between these acts, with the former intuited as morally acceptable and the latter as morally unacceptable. However, there has been no empirical investigation of these claims. To explore these issues, we developed an experimental survey study in which participants were asked to reflect (...) on imaginary video game scenarios as part of a 2 (undertake virtual murder or molestation) X 2 (against an adult or child) X 2 (in a high or low realism virtual environment) factorial design. We found that there was a significant difference between people’s views about virtual murder and virtual molestation. Whether the virtual act was performed against an adult or child was non-significant in most conditions, whereas whether it was performed in a high or low realism virtual environment was significant in most conditions. Gender did not impact these results, whereas perceived gaming experience, hours of video game play per week, and integrity did. These results provide an empirical grounding for future discussions of the Gamer's Dilemma. (shrink)

Debates about the moral status of social robots (SRs) currently face a second-order, or metatheoretical impasse. On the one hand, moral individualists argue that the moral status of SRs depends on their possession of morally relevant properties. On the other hand, moral relationalists deny that we ought to attribute moral status on the basis of the properties that SRs instantiate, opting instead for other modes of reflection and critique. This paper develops and defends a pragmatic approach which aims to reconcile (...) these two positions. The core of this proposal is that moral individualism and moral relationalism are best understood as distinct deliberative strategies for attributing moral status to SRs, and that both are worth preserving insofar as they answer to different kinds of practical problems that we face as moral agents. (shrink)

What is fanaticism and why is it an important philosophical topic? In this introductory chapter, I discuss the way in which fanaticism arose as a central philosophical concern in the early modern period. Philosophical discussions of fanaticism focus on psychological, epistemic, and behavioral dimensions of fanatics. The fanatic displays psychological peculiarities; epistemic defects; and potentially problematic behavioral tendencies. I discuss the ways in which different philosophers have offered different accounts of these three features; offer a brief defense of my own (...) account of fanaticism; and highlight some key questions about fanaticism. I close with an overview of the essays in this volume. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch claims that “clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort.” Our experience of the world can be blurred by egoism, inattentiveness, and other failings. I ask how we distinguish clear vision from distorted vision. Murdoch’s texts appeal to four factors: (A) attention; (B) unselfing; (C) a form of conceptual articulacy; and (D) love. I ask three questions about these standards: - Are these standards directed at the same goal? (For example, are they all geared toward (...) securing purely epistemic goals?) - Are these standards criterial for improvements in vision? (That is, does the presence of some combination of (A)-(D) constitute or guarantee better vision?) - Does Murdoch think that there’s a single best form of vision? (Such as the one attained by the person who manifests (A)-(D)?) In the secondary literature, the typical answers to these questions are: yes, yes, yes. But I give different answers: no, no, no. (shrink)

This paper states and gives three applications of a novel ‘Presentist Fragmentalist’ interpretation of quantum mechanics. In a cognate paper it was explicitly shown this kind of presentism is consistent with special relativity and that it has implications for how to understand time as it relates to the Big Bang. In this paper we narrowly focus on three applications. These are surely the most important conundrums for any proposed interpretation of quantum mechanics: Schrodinger’s Cat, Bell non-locality, and the Born rule. (...) It will be shown that these can be handled in a consistent and intuitive way. (shrink)

We can be aware of particulars, properties, events, propositions, facts, skills, and qualia. We can also have knowledge of and be conscious of a similar range of objects. We can, furthermore, be ignorant of such objects. Awareness is quite clearly related to knowledge, consciousness, and ignorance. But how? This entry explores some of the ways that awareness is (not) related to knowledge, consciousness, and ignorance. It also explores some of the ways that awareness might be required by, and thus fundamental (...) to, these other relations. The emerging insight is that additional clarity on the nature of awareness stands poised to add clarity to a wide range of philosophical issues in both epistemology and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Despite having worked in higher education for over twenty years, I am still, first and foremost, a practicing nurse. My employer requires me to be a nurse and my regulator regards what I do as nursing. My practice is regulated by the Code and informed by nursing ethics. If I am nurse, practicing nursing, does that mean that my students are my patients? This paper considers how the relationship that I have with my students can be informed by the ethics (...) of the nurse/patient relationship. After some initial theoretical preparation concerning argument from analogy, the paper identifies some areas for comparison between the two relationships. Areas of similarity and difference identify two areas of concern: Nurse education and educators regularly engage in coercion and surveillance in an attempt to increase student success, both of which would be considered outside nursing ethics. It is concluded that these coercive practices are not conducive to an environment where character is cultivated. Despite current financial and workforce pressures, nurse lecturers and more especially their managers would do well to return to the professional ethics of nursing to question and guide their practice. (shrink)

This chapter explores the notion of the Web‐extended mind, which is the idea that the technological and informational elements of the Web can sometimes serve as part of the mechanistic substrate that realizes human mental states and processes. It is argued that while current forms of the Web may not be particularly suited to the realization of Web‐extended minds, new forms of user interaction technology as well as new approaches to information representation do provide promising new opportunities for Web‐based forms (...) of cognitive extension. In addition, it is suggested that extended cognitive systems often rely on the emergence of social practices and conventions that shape how a technology is used. Web‐extended minds may thus depend on forms of socio‐technical co‐evolution in which social forces and factors play just as important a role as do the processes of technology design and development. (shrink)

Marcus Willaschek’s new book Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics: The Dialectic of Pure Reason is a penetrating analysis of the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In his comments, the author first raises some questions concerning the structure of the Transcendental Dialectic and then proposes that looking at the second Critique and continuing on into the third Critique will reveal more roles for the idea of God in Kant’s reconstruction of traditional metaphysics than Willaschek’s treatment suggests.

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the impact of AI technologies on the climate crisis beyond their mere resource consumption. To critically examine this impact, I introduce the concept of AI futurism. With this term I capture the ideology behind AI, and argue that this ideology is inherently connected to the climate crisis. This is because AI futurism construes a socio-material environment overly fixated on AI and technological progress, to the extent that it loses sight of the existential threats (...) ahead. In that way, the perceived significance of the planetary reality is softened, and the unsustainable paths charted by the AI industry remain opaque. To make this argument the paper unfolds in two main sections. (1) It delves into the ideology of AI futurism and its discursive impact on the societal perception of the climate crisis. (2) It employs a materialist perspective to elucidate the tangible effects of the AI industry on the climate crisis, and to show what is going on behind the façade of AI futurism. Adding to a critical theory of AI and the climate crisis, this paper starts a realistic conversation about the challenges posed by the intersection of these transformations. (shrink)

We propose in this article some new elements for the interpretation of Heraclitus' doctrine, concerning in particular the role of the opposition of contraries as generator of harmony, that results from Fragments 8DK and 51DK. This interpretation is based on the conceptual tool of matrices of concepts. After having described the basic elements that govern the latter, we set out to define in this conceptual framework the notions of opposition and contrary, as well as of harmony. This allows us to (...) give an interpretation and also a justification of Heraclitus' specific doctrine, according to which the opposition of opposites generates harmony. (shrink)

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is to articulate a Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism as well as a Foucauldian critique of the nomothetic framework underlying the Placement Problem. My Foucauldian post-structuralist critique of scientific naturalism questions the relations between our society’s imbrication of economic-political power structures and knowledge in a way that also effects some constructive critical alignment between Foucault and Habermas, helping to undermine the traditional view of their respective social critiques as incompatible. First, I will outline a (...) brief genealogical backstory for the rise of scientific naturalism, and I will then reconstruct the Placement Problem. In the second part of the paper, I introduce Foucault’s notion of pouvoir-savoir, namely his account of the interconnection between power and knowledge. I then go on to articulate the Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism by arguing that the levelling nature of nomothetic rationality and its conservative naturalistic vocabulary involves regulative discourse: anything that resists placeability/locatability is labelled “odd”. By being thus visibly marked, “odd” phenomena become “queer” phenomena, which then become “problematic” phenomena. They are, thereby, construed in need of discipline. Understood in this Foucauldian way, scientific naturalist disciplinarity produces subjected and practised minds, “docile” minds. (shrink)

Threats to the stability of liberal democracies are of obvious contemporary import. Concern with stability runs through John Rawls’s work. The stability that concerned him was that of fundamental terms of cooperation. Rawls long believed that the terms which would be stable were his two principles, but he eventually conceded that even a well-ordered society was more likely to be characterized by “justice pluralism” than by consensus on his own conception of justice. Contemporary liberal democracies, too, are divided about what (...) justice demands. I believe Rawls’s treatment of stability can help us understand the conditions under which fundamental terms of cooperation can be stable under non-ideal conditions such as ours. But because Rawls never worked through the consequences of his concession, his view needs to be developed before we can draw on it. Rawls’s treatment makes use of elementary game theory. Thus in _Theory of Justice_ he said -- and in _Political Liberalism_ he implied -- that stability would result from citizens with a sense of justice “playing” strategies which combined for what was, in effect, a Nash equilibrium. I argue that his concession requires a new conception of stability and implies that Rawls cannot appeal to a Nash equilibrium to show how stability would be maintained. His concession therefore forces open a troubling gap in his analysis. I fill that gap by proposing a weaker equilibrium concept that serves Rawlsian purposes. I conclude with what this project suggests for challenges facing the fragile liberal democracies of our own time. (shrink)

Useful as a text for students and a reference for the more advanced mathematician, this book presents a unified treatment of that part of measure theory most useful for its application in modern analysis. Coverage includes sets and classes, measures and outer measures, Haar measure and measure and topology in groups. From the reviews: "Will serve the interested student to find his way to active and creative work in the field of Hilbert space theory." --MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS.

Nietzsche suggests that even individuals who take themselves to bear an affirmative attitude toward life would be horrified by the thought of eternal recurrence (roughly, the idea that our lives will repeat endlessly in exactly the same fashion). But why? Why is it supposed to be more difficult to affirm recurring lives than to affirm a non-recurring, singular life? I argue that standard interpretations of eternal recurrence are unable to answer this question. I offer a new interpretation of eternal recurrence, (...) which attributes its difficulty to the conditional nature of ordinary affirmation. Affirmation is conditional when it depends on the possibility of excising objectionable elements from the object of affirmation. What Nietzsche means to reveal, with eternal recurrence, is that even the most apparently affirmative individuals often manifest only a conditional affirmation of life, a form of affirmation that conceals a tacit negation. Eternal recurrence brings this hidden negation to light, thereby encouraging us to move toward an unconditionally affirmative stance. I conclude by reflecting on why Nietzsche takes the distinction between conditional and unconditional affirmation to be such an important philosophical idea. I argue that those who devote themselves to challenging, long-term goals will face psychological pressures that tend to deform unconditional affirmation into conditional affirmation. (shrink)

This article aims to examine the perspective on miracles and their relationship to humility offered by the alphabetical collection of Apophthegmata Patrum. For the analysis of this relationship, texts that speak directly or indirectly about humility have been selected and an attempt has been made to organize them into a coherent discourse. Then a significant set of accounts of miracles is analysed, which are seen from the perspective of their relationship with humility.

Schiller’s essay “On Grace and Dignity” has been taken by many, including Kant himself, to be an attack on Kant’s moral philosophy, understood as requiring that moral motivation must always be a struggle between duty and inclination. Actually, Schiller conceives of harmony between inclination and duty, or grace and dignity, as an aesthetic requirement, and agrees with Kant that when grace and dignity conflict, dignity must prevail. Kant does not see this, but nevertheless in his own, late, account of the (...) “aesthetic preconditions of the mind’s susceptibility to concepts of duty” he describes how feeling and duty are actually to be brought together. (shrink)

The article bears an implicit appeal to judge political programs not by ideological labels but rather by the criteria I call ‘decency.’ I enjoin Martin Buber’s concept of dialogue to argue that a politics of decency seeks to promote human well-being that reaches beyond mere material flourishing but is attentive to the full sweep of the regnant existential, social and politics realities that diminish fundamental human dignity. Such a political ethic, as Buber would put it, transcends the barriers of regarding (...) others as “It” – as perceived and conceived by the divisive categories of religious and cultural affiliation, age, sexual orientation, socalled race, and as inveterate political opponents. (shrink)

Non-player characters (NPCs) are a common feature in contemporary videogames, particularly role-playing games (RPGs). Evidence suggests player relationships with these fictional, digital characters can manifest as deeply emotional experiences that can ‘bleed’ off the screen and affect the daily lives of players. However, research in this area is still in its infancy, and as yet has not been given a thorough conceptual treatment. Applying the sociological phenomenology of Alfred Schütz, this paper will examine the structure of the experiences that players (...) have with NPCs, and how these experiences manifest as meaningful social experiences. By a reconceptualization of the player-NPC relationship as a deeply mediated human-human relationship, this paper aims to build a foundation for further phenomenological study into how players engage with fictional characters in immersive videogame worlds. (shrink)

The journal is delighted to include the following suite of articles on the theme of ‘Questioning Progress in Times of “No Future”: Orientations for Education’.