The target article discusses a model of how brain circuits mediate social behaviors such as imitation and mindreading. Hurley suggests potential mechanisms for development of shared circuits. We propose that empirical studies can be designed to differentiate the influence of genetic and learning-based factors on the development of shared circuits. We use the mirror neuron system as a model system.

We use the format of a hypothetical case study to review issues related to pharmaceutical product approval and physician prescribing practices. In this case, a new FDA-approved drug is recommended for a patient who subsequently experiences an adverse event that may or may not be related to the prescription. This case raises a number of ethical and legal considerations physicians routinely face when deciding whether to recommend such drugs for their patients. Despite the need for ongoing observation by the regulatory (...) apparatus, physicians should be cognizant of the limitations of the drug approval system and the post-approval prescription drug surveillance system. We discuss physicians’ ethical obligations when faced with a newly approved drug, including seeking out independent sources of learning, reporting adverse effects, and notifying patients about limitations in available knowledge about therapeutic recommendations. (shrink)

The essays in this collection treat historical, literary, and philosophical topics related to Ayn Rand's Anthem, an anti-utopia fantasy set in the future. The first book-length study on Anthem, this collection covers subjects such as free will, political freedom, and the connection between freedom and individual thought and privacy.

Phillips & Singer's compelling presentation is weakest in its demonstration of commonalities between sensory plasticity and higher forms of learning and behavior. We propose that available data on schizophrenia can provide such evidence, because of the presence of impairments in a number of functions central to their model, and strong relationships between these dysfunctions and behavior.

The fourth volume in the Criminalization series, this volume explores some of the most general principles and theories of criminalization. It includes not only philosophical work, but also historical, legal, and sociological investigations into criminalization, clarifying the state of the discipline today.

In this chapter, we explore whether agents have an epistemic duty to eradicate implicit bias. Recent research shows that implicit biases are widespread and they have a wide variety of epistemic effects on our doxastic attitudes. First, we offer some examples and features of implicit biases. Second, we clarify what it means to have an epistemic duty, and discuss the kind of epistemic duties we might have regarding implicit bias. Third, we argue that we have an epistemic duty to eradicate (...) implicit biases that have negative epistemic impact. Finally, we defend this view against the objection that we lack the relevant control over implicit bias that’s required for such a duty. We argue that we have a kind of reflective control over the implicit biases that we are duty-bound to eradicate. And since, as we show, we have this control over a wide variety of implicit biases, there are a lot of implicit biases that we have epistemic duties to eradicate. (shrink)

The third book in the Criminalization series examines the constitutionalization of criminal law. It considers how the criminal law is constituted through the political processes of the state; how the agents of the criminal law can be answerable to it themselves; and finally how the criminal law can be constituted as part of the international order.

Explaining how something is possible is a familiar and epistemically important achievement in both science and ordinary life. But a satisfactory general account of how-possibly explanation has not yet been given. A crucial desideratum for a successful account is that it must differentiate a demonstration that something is possible from an explanation of how it is possible. In this paper, I offer an account of how-possibly explanation that fully captures this distinction. I motivate my account using two cases, one from (...) ordinary life and one from ornithology. On my account, a how-possibly explanation is a greater achievement than a mere description of how a state of affairs might possibly obtain. In addition to being a potential explanation of why some state of affairs actually obtains, a how-possibly explanation must involve the relief of an imaginative frustration on the part of its recipient. When a recipient’s imaginative frustration is relieved, she does not just know that the state of affairs in question is possible, but is also able to imagine how it could possibly obtain. (shrink)

Lindsay Judson and Vassilis Karasmanis present a selection of philosophical papers by an outstanding international team of scholars, assessing the legacy and continuing relevance of Socrates's thought 2,400 years after his death. The topics of the papers include Socratic method; the notion of definition; Socrates's intellectualist conception of ethics; famous arguments in the Euthyphro and Crito; and aspects of the later portrayal and reception of Socrates as a philosophical and ethical exemplar, by Plato, the Sceptics, and in the early (...) Christian era. Contributors include Lesley Brown, David Charles, John Cooper, Michael Frede, Terence Irwin, Charles Kahn, Vassilis Karasmanis, Carlo Natali, Vasilis Politis, Dory Scaltsas, Gerhard Seel, and C. C. W. Taylor. (shrink)

The central dispute between evidentialists and pragmatists about reasons for belief concerns whether or not non-evidential considerations can be reasons for belief. In recent work, some pragmatists about reasons for belief have made their case for pragmatism by appealing, in part, to a broad range of cases in which facts about one’s relationships with significant others (friends, romantic partners, and the like) appear to give one non-evidential reasons to have beliefs skewed in their favor. This chapter explores whether and how (...) such relationships might provide non-evidential reasons for belief. After first making the case against the evidentialist’s claim that there cannot be non-evidential reasons for belief, this chapter turns to examine different accounts of how our personal relationships might ground reasons for doxastic partiality. These are accounts on which reasons for doxastic partiality are grounded in facts about what attitudes are partly constitutive of being a good significant other to someone, and accounts on which reasons for doxastic partiality are grounded in reasons, more broadly, to benefit one’s significant others. This chapter argues that our personal relationships do not provide non-evidential reasons for belief, even if the pragmatist is right that there can be non-evidential reasons for belief. (shrink)

The result is a vision of creative individualism for the post-communist world that combines Macpherson's insistence on social justice with the lessons learned ...

The patient, an 89-year-old man—let’s call him Mr. Smith—had no known relatives, friends, or advance directives. He was a bright man and served as a scientist in the Reagan administration.

Early life in Athens -- Plato's education in philosophy -- A departure from Socrates -- The Academy and Plato's last teachings.

Despite recognizing the importance of developing authentic corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, noticeably absent from the literature is consideration for how employees distinguish between authentic and inauthentic CSR programs. This is somewhat surprising given that employees are essentially the face of their organization and are largely expected to act as ambassadors for the organization’s CSR program (Collier and Esteban in Bus Ethics 16:19–33, 2007 ). The current research, by conducting depth interviews with employees, builds a better understanding of how employees (...) differentiate between authentic and inauthentic CSR programs, and how these judgments influence their perceptions of the organization. We find that employees rely on two different referent standards to form authenticity judgments—the extent to which the image put forth in the CSR program aligns with the organization’s true identity and the extent to which the CSR program itself is developmental. To assess the former, employees draw on cues about resource commitment, alignment between elements of the organization’s CSR program, emotional engagement, justice, and embeddedness. The latter assessments are based on the extent to which the organization adopts a leadership role with regards to its CSR initiatives. We also find that perceived authenticity can lead to positive outcomes such as organizational identification and employee connections. This study contributes to the broad literatures on both CSR and authenticity, as well as more specifically adding to the conversation on authenticity as a potentially valuable lens for enriching business ethics theorizing. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that friendship can normatively require us to have certain beliefs about our friends that epistemic norms would prohibit. On this view, we ought to exhibit some degree of doxastic partiality toward our friends, by having certain generally favorable beliefs and doxastic dispositions that concern our friends that we would not have concerning relevantly similar non-friends. Can friendship genuinely make these normative demands on our beliefs, in ways that would conflict with what we epistemically ought to believe? On (...) a widely influential evidentialist approach to thinking about epistemic norms, friendship cannot normatively require things of our beliefs, because friendship cannot generate reasons for belief. And this is due, in part, to the alleged fact that we are incapable of forming beliefs directly in response to, or on the basis of, non-epistemic reasons. In this paper, I argue that this evidentialist response to alleged cases of conflict between friendship and epistemic norms fails. Instead, I argue that friendship cannot generate reasons for belief due to an underappreciated feature of friendship: that being a good friend constitutively involves forming attitudes about one’s friends that are appropriately responsive to the features that one’s friends have that appear to warrant those attitudes. I argue that this feature of friendship helps explain why friendship cannot give us reasons to have beliefs that are doxastically partial. (shrink)

What is it to suspend judgment about whether p? Much of the recent work on the nature and normative profile of suspending judgment aims to analyze it as a kind of doxastic attitude. On some of these accounts, suspending judgment about whether p partly consists in taking up a certain higher-order belief about one's deficient epistemic position with respect to whether p. On others, suspending judgment about whether p consists in taking up a sui generis attitude, one that takes the (...) question of whether p? as its content. In this paper, I defend an account on which suspending judgment about whether p is not a matter of taking up a doxastic attitude, but rather a way of intentionally omitting to judge whether p. I then close with a discussion of how an account like mine, which sees suspending judgment as fundamentally practical, rather than doxastic, can accommodate what appear to be distinctively epistemic reasons to suspend judgment. (shrink)

Eleonore Stump insightfully develops Aquinas’s theodicy to account for a significant source of human suffering, namely the undermining of desires of the heart. Stump argues that what justifies God in allowing such suffering are benefits made available to the sufferer through her suffering that can defeat the suffering by contributing to the fulfillment of her heart’s desires. We summarize Stump’s arguments for why such suffering requires defeat and how it is defeated. We identify three problems with Stump’s account of how (...) such suffering is defeated and offer solutions to each. We defend and strengthen Stump’s response to the hardest cases for her view, and explain what her view demands of God. (shrink)

Much of the recent work on the nature of testimonial injustice holds that a hearer who fails to accord sufficient credibility to a speaker’s testimony, owing to identity prejudice, can thereby wrong that speaker. What is it to wrong someone in this way? This paper offers an account of the wrong at the heart of testimonial injustice that locates it in a failure of interpersonal justifiability. On the account I develop, one that draws directly from T. M. Scanlon’s moral contractualist (...) framework, a hearer who fails to accord sufficient credibility to a speaker, owing to identity prejudice, cannot justify his response to that speaker, insofar as the speaker can reasonably reject principles that would permit the hearer to prejudicially discount the speaker’s testimony. I argue that my account can better illuminate the idea, shared among many philosophers, that testimonial injustice centrally involves some kind of failure, on the hearer’s part, to appropriately recognize the speaker. In contractualist terms, this consists in a failure of mutual recognition—a failure to acknowledge the speaker as having standing to co-determine the terms on which the hearer and speaker, as epistemic agents, are to engage with each other in testimonial exchanges. (shrink)

In June 2012, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his plans for a ban on the sale of sugary beverages in containers larger than 16 ounces. Shortly thereafter, the Center for Consumer Freedom took out a full-page ad in the New York Times featuring Bloomberg photo-shopped into a matronly dress with the tag line “New Yorkers need a Mayor, not a Nanny.” On television, the CATO Institute's Michael Cannon declared, “This is the most ridiculous sort of nanny state-ism; [i]t’s (...) none of the mayor's business how much soda people are drinking.” And in newspapers around the country, editorial pages featured headlines such as “Gulp! Yet Another Intrusion of the Nanny State.” Just like that, the public debate about this measure became focused on government overreach, while the public health problem of obesity faded into the background. (shrink)

Background: Moral distress, which is especially high in critical care nurses, has significant negative implications for nurses, patients, organizations, and healthcare as a whole. Aim: A moral distress workshop and follow-up activities were implemented in an intensive care unit in order to decrease levels of moral distress and increase nurses’ perceived comfort and confidence in ethical decision-making. Design: A quality improvement (QI) initiative was conducted using a pre- and post-intervention design. The program consisted of a four-hour interactive workshop, followed by (...) two individual self-reflection activities at 2–3 weeks and 5–6 weeks after the workshop. Participants: Critical care nurses working in a heart and vascular intensive care unit at a large academic medical center. Ethical Considerations: This study was deemed to be a QI project by the institution’s Institutional Review Board. Participation was voluntary. Findings: Nurses experienced a significant decrease in moral distress. The participants’ average ethical confidence increased in four areas (ability to identify the conflicting values at stake, knowing role expectations, feeling prepared to resolved ethical conflict, and being able to do the right thing), with knowledge of role expectations and feeling prepared to resolve ethical conflict yielding statistically significant increases. Qualitative findings resulted in consistent themes related to causes of moral distress and ways nurses approached addressing moral distress. Discussion: This study reinforces previous evidence on moral distress and its causes in critical care nurses, and provides a mechanism for improving moral distress and ethical confidence. Conclusions: This QI study demonstrates the effectiveness of an evidence-based program for decreasing critical care nurses’ moral distress and increasing their ethical confidence. The strategies described in this paper can replicated by nursing leaders who wish to effect change at their local level, or adapted and expanded to other professions and clinical care units. (shrink)

Aristotle's Physics is a work of extraordinary intellectual power which has had a profound influence on scientists and philosophers throughout the ages, and on the development of physics itself. This collection of major, previously unpublished, essays by leading Aristotelian scholars examines a wide range of major issues in the Physics and other related works. They offer fresh approaches to Aristotle's work and important new interpretations of his thought.

As it becomes increasingly plausible that the mind–brain is explicable in naturalistic terms, science‐and‐religion scholars have the opportunity to engage creatively and proactively with facets of brain‐related research that better inform our understanding of human well‐being. That is, once mental health is recognized as being a whole‐body phenomenon, exciting theological conversations can take place. One fascinating area of research involves the “gut–brain axis,” or the interactive relationship between the microbiome in the gastrointestinal tract (i.e., gut bacteria), the central nervous system, (...) and mental health. A growing body of literature explores the immensely significant interactions between the gut microbiome and mental health issues involving depression, anxiety, gene expression, and stress responses. One's mental health does not occur in a disembodied state, but in a complex physical environment that is strongly influenced by environmental factors, many of which we can control. This article argues that science‐and‐religion can welcome scientific research in this area, creatively incorporating such insights into a theology of mental health and physical well‐being. (shrink)

This study employed interpretivist, grounded theory method and utilized semi-structured interviews to explore how 31 African migrant high school and university students from eight sub-Saharan African representative countries and currently residing in Townsville, Australia, perceived the roles of their parents in their career development. The study findings revealed that the support and encouragement received from parents underpinned the youths’ perceptions of their parents as influential in their career trajectories. Though participants acknowledged their indebtedness to parents and the system that nurtured (...) them, they faced a dilemma conforming to parental preference or personal conviction, which presented “a fork in the career decision-making road.” Study findings indicate that participants’ reactions and strategies for negotiating parental approval differ based on entry status and gender. Most participants, particularly those with professional entry status, conformed to their parents’ career choice for fear of failure, while a few who followed their personal interests negotiated parental approval through dialogue and educating parents. Male participants with humanitarian entry status opposed their parents’ career preferences and followed their own personal interests. Taken together, all participants had strong desire to obtain parental approval and whether sought early or later, the main focus for all participants was prioritizing family needs and obligations. The practical implications of these findings for all stakeholders are discussed. (shrink)

All five elements live within you, and experiences like heartache, anxiety, and procrastination are signs that one of them is out of balance. This beginner-friendly book introduces you to each of the elements--Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal--and shows you how to use them to improve your mental, emotional, and spiritual health. In Our Element weaves together Eastern medicine, Western psychology, Indigenous traditions, and African ancestral principles of spirituality. With a practical approach that incorporates journal prompts, flower essences, yoga poses, (...) and music, Lindsay Fauntleroy teaches you how to tap into the five elements for a balanced and empowered life that aligns with your soul's calling. (shrink)

The mental and emotional dimensions of climate change are increasingly concerning as extreme events become more frequent and severe, ecosystem destruction advances, and people become more aware of climate impacts and injustices. Research on climate emotions has rapidly advanced over the last decade with growing evidence illustrating that climate emotions can impact health, shape climate action, and ought to be considered in climate change communication, education, and engagement. This paper explores, describes, and discusses climate emotions in the context of Canada’s (...) Provincial North: a vast region characterized by a vulnerability to climate change, remoteness, political marginalization, diverse Indigenous populations, and economies/livelihoods tied to resource extraction. Using postal survey data collected in two Provincial North communities, we aim to describe climate emotions experienced in the context of Canada’s Provincial North, including relationships among specific emotions; and examine if socio-demographic variables show a relationship with climate emotions. Results show high levels of emotional response to climate change overall, with worry and frustration as those emotions reported by the highest percentage of participants. We also find significant difference in climate emotions between men and women. A methodological result was noted in the usefulness of the Climate Emotion Scale, which showed high reliability and high inter-item correlation. A notable limitation of our data is its’ underrepresentation of Indigenous peoples. The findings contribute to a greater understanding of climate emotions with relevance to similar settings characterized by marginalization, vulnerability to climate change, urban islands within vast rural and remote landscapes, and economies and social identities tied to resource extraction. We discuss our findings in relation to the literature and outline future research directions and implications. (shrink)

This paper critically reflects on a social work student placement experience at an Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service. It utilises ethical concepts to analyse the goals and working methods of the medical-dominated service alongside the professional and personal values taken to the role. Discussion focuses on the organisation's assessment process and use of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), concluding that the utilitarian and managerialist principles embodied in their procedure conflict with anti-oppressive social work ethics. Particular attention is given to (...) the role and power of a student including personal reflection on the social work methods used and how practice would be changed in the future. (shrink)

This article discusses the representation of law in Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the context of legal philosophy. Beloved’s contribution to the legal humanities has been described in terms of the contrast Morrison dramatizes between two visions of law: the violence of human chattel slavery embodied by the titular ghost, Beloved, and the communal act of solidarity that exorcizes her from her mother’s house. Yet this characterization neglects the associations Morrison draws in Beloved and in her metacommentary between the ghost and (...) other juridical forms, including personality and property. This article proposes an interpretation of Beloved that reads the ghost as a metaphor for the modern, metaphysicalized sense of the legal person for whom self-possession has become a prerequisite for action. Through a reading of Beloved that considers the final version of the novel against an unpublished earlier ending revealed by Morrison’s papers, I argue that Beloved challenges the reducibility of modern personhood to reflexive ownership. (shrink)

I defend a broadly Aristotelian account of the virtue of magnanimity against the objection that Aristotelian magnanimity is an expression of the vice of pride and so cannot be a virtue. I identify the essential features of magnanimity on Aristotle’s account and argue that Aquinas preserves these essential features while identifying additional necessary conditions of the virtue of magnanimity that illuminate the virtue and show it to be incompatible with pride. I also show where two other attempts to defend Aquinas’s (...) development of Aristotelian magnanimity against the pride objection fail. (shrink)

This is a response to Hwa Yung's paper on the shift of the centre of the gravity of the church from the West into the Majority World. It reflects on the reasons why the church grew in the West, particularly in Europe, in the past and suggests what can be learned from the strengths of the Western church, as well as its weaknesses and failures. Three periods of Western church history are covered: The Early Church from AD 30 to AD (...) 330, the sixteenth century European Reformation, and the modern missionary expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the subsequent decline of the Western church. (shrink)

Populated by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer (LGBTQ) and allied youth, school-based gay straight alliances (GSAs) offer a unique opportunity to re-imagine or redefine youth subjectivity, especially with regards to the intersections of sexual orientation, gender identity, and civic rights. Tracing the evolution of youth subjectivity from the emergence of Canadian schooling in the 1860s, I turn to Ontario’s Bill 13 as a recent example of how GSAs are subverting, or resisting these norms, and in so doing, operate as a (...) kind of counter-public. Drawing from Jenks’ (2005) archetypes of the Dionysian and Apollonian child, I assert that GSAs can embody a third type of child subjectivity, the Athenian child (Smith, 2011; 2014) and, in so doing, provide theoretical space to reconstitute subjectivity for all youth. (shrink)

In 1984, eight-year-old Paula Logares was called into a judge’s chambers and was told the man and woman she lived with were not her parents. Her parents had been disappeared during the dirty war, and now, through her blood, scientists would be able to return her to her birth family. Paula, thus, became the first “stolen” child in Argentina to be identified via the incipient technology of DNA identification. With this forensic first, DNA identification has emerged as a central tool (...) of good governance the world round. From routine crime fighting to international criminal tribunals, DNA plays a crucial role in attempts to reckon with crimes of the body. As an alternative origin for forensic DNA, Argentina offers an early example of science emerging from social movements in the Global South. Drawing on twenty-seven months of fieldwork with family members, activists, and scientists, this article documents the ways in which DNA has emerged as a core site of subject formation for individuals and families affected by the terror of the dictatorship and for the Argentine nation-state, as it reckons with the legacies of repression. Through a feminist, postcolonial frame, I offer the concept of restitution as a way of attending to the forms of biocitizenship that emerge during times of humanitarian crisis and transitional justice. As a tool of reproductive governance, forensic DNA acts not only as a powerful disciplinary site of biocitizenship but also as a potential space to reimagine the social contract between the body, the public, and the state. (shrink)

On the basis of what Aristotle says in the Posterior Analytics about how sciences are differentiated and about the impermissibility of ‘kind-crossing’, many commentators suppose that when it comes to his scientific practice, Aristotle treats the boundaries of the sciences as impermeable, so that if subject-matter X is the business of one science, it simply cannot be the business of another. I call this the impermeable boundary theory of the sciences: knowledge is divided into watertight compartments, determined by their distinct (...) genera, and what goes on in one compartment cannot turn up in another. I argue that, even if this is a correct account of Aristotle’s position in the Analytics, the view that he accepts the impermeable boundary theory when it comes to his scientific and philosophical work outside the Analytics is simply untenable. (shrink)