Background Over the last decade, the return of results (ROR) in precision medicine research (PMR) has become increasingly routine. Calls for individual rights to research results have extended the “duty to report” from clinically useful genetic information to traits and ancestry results. ROR has thus been reframed as inherently beneficial to research participants, without a needed focus on who benefits and how. This paper addresses this gap, particularly in the context of PMR aimed at increasing participant diversity, by providing investigator (...) and researcher perspectives on and questions about the assumed value of ROR in PMR.Methods Semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of investigators and researchers across federally funded PMR studies in three national consortia, as well as observations of study activities, focused on how PM researchers conceptualize diversity and implement inclusive practices across research stages, including navigating ROR.Results Interviewees (1) validated the value of ROR as a benefit of PMR, while others (2) questioned the benefit of clinically actionable results to individuals in the absence of sufficient resources for translating findings into health care for diverse and disadvantaged populations; (3) expressed uncertainties in applying the presumed value of ROR as a benefit for non-clinical results; and (4) and debated when the promise of the value of ROR may undermine trust in PMR, and divert efforts to return value beyond ROR.Conclusions Conceptualizations of diversity and inclusion among PM researchers and investigators raise unique ethical questions where unexamined assumptions of the value of ROR inform study recruitment efforts to enroll minoritized and under-represented populations. A lack of consideration for resources and infrastructure necessary to translate ROR into actionable information may hinder trustworthy community-research relationships. Thus, we argue for a more intentional interrogation of ROR practices as an offer of benefit and for whom. (shrink)

This volume offers evidence for a more classical and philosophically-optimistic interpretation of Wallace Stevens than former studies have made. It examines his collected essays, his letters, journals and poems, existing scholarship, and the philosophic tradition in which he should be located.

This paper comments on an article by V.S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein (JCS,1999) in which they purport to be identifying the neurological principles of beauty. I draw attention to the way the problem of beauty is construed in the philosophical literature by Mary Mothersill (1984) and Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment). I argue that Ramachandran and Hirsteins' principles do not address the problem of beauty because they do not differentiate between the experience of beauty and other closely related phenomena. (...) I then show how one might address the problem of beauty within the framework that they have adopted. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the drafts and discussions which went into the first edition of the Perambulation. Lambarde’s autograph drafts and letters set his work in dialogue with other contemporary efforts to study the English past, in particular Matthew parker’s De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae. This book developed in tandem with Lambarde’s. Lambarde and parker created and shared drafts in manuscript and print as they delved into Kentish church history. Remnants of their conversations about sources like the Textus Roffensis can be (...) found in their books and even in the manuscripts under discussion. Revision, like reading, was a particular social enterprise with its own conventions. The line between a finished, printed presentation copy and a manuscript draft was completely blurred: both constituted a ‘beare whelpe that lacketh licking’. (shrink)

Our editorial introduces this Special Issue devoted to exploring the ethics of youth work practice in the twenty-first century. The call for papers for this Special Issue went out in October 2022 w...

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients (...) than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. _Shame and Necessity_ gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world. (shrink)

Rights, justice, and power raise many interesting questions. Why do such basic concepts as rights and justice have such differentpoints of concern—equality, proportionality, medium rei? Why are there such different perspectives in philosophy, theology, and law? Why is the notion of power in business ethics so isolated from the general discussion of applied justice in treatises on business contracts, employee relations, and in other related topics? Discussions of power seemed parallel with discussions of justice. The two did not seem to (...) intersect. In this paper I shall argue that rights, power, and justice are interrelated. While natural rights are the basis for justice, rights cannotbe realized nor justice become operative without power. I shall call this relationship and the theory underlying it “Transforming Justice.”One of the basic concerns of this article is to notice the lack of interaction between rights and power in the traditional theories ofjustice. Granted that for many philosophers it is sufficient to determine what is just. But the notion of justice as an active virtue that persons are to exercise in their dealings with others goes further. It touches the realities of life that every person experiences. Life doesnot separate rights from power. Reflection upon the current separation of rights from power both in theory and in action is analogous to the separation of the “sensory” from the “imaginative” in art and in life. The urge to devise a framework of justice that brings out thewholeness of its existential being is the underlying rationale for developing a theory of transforming justice. Another purpose fordeveloping a theory of transforming justice is to suggest a conceptual framework of business ethics and corporate social responsibility that incorporates values, rights, power, and virtue. Authors and teachers approach these issues either from a value perspective or from the view that institutions respond only to those who exercise power. Thus, it isnecessary for a conceptual framework to incorporate the dynamics of power and the qualifying aspects of rights or claims.A natural law approach to justice and rights argues that humans have certain basic rights that others, whether humans or institutions, are required to respect. Natural rights theory places the burden or duty on each individual to respect the rights ofevery other person. In addition, justice is usually defined by natural law theorists as “giving each person his or her due,” what is requiredby natural rights, what is owed, earned, or deserved. But its applications fall short of reality. It raises other questions. How does one person get another to give him what is “his due”? How are duties and claims entailed by natural rights enforced in practice? The notionof transforming justice attempts to answer these questions. (shrink)

In this paper I suggest ways in which vision theory and psychology of perception may illuminate our understanding of beauty. I identify beauty as a phenomenon which is (i) ineffable, (ii) subjectively universal (intersubjective), and (iii) manifested in objects as formal structure. I present a model of perception by which I can identify a representation whose underlying principles would explain these features of beauty. The fact that these principles underlie the representation rather than constitute the content of representation, provides an (...) explanation for the ineffability and subjective universality of the perception of beauty in the form of objects. In part one, I set out two models of perception conducive to this approach. In part two, I suggest how such theories can offer a way of explaining and understanding the experience of beauty. (shrink)

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order to (...) take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

This paper explores how transformative experience generates decision-making problems of particular seriousness in medical settings. Potentially transformative experiences are especially likely to be encountered in medicine, and the associated decisions are confronted jointly by patients and clinicians in the context of an imbalance of power and expertise. However in such scenarios the principle of informed consent, which plays a central role in guiding clinicians, is unequal to the task. We detail how the principle’s assumptions about autonomy, rationality and information handle (...) transformative experiences poorly, appealing to several difficult cases for medical decision-making to illustrate the resulting problem, and we consider how the existing literature on complications with consent fails to offer a resolution. We argue that recognition of the problem has a role to play in achieving a more effective response to transformative decisions. In Sect. 1 we introduce several representative cases of challenging patient decision-making that clinicians might face. In Sect. 2 we detail how transformative experience has been analysed in the recent literature, before outlining in Sect. 3 the theoretical basis of the principle of informed consent, which plays a central role in how clinicians are expected to support decision-making. In Sect. 4, having laid the groundwork for a clear description, we return to the cases given in Sect. 1 to confirm how their transformative nature presents a problem: either clinicians treat the decisions faced by these patients as ‘normal’, encouraging them to focus on information provision that patients may be unable to act on, or they treat them as transformative, in which case they lack the resources to recognise whether they are helping patients make (subjectively) good decisions. In Sect. 5 we argue that the existing literature does not offer any escape from this problem. We close in Sect. 6 by noting the significant impact that appreciating the problem of transformative experience could have on supporting transformative decisions in medicine and briefly suggesting how we might aim to develop new approaches to dealing with these. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant claims that genius is a talent for art, but not for science. Despite his restriction of genius to the domain of fine art, several recent interpreters have suggested that genius has a role to play in Kant’s account of cognition in general and scientific practice in particular. In this paper, I explore Kant’s reasons for excluding genius from science as well as the reasons that one might nevertheless be tempted to think that his account (...) allows room for the scientific genius. I then argue that Kant’s concerns are not only epistemic, but also moral, and together, they give us good reason for resisting the veneration of genius. (shrink)

Introduction: the advance of governmentality -- Foucault, power, and governmentality: introduction; what is governmentality?; beyond the microphysics of power?; from theory of the state to genealogy of the state; history of the art of government; pastoral power; raison d'état; liberal governmentality; five propositions on foucault and governmentality -- Governmentality 3.4.7.: introduction; governmentality after Foucault; governmentality and the political sciences; some problems in governmentality -- Foucault effect redux? some notes on international governmentality studies: constellation; a few preliminary observations; problems and debates (...) in international governmentality studies -- Reconnecting governmentality and genealogy: introduction; genealogy and governmentality; pluralizing genealogy; practicing genealogy; lines of descent: the family tree of power?; counter-memory and re-serialization; the retrieval of forgotten struggles and subjugated knowledges -- Conclusion: encountering governmentality: governmentality as a new cartography of power; from mapping to encountering; governmentality and politics. (shrink)

Bernard Williams's remarkable essay on morality confronts the problems of writing moral philosophy, and offers a stimulating alternative to more systematic accounts which seem nevertheless to have left all the important issues somewhere off the page. Williams explains, analyses and distinguishes a number of key positions, from the purely amoral to notions of subjective or relative morality, testing their coherence before going on to explore the nature of 'goodness' in relation to responsibilities and choice, roles, standards, and human nature. The (...) final chapters make a fascinating enquiry into what morality is about, looking beyond happiness to other human aims and ideals. This re-issue of a classic in moral philosophy includes a new foreword by the author. (shrink)

Are interpersonal comparisons of desire possible? Can we give an account of how facts about desires are grounded, that underpins such comparisons? This paper supposes the answer to the first question is yes, and provides an account of the nature of desire that explains how this is so. The account is a modification of the interpretationist metaphysics of representation that the author has recently been developing. The modification is to allow phenomenological affective valence into the “base facts” on which correct (...) interpretation is grounded. To use this extra resource within that theory to vindicate interpersonal comparisons, we will need to appeal rational connections between level of valence and level of desire, which this paper sets out and examines. (shrink)

A pioneer in early studies of the human mind and founder of that peculiarly American philosophy called Pragmatism, William James remains America's most widely read philosopher. Generations of students have been drawn to his lucid presentations of philosophical problems. His works, now being made available for the first time in a definitive edition, have a permanent place in American letters and a continuing influence in philosophy and psychology. The essays gathered in the posthumously published Essays in Radical Empiricism formulate (...) ideas that had brewed in James's mind for thirty years as he sought a way out of the philosophical dilemmas generated by the new psychology of the late nineteenth century. They constitute the explanatory core of his doctrine of radical empiricism, a doctrine that charts his course between the absolute idealism he could not accept and, at the other extreme, the law of associationism, which reduces knowledge to sheer contiguity of ideas. In his introduction John J. McDermott describes the historical background and the genesis of James's theory and considers the objections raised by its opponents. (shrink)

Ideals of democratic participation and rational self-government have long informed modern political theory. As a recent elaboration of these ideals, the concept of deliberative democracy is based on the principle that legitimate democracy issues from the public deliberation of citizens. This remarkably fruitful concept has spawned investigations along a number of lines. Areas of inquiry include the nature and value of deliberation, the feasibility and desirability of consensus on contentious issues, the implications of institutional complexity and cultural diversity for democratic (...) decision making, and the significance of voting and majority rule in deliberative arrangements.The anthology opens with four key essays--by Jon Elster, Jürgen Habermas, Joshua Cohen, and John Rawls--that helped establish the current inquiry into deliberative models of democracy. The nine essays that follow represent the latest efforts of leading democratic theorists to tackle various problems of deliberative democracy. All the contributions address tensions that arise between reason and politics in a democracy inspired by the ideal of achieving reasoned agreement among free and equal citizens. Although the authors approach the topic of deliberation from different perspectives, they all aim to provide a theoretical basis for a more robust democratic practice.Contributors : James Bohman, Thomas Christiano, Joshua Cohen, Jon Elster, David Estlund, Gerald F. Gaus, Jürgen Habermas, James Johnson, Jack Knight, Frank I. Michelman, John Rawls, Henry S. Richardson, Iris Marion Young. (shrink)