In this paper we discuss ethical implications of the use of mobile phone apps in the control of the COVID-19 pandemic. Contact tracing is a well-established feature of public health practice during infectious disease outbreaks and epidemics. However, the high proportion of pre-symptomatic transmission in COVID-19 means that standard contact tracing methods are too slow to stop the progression of infection through the population. To address this problem, many countries around the world have deployed or are developing mobile phone apps (...) capable of supporting instantaneous contact tracing. Informed by the on-going mapping of ‘proximity events’ these apps are intended both to inform public health policy and to provide alerts to individuals who have been in contact with a person with the infection. The proposed use of mobile phone data for ‘intelligent physical distancing’ in such contexts raises a number of important ethical questions. In our paper, we outline some ethical considerations that need to be addressed in any deployment of this kind of approach as part of a multidimensional public health response. We also, briefly, explore the implications for its use in future infectious disease outbreaks. (shrink)

During the WHO-GloPID COVID-19 Global Research and Innovation Forum meeting held in Geneva on the 11th and 12th of February 2020 a number of different ethical concepts were used. This paper briefly states what a number of these concepts mean and how they might be applied to discussions about research during the COVID-19 pandemic and related outbreaks. This paper does not seek to be exhaustive and other ethical concepts are, of course, relevant and important.

The European Biomedical Ethics Practitioner Education Project (EBEPE), funded by the BIOMED programme of the European Commission, is a five-nation partnership to produce open learning materials for healthcare ethics education. Papers and case studies from a series of twelve conferences throughout the European Union, reflecting the ‘burning issues’ in the participants' healthcare systems, have been collected by a team based at Imperial College, London, where they are now being edited into a series of seven activity-based workbooks for individual or group (...) study. These draft workbooks are now being read by a network of critical readers across Europe, whose comments will be incorporated into the final versions of the workbooks. The result will be the first European-wide and Europe-centred resource for teaching students, practitioners, and members of ethics committees. Topics covered include: • Resource allocation and rationing • The rights of children and young people • Long-term care of the elderly • Mental health and mental illness • Autonomy and patient choice • Decisions at the end of life • A study guide to using the workbooks The collaborative nature of the project has highlighted differentiated national approaches in medical ethics. Against the British and Dutch rights-orientated approach have emerged two other alternative models: the Nordic preference for administrative resolution of entitlement disputes, and the southern European emphasis on deontological codes. A genuinely European reconstruction of autonomy and rights, using hermeneutic, feminist and narrative approaches to counterbalance individualistic models, is emerging across the workbooks. The programme has also uncovered national differences in how ethics should be taught, with the workbooks' style being an experiential approach. Thus the EBEPE project is developing new models in both substantive and pedagogic senses, about both what should be taught and how it should be presented. (shrink)

Research funders, regulatory agencies, and journals are increasingly expecting that individual-level data from health research will be shared. Broad consent to such sharing is considered appropriate, feasible and acceptable in low- and middle-income settings, but to date limited empirical research has been conducted to inform the design of such processes. We examined stakeholder perspectives about how best to seek broad consent to sharing data from the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, which implemented a data sharing policy and broad consent (...) to data sharing in January 2016. Between February and August 2017 qualitative data were collected at two sites, Bangkok and the Thai-Myanmar border town of Mae Sot. We conducted eighteen semi-structured interviews. We also conducted four focus group discussions with a total of nineteen people. Descriptive and thematic coding informed analysis of aspects of data sharing that are considered most important to inform participants about, and the best ways to explain complex and abstract topics relating to data sharing. The findings demonstrated that clinical trial participants prioritise information about the potential benefits and harms of data sharing. Stakeholders made multiple suggestions for clarifying information provided about data sharing on such topics. There was significant variation amongst stakeholders’ perspectives about how much information should be provided about data sharing, and it was clear that effective information provision should be responsive to the study, the study population, the individual research participant and the research context. Effectively communicating about data sharing with research participants is challenging in practice, highlighting the importance of robust and effective data sharing governance in this context. Broad consent should incorporate effective and efficient explanations of data sharing to promote informed decision-making, without impeding research participants’ understandings of key aspects of the research from which data will be shared. Further work is required to refine both the development of core information about data sharing to be provided to all research participants, and appropriate solutions for context specific-challenges arising when explaining data sharing. (shrink)

Since January 2016, the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit has trialled a data-sharing policy where requests to access research datasets are processed through a Data Access Committee. In this paper, we share our experiences establishing data management systems and data-sharing infrastructure including a data-sharing policy, data access committee and related procedures. We identified a number of practical and ethical challenges including requests for datasets collected without specific or broad consent to data sharing and requests from pharmaceutical companies for data (...) to support drug registration applications. We also encountered significant resource constraints which required the development of appropriate human resources and infrastructure. We suggest a research agenda to promote responsible and equitable data sharing while safeguarding the rights and interests of research participants and researchers. (shrink)

COVID-19 poses an exceptional threat to global public health and well-being. Recognition of the need to develop effective vaccines at unprecedented speed has led to calls to accelerate research pathways ethically, including by conducting challenge studies ) with SARS-CoV-2. Such research is controversial, with concerns being raised about the social, legal, ethical and clinical implications of infecting healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2 for research purposes. Systematic risk evaluations are critical to inform assessments of the ethics of any proposed SARS-CoV-2 CHIs. Such (...) evaluations will necessarily take place within a rapidly changing and at times contested epidemiological landscape, in which differing criteria for the ethical acceptability of research risks have been proposed. This paper critically reviews two such criteria and evaluates whether the use of effective treatment should be a necessary condition for the ethical acceptability of SARS-CoV-2 CHIs, and whether the choice of study sites should be influenced by COVID-19 incidence levels. The paper concludes that ethical evaluations of proposed SARS-CoV-2 CHIs should be informed by rigorous, consultative and holistic approaches to systematic risk assessment. (shrink)

As the federal government distributed remdesivir to some of the states COVID-19 hit hardest, policymakers scrambled to develop criteria to allocate the drug to their hospitals. Our state, Michigan, was among those states to receive an initial quantity of the drug from the U.S. government. The disparities in burden of disease in Michigan are striking. Detroit has a death rate more than three times the state average. Our recommendation to the state was that it should prioritize the communities that bear (...) a disproportionate burden of suffering in the allocation of the new potential treatment. This recommendation is justified not only for new drugs with uncertain effects, but also for drugs of certain benefit or vaccines. For states with significant health disparities, such as Michigan, this allocation priority may help to repair them. In fact, any other allocation strategy may make them worse. (shrink)

Nipah virus is a priority pathogen that is receiving increasing attention among scientists and in work on epidemic preparedness. Despite this trend, there has been almost no bioethical work examining ethical considerations surrounding the epidemiology, prevention, and treatment of Nipah virus or research that has already begun into animal and human vaccines. In this paper, we advance the case for further work on Nipah virus disease in public health ethics due to the distinct issues it raises concerning communication about the (...) modes of transmission, the burdens of public health surveillance, the recent use of stringent public health measures during epidemics, and social or religious norms intersecting with preventive measures. We also advance the case for further work on Nipah virus disease in research ethics, given ethical issues surrounding potential vaccine trials for a high-fatality disease with sporadic spillover events, the different local contexts where trials may occur, and the potential use of unproven therapeutics during outbreaks. Further bioethics work may help to ensure that research and public health interventions for Nipah virus disease are ethically acceptable and more likely to be effective. (shrink)

Much has been published about the ethical issues encountered by clinicians in genetics/genomics, but those experienced by clinical laboratory scientists are less well described. Clinical laboratory scientists now frequently face navigating ethical problems in their work, but how they should be best supported to do this is underexplored. This lack of attention is also reflected in the ethics tools available to clinical laboratory scientists such as guidance and deliberative ethics forums, developed primarily to manage issues arising within the clinic.We explore (...) what ethical issues are being experienced by clinical scientists, how they think such issues could be best analysed and managed, and whether their practice might be enhanced by more situated approaches to ethics deliberation and practice such as ethical preparedness. From thematic analysis of cases presented by clinical scientists at a specially convened meeting of the UK Genethics Forum, we derived three main ethical themes: (1) the redistribution of labour and responsibilities resulting from the practice of genomic medicine; (2) the interpretation and certainty of results and (3) the proposal that better standardisation and consistency of ethical approaches (for example, more guidelines and policy) could resolve some of the challenges arising.We argue that although standardisation is important for promoting shared understandings of good (including ethical) practice, supplementary approaches to enhance and sustain ethical preparedness will be important to help clinical scientists and others in the recently expanded genetic/genomic medicine environment foster quality ethical thinking. (shrink)

The UK government has recently committed to adopting a new policy—dubbed ‘Martha’s Rule’—which has been characterised as providing patients the right to rapidly access a second clinical opinion in urgent or contested cases. Support for the rule emerged following the death of Martha Mills in 2021, after doctors failed to admit her to intensive care despite concerns raised by her parents. We argue that framing this issue in terms of patient rights is not productive, and should be avoided. Insofar as (...) the ultimate goal of Martha’s Rule is the provision of a clinical service that protects patient safety, an approach that focuses on the obligations of the health system—rather than the individual rights of patients—will better serve this goal. We outline an alternative approach that situates rapid clinical review as part of a suite of services aimed at enhancing and protecting patient care. This approach would make greater progress towards addressing the difficult systemic issues that Martha’s Rule does not, while also better engaging with the constraints of clinical practice. (shrink)

BackgroundCommunity engagement is increasingly promoted as a marker of good, ethical practice in the context of international collaborative research in low-income countries. There is, however, no widely agreed definition of community engagement or of approaches adopted. Justifications given for its use also vary. Community engagement is, for example, variously seen to be of value in: the development of more effective and appropriate consent processes; improved understanding of the aims and forms of research; higher recruitment rates; the identification of important ethical (...) issues; the building of better relationships between the community and researchers; the obtaining of community permission to approach potential research participants; and, the provision of better health care. Despite these diverse and potentially competing claims made for the importance of community engagement, there is very little published evidence on effective models of engagement or their evaluation.MethodsIn this paper, drawing upon interviews with the members of a Community Advisory Board on the Thai-Myanmar border, we describe and critically reflect upon an approach to community engagement which was developed in the context of international collaborative research in the border region.Results and conclusionsDrawing on our analysis, we identify a number of considerations relevant to the development of an approach to evaluating community engagement in this complex research setting. The paper also identifies a range of important ways in which the Community Advisory Board is in practice understood by its members to have morally significant roles and responsibilities beyond those usually associated with the successful and appropriate conduct of research. (shrink)

Four ethical values — maximizing benefits, treating equally, promoting and rewarding instrumental value, and giving priority to the worst off — yield six specific recommendations for allocating medical resources in the Covid-19 pandemic: maximize benefits; prioritize health workers; do not allocate on a first-come, first-served basis; be responsive to evidence; recognize research participation; and apply the same principles to all Covid-19 and non–Covid-19 patients.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous weaknesses in pandemic preparedness and response, including underfunding, inadequate surveillance, and inequitable distribution of countermeasures. To overcome these weaknesses for future pandemics, WHO released a zero draft of a pandemic treaty in February, 2023, and subsequently a revised bureau's text in May, 2023. COVID-19 made clear that pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response reflect choices and value judgements. These decisions are therefore not a purely scientific or technical exercise, but are fundamentally grounded in ethics. The latest (...) treaty draft reflects these ethical considerations by including a section entitled Guiding Principles and Approaches. Most of these principles are ethical—they establish core values that undergird the treaty. Unfortunately, the treaty draft's set of principles are numerous, overlapping, and show inadequate coherence and consistency. We propose two improvements to this section of the draft pandemic treaty. First, key guiding ethical principles should be clearer and more precise than they currently are. Second, the link between ethical principles and policy implementation should be clearly established and define boundaries on acceptable interpretation, ensuring that signatories abide by these principles. (shrink)

BackgroundObtaining consent has become a standard way of respecting the patient’s rights and autonomy in clinical research. Ethical guidelines recommend that the child’s parent/s or authorised legal guardian provides informed consent for their child’s participation. However, obtaining informed consent in paediatric research is challenging. Parents become vulnerable because of stress related to their child’s illness. Understanding the views held by guardians and researchers about the consent process in Malawi, where there are limitations in health care access and research literacy will (...) assist in developing appropriate consent guidelines.MethodsWe conducted 20 in-depth interviews with guardians of children and research staff who had participated in paediatric clinical trial and observational studies in acute and non-acute settings in the Southern Region of Malawi. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analysed. Interviews were compared across studies and settings to identify differences and similarities in participants’ views about informed consent processes. Data analysis was facilitated by NVIVO 11 software.ResultsAll participants across study types and settings reported that they associated participating in research with therapeutic benefits. Substantial differences were noted in the decision-making process across study settings. Guardians from acute studies felt that the role of their spouses was neglected during consenting, while staff reported that they had problems obtaining consent from guardians when their partners were not present. Across all study types and settings, research staff reported that they emphasised the benefits more than the risks of the study to participants, due to pressure to recruit. Participants from non-acute settings were more likely to recall information shared during the consent process than participants in the acute setting.ConclusionThe health care context, culture and research process influenced participants’ understanding of study information across study types and settings. We advise research managers or principal investigators to define minimum requirements that would not compromise the consent process and conduct study specific training for staff. The use of one size fits all consent process may not be ideal. More guidance is needed on how these differences can be incorporated during the consent process to improve understanding and delivery of consent.Trial registration Not applicable. (shrink)

Drawing on the influence of primacy and recency effects in processing information about corporate social responsibility, the authors examine how internal and external factors impact the consumer-firm relationship in the presence of contradictory CSR information. Evaluating these factors provides a more comprehensive understanding of how consumers react to unethical and socially irresponsible actions. Contrary to recent research that suggests a reactive CSR communication strategy to be best due to recency effects, the present findings show that past customer experiences with the (...) firm facilitate a ‘primacy effect’. Thus, when corporate social irresponsibility occurs, a customer’s prior experiences mitigate negative consequences. Conversely, a firm’s positive CSR reputation may provide goodwill, although it does not guarantee that consumers will process CSR information differently. Therefore, firms cannot build a strong CSR reputation and expect to be immune from the consequences of CSI. Given these new findings of how consumers process contradictory CSR information, firms should implement a strategic and deliberate communication plan that delivers different messages to different stakeholders. Specifically, these findings suggest that firms benefit most from a proactive communication strategy with their current customers and a reactive communication strategy with the general public. (shrink)

This open access casebook addresses complex and important ethical challenges arising when health-related research in conducted in the context of epidemics and pandemics. This book provides contextually-rich real-world case studies illustrating research ethics issues encountered by researchers, ethics reviewers and regulators around the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The accompanying commentaries outline relevant conceptual approaches and ethical considerations. These promote understanding and reflection on relevant ethical issues, ethical approaches and competing considerations in a manner supporting thoughtful evaluation of their implications (...) for practice. As such the casebook is relevant to academic and professional audiences with an interest in global health, research ethics, and outbreaks and epidemics. (shrink)

BackgroundGenome-wide association studies (GWAS) provide a powerful means of identifying genetic variants that play a role in common diseases. Such studies present important ethical challenges. An increasing number of GWAS is taking place in lower income countries and there is a pressing need to identify the particular ethical challenges arising in such contexts. In this paper, we draw upon the experiences of the MalariaGEN Consortium to identify specific ethical issues raised by such research in Africa, Asia and Oceania.DiscussionWe explore ethical (...) issues in three key areas: protecting the interests of research participants, regulation of international collaborative genomics research and protecting the interests of scientists in low income countries. With regard to participants, important challenges are raised about community consultation and consent. Genomics research raises ethical and governance issues about sample export and ownership, about the use of archived samples and about the complexity of reviewing such large international projects. In the context of protecting the interests of researchers in low income countries, we discuss aspects of data sharing and capacity building that need to be considered for sustainable and mutually beneficial collaborations.SummaryMany ethical issues are raised when genomics research is conducted on populations that are characterised by lower average income and literacy levels, such as the populations included in MalariaGEN. It is important that such issues are appropriately addressed in such research. Our experience suggests that the ethical issues in genomics research can best be identified, analysed and addressed where ethics is embedded in the design and implementation of such research projects. (shrink)

Community engagement is increasingly promoted as a marker of good, ethical practice in the context of international collaborative research in low-income countries. There is, however, no widely agreed definition of community engagement or of approaches adopted. Justifications given for its use also vary. Community engagement is, for example, variously seen to be of value in: the development of more effective and appropriate consent processes; improved understanding of the aims and forms of research; higher recruitment rates; the identification of important ethical (...) issues; the building of better relationships between the community and researchers; the obtaining of community permission to approach potential research participants; and, the provision of better health care. Despite these diverse and potentially competing claims made for the importance of community engagement, there is very little published evidence on effective models of engagement or their evaluation. (shrink)

At the heart of ethics reside the concepts of good and bad; they are at work when we assess whether a person is virtuous or vicious, an act right or wrong, a decision defensible or indefensible, a goal desirable or undesirable. But there are many varieties of goodness and badness. At their core lie intrinsic goodness and badness, the sort of value that something has for its own sake. It is in virtue of intrinsic value that other types of value (...) may be understood, and hence that we can begin to come to terms with questions of virtue and vice, right and wrong, and so on. This book investigates the nature of intrinsic value: just what it is for something to be valuable for its own sake, just what sort of thing can have such value, just how such a value is to be computed. In the final chapter, the fruits of this investigation are applied to a discussion of pleasure, pain, and displeasure and also of moral virtue and vice, in order to determine just what value lies within these phenomena. (shrink)

In this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self. Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the cybernetic society, a (...) cohesive totalization of the social logics of the institutional spheres of economy, culture and polity. These logics have been progressively defined by the imperatives of economic growth and technical-administrative management of labor and consumption, routinizing patterns of life, practices, and consciousness throughout the culture. Evolving out of the neoliberal transformation of economy and society since the 1980s, the cybernetic society has transformed how that the individual is articulated in contemporary society. Thompson examines the various pathologies of the self and consciousness that result from this form of socialization--such as hyper-reification, alienated moral cognition, false consciousness, and the withered ego--in new ways to demonstrate the extent of deformation of modern selfhood. Only with a more robust, more socially embedded concept of autonomy as critical agency can we begin to reconstruct the principles of democratic individuality and community. (shrink)

Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings is a comprehensive anthology that draws together leading philosophers writing on the major themes in Metaphysics. Chapters appear under the headings: Universals Particulars Modality and Possible Worlds Causation Time Persistence Realism and Anti-Realism Each section is prefaced by an introductory essay by the editor which guides students gently into each topic. Articles by the following leading philosophers are included: Allaire, Anscombe, Armstrong, Black, Broad, Casullo, Dummett, Ewing, Heller, Hume, Kripke, Lewis, Mackie, McTaggart, Mellor, Merricks , Parfit, Plantinga, (...) Price, Prior, Putnam, Quine, Russell, Smart, Swinburne, Taylor , Van Cleve, van Inwagen, Williams Featuring a new section on causation, this new edition is highly accessible and provides a broad-ranging exploration of the subject. Ideal for any philosophy student, this reader will prove essential reading for any metaphysics course. The sections and selections of readings have been updated to complement Michael Loux's textbook Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction , third edition. (shrink)

For the first time an award-winning Harvard professor shares the lessons from his wildly popular course on classical Chinese philosophy, showing you how these ancient ideas can guide you on the path to a good life today. The lessons taught by ancient Chinese philosophers surprisingly still apply, and they challenge our fundamental assumptions about how to lead a fulfilled, happy, and successful life. Self-discovery, it turns out, comes through looking outward, not inward. Power comes from holding back. Good relationships come (...) from small gestures. Spontaneity comes from practice. And excellence comes from what you choose to do, not your “natural” abilities. Counterintuitive. Countercultural. Even revolutionary. These powerful ideas have made Professor Michael Puett's course the third most popular at Harvard University in recent years, with enrollment surging every year since it was first offered in 2006. It's clear students are drawn by a bold promise Professor Puett makes on the first day of class: “These ideas will change your life.” Now he offers his course to the world. (shrink)

Human existence is structured as an interruption that is forever calling us into question (interrupting our everyday routinized ways of being) and confronting us with the related challenges of having a conscience, being open to and acknowledging others, striving to better ourselves when improvement is necessary for maintaining our well-being, and enacting our rhetorical competence to disclose the truth of the matters at hand.

Thoughts of mortality sometimes bring on a crisis in confidence in the meaning in one's life. One expression of this collapse is the midlife crisis. In a recent article, Kieran Setiya argues that if one can value activities as opposed to accomplishments as the primary goods in one's life then one might avoid the midlife crisis. I argue that Setiya's advice, rather than safeguarding the meaning in one's life, substitutes for it something else, a kind of happiness. I use Susan (...) Wolf's concept of meaning in order to make this case. Wolf has not written much about the importance of death, but I argue that her account of meaning shares essential features with the theories developed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. Sartre argues that death is an unqualified harm, while Heidegger argues that there is meaning in life only because we are mortal. I conclude by showing how Heidegger's theory of mortality underwrites accounts of meaning like those found in Wolf. (shrink)

Rickert, value philosophy, and the primacy of practical reason -- Husserl, phenomenology, and lived-experience -- Heideggerian reflections on Paul Natorp -- Dilthey on life, lived-experience, and worldview philosophy -- Toward a fundamental ontology -- Philosophy as praxix.

In The Phenomenology of Religious Belief, the renowned philosopher Michael J. Shapiro investigates how art - and in particular literature and film - can impact upon both traditional interpretations and critical studies of religious beliefs and experiences. In doing so, he examines the work of prolific and award-winning writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip K. Dick and Robert Coover. By placing their work in conjunction with critical analyses of media by the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini (...) and combining it with the work of groundbreaking thinkers such as George Canguilhem, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek, Shapiro takes a truly interdisciplinary approach to the question of how life should be lived. His assessment of phenomenological subjectivity also leads him to question the nature of political theology and extend the criticism of Pauline theology. (shrink)

Adorno was deeply influenced by ideas about the rationalization of mass society and effects of commodification on consciousness. The work of Max Weber and Georg Lukács were dual influences that shaped much of Adorno's own work. He develops his critique of the “totally administered society” as a confluence of Weber's rationalization thesis as well as Lukács' theory of reification of consciousness due to the penetration of the commodity form into everyday life. But Adorno moves beyond these ideas by arguing that (...) the spread of exchange‐value and quantification, carried forth via the commodity form, collapses the modern individual and its consciousness into the prevailing forms of dominant rationality. I then show how his later projects of Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory seek to protect the subject from these trends and then reflect on how Adorno's ideas can be brought together with Lukács' later ideas about social ontology in order to glimpse a broader concept of Critical Theory. (shrink)

In this accessible guide, science educator Michael J. Reiss and philosopher Michael Ruse argue that organicism-rather than mechanism-is the best way to understand the nature of life, and detail the resulting implications for biology, philosophy, education, and policy.

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called the slippery slope. According to Patrick Hurley in A Concise Introduction to Logic, “the fallacy of slippery slope is a variety of the false cause fallacy. It occurs when the conclusion of an argument rests on an alleged chain reaction and there is not sufficient reason to think that the chain reaction will actually take place”. The key term in the chapter is “chain reaction”. If all of (...) the events in the chain reaction can be justified, then the slippery slope is not committed. But the nuances and intricate improbable connections between each event still make it difficult to support the ultimate conclusion, which is to get rid of cable. The chapter discusses two simple techniques in order to avoid committing the slippery slope fallacy. (shrink)

This book reconstructs the concept and practice of dialectics as a means of grounding a critical theory of society. At the center of this project is the thesis of phronetic criticism or a form of reason that is able to synthesize human value with objective rationality. This book argues that defects in modern forms of social reason are the result of the powers of social structure and the norms and purposes they embody. Increasingly, modern societies are driven not by substantive (...) values concerning human good but by the technical imperatives of economic management leading to a cultural condition of nihilism that has eroded dialectical consciousness. The first half of the book demonstrates the various ways that social power erodes and undermines critical-rational forms of consciousness. The second part of the book constructs an alternative basis for critical reason by showing how it requires seeing human value as essentially ontological: that is, constituted by objective forms of sociality that either promote human freedom or pervert our capacities and drives toward pathological forms of life. The philosophical claim is that a critical theory of ethics must be rooted in these concrete forms of life and that this will serve as a critical vantage point for critical political judgment and transformational praxis. Descent of the Dialectic will be of interest to researchers working in philosophy, political theory, social theory, and critical theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:An Exposition of The Divine Names, The Book of Blessed Dionysius by Thomas AquinasMichael J. Rubin, Elizabeth C. Shaw, and Staff*AQUINAS, Thomas. An Exposition of The Divine Names, The Book of Blessed Dionysius. Translated and edited with an introduction by Michael A. Augros. Merrimack, N.H.: Thomas More College Press, 2021. xxv + 549 pp. Cloth, $65.00The profound influence that Pseudo-Dionysius had on Aquinas’s thought, especially in his (...) metaphysics of participation and his apophatic theology, has been known for some time now, thanks to the excellent work of such scholars as Fran O’Rourke. One would therefore think that Aquinas’s Exposition of the Divine Names (his only commentary on the works of Pseudo-Dionysius) would have been translated a lot sooner. This delay is assuredly due not just to the difficulty of translating this work but also to a certain embarrassment felt by Thomists over Aquinas’s sincere belief that the “Dionysius” who wrote the Divine Names was the Areopagite whose conversion at the teaching of St. Paul is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles. That the author calling himself “Dionysius” was in fact a theologian writing in the fifth or sixth centuries has been well established by modern scholarship. Hence, Thomists may have felt tempted to discount or at least pass over the influence of this author on Aquinas since it is discomfiting to think that the Church’s greatest theologian accorded such authority to an imposter.Michael Augros tackles these concerns head-on in the excellent introduction to his new translation of the Divine Names commentary. First, Augros points out that in past centuries a pseudonym was usually not an act of forgery but, rather, a way of concealing the author’s identity, which an early Christian theologian might well decide to do either out of humility or out of a desire “to avoid provoking certain prejudices” in those who disagreed with him in contemporary theological disputes. Moreover, it is likely that the work was never intended for the general public (who could easily mistake the pseudonym as genuine) but, rather, was written for those “already initiated in a particular Neoplatonic school of Christian theology,” who would recognize the author as being “one of their own” but without knowing his precise identity. Finally, in taking the particular name of “Dionysius,” the author of the Divine Names was indicating his intention for the work: Just as the biblical Dionysius was a Greek philosopher who converted to Christianity, so the works of Pseudo-Dionysius [End Page 345] are an attempt to reconcile Greek philosophy with the Christian faith.It therefore seems likely, as Augros observes, that Aquinas would still have accorded a great deal of respect to the Divine Names even if he had learned the truth of the author’s identity. The work would not have had the same deuterocanonical authority for him that comes with being written by a direct disciple of St. Paul himself, but “the inherent cogency, coherence, and beauty” of Pseudo-Dionysius’s theology would have been the same. Hence, Pseudo-Dionysius would surely have earned from Aquinas the “docile attitude” appropriate “for a philosopher and theologian of the first order, such as Boethius.”That Aquinas was right to see the author of the Divine Names as a master philosopher and theologian becomes evident when one dives into the text itself, in which Aquinas sees a truly dazzling order, both externally and internally. According to Aquinas, the Divine Names discusses those truths about God of which there are intelligible likenesses in creatures, such as goodness or wisdom, whereas the truths about God of which there are sensible likenesses (for example, “when God is called a lion, or a rock”) are treated by Pseudo-Dionysius in The Symbolic Theology; meanwhile, in the lost or fictional work The Divine Characteristics, Dionysius claims to have treated those truths about God (such as the Trinity) that cannot be known through any likenesses in creatures.Aquinas finds a still more intricate order within the Divine Names itself. Since this work is dedicated to “the divine names by which the processions of God to creatures are manifested,” the plan of the work... (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy: hasty generalization (HG). HG is committed when some aspect of the definition of the proper generalization is violated. In other words, the “hasty” aspect of this fallacy is triggered either when there is a lack of knowledge of the selected sample or when the selected sample is not representative of the whole group, or when both and are true. We see HG committed just about every day in politics (...) and the media. In politics, HGs are used to emphasize the extremes of a particular viewpoint. Concurrently, HG is used quite often by advertisers to promote a particular product. To avoid committing this fallacy, the arguer should take into consideration the amount of justifiable knowledge one might have on a particular subject and whether the selected sample being used in the case is justifiably representative of the group in question. (shrink)

The authors examine the internal and external motivating factors behind the actions of the House Committee on Ethics members by looking at the procedural efficiency of the Committee on Ethics (or lack thereof), as a natural consequence of the committee members' implicit public policy actions.