Our aim in this article is to bring some clarity to the clinical ethics expertise debate by critiquing and replacing the taxonomy offered by the Core Competencies report. The orienting question for our taxonomy is: Can clinical ethicists offer justified, normative recommendations for active patient cases? Views that answer “no” are characterized as a “negative” view of clinical ethics expertise and are further differentiated based on (a) why they think ethicists cannot give justified normative recommendations and (b) what they think (...) ethicists can offer, if they cannot offer recommendations. Views that answer “yes” to the orienting question are characterized as a “positive” view of clinical ethics expertise. Positive views are distinguished according to four additional questions. First (P1), how are those recommendations generated? Second (P2), what is the nature of the recommendations? Third (P3), we ask, how are the recommendations justified? And finally (P4), how are the recommendations communicated? (shrink)

Legal precedent, professional‐society statements, and even many medical ethicists agree that some situations may call for a clinician to engage in an act of lying or nonlying deception of a patient or patient's family member. Still, the moral terrain of clinical deception is largely uncharted, and when it comes to practical guidance for clinicians, many might think that ethicists offer nothing more than the rule never to deceive. This guidance is insufficient to meet the real‐world demands of clinical practice, and (...) this article endeavors to articulate a framework to help clinicians better navigate the ethics of clinical deceit. The framework articulates four morally relevant dimensions of a potential deceptive act that should be examined to better determine the moral justification that might be required: the target of the act, the nature of the information, the nature of the act, and the context of the act. (shrink)

Whether adolescents should be allowed to make their own medical decisions has been a topic of discussion in bioethics for at least two decades now. Are adolescents sufficiently capacitated to make their own medical decisions? Is the mature-minor doctrine, an uncommon legal exception to the rule of parental decision-making authority, something we should expand or eliminate? Bioethicists have dealt with the curious liminality of adolescents—their being neither children nor adults—in a variety of ways. However, recently there has been a trend (...) to rely heavily, and often exclusively, on emerging neuroscientific and psychological data to answer these questions. Using data from magnetic resonance imaging and functional MRI studies on the adolescent brain, authors have argued both that the adolescent brain isn't sufficiently mature to broadly confer capacity on this population and that the adolescent brain is sufficiently mature to assume adolescent capacity. Scholars then accept these data as sufficient for concluding that adolescents should or should not have decision-making authority. Two critical mistakes are being made here. The first is the expectation that neuroscience or psychology is or will be able to answer all our questions about capacity. The second, and more concerning, mistake is the conflation of decision-making capacity with decision-making authority. (shrink)

We argue against Christopher Meyers’s call for clinical ethicists to participate in deceiving patients, surrogate decision-makers, or family members. While we acknowledge that some forms of deception may be ethically appropriate in highly circumscribed situations, the type of case Meyers describes as involving justifiable deception differs in at least two important ways. First, Meyers fails to distinguish acts of deception based on the critical feature of who is being deceived—patient, surrogate, or family member—and the overarching duty to respect the autonomy (...) of relevant decision-makers to make rationally-informed decisions. Second, Meyers’s analysis relies on an assessment of harm, a value-laden concept which health care professionals and ethicists should not presumptively assess without considering how the patient, surrogate, or family might assess specific harms. (shrink)

This article enumerates and critically examines the potential grounds on which we might treat the case of a patient with an advance directive who attempted suicide, differently from one whose injuries were the result of an accident. Grounds for differentiation are distilled into two potential justifications. The first addresses the concern that withholding or withdrawing care from a patient with self-inflicted injuries would be aiding and abetting suicide. The second examines concerns about the patient’s decisionmaking capacity. Ultimately, it is argued (...) that while there might be legitimate reasons to hold the advance directive of a suicidal patient to a different standard of scrutiny, the fact that the patient’s medical state was self-inflicted should not, in and of itself, necessarily invalidate the guidance of the directive. Finally, four practical recommendations are offered for negotiating similar cases. (shrink)

Through an exploration of the experience of severe and profound intellectual disability, this essay will attempt to expose the predominant, yet usually obscured, medical anthropology of the child and examine its effects on pediatric bioethics. I will argue that both modern western society and modern western medicine do, actually, have a robust notion of the child, a notion which can find its roots in three influential thinkers: Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and Jean Piaget. Together, these philosophers offer us a compelling vision: (...) the child is primarily a future rational, autonomous adult. While this tacit understanding has arguably widespread effects on such things as our concept of good parenting, of proper schooling, and so on, I will focus on the effect is has on the treatment of children with severe developmental disabilities. When examined in light of this population, the dominant medical anthropology of the child will be shown to be deficient. Instead, I argue for an expansion—indeed, a full reimagining—of our notions of childhood, not only to re-infuse dignity into the lives of children with SDD, but to better represent the goods of childhood, generally. (shrink)

This article examines the role of context in the development and deployment of standards of medical decision-making. First, it demonstrates that bioethics, and our dominant standards of medical decision-making, developed out of a specific historical and philosophical environment that prioritized technology over the person, standardization over particularity, individuality over relationship and rationality over other forms of knowing. These forces de-contextualize the patient and encourage decision-making that conforms to the unnatural and contrived environment of the hospital. The article then explores several (...) important differences between the home health care and acute care settings. Finally, it argues that the personalized, embedded, relational and idiosyncratic nature of the home is actually a much more accurate reflection of the context in which real people make real decisions. Thus, we should work to “re-contextualize” patients, in order that they might be better equipped to make decisions that harmonize with their real lives. (shrink)

Cases like Mr. Walker’s are distressing, and for good reason. The Supreme Court has given clear moral and legal reasons to distinguish life-saving treatment refusal from suicide, and physicians are...

This case analysis examines the pediatric clinical ethics issues of adolescent autonomy and parental authority in medical decision–making. The case involves a dying adolescent whose parents request that the medical team withhold diagnosis and prognosis information from the patient. The analysis engages two related ethical questions: Should Annie be given information about her medical condition? And, who is the proper decision–maker in Annie’s case? Ultimately, four practical recommendations are offered.

Objectives To characterize the prevalence and content of pediatric triage policies.Methods We surveyed and solicited policies from U.S. hospitals with pediatric intensive care units. Policies were analyzed using qualitative methods and coded by 2 investigators.Results Thirty-four of 120 institutions (28%) responded. Twenty-five (74%) were freestanding children’s hospitals and 9 (26%) were hospitals within a hospital. Nine (26%) had approved policies, 9 (26%) had draft policies, 5 (14%) were developing policies, and 7 (20%) did not have policies. Nineteen (68%) institutions shared (...) their approved or draft policy. Eight (42%) of those policies included neonates. The polices identified 0 to 5 (median 2) factors to prioritize patients. The most common factors were short- (17, 90%) and long- (14, 74%) term predicted mortality. Pediatric scoring systems included Pediatric Logistic Organ Dysfunction-2 (12, 63%) and Score for Neonatal Acute Physiology and Perinatal Extensions-II (4, 21%). Thirteen (68%) policies described a formal algorithm. The most common tiebreakers were random/lottery (10, 71%) and life cycles (9, 64%). The majority (15, 79%) of policies specified the roles of triage team members and 13 (68%) precluded those participating in patient care from making triage decisions.Conclusions While many institutions still do not have pediatric triage policies, there appears to be a trend among those with policies to utilize a formal algorithm that focuses on short- and long-term predicted mortality and that incorporates age-appropriate scoring systems. Additional work is needed to expand access to pediatric-specific policies, to validate scoring systems, and to address health disparities. (shrink)

In this commentary, the author discusses two strengths and two weaknesses of “Better than Best (Interest Standard) in Pediatric Decision-Making,” in which Lainie Friedman Ross critiques the best interest standard and proposes her own model of constrained parental autonomy (CPA) as a preferable replacement for both an intervention principle and a guidance principle in pediatric decision making. The CPA’s strengths are that it detaches from the language and concept of “best” and that it better respects the family as a distinct (...) and intimate decision-making unit. The first weakness of the framework, as an intervention principle, is that because it imports a Rawlsian understanding of basic interests, it neglects certain populations of children (for example, children with intellectual disabilities). The second weakness is that, as a guidance principle, it is unclear what actual guidance the CPA is positioned to offer and how that guidance would be justified. To conclude, this commentary offers suggestions for what should be required of both an intervention principle and a guidance principle in pediatric decision making. (shrink)

This article critically examines, and ultimately rejects, the best interest standard as the predominant, go-to ethical and legal standard of decision making for children. After an introduction to the presumption of parental authority, it characterizes and distinguishes six versions of the best interest standard according to two key dimensions related to the types of interests emphasized. Then the article brings three main criticisms against the best interest standard: (1) that it is ill-defined and inconsistently appealed to and applied, (2) that (...) it is unreasonably demanding and narrow, and (3) that it fails to respect the family. Finally, it argues that despite the best interest standard’s potent rhetorical power, it is irreparably encumbered by too much inconsistency and confusion and should be rejected. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 12-14, January/February 2022.

In “Acquiescence is Not Agreement,” Caruso Brown (2022) offers a comprehensive framework for identifying and empowering marginalized voices in pediatric decision-making. She does so through both a...

From growth attenuation therapy for severely developmentally disabled children to the post-natal management of infants with trisomy 13 and 18, pediatric treatment decisions regularly involve assessments of the probability and severity of a child’s disability. Because these decisions are almost always made by surrogate decision-makers and because these decision-makers must often make decisions based on both prognostic guesses and potentially biased quality of life judgments, they are among the most ethically complex in pediatric care. As the introduction to HEC Forum’s (...) special thematic issue on Childhood and Disability, this article orients the reader to the history of bioethics’ relationship to both pediatric ethics and disability studies and introduces the issue’s five manuscripts. As clinicians, disability scholars, philosophers and clinical ethicists writing on various aspects of pediatric disability, the articles’ authors all invite readers to dig beneath an overly-simplified version of what disability might mean to children and families and instead embrace a posture of genuine humility, recognizing both the limits and harms of traditional medical and bioethical responses to the disabled child. (shrink)

Teaching healthcare ethics at the doctoral level presents a particular challenge. Ethics is often taught to medical students, but rarely is medicine taught to graduate students in health care ethics. In this paper, Medicine for Ethicists [MfE] — a course taught both didactically and experientially — is described. Eight former MfE students were independently interviewed in a semi-structured, open-ended format regarding their experience in the experiential component of the course. Themes included concrete elements about the course, elements related to the (...) broader PhD student learning experience, and themes related to the students’ past and future career experiences. Findings are related to the educational philosophy of John Dewey and David Kolb’s experiential learning theory. Broader implications of this work are explored. (shrink)

In their article, Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland defend the moral permissibility of cDCD, suggesting that much of the controversy around this donation practice has been the result of a misinterpretatio...

In this commentary, I explore the usefulness of the framework Abram Brummett and Erica K. Salter present in their article “Mapping the Moral Terrain of Clinical Deception.” Deception cases are divisive because they nearly always evoke the metadilemma of clinical ethics: a clash between duties (in these cases, truth telling) and consequences (whatever good might come of the lie). Here, I describe a patient case in which the clinical team considered deceiving a patient about his pain‐medicine dosage in (...) exchange for his allowing the clinicians to properly care for his percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube stoma, so as to prevent infection. Applying the framework that Brummett and Salter have developed helped our clinical team parse the numerous complex issues involved. The nuances of our case also illustrated additional ways in which the ethics of deception needs to be further refined. (shrink)

In Abram Brummett and Erica K. Salter's excellent paper, “Mapping the Moral Terrain of Clinical Deception,” they rightly note that it is sometimes ethically appropriate for health care professionals to deceive patients and families. However, they also note that because doing so violates a prima facie duty of honesty, the ethical burden of proof falls upon the deceiver. Hence, they also provide a sophisticated framework for determining whether any given case is warranted. I applaud their overall approach but (...) also critique some of their claims, in particular, their conclusion that lies of commission require greater justification than those of omission and their conflation of the principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence. I also urge them to give greater attention to how power asymmetries should be accounted for and to the impact such deceptive choices might have on the clinician's character. (shrink)

Climate change adaptation is largely a local matter, and adaptation planning can benefit from local climate change projections. Such projections are typically generated by accepting climate model outputs in a relatively uncritical way. We argue, based on the IPCC’s treatment of model outputs from the CMIP5 ensemble, that this approach is unwarranted and that subjective expert judgment should play a central role in the provision of local climate change projections intended to support decision-making.

What are the affordances of artifacts? One view is that the affordances of artifacts, just as the affordances of natural objects, pertain to possible ways in which they can be manipulated. Another view maintains that, given that artifacts are sociocultural objects, their affordances pertain primarily to their culturally-derived function. Whereas some have tried to provide a unifying notion of affordance to capture both aspects, here I argue that they should be kept separate. In this paper, I introduce a distinction between (...) standard affordances, which concern the function of artifacts, and ad-hoc affordances, which refer to how artifacts are manipulated. I then argue for the neuropsychological plausibility of such a distinction, linking it to the dissociation between function knowledge and manipulation knowledge. Finally, I defend the equal status of these forms of knowledge and, hence, of standard and ad-hoc affordances, and I show that this has some implications for the debate on the role of motor processes in the conceptual knowledge of artifacts. (shrink)

Time has been considered a crucial factor in distinguishing between two levels of self-awareness: the “core,” or “minimal self,” and the “extended,” or “narrative self.” Herein, I focus on this last concept of the self and, in particular, on the relationship between the narrative self and language. In opposition to the claim that the narrative self is a linguistic construction, my idea is that it is created by the functioning of mental time travel, that is, the faculty of human beings (...) to project themselves mentally backwards in time to relive, or forward to anticipate, events. Moreover, I propose that narrative language itself should be considered a product of a core brain network that includes mechanisms, such as mental time travel, mindreading, and visuo-spatial systems. (shrink)

What is, what was the human? This book argues that the making of the human as it is now understood implies a renogotiation of the relationship between the self and the world. The development of Renaissance technologies of difference such as mapping, colonialism and anatomy paradoxically also illuminated the similarities between human and non-human. This collection considers the borders between humans and their imagined others: animals, women, native subjects, machines. It examines border creatures (hermaphrodites, wildmen, and cyborgs) and border practices (...) (science, surveying, and pornography). (shrink)

Contemporary semantic theories can be classified along two dimensions: (i) the way and time-course in which contextual factors influence sentence truth-conditions; and (ii) whether and to what extent comprehension involves sensory, motor and emotional processes. In order to explore this theoretical space, our ERP study investigates the time-course of the interaction between the lexically specified telic component of a noun (the function of the object to which the noun refers to, e.g., a funnel is generally used to pour liquids into (...) containers) and an ad-hoc affordance contextually induced by the situation described in the discourse. We found that, if preceded by a neutral discourse context, a verb incongruent with the noun’s telic component as in “She uses the funnel to hang her coat” elicited an enhanced N400 compared to a congruent verb as in “She uses the funnel to pour water into a container”. However, if the situation introduced in the preceding discourse induced a new function for the object as an ad-hoc affordance (e.g., the funnel is glued to the wall and the agent wants to hang the coat), we observed a crossing-over regarding the direction of the N400 effect: comparing the ad-hoc affordance-inducing context with the neutral context, the N400 for the incongruent verb was significantly reduced, whereas the N400 for the congruent verb was significantly enhanced. We explain these results as a consequence of the incorporation of the contextually triggered ad-hoc affordance into the meaning of the noun. Combining these results with an analysis of semantic similarity values between test sentences and contexts, we argue that one possibility is that the incorporation of an ad-hoc affordance may be explained on the basis of the mental simulation of concurrent motor information. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine has beendefined as the conscientious and judicious useof current best evidence in making clinicaldecisions. This paper will attempt to explicatethe terms ``conscientious'''' and ``judicious''''within the evidence-based medicine definition.It will be argued that ``conscientious'''' and``judicious'''' represent virtue terms derived fromvirtue ethics and virtue epistemology. Theidentification of explicit virtue components inthe definition and therefore conception ofevidence-based medicine presents an importantstarting point in the connection between virtuetheories and medicine itself. In addition, aunification of virtue theories andevidence-based medicine will illustrate theneed for (...) future research in order to combinethe fields of virtue-based approaches andclinical practice. (shrink)

Humeans and anti-Humeans agree that laws of nature should explain scientifically particular matters of fact. One objection to Humean accounts of laws contends that Humean laws cannot explain particular matters of fact because their explanations are harmfully circular. This article distinguishes between metaphysical and semantic characterizations of the circularity and argues for a new semantic version of the circularity objection. The new formulation suggests that Humean explanations are harmfully circular because the content of the sentences being explained is part of (...) the content of the sentences doing the explaining. I describe the nature of partial content and demonstrate how this account of partial content renders Humean explanations ineffective while sparing anti-Humean explanations from the same fate. 1Introduction2Standard Formulations of the Circularity Charge3Humean Responses4Semantic Characterizations of the Circularity Worry 4.1Hempel and Oppenheim’s semantic circularity concern4.2A new version of the semantic circularity charge4.3Partial content as a guide to circularity5Humean Responses to the Semantic Circularity Charge 5.1Smuggling in metaphysics through the back door?5.2Do anti-Humean laws fare any better?5.3The over-generalization concern6ConclusionAppendix. (shrink)

Identity and distinctness facts are ones like “The Eiffel Tower is identical to the Eiffel Tower,” and “The Eiffel Tower is distinct from the Louvre.” This paper concerns one question in the metaphysics of identity: Are identity and distinctness facts metaphysically fundamental or are they nonfundamental? I provide an overview of answers to this question.

As COVID-19 drags on and new vaccines promise widespread immunity, the world's attention has turned to predicting how the present pandemic will end. How do societies know when an epidemic is over and normal life can resume? What criteria and markers indicate such an end? Who has the insight, authority, and credibility to decipher these signs? Detailed research on past epidemics has demonstrated that they do not end suddenly; indeed, only rarely do the diseases in question actually end. This article (...) examines the ways in which scholars have identified and described the end stages of previous epidemics, pointing out that significantly less attention has been paid to these periods than to origins and climaxes. Analysis of the ends of epidemics illustrates that epidemics are as much social, political, and economic events as they are biological; the “end,” therefore, is as much a process of social and political negotiation as it is biomedical. Equally important, epidemics end at different times for different groups, both within one society and across regions. Multidisciplinary research into how epidemics end reveals how the end of an epidemic shifts according to perspective, whether temporal, geographic, or methodological. A multidisciplinary analysis of how epidemics end suggests that epidemics should therefore be framed not as linear narratives—from outbreak to intervention to termination—but within cycles of disease and with a multiplicity of endings. (shrink)

Benner, Erica. Machiavelli’s Ethics. Princeton, 2009. 527p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780691141763, $75.00; ISBN 9780691141770 pbk, $35.00.

Reviewed in CHOICE, April 2010

This major new study of Machiavelli’s moral and political philosophy by Benner (Yale) argues that most readings of Machiavelli suffer from a failure to appreciate his debt to Greek sources, particularly the Socratic tradition of moral and political philosophy. Benner argues that when read in the light of his Greek sources, Machiavelli appears as much less the immoralist or (...) sophist he often is taken for and instead as a serious moral philosopher very much concerned with the republican ideals of justice and the rule of law. The author does not ignore Machiavelli’s more infamous dicta, but argues that a careful reading shows that they are expressions of views he ultimately rejects. Particularly noteworthy here is her careful attention to Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories.
Benner’s reading of Machiavelli is far too complex and subtle for such a brief summary. Her research is meticulous and her arguments finely honed. This important contribution to both Machiavelli studies and the history of political philosophy will be indispensable for scholars.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and faculty/researchers. — B. T. Harding

Endorsements:

"Machiavelli's Ethics is a superb scholarly book. Erica Benner does truly impressive work in analyzing Machiavelli's views on the most fundamental ethical issues--including necessity and virtue, justice and injustice, and ends and means. She shows, with very solid evidence, that Machiavelli did in fact worry a lot about justice and that he put it at the core of his republican theory."--Maurizio Viroli, author of Niccolò's Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli

"Machiavelli's Ethics is excellent--learned, subtle, highly original, and a constant pleasure to read. And, since it is really a study of Machiavelli's thought in its entirety, it is also the first book of its kind. Its originality lies in taking seriously the claim by some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers--notably Bacon, Spinoza, and Alberico Gentili--that Machiavelli was essentially a moral and political philosopher. Erica Benner does a brilliant job of resurrecting this neglected Machiavelli."--Giulia Sissa, University of California, Los Angeles


About the book, from the publisher:
Machiavelli's Ethics challenges the most entrenched understandings of Machiavelli, arguing that he was a moral and political philosopher who consistently favored the rule of law over that of men, that he had a coherent theory of justice, and that he did not defend the "Machiavellian" maxim that the ends justify the means. By carefully reconstructing the principled foundations of his political theory, Erica Benner gives the most complete account yet of Machiavelli's thought. She argues that his difficult and puzzling style of writing owes far more to ancient Greek sources than is usually recognized, as does his chief aim: to teach readers not how to produce deceptive political appearances and rhetoric, but how to see through them. Drawing on a close reading of Greek authors--including Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, and Plutarch--Benner identifies a powerful and neglected key to understanding Machiavelli.

This important new interpretation is based on the most comprehensive study of Machiavelli's writings to date, including a detailed examination of all of his major works: The Prince, The Discourses, The Art of War, and Florentine Histories. It helps explain why readers such as Bacon and Rousseau could see Machiavelli as a fellow moral philosopher, and how they could view The Prince as an ethical and republican text. By identifying a rigorous structure of principles behind Machiavelli's historical examples, the book should also open up fresh debates about his relationship to later philosophers, including Rousseau, Hobbes, and Kant.
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This paper offers a metaphysical explanation of the identity and distinctness of concrete objects. It is tempting to try to distinguish concrete objects on the basis of their possessing different qualitative features, where qualitative features are ones that do not involve identity. Yet, this criterion for object identity faces counterexamples: distinct objects can share all of their qualitative features. This paper suggests that in order to distinguish concrete objects we need to look not only at which properties and relations objects (...) instantiate but also how they instantiate these properties and relations. I propose that objects are identical when they stand in certain qualitative relations in virtue of their existence. And concrete objects are distinct when they do not stand in the same kinds of relations to one another in virtue of their existence. (shrink)

I provide a new account of what it is for the laws of nature to govern the evolution of events. I locate the source of governance in the content of law propositions. As such, I do not appeal to primitive notions of ground, essence, or production to characterize governance. After introducing the account, I use it to outline previously unrecognized varieties of governance. I also specify that laws must govern to have two theoretical virtues: explanatory power as well as a (...) theoretical virtue I call expansiveness. A theory is expansive, roughly, when it can do more with less. (shrink)

Many scholars of early China agree that the fourth century bce witnessed a surge in intellectual interest in concepts that have been dubbed the self, “subjectivity,” the private realm, and the body. As such a sphere came into greater focus in intellectual circles, so did a new discourse that evaluated what it meant to benefit or deprive the self and its related parts. The famous statement purportedly by Yang Zhu 楊朱 (or Yangzi 楊子) that claims he was not willing to (...) pluck out a single hair in order to benefit the world reminds us of such a discourse.2 Around the same time, there also emerged discussions that polarized various ideas of self and the private sphere (si 私), on the one hand, ver- sus the state and the public sphere (gong 公), on the other, especially in circles that concerned themselves with public policy and statecraft, but also more generally. These discussions formed a forceful counterpoint to the discourses involving human subjectivity and the body. Indeed, their open dislike of the influence of private, individual, and personal realms in politics strongly suggests that the statecraft writers were re- acting to and in dialog with those intellectuals who engaged discussion of subjectivity, the self, and its agencies. (shrink)

A key distinction in ethics is between members and nonmembers of the moral community. Over time, our notion of this community has expanded as we have moved from a rationality criterion to a sentience criterion for membership. I argue that a sentience criterion is insufficient to accommodate all members of the moral community; the true underlying criterion can be understood in terms of whether a being has interests. This may be extended to conscious, self-aware machines, as well as to any (...) autonomous intelligent machines. Such machines exhibit an ability to formulate desires for the course of their own existence; this gives them basic moral standing. While not all machines display autonomy, those which do must be treated as moral patients; to ignore their claims to moral recognition is to repeat past errors. I thus urge moral generosity with respect to the ethical claims of intelligent machines. (shrink)

Childress and colleagues conclude that arguments from distributive justice do not justify discontinuing ECMO over a capacitated patient’s objections (Childress et al. 2023). However, this conclusio...

Models of discourse and narration elaborated within the classical compositional framework have been characterized as bottom-up models, according to which discourse analysis proceeds incrementally, from phrase and sentence local meaning to discourse global meaning. In this paper we will argue against these models. Assuming as a case study the issue of discourse coherence, we suggest that the assessment of coherence is a top-down process, in which the construction of a situational interpretation at the global meaning level guides local meaning analysis. (...) In support of our hypothesis, we explore the role of executive functions (brain functions involved in planning and organization of goal-oriented behaviors) in coherence’s establishment, discussing the results of several studies on narrative abilities of patients with brain injuries. We suggest that, compared to other models of discourse processing focused on comprehension, our model is a viable candidate for an integrated account of discourse comprehension and production. (shrink)

I explore proposals for stating identity criteria in terms of ground. I also address considerations for and against taking identity and distinctness facts to be ungrounded.

Identity criteria are powerful tools for the metaphysician. They tell us when items are identical or distinct. Some varieties of identity criteria also try to explain in virtue of what items are identical or distinct. This Element has two objectives: to discuss formulations of identity criteria and to take a closer look at one notorious criterion of object identity, Leibniz's Law. The first section concerns the form of identity criteria. The second section concerns the better-regarded half of Leibniz's Law, the (...) indiscernibility of identicals. The third section turns to the more controversial half of Leibniz's Law, the identity of indiscernibles. The author considers alternatives to Leibniz's Law as well as the possibility that there are no adequate identity criteria to be found. (shrink)

Although personal attributes have gained recognition as an important area of effective corporate governance, scholarship has largely overlooked the value and implications of individual virtue in governance practice. We explore how authenticity—a personal and morally significant virtue—affects the primary monitoring and strategy functions of the board of directors as well as core processes concerning director selection, cultivation, and enactment by the board. While the predominant focus in corporate governance research has been on structural factors that influence firm financial outcomes, this (...) paper shifts attention to the role of authenticity and its relationship to individual board member qualities and collective board activities. We explore how authenticity has the potential to influence board dynamics and decision making and to enhance transparency and accountability. (shrink)

Mapping figures in cinema as an experiential process inscribed within historically specific aesthetic regimes. The three long essays in this book explore mapping as a process of violent inscription on colonial landscapes (Malcomess); a practice of c.

I defend the following argument in this paper. Premise 1: Laws of nature are intrinsic to the universe. Premise 2: Humeanism maintains that laws of nature are extrinsic to the universe. Conclusion: Humeanism is false. This argument is inspired by John Hawthorne’s (2004) argument in “Why Humeans are out of their Minds”. My argument differs from his; Hawthorne focuses on Humean views of causation and how they interact with judgments about consciousness. He thinks Humeans are forced to treat certain mental (...) properties (insofar as they involve causal features) as extrinsic to conscious minds. I do not discuss causation or consciousness here. I focus on Humean accounts of laws. I argue that Humean laws are extrinsic to the entire universe. As such, Humeans are not just out of their minds; they are out of this world. I aim to show that premises 1 and 2 are well-supported and that denying either of them comes at a cost. Nevertheless, Humeans may prefer to reject 1 or 2 rather than give up Humeanism. Even if the Humean takes one of these routes, the argument above has philosophical import: it shows that Humeanism involves surprising commitments. (shrink)