In this article we discuss generosity, a virtue that has received little attention in relation to nursing practice. We make a distinction between material generosity and generosity of spirit. The moral imagination is central to our analysis of generosity of spirit. We discuss data taken from a team meeting and identify the components of generosity, for example, the role of the moral imagination in interrupting value judgements, protecting the identity of the chronically ill patient through use of the psychosocial format, (...) and displaying empathetic maturity. The talk of the team enables us to understand and make visible the link between generosity, moral imagination and identity construction. The topic of generosity, although contextualized in a UK setting, has relevance to other cultural contexts. (shrink)

Although disgust is recognized as a common and prominent emotion in healthcare, little is known about how healthcare professionals understand, experience and conceptualize disgust. The aim of the study was to gain an in‐depth understanding of how nursing and midwifery students experience, understand and cope with disgust in their clinical work. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Six participants (all women: two nursing students, four midwifery students) from a university in the South of England were (...) interviewed. Four superordinate themes with eight subthemes were identified. Overall, findings suggest that participants experience both moral and physical disgust; however, they find it difficult to talk about and use other terms to describe their experience. Findings are discussed through the lens of social identity theory, to understand the relevance of professional identity and how this might further maintain the disgust taboo. The strategies participants have developed in order to cope with disgust are explored and understood within the current healthcare climate. Future research should focus on ways of addressing the experience of disgust by healthcare professionals in order to improve the quality of care provided, especially in the climate of the COVID‐19 crisis. (shrink)

Generic statements express generalizations about categories. Current theories suggest that people should be especially inclined to accept generics that involve threatening information. However, previous tests of this claim have focused on generics about non-human categories, which raises the question of whether this effect applies as readily to human categories. In Experiment 1, adults were more likely to accept generics involving a threatening property for artifacts, but this negativity bias did not also apply to human categories. Experiment 2 examined an alternative (...) hypothesis for this result, and Experiments 3 and 4 served as conceptual replications of the first experiment. Experiment 5 found that even preschoolers apply generics differently for humans and artifacts. Finally, Experiment 6 showed that these effects reflect differences between human and non-human categories more generally, as adults showed a negativity bias for categories of non-human animals, but not for categories of humans. These findings suggest the presence of important, early-emerging domain differences in people's judgments about generics. (shrink)

Although traditional economic models posit that money is fungible, psychological research abounds with examples that deviate from this assumption. Across eight experiments, we provide evidence that people construe physical currency as carrying traces of its moral history. In Experiments 1 and 2, people report being less likely to want money with negative moral history. Experiments 3–5 provide evidence against an alternative account that people's judgments merely reflect beliefs about the consequences of accepting stolen money rather than moral sensitivity. Experiment 6 (...) examines whether an aversion to stolen money may reflect contamination concerns, and Experiment 7 indicates that people report they would donate stolen money, thereby counteracting its negative history with a positive act. Finally, Experiment 8 demonstrates that, even in their recall of actual events, people report a reduced tendency to accept tainted money. Altogether, these findings suggest a robust tendency to evaluate money based on its moral history, even though it is designed to participate in exchanges that effectively erase its origins. (shrink)

Who gets to decide what it means to live a healthy lifestyle, and how important a healthy lifestyle is to a good life? As more governments make preventing obesity and diet-related illness a priority, it's become more important to consider the ethics and acceptability of their efforts. When it comes to laws and policies that promote healthy eating--such as special taxes on sugary drinks and the banning of food deemed unhealthy--critics argue that these policies are paternalistic, and that they limit (...) individual autonomy over food choices. In Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach, Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti show that both paternalistic justifications for healthy eating efforts and anti-paternalistic arguments against them can be grounded in perfectionist views that overly prioritize some values over others. The authors therefore propose a more inclusive, public reason approach to healthy eating policy that will be appealing to those who take pluralism and cultural diversity seriously, by providing a framework through which different kinds of values, including but not limited to autonomy and health, can be factored into the public justification for healthy eating efforts. Additionally, the book adopts a 'farm to fork' approach to the ethics of healthy eating efforts: it engages with theories and debates in political philosophy, considers the implications of different theoretical positions for healthy eating efforts, and then develops a concrete tool for assessing policies that will be of interest to both scholars and policymakers. As well as offering a novel normative analysis of healthy eating policy, the authors offer a new theoretical framework that will be applicable to a wide range of public policy scenarios. (shrink)

Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory.

_Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory._.

There are countless circumstances under which random individuals COULD act together to prevent something morally bad from happening or to remedy a morally bad situation. But when OUGHT individuals to act together in order to bring about a morally important outcome? Building on Philip Pettit’s and David Schweikard’s account of joint action, I will put forward the notion of joint duties: duties to perform an action together that individuals in so-called random or unstructured groups can jointly hold. I will show (...) how this account of joint duties is preferable to one which defends individual duties to cooperate. I then discuss the limits of joint duties and the ways in which one can fail to comply with them. It will become apparent that the circumstances under which individuals in random collectives acquire such joint duties are rare. (shrink)

In this article, I will consider whether, and in what way, doxastic states can harm. I’ll first consider whether, and in what way, a person’s doxastic state can harm her, before turning to the question of whether, and in what way, it can harm someone else.

Why equality cannot be conditional on a shared human “nature” but has to be for all For centuries, ringing declarations about all men being created equal appealed to a shared human nature as the reason to consider ourselves equals. But appeals to natural equality invited gradations of natural difference, and the ambiguity at the heart of “nature” enabled generations to write of people as equal by nature while barely noticing the exclusion of those marked as inferior by their gender, race, (...) or class. Despite what we commonly tell ourselves, these exclusions and gradations continue today. In Unconditional Equals, political philosopher Anne Phillips challenges attempts to justify equality by reference to a shared human nature, arguing that justification turns into conditions and ends up as exclusion. Rejecting the logic of justification, she calls instead for a genuinely unconditional equality. Drawing on political, feminist, and postcolonial theory, Unconditional Equals argues that we should understand equality not as something grounded in shared characteristics but as something people enact when they refuse to be considered inferiors. At a time when the supposedly shared belief in human equality is so patently not shared, the book makes a powerful case for seeing equality as a commitment we make to ourselves and others, and a claim we make on others when they deny us our status as equals. (shrink)

People hold wildly opposing and very strong views on the question whether mental disorders are brain disorders, and the disagreement is primarily a conceptual one, not one about whether there are,...

Analytic metaphysics has recently discovered biology as a means of grounding metaphysical theories. This has resulted in long-standing metaphysical puzzles, such as the problems of personal identity and material constitution, being increasingly addressed by appeal to a biological understanding of identity. This development within metaphysics is in significant tension with the growing tendency amongst philosophers of biology to regard biological identity as a deep puzzle in its own right, especially following recent advances in our understanding of symbiosis, the evolution of (...) multi-cellular organisms and the inherently dynamical character of living systems. Moreover, and building on these biological insights, the broadly substance ontological framework of metaphysical theories of biological identity appears problematic to a growing number of philosophers of biology who invoke process ontology instead. This volume addresses this tension, exploring to what extent it can be dissolved. For this purpose, the volume presents the first selection of essays exclusively focused on biological identity and written by experts in metaphysics, the philosophy of biology and biology. The resulting cross-disciplinary dialogue paves the way for a convincing account of biological identity that is both metaphysically constructive and scientifically informed, and will be of interest to metaphysicians, philosophers of biology and theoretical biologists. (shrink)

Money can take many forms—a coin or a bill, a payment for an automobile or a prize for an award, a piece from the 1989 series or the 2019 series, and so on—but despite this, money is designed to represent an amount and only that. Thus, a dollar is a dollar, in the sense that money is fungible. But when adults ordinarily think about money, they think about it in terms of its source, and in particular, its moral source (e.g., (...) dirty money). Here we investigate the development of the belief that money carries traces of its moral history. We study children ages 5–6 and 8–9, who are sensitive to both object history and morality, and thus possess the component pieces needed to think that a dollar may not be like any other. Across three principal studies (and three additional studies in Appendix S1; N = 327; 219 five‐ and six‐year‐olds; 108 eight‐ and nine‐year‐olds), we find that children are less likely to want money with negative moral history, a pattern that was stronger and more consistent among 8‐ and 9‐year‐olds than 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds. These findings highlight pressing directions for future research that could help shed light on the mechanisms that contribute to the belief that money carries traces of its moral history. (shrink)

The target article proposes that people perceive social robots as depictions rather than as genuine social agents. We suggest that people might instead view social robots as social agents, albeit agents with more restricted capacities and moral rights than humans. We discuss why social robots, unlike other kinds of depictions, present a special challenge for testing the depiction hypothesis.

COVID-19 vaccine refusal seems like a paradigm case of irrationality. Vaccines are supposed to be the best way to get us out of the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet many people believe that they should not be vaccinated even though they are dissatisfied with the current situation. In this paper, we analyze COVID-19 vaccine refusal with the tools of contemporary philosophical theories of responsibility and rationality. The main outcome of this analysis is that many vaccine-refusers are responsible for the belief that (...) they should not be vaccinated and epistemically rational in holding it. This is an important result because it provides insights into the legitimacy of certain public health policies. In particular, this result shows that a public health policy that would abandon the project of convincing certain vaccine-refusers with reasons – e.g., by simply making vaccination compulsory – is prima facie illegitimate. (shrink)

Prison work creates ethical challenges for which a training program was initiated for Dutch prison staff to foster their Moral Craftsmanship (MCS). The concept of MCS is not yet defined and operationalized in literature. This explorative study aims to 1) define MCS, 2) identify conceptual elements of MCS, and 3) develop a measurement tool for MCS. A document and literature study provided input for the definition and selection of conceptual elements related within DCIA policy documents, identifying three conceptual levels of (...) MCS: individual (cognition, attitude, and actions), team, and leadership. This first MCSQ consists of seventy-one items distributed across the domains: values and norms, judgment and reasoning, consultation, implementation, looking back, interactions, and leadership. We tested its usability via ‘think-aloud interviews.’ Validation of the current version of the MCS-Questionnaire and consensus among experts about what to include or exclude in the concept of MCS are needed for further development. (shrink)

This Element has two aims. The first is to discuss arguments philosophers have made about the difference God's existence might make to questions of general interest in metaethics. The second is to argue that it is a mistake to think we can get very far in answering these questions by assuming a thin conception of God, and to suggest that exploring the implications of thick theisms for metaethics would be more fruitful.

Our moral obligations can sometimes be collective in nature: They can jointly attach to two or more agents in that neither agent has that obligation on their own, but they – in some sense – share it or have it in common. In order for two or more agents to jointly hold an obligation to address some joint necessity problem they must have joint ability to address that problem. Joint ability is highly context-dependent and particularly sensitive to shared (or even (...) common) beliefs. As such, joint ability can be deliberately generated in a given collection of agents by providing information related to collective goals and contributory actions. As moral agents, we regularly face problems wherein the outcome of our actions depends on how others choose. There are two ways of deliberating about our own choices in such cases. We can either think of our choices as best responses to others’ choices (I-mode reasoning). Or we can think of our own choices as contributions to the collectively best option (even when we do not know how others are (likely) to choose) (we-mode reasoning). In deliberating about the right (individual) course of action vis-à-vis collective action problems, agents regularly we-frame the case at hand, that is, they include options in their deliberation that are only collectively available, and they we-reason with regard to their individual contributory actions. It is a necessary condition for collective obligations that potential collaborators facing a joint necessity case have grounds to privilege we-reasoning over reasoning in I-mode. (shrink)

Agnes Arber's international reputation is due in part to her exceptional ability to interpret the German tradition of scholarship for the English-speaking world. The Mind and the Eye is an erudite book, revealing its author's familiarity with philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas to Kant and Hegel; but it is not dull, because the quiet enthusiasm of the author shines through. In this book she turns from the work of a specialist in one science to those wider questions (...) which any scientist must ask at intervals. What, in short, is the relationship between the eye that sees and the mind that weighs and pronounces? An important feature of this Cambridge Science Classics reissue is the introduction provided by Professor P. R. Bell, who as a Cambridge botany student at the time that Agnes Arber was writing The Natural Philosopby of Plant Form, is uniquely able to set The Mind and the Eye in the context of contemporary biological research. (shrink)

The most remarkable about the continuity in Chomsky's thought about language is that it takes place against a theoretical landscape in constant flux, the landscape of generative grammar. Chomsky introduced a central distinction between E‐languages and I‐language, the internalized knowledge of language that each speaker has and which is the result of the interaction between his or her language faculty and the (limited) experience that he or she had of his or her mother tongue during language acquisition. The Faculty of (...) Language narrowly understood corresponds to “the abstract linguistic computational system alone, independent of the other systems with which it interacts”. This chapter aims to follow the trail of Chomsky's strongly reiterated claim throughout the years that language is not primarily a tool for communication, but rather, a tool for thought. (shrink)

Research on emotion and psychopathology has blossomed due in part to the translation of affective science theory and methods to the study of diverse disorders. This translational approach has helped the field to hone in more precisely on the nature of emotion deficits to identify antecedent causes and maintaining processes, and to develop promising new interventions. The future of emotion research in psychopathology will benefit from three inter-related areas, including an emphasis on emotion difficulties that cut across traditional diagnostic boundaries (...) (i.e., a transdiagnostic approach), the explicit linking of emotion and cognition in behavioral and neuroimaging studies in psychopathology, and continued translation of the latest conceptualizations of emotion to the study of psychopathology. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to commentaries on my book “Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders?”. The topics I discuss are: accounts of function and dysfunction, constraints on the relationship between processes at the level of the brain and the mind, externalism in psychiatry, implications for moral responsibility and the question whether my account is a form of conceptual engineering. I defend my account and argue that the key criterion for whether mental disorders are brain disorders is whether we can map (...) dysfunctional psychological processes onto specific differences in brain function. I also acknowledge that my commentators have identified points where my account needs further development. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adornos posthum veröffentlichte Ästhetische Theorie exponiert die Krise der Kunst im Zeitalter ihrer gesellschaftlichen Integration. Gesättigt mit der Erfahrung konkreter Kunstwerke, hinterfragt sie das tradierte Kategoriensystem philosophischer Ästhetik. Der vorliegende Band unternimmt erstmals eine kommentierende Auslegung, um den dichten Text aufzuschließen und ein Weiterdenken von Adornos kritischer Ästhetik anzuregen.

Some feminist theorists have argued that emphasizing women's self-defense mistakenly emphasizes women's behavior and choices rather than male aggression as a cause of sexual violence. I argue here that such critiques of self-defense are misguided, and do not sufficiently take into account the ways in which feminist self-defense courses can constitute embodied transformations of the meanings of femininity and rape. While certainly not sufficient to counter a rape culture by themselves, self-defense courses should remain a crucial element in feminist anti-rape (...) activism. (shrink)

The traditional concept of prime matter – a purely potential substratum that persists through substantial change and serves to constitute the generated substance – has played a dwindling part in Aristotelian scholarship over the centuries. In medieval interpretations of Aristotle, prime matter was thought to play these two roles in all substantial changes, not only in changes at the level of the four elements. In more recent centuries, traditional prime matter was relegated only to the context of substantial changes between (...) the four elements. And in the last few decades of Aristotelian scholarship, it has become common either to downplay or even to eliminate prime matter’s role in elemental changes too. I will support the traditional concept of prime matter by showing that it aligns Aristotle’s view of elemental change with one of the central constraints on matter imposed in his Physics to a degree that cannot be achieved on the non-traditional interpretations: the need for matter to be in potentiality in a way that avoids the two problematic extremes of mere persistence, on the one hand, and destruction, on the other. This point will be supported by Aristotle’s rejection of both monism and pluralism in On Generation and Corruption. Second, I will argue that Aristotle calls for precisely the same kind of potentiality in a very different context: his critique of Anaxagoras’s view of matter in the Generation of Animals. Here the very same problematic extremes of mere persistence and destruction that plague the alternate views to traditional prime matter also plague the dominant views on the matter for animal generation. Especially since Aristotle takes living things to be paradigmatic substances, these comparisons suggest that the apparent idiosyncrasies of elemental transformation which have motivated interpreters to depart from traditional prime matter may not be so idiosyncratic after all. And if that is so, it may be that the problem lies not so much with traditional prime matter as with our assumptions about how persistence and constitution work in substantial change according to Aristotle. In the end, this line of argument opens the door to three new potential interpretations of the matter for substantial generation in Aristotle, interpretations which align with his concept of potentiality and – to varying degrees – with traditional prime matter as well. (shrink)

Human persons exist longer than a single moment in time; they persist through time. However, so far it has not been possible to make this natural and widespread assumption metaphysically comprehensible. The philosophical debate on personal identity is rather stuck in a dilemma: reductionist theories explain personal identity away, while non-reductionist theories fail to give any informative account at all. This chapter argues that this dilemma emerges from an underlying commitment, shared by both sides of in the debate, to an (...) ontology which that gives the priority to static unchanging things. The claim defended here is that the dilemma of personal identity can be overcome if we acknowledge the biological nature of human persons and switch to a process- ontological framework that takes process and change to be ontologically primary. Human persons are biological higher-order processes, rather than things, and their identity conditions can be scientifically investigated. (shrink)

In the contemporary virtue ethics literature, eudaimonia is discussed far more often than it is defined or fully articulated. It was introduced into the contemporary virtue ethics literature by philosophers who work in ancient philosophy, and who are familiar with the work of ancient eudaimonists (where the ancient eudaimonists are typically thought to include Plato, the Stoics, and (especially) Aristotle). Yet, predictably, among philosophers who study ancient philosophy, there is not consensus, but rather lively debate, about what eudaimonia is: how (...) the various ancient eudaimonists understood it, the role it played in their theories, and so on.2 In this chapter, I will discuss the role of eudaimonia in contemporary virtue ethics, and especially contemporary eudaimonist virtue ethics. (shrink)

s This article focuses on the recent production of sleep as a matter of concern in American society. In it, I draw primarily on fieldwork with sleep researchers and clinicians to understand the means by which ideas about sleep are produced and disseminated, and discuss the rise of sleep medicine since the late 1970s and the ways sleep disabilities have been constructed and mobilized in contemporary allopathic research and practice. The article provides a description of modern sleep medicine practices, and (...) analyses clinical encounters between researchers, clinicians and patients, particularly the ways patient cases are produced and interpreted. I follow these ethnographic observations with textual analysis of the National Sleep Foundation's campaigns to promote sleep awareness, and offer the theoretical concepts of medical abstraction and insistence as a means to understand the production of sleep as a matter of concern, and how it might be made to adhere in particular patients' lives and the practices of clinicians. (shrink)

Analytic metaphysics has recently discovered biology as a means of grounding metaphysical theories. This has resulted in long-standing metaphysical puzzles, such as the problems of personal identity and material constitution, being increasingly addressed by appeal to a biological understanding of identity. This development within metaphysics is in significant tension with the growing tendency amongst philosophers of biology to regard biological identity as a deep puzzle in its own right, especially following recent advances in our understanding of symbiosis, the evolution of (...) multi-cellular organisms and the inherently dynamical character of living systems. Moreover, and building on these biological insights, the broadly substance ontological framework of metaphysical theories of biological identity appears problematic to a growing number of philosophers of biology who invoke process ontology instead. This volume addresses this tension, exploring to what extent it can be dissolved. For this purpose, the volume presents the first selection of essays exclusively focused on biological identity and written by experts in metaphysics, the philosophy of biology and biology. The resulting cross-disciplinary dialogue paves the way for a convincing account of biological identity that is both metaphysically constructive and scientifically informed, and will be of interest to metaphysicians, philosophers of biology and theoretical biologists. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Difference Between Appropriate and Inappropriate Boundary Violations Why Does Prospective Action Work? Rules on Prospective Boundary Violation Conclusions.

Research has demonstrated that how teachers spend their time is an important educational issue. In this paper it is argued that there is a good case for examining teachers’ personal and professional time simultaneously in order to enhance the quality of teaching, learning and teachers’ lives.

This chapter contains sections titled: Education as Gardening: An Image of Natural Growth Do We All Possess Fertile Souls? The Gardener: What is His Contribution to the Growth of the Seeds? Gardening: Labor and Reward Plato as Gardener Dialogue Between Text and Reader: Cultivating the Seeds Teaching Us to Become Gardeners of Our Souls Plato's Literary Garden: A Corpus of Works Gardeners of Souls Notes.

Abstract This article raises a worry concerning Ernest Sosa's way of solving the problem of epistemic circularity. Sosa's solution to the problem of epistemic circularity relies on the following claim of sufficiency: for S to deserve to be credited for his true belief, it is sufficient that his belief is, in a sense to be made clear, ?apt?. I argue that this solution undersells the notion of credit. I present three kinds of cases in which the attribution of credit to (...) a believer requires more than the possession of apt beliefs and I defend these cases against possible misinterpretations. (shrink)

This book explores the future of doctoral research and what it means to be involved in all stages of the process, providing international insights into what's changing, why it's changing and how to work best with these changes. It looks at the key issues that have been thrown into sharp relief by crises such as world pandemics. Drawing on work from outstanding authors, this book shows the ways in which the doctoral process has altered the supervisor/supervisee model, the challenges that (...) now need to be managed and demonstrates the importance of aligning all the stakeholders, systems and processes to ensure a successful future for doctoral education. Bringing together a range of perspectives, innovative practices and rigorous research this book tackles topics such as: how doctoral research changes in keeping with the global expansion and transformation of doctoral education programs the significant influence funding bodies - be they charities, governments, businesses, or non-governmental agencies - can have on doctoral research the extent to which doctoral research penetrates daily life and vice versa, and how to encourage and embed an ethical approach to research, as well as university responses to external challenges Uniquely international and bringing together the many stakeholders in the research business, this book is essential reading for all doctoral supervisors, candidates, and anyone involved in designing or organising research programmes for early career researchers and doctoral students. (shrink)