This chapter explores Claudia Card's views about victims and victimizers, then to her account of surviving evils. It also explores some thoughts about autonomy and agency that extend her thinking. Atrocities are evils marked by exceptional cruelty or degradation. Evils can be deeds, practices, social structures, or environments. Misogyny is an evil that has everyday forms, such as spousal abuse and sex trafficking, and spasmodic forms, such as outbreaks of mass rape during armed conflict. The concepts of autonomy and (...) agency are a bit slippery partly because of their close relationship and partly because they are terms of art. The chapter focuses on the survival agency of the victims of the surviving trafficking and sexual violence against humanity. Survival agency is the weapon of last resort for victims of evils—people who are as disempowered as possible by an evil deed, evil practices, evil social structures, or evil environments. (shrink)

Claudia Card did not live long enough to complete her work on surviving evils. Yet she left us an invaluable body of work on this topic. This essay surveys Card's views about the nature of evils and the ethical quandaries of surviving them. It then develops an account of survival agency that is based on Card's insights and in keeping with the agentic capacities exercised by Yezidi women and girls who have escaped from ISIS's obscene program of trafficking (...) in women and sexual violence. Card holds that true survival requires not only staying alive and as healthy as possible but also preserving your good moral character. The essay maintains that while exercising agency to elude evil and protect yourself often depends on your own skills and personality traits, exercising agency to restore or develop your moral character often depends on social support. (shrink)

This article argues against scientistic arguments of the redundancy of religious belief structures due to the explicability of the physical world, as exemplified here by a discussion of the “popular science” of Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss. It is claimed that the root of belief in “sense” is in animation, rather than in cosmological creation myths. The paper displays that the ideal of the absolute is linguistically signified by the termini “survival” and “freedom” in human understanding. However, it does (...) not appear through human understanding as an illusion stemming from the illegitimate inference of a pantheistic spirit or prime mover. Instead, human reason builds an analytical understanding upon a fundamental instinct, which long predates human-level consciousness. Approaching the subject’s role in the physical world, the article displays that animation itself, as the primal form of awareness and agency, is the urge to overcome an inherent antagonism in the structure of being. It is argued that the cosmological argument is mirrored by an argument that has no strict theoretical cogency, but is likewise irreducible and irrefutable by science. Science investigates the object empirically but has limited explanatory capabilities when it comes to subjective being. (shrink)

Institutionalism gives priority to structure over agency. Yet institutions have never developed and operated without the intervention of interested groups. This paper develops a conceptual framework for the role of agency in historical institutionalism. Based on recent contributions following the coalitional turn and drawing on insights from sociological institutionalism, it argues that agency plays a key role in the creation and maintenance of social coalitions that stabilize but also challenge institutions. Without such agency, no coalition can (...) be created, maintained, or changed. Similarly, without a supporting coalition, no contested institution can survive. Yet, due to collective action problems, such coalitional work is challenging. This coalitional perspective offers a robust role for agency in historical institutionalism, but it also explains why institutions remain stable despite agency. In addition, this paper forwards several portable propositions that allow for the identification of who is likely to develop agency and what these actors do. (shrink)

In his influential book 'Making Things Happen' and in other places, Jim Woodward has noted some affinities between his own account of causation and that of Menzies and Price, but argued that the latter view is implausibly ‘subjective’. In this piece I discuss Woodward’s criticisms. I argue that the Menzies and Price view is not as different from Woodward’s own account as he believes, and that in so far as it is different, it has some advantages whose importance Woodward misses; (...) but also that the Menzies and Price view lacks some elements whose importance Woodward rightly stresses. When properly characterized, however, the ‘subjectivity’ survives unscathed. (shrink)

In this chapter I offer a critique of the received way of thinking about responsibility for collective inaction and propose an alternative approach that takes as its point of departure the epistemic agency exhibited by people navigating impossible situations together. One such situation is becoming increasingly common in the context of climate change: so-called “natural” disasters wreaking havoc on communities—flooding homes, collapsing infrastructures, and straining the capacities of existing organizations to safeguard lives and livelihoods. What happens when philosophical reflection (...) begins here—in places where the institutions and practices that have emerged over the last century seem incapable of addressing the problems communities face now, and where people find themselves turning to one another for the sake of their own survival? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When Ethics Survives Where People Do Not: A Story From DarfurGhaiath HusseinI was not new to Darfur. I had been here before, although I wore a different hat as I literally walked under the burning April sun along the wide, dusty, unpaved streets of Nyala, South Darfur, to “headquarters.” It was to be another interesting, but normal, peaceful, and safe day as I led the Sudanese household survey in (...) South Darfur, then the largest of all Darfur states. That was in 2006, a few years after I joined the Federal Ministry of Health. My office overlooked the Nile, but getting out of the capital city of Khartoum was always the best part of working there. I had the opportunity to meet real people in their real places, where they are home and at ease.Overall, the data collection team’s work went according to plan. Most of the randomly selected villages were visited as planned or replaced according to protocol. But this morning was anything but normal. A few days earlier, while visiting a village in a nearby town, Kass, my team was able to make a single phone call to us, the leadership [End Page 162] team, composed of two colleagues from Darfur and myself, indicating the team had no reception—the nearest signal was an hour’s drive away. The team leader assured me that they had started collecting data and promised to call every day or every other day. They were a team of six young men and women (I called them boys and girls because they were so young and innocent) between the ages of 20 and 25, all from Darfur. Two of them were in love and participated in the survey collection to save the per diem for their wedding.The time I was expecting their call came, but the call did not come. Then another day, then another, then another.One of the management team was in charge of the security update, and that morning he asked me in a shaky voice if we could have a private meeting as soon as I entered the room. He informed me that the village where my team was located had been attacked by the Janjaweed, the notorious militia known for its ruthless, brutal attacks that leave nothing behind, but men killed indiscriminately, houses and children on fire, and women raped. I recalled my experience in Darfur the year before when I mechanically asked a woman if she had lost a family member in the last six months and what the cause of death was. She burst into tears. I tried to calm her down. Finally, she told me that her few-month-old baby had been burned alive in front of her own eyes. Before I could even imagine the fate of the boys and girls on the team, a call came in. It was not from the team, but from a crying mother who asked me to “bring her daughter back.” She told me she did not want her daughter killed or raped. I cannot remember what I said because I was in shock and did not want anyone to see this, especially the other teams. The last thing I needed was to see the panic for which I was not trained to manage.I had no time to waste. I had no exit or contingency plan in the 224-page survey guide that explained how to collect the data, how to ask the questions, how to sort and safely store the paper questionnaires, how to enter the data. It seemed to provide extensive guidance on everything except for the only instruction I needed at the time—How to keep my teams safe under fire. I took the first flight to the survey’s national headquarters in Khartoum seeking help. I was promised to be put in contact with the intelligence and army in the region through the government agency responsible for organizing humanitarian work in the country. In fact, none of them were in the attacked village. My colleagues on the management team seemed more hardened to the conflict than I was. For me it was something I followed on the news... (shrink)

The materialistic philosophy which sees 'man' as pitted against his environment is rapidly breaking down as technological man becomes more and more able to oppose the largest systems. Every battle that he wins brings a threat of disaster. The unit of survival—either in ethics or in evolution—is not the organism or the species but the largest system or 'power' within which the creature lives. If the creature destroys its environment, it destroys itself.Man needs the earth in order to walk, (...) the sea to swim or sail, the air to fly. Of necessity he acts within the world and in order to be, he must in some measure adapt himself as one part of nature to other parts.In this paper, I argue that global climate change and... (shrink)

The paper looks into a participatory art project developed in two women’s refuges, one in Portugal and the other in England. Addressing liminality after surviving violence, the project constructs a portrait of survivors, utilising feminist pragmatist aesthetics to transfer representational agency to participants. Against a background where women who have experienced domestic violence have often been portrayed in simplistic representations of damaged beauty, the study sought to gain a deeper understanding by holding visual art workshops with participants (Portugal, England) (...) and analysing data from verbal testimonies (England). The paper contributes to a discussion of the practical issues negotiated when establishing a representational power balance between researchers and research participants. It does this by providing a critical discussion of three ethical problems emerging in relation to the project. The first concerns the dominant representation of survivors, the second the need for participants’ anonymity and the third the challenges of inequality in qualitative research. (shrink)

In this essay Harry Boyte and Margaret Finders argue that addressing the “shrinkage” of education and democracy requires acting politically to reclaim and augment Deweyan agency-focused concepts of democracy and education. Looking at agency from the vantage of civic studies, which advances a politics of agency — a citizen politics that is different from ideological politics — and citizens as cocreators of political communities, Boyte and Finders explore the technocratic trends that have eclipsed agency. These disempower (...) educators, students, and communities. Using the case study of the youth empowerment initiative Public Achievement and its translation into the Special Education Program and partnerships of Augsburg College, the authors conclude with an examination of how agentic practices have survived in “shadow spaces” in schools, how such spaces might be turned into “free spaces” for democratic change, and how teacher education needs to prepare “citizen teachers” as well as promoting pedagogies of empowerment. These suggest grounds for a movement of hope and democratic change. (shrink)

Nursing in the United Kingdom is undergoing massive retrenchment. An increasing number of nurses are unable to obtain employment following qualification and agency nursing and short-term contracts are becoming the norm. Amalgamations of colleges of nursing have resulted in redundancies of nurse teachers and a significant reduction in student nursing places. The profession of nursing in the UK is in a state of crisis from which it may never recover. Nurses have generated and facilitated this situation in their self-interested (...) quest for professional status. Essentially, nurses have turned their backs on many nursing skills and allowed others to take on the role. British nursing may find its survival through its health care assistants. Nurses in other countries should take note and take steps to safeguard the profession on an international level. (shrink)

The central claim of this article is that narrative agency, which I will define as a subject’s capacity to make sense of herself as an ‘I’ over time and in relation to other ‘I’s, is a precondition for identity formation. I engage with two critiques of this claim: first, that narrative agency is limited by, rather than primary to, subordinating gender norms and, second, that a view of narrative agency as primary is committed to too ambitious a (...) conception of the communicability of narratives. I argue that the narrative model survives these two criticisms by emphasising its irreducibility, its inherent relationality and its generative potential. I then suggest some of the ways in which a concept of narrative agency might help feminist critical theory to posit mutual recognition and respect as productive criteria for progressive self and social transformation. (shrink)

Abstract:Whereas utopia is the vision of an ideal community, dystopias create the image of a cataclysmic decline of society and environment. This article deals with the construction of personal agency and the analysis of digital simulation that is reflected in an online commercial for a first-person survival horror video game. Agency is understood here as the capacity to act in the virtual environment that is ascribed to the actor by the marketing strategy. Applying approaches from phenomenology, simulation (...) theory, and sound studies, the analysis proceeds in reference to a corresponding educational political agenda. The findings show a certain discrepancy between the more utopian education political rhetoric and the more dystopian construction of personal agency in the video game context, a discrepancy from which specific educational challenges emerge. Finally, even if a case study generally cannot be seen as representative, its results present a direction for the further investigation of virtual reality from the education perspective as suggested by international policies. (shrink)

Philosophical inquiries in a particular field sometimes simply fade out. Interest shifts to new problems, the old problems come to seem intractable, philosophical curiosity does not survive the detailed work a glimpse of the solution discloses as necessary, or one finds that there is nothing new to say, that one can no longer be creative about the issues involved. But sometimes the loose ends are recognized and someone attempts to tie them up together and bring the inquiries to a more (...) or less satisfactory conclusion. John Bishop has done this in his book about agency. (shrink)

By all accounts, James Cook’s HMS Endeavour sojourn in Tahiti was a pivotal moment in Enlightenment engagements between Indigenous and European cultures. Among the voyage records that survive, the Endeavour draftsman Sydney Parkinson’s Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas is widely viewed as anomalous for the depth and breadth of its interests in Indigenous Tahitian culture and plant knowledge. This essay complicates that view, with emphasis on the contingencies peculiar to the Journal’s publication and to Parkinson’s own authorial (...) biography. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, I analyze Parkinson’s account alongside the botanist Daniel Solander’s historiographically underutilized “Plantae Otaheitenses” manuscript. In so doing, I offer an alternative reading of the Journal as archetypal rather than exceptional in its attention to Indigenous cultures and knowledges. At stake, I suggest, is an enhanced appreciation for Indigenous–European botanical engagements and for Enlightenment print culture more broadly, as well as for the nebulously adisciplinary and collaborative nature of Enlightenment natural history field practices. (shrink)

The large number of hungry people in a global economy based on industrialization, privatization, and free trade raises the question of the ethical dimensions of the worsening food crisis in the world in general and in developing countries in particular. Who bears the moral responsibility for the tragic situation in Africa and Asia where people are starving due to poverty? Who is morally responsible for their poverty - the hungry people themselves? the international community? any particular agency or institution? (...) In the context of Article 3 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which states that "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security" (UNDHR, 1948), the ethical question of poverty and hunger becomes a major human concern that should be discussed publicly and resolved by whatever means available. But how can the poor and hungry realize their right to life and security if their very survival is at stake? This paper maintains that responsibility for global poverty at present lies in recent neo-liberal trends in the global economy and with those individuals and organizations who, though small in number, have acquired a disproportionate share of the world's assets and financial resources. That being the case, it is suggested that our monetary and financial policies are in need of drastic changes with regard to global responsibility towards the hungry and impoverished. (shrink)

: The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report issued in April 2005 shows how severely our civilisation is degrading and overstressing the natural systems that support human life and all other lives on earth. An important critical challenge, especially for the eco-humanities, is to help us understand the conceptual frameworks and systems that disappear the crucial support provided by natural systems and prevent us from seeing nature as a field of agency. This paper considers the currently popular concept of a cultural (...) landscape as an example of a concept that downplays natural agency, and discusses the epistemology of nature scepticism and nature cynicism that often accompanies its vogue in the humanities. Can some philosophical disentangling of senses of nature (often considered the most complex term in the language) allow sceptics their main points without placing them on such a strong collision course with the requirements of commonsense and survival? (shrink)

Climate change is a threat to food system stability, with small islands particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events. In Puerto Rico, a diminished agricultural sector and resulting food import dependence have been implicated in reduced diet quality, rural impoverishment, and periodic food insecurity during natural disasters. In contrast, smallholder farmers in Puerto Rico serve as cultural emblems of self-sufficient food production, providing fresh foods to local communities in an informal economy and leveraging traditional knowledge systems to manage varying ecological and (...) climatic constraints. The current mixed methods study sought to document this expertise and employed a questionnaire and narrative interviewing in a purposeful sample of 30 smallholder farmers after Hurricane María to identify experiences in post-disaster food access and agricultural recovery and reveal underlying socioecological knowledge that may contribute to a more climate resilient food system in Puerto Rico. Although the hurricane resulted in significant damages, farmers contributed to post-disaster food access by sharing a variety of surviving fruits, vegetables, and root crops among community members. Practices such as crop diversification, seed banking, and soil conservation were identified as climate resilient farm management strategies, and smallholder farmer networks were discussed as a promising solution to amass resources and bolster agricultural productivity. These recommendations were shared in a narrative highlighting socioecological identity, self-sufficiency, community and cultural heritage, and collaborative agency as integral to agricultural resilience. Efforts to promote climate resilience in Puerto Rico must leverage smallholder farmers’ socioecological expertise to reclaim a more equitable, sustainable, and community-owned food system. (shrink)

Medical researchers must continue to develop and test non-blood oxygen-transport products. Resources provided by the Jehovah's Witness Hospital Assistance Line must be consulted. Sickle cell researchers must continue to test non-blood treatment. Information about non-blood treatments must be disbursed. Ways to enhance parental comport as the laws further and further support children's best interest must be provided. Information regarding cultural diversity must be disseminated. Hospitals and healthcare agencies that have not done so must institute the use of ethics consulting or (...) ethics committees. Nurse ethicists must continue development of the role of educating staff; mediation, arbitration and negotiation; problem solving; obtaining legal opinion; providing patient, family, or staff advocacy; and helping to reduce suffering on the part of the providers. Difficult ethical decisions should continue to be debated.Were the staff at X Med Center correct in overriding parental wishes and breaking tenets of their faith? In the doctor's, nurse's lawyer's, and judge's view they were. The child, now eight years old, is alive and well. The stroke resolved, and imminent death averted. The parents' and child's views are not presently available. Whether the family is suffering from the child's loss of his relationship with God, or are secretly relieved in their hearts that they are not, like Rita Swan, mourning their dead son, is unknown. What is known, is that this was a difficult case for all involved, and that such cases will continue to present themselves in the future. (shrink)

Over recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the National Health Service research governance and ethics approvals process in the UK. New regulations mean that approval from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency is now also needed for conducting all clinical trials. Practical experience of gaining MHRA and sponsorship approval has yet to be described and critically explored in the literature. Our experience, from start to finish, of applying for these four approvals for a multicentre randomised controlled (...) trial of two licensed drugs for opiate detoxification in the prison setting is described here. In addition, the implications of the approvals process for research projects, particularly clinical trials, in terms of time and funding, and also indirect implications for NHS patients are discussed. Inconsistencies are discussed and suggestions that could improve and streamline the overall process are made. The current approvals process could now be hindering non-commercial clinical trials, leading to a loss of important evidence-based medical information. (shrink)

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion involves extraordinary use of ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its (...) inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an "Innate Releasing Mechanism," or “agency detector,” whose proper domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival - such as predators, protectors and prey - but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order; however, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims. (shrink)

Background:While there have been studies exploring moral habitability and its impact on the work environments of nurses in Western countries, little is known about the moral habitability of the work environments of nurses and midwives in resource-constrained settings.Research objective:The purpose of this research was to examine the moral habitability of the work environment of nurses and midwives in Ghana and its influence on their moral agency using the philosophical works of Margaret Urban Walker.Research design and participants:A critical moral ethnography (...) was conducted through the analysis of interviews with 30 nurses and midwives, along with observation, and documentary materials.Ethical considerations:After receiving ethics approval, signed informed consent was obtained from participants before data collection.Results:Five themes were identified: (1) holding onto the values, identities, and responsibilities of being a midwife/nurse; (2) scarcity of resources as limiting capacity to meet caring responsibilities; (3) gender and socio-economic inequities shaping the moral-social context of practice; (4) working with incoherent moral understandings and damaged identities in the context of inter- and intra-professional relationships; and (5) surviving through adversity with renewed commitment and courage.Discussion:The nurses and midwives were found to work in an environment that was morally uninhabitable and dominated by the scarcity of resources, overwhelming and incoherent moral responsibilities, oppressive conditions, and workplace violence. These situations constrained their moral agency and provoked suffering and distress. The nurses and midwives negotiated their practice and navigated through morally uninhabitable work environment by holding onto their moral values and commitments to childbearing women.Conclusion:Creating morally habitable workplaces through the provision of adequate resources and instituting interprofessional practice guidelines and workplace violence prevention policies may promote safe and ethical nursing and midwifery practice. (shrink)

The woman at the heart of Pearl Jam’s “Better Man” (Vitalogy, 1994) is trapped. She has committed herself to a relationship that makes her miserable, but she sees no viable alternative to staying in it. She mourns a past self who might have been able to leave and dreams of a dierent way things might be, but remains unable to move on. It is tempting to view her with a mixture of pity and frustration (reecting some of the personal circumstances (...) -- Eddie Vedder’s mother’s second marriage -- informing its composition). As a moral being, she appears to be hopelessly compromised by her situation, even as she is also doing her best to survive under conditions designed to undermine her autonomy and keep her trapped (as abusive relationships do). The song is not so much critical of her choice to stay as it is confused by and resigned to it. -/- What keeps a person where she so clearly does not want to be? -/- The song itself was, at least early in its recorded life for Pearl Jam, similarly compromised. Vedder appears to have thought of it as too “accessible”, too much of a pop hit for the kind of musical vision he had in mind either for Vs. (for which it had originally been intended) or for Vitalogy; by this point in the band’s career, he was ever more actively resisting success, accessibility, and everything that went with the version of rock star life imposed collectively on the band and on him as an individual. The form that resistance took was an exercise of artistic and other forms of control, sometimes exercised in ways that were destructive or damaging (to the band and its internal relationships, its fame or success, its image, its artistic identity, etc.). -/- What keeps an artist or a band where they so clearly do not want to be? In this chapter, I oer a loose exploration of some possible philosophical approaches to answering the question of what keeps us where we are, like it or not, worked out in parallel through the lyrics of “Better Man” and the circumstances of the song’s eventual arrival Vitalogy. My main interest is in examining the ethical dimensions of the question itself -- what, if anything, are we morally required or expected to do under compromised or compromising conditions? My main suggestion is that answering the question might require of us a messier, more ambivalent, and perhaps more compassionate notion of moral agency, inspired by Simone Weil’s work on affliction. (shrink)

Despite the compelling subjective experience of executive self-control, we argue that ‘consciousness’ contains no top-down control processes. We propose that ‘consciousness’ involves no executive, causal or controlling relationship with any of the familiar psychological processes conventionally attributed to it. In our view all psychological processing and psychological products are non-conscious. In particular, we argue that all ‘contents of consciousness’ are generated by and within non-conscious brain systems in the form of a continuous self-referential personal narrative that is not directed or (...) influenced in any way by the ‘experience of consciousness’. This continuously updated personal narrative arises from selective ‘internal broadcasting’ of outputs from non-conscious executive systems that have access to all forms of cognitive processing, sensory information and motor control. The personal narrative provides information for storage in autobiographical memory and is underpinned by constructs of self and agency, also created in non-conscious systems. The experience of consciousness, is seen as a passive accompaniment to the non-conscious processes of internal broadcasting and the creation of the personal narrative. In this sense personal awareness is analogous to the rainbow which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them. Though at an individual level it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows the recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage – not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse Alexander von Humboldt's views on the theory of evolution and tackle the following question: Can Humboldt be considered an evolutionist? I seek to show that Humboldt acknowledges three essential Darwinian elements of the theory of evolution: fossil records, the geographical distribution of species and the struggle for survival. Further, Humboldt recognises a special relation between the natural environment and organic life, and understands it in light of his naturalistic holism. This holism (...) reveals the unity of organic and inorganic nature and highlights the agency of organic life whilst allowing it to create and preserve the adaptive conditions in the natural environment. Accordingly, I argue that Humboldt believes some kind of evolutionary process happens in nature. However, due to the immense influence of Kant’s transcendental study and the rigid utilisation of the empirical method, Humboldt concludes that we cannot acquire knowledge of the exact course of the evolutionary process. This, however, does not imply Humboldt discredits the theory of evolution. (shrink)

Theology and the life sciences are mutually dependent on one another in the task of understanding the origin and function of moral behavior. The life sciences investigate morality from the perspective of the historical and communal dimension of humanity and point to survival as the primary function of human behavior. A Christian ethic of self‐sacrifice advances the preservation of the entire human and nonhuman creation and should not, therefore, be objected to by the life sciences. Religion, however, is more (...) than a survival mechanism. It points to a preserving agency beyond humanity and prevents the life sciences from reducing life to its strictly biological side. (shrink)

In this discussion, I engage the politics of intention to explore how structural racism structures the production of meaning and the practice of reason. Building on María Lugones's analysis of intention formation as a form of practical reasoning, I explore the reasoning at work during the 2011 Stand Your Ground (SYG) hearing of black survivor of domestic violence, Marissa Alexander, to contend that structural racism—in this case, both intimate personal violence and intimate state violence against black women—enacts race/gender domination through (...) projecting constructed intentions onto black women as a strategy to rationalize punishing black women. I also discuss two key black feminist critiques of reason—Patricia Hill Collins’ discussion of “controlling images” (2000) and Michelle Cliff's concept of the “mythic mind” (1982)—to propose controlling intentions as a framework to theorize how structural racism produces fictive intentions used to rationalize the criminal punishment of survival and justify that outcome as common sense. (shrink)

While the majority of surviving hagiography in the Celtic and other traditions is focused on male saints, studying hagiography of female saints can provide historians with crucial insight into how religion shaped medieval attitudes towards gender, and how women exercised power and agency within the existing societal confines shaped by Christianity. Initially, the glorification of female virginity in Celtic hagiography appears to demonize sexually active women while idealizing the rhetorical figure of the virgin. However, while Celtic hagiography certainly uses (...) literary symbolism, metaphor, and imagery to promote female virginity, as narrowly defined by patriarchal standards, the social structures created by Christian institutions also provided some of the only spaces in medieval communities wherein women could construct lives independent of men, access education, and exercise political and social power. Consequently, a more nuanced understanding of the feminist implications of Celtic hagiography and its depictions of female saints is necessary in historical study. (shrink)

Many healthcare agencies are producing evidence-based guidance and policy that may determine the availability of particular healthcare products and procedures, effectively rationing aspects of healthcare. They claim legitimacy for their decisions through reference to evidence-based scientific method and the implementation of just decision-making procedures, often citing the criteria of ‘accountability for reasonableness’; publicity, relevance, challenge and revision, and regulation. Central to most decision methods are estimates of gains in quality-adjusted life-years, a measure that combines the length and quality of (...) class='Hi'>survival. However, all agree that the QALY alone is not a sufficient measure of all relevant aspects of potential healthcare benefits, and a number of value assessment frameworks have been suggested. I argue that the practical implementation of these procedures has the potential to lead to a distorted assessment of value. Undue weight may be ascribed to certain attributes, particularly those that favour commercial or political interests, while other attributes that are highly valued by society, particularly those related to care processes, may be omitted or undervalued. This may be compounded by a lack of transparency to relevant stakeholders, resulting in an inability for them to participate in, or challenge, the decisions. The makes it likely that costly new technologies, for which inflated prices can be justified by the current value frameworks, are displacing aspects of healthcare that are highly valued by society. (shrink)

This paper criticises Miranda Fricker's account of the primary harm of testimonial injustice as a kind of epistemic objectification, where the latter is understood on the model provided by Martha Nussbaum's influential analysis of sexual objectification and where it is taken to involve the denial of someone's epistemic agency. I examine the existing objections to Fricker's account of the primary harm, criticising some while accepting the force of others, and I argue that one of Fricker's own central examples of (...) testimonial injustice in fact offers the basis of a particularly telling objection. While Fricker's other critics have mostly concluded that we need to look at alternative theoretical resources to offer an account of the primary harm of testimonial injustice, I aim to show that this is premature; both Fricker and her critics have underestimated the resources provided by Nussbaum's analysis of objectification when offering an account of the primary harm, and something very much in the spirit of Fricker's account survives the objections. (shrink)

In bioethics, the predominant categorization of various types of influence has been a tripartite classification of rational persuasion (meaning influence by reason and argument), coercion (meaning influence by irresistible threats—or on a few accounts, offers), and manipulation (meaning everything in between). The standard ethical analysis in bioethics has been that rational persuasion is always permissible, and coercion is almost always impermissible save a few cases such as imminent threat to self or others. However, many forms of influence fall into the (...) broad middle terrain—and this terrain is in desperate need of conceptual refining and ethical analysis in light of recent interest in using principles from behavioral science to influence health decisions and behaviors. This paper aims to address the neglected space between rational persuasion and coercion in bioethics. First, I argue for conceptual revisions that include removing the “manipulation” label and relabeling this space “nonargumentative]influence,” with two subtypes: “reason-bypassing” and “reason-countering.” Second, I argue that bioethicists have made the mistake of relying heavily on the conceptual categories themselves for normative work and instead should assess the ethical permissibility of a particular instance of influence by asking several key ethical questions, which I elucidate, that relate to (1) the impact of the form of influence on autonomy and (2) the relationship between the influencer and the influenced. Finally, I apply my analysis to two examples of nonargumentative influence in health care and health policy: (1) governmental agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) trying to influence the public to be healthier using nonargumentative measures such as vivid images on cigarette packages to make more salient the negative effects of smoking, and (2) a physician framing a surgery in terms of survival rates instead of mortality rates to influence her patient to consent to the surgery. (shrink)

This book is the first translation into English of the Reflections which Kant wrote whilst formulating his ideas in political philosophy: the preparatory drafts for Theory and Practice, Toward Perpetual Peace, the Doctrine of Right, and Conflict of the Faculties; and the only surviving student transcription of his course on Natural Right. Through these texts one can trace the development of his political thought, from his first exposure to Rousseau in the mid 1760s through to his last musings in the (...) late 1790s after his final system of Right was published. The material covers such topics as the central role of freedom, the social contract, the nature of sovereignty, the means for achieving international peace, property rights in relation to the very possibility of human agency, the general prohibition of rebellion, and Kant's philosophical defense of the French Revolution. (shrink)

The way in which accountability is currently employed in business ethics practice is based on a few central assumptions. It is assumed, for instance, that ethical failures result from the deliberate, rational decision-making of moral agents. A second important assumption is that there is a direct cause and effect relationship between the decisions and actions of individuals and the consequences of those decisions. Furthermore, the current approach towards accountability failures relies on the ability on legal sanctions to deter agents from (...) ethical lapses. This paper will argue that these three assumptions do not survive critical interrogation and that our understanding of accountability therefore has to be reconsidered. It will propose that accountability be reconceived as a relational responsiveness towards stakeholders. (shrink)

In this chapter, I examine the concept of vulnerability as a complex constitutive feature of human agency and argue that it is both a constraint on and a resource for practical reasoning. When discussed as an ontological feature of human agency, vulnerability is primarily understood as an aspect of embodiment, which is problematic in different respects. First, in relation to the situatedness of human agency, vulnerability indicates that human agents are subjected to contextual contingencies. Second, in relation (...) to temporality, vulnerability indicates that agents act in time and under the pressure of time. They are finite and produce finite and perishable actions, even though the longlasting effects of an action may survive the action itself. Third, in relation to corporal feature of agency, vulnerability is associated to suffering and frailty, insofar as bodily needs and desires represent both springs of and hindrances to rational action. Finally, in relation to the social nature of human animals, vulnerability indicates the susceptibility to be harmed, obstructed, undercut or manipulated by other agents These varieties of vulnerability are constituive features of human agency, which cannot be removed without removing what is peculiar and specific to human agency. Theories of practical reason are primarily concerned with constitutive vulnerability as a defect, and presume to offer normative guidance by adopting an idealized account of rational agency, which corrects or merely cancels the defective features of human agency. By contrast, theories of bounded rationality understand practical reasoning instrumentally, and thus are concerned with cognitive limitations of practical rationality, in particular with partial and perspectival information. However, the notion of “partial information” is inadequate to capture the complexities and significance of vulnerability, even in its restricted cognitive sense, which has to do with the agent’s situatedness. On the view I propose, instead, vulnerability is declined as a constitutive constraint on practical reasoning. Susceptibility to time constraints makes sense of the agents’ engagement in action and of their distinctive deliberative perspective. Susceptibility to bodily needs and desires tracks the normative relation between motivations and reasons for action, as well as the corporal roots of the agents’ efficacy in a perceived context. Susceptibility to others makes possible to broaden the scope and the modes of individual agency, by way of inter-action and shared agency. Rather than the source of problems and issues for rational agency, I take vulnerability to name the cluster of constitutive constraints that shape practical reasoning. According to the distinctive variety of Kantian constructivism I defend, practical reason is incomplete, rather than imperfect or defective. The completion of practical reason does not aim to correct or dissolve vulnerability, but deploys vulnerability as a resource to build up autonomy. This view accounts for autonomy as a normative relation among vulnerable agents, which develops in time. (shrink)

The idea that we might be robots is no longer the stuff of science fiction; decades of research in evolutionary biology and cognitive science have led many esteemed scientists to the conclusion that, according to the precepts of universal Darwinism, humans are merely the hosts for two replicators that have no interest in us except as conduits for replication. Richard Dawkins, for example, jolted us into realizing that we are just survival mechanisms for our own genes, sophisticated robots in (...) service of huge colonies of replicators to whom concepts of rationality, intelligence, agency, and even the human soul are irrelevant. Accepting and now forcefully responding to this decentering and disturbing idea, Keith Stanovich here provides the tools for the "robot's rebellion," a program of cognitive reform necessary to advance human interests over the limited interest of the replicators and define our own autonomous goals as individual human beings. He shows how concepts of rational thinking from cognitive science interact with the logic of evolution to create opportunities for humans to structure their behavior to serve their own ends. These evaluative activities of the brain, he argues, fulfill the need that we have to ascribe significance to human life. We may well be robots, but we are the only robots who have discovered that fact. Only by recognizing ourselves as such, argues Stanovich, can we begin to construct a concept of self based on what is truly singular about humans: that they gain control of their lives in a way unique among life forms on Earth—through rational self-determination. (shrink)

The question of the holistic structure of an organism is a recurring theme in the philosophy of biology and has been increasingly discussed again in recent years. Organisms have recently been described as complex systems that autonomously create, maintain and reproduce themselves while constantly interacting with their environment. Key focal points include their autopoiesis, autonomy, agency and teleological structure. This perspective marks a significant advancement from the 20th-century viewpoint, which predominantly saw organisms as genetically programmed, randomly generated and blindly (...) selected survival-machines. However, crucial questions about the shape and development of organisms still lack answers. Shape and development are deeply interconnected and seem to require a holistic approach. Here, I will briefly outline a phenomenological perspective which could provide a framework for seeking answers to these fundamental questions. In particular, I propose a common four-fold phenomenal structure of the developing organism and the cognising consciousness, which makes it possible to observe the agential and teleological structure of the organism "from within". This fourfold structure also describes the molecular level and thus provides a general organismic concept. It furthermore corresponds to the four Aristotelian "causes" (conditions). (shrink)

This paper focuses on the research field of machine ethics and how it relates to a technological singularity—a hypothesized, futuristic event where artificial machines will have greater-than-human-level intelligence. One problem related to the singularity centers on the issue of whether human values and norms would survive such an event. To somehow ensure this, a number of artificial intelligence researchers have opted to focus on the development of artificial moral agents, which refers to machines capable of moral reasoning, judgment, and decision-making. (...) To date, different frameworks on how to arrive at these agents have been put forward. However, there seems to be no hard consensus as to which framework would likely yield a positive result. With the body of work that they have contributed in the study of moral agency, philosophers may contribute to the growing literature on artificial moral agency. While doing so, they could also think about how the said concept could affect other important philosophical concepts. (shrink)

Responding to the increasingly influential role of Hannah Arendt's political philosophy in recent years, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination: The Holocaust, Plurality, and Resistance, critically engages with Arendt's understanding of totalitarianism. According to Arendt, the main goal of totalitarianism was total domination; namely, the virtual eradication of human legality, morality, individuality, and plurality. This attempt, in her view, was most fully realized in the concentration camps, which served as the major "laboratories" for the regime. While Arendt focused (...) on the perpetrators' logic and drive, Michal Aharony examines the perspectives and experiences of the victims and their ability to resist such an experiment. The first book-length study to juxtapose Arendt's concept of total domination with actual testimonies of Holocaust survivors, this book calls for methodological pluralism and the integration of the voices and narratives of the actors in the construction of political concepts and theoretical systems. To achieve this, Aharony engages with both well-known and non-canonical intellectuals and writers who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Additionally, she analyzes the oral testimonies of survivors who are largely unknown, drawing from interviews conducted in Israel and in the U.S., as well as from videotaped interviews from archives around the world. Revealing various manifestations of unarmed resistance in the camps, this study demonstrates the persistence of morality and free agency even under the most extreme and de-humanizing conditions, while cautiously suggesting that absolute domination is never as absolute as it claims or wishes to be. Scholars of political philosophy, political science, history, and Holocaust studies will find this an original and compelling book. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers have focused on whether and how emotions threaten autonomy, insofar as they lie outside the sphere of rational agency. That is, they have conceptualized emotional vulnerability as passivity. Second, they have considered how emotions are insensitive to rational judgment, focusing on cases in which emotions are dissonant or recalcitrant. Third, in recognizing the motivational force of emotions, philosophers have tracked their negative impact on rational deliberation. Indeed, emotions are often contrastive elements in rational deliberation. They appear to (...) defeat deliberative judgments about what to do, survive rational deliberation or preempt the very possibility of rational deliberation. But there are more interesting cases in which it is apparent that emotions bear a rather complicated relation to autonomy. Love and shame provide powerful examples of the ambivalences and complexities of such a relation. In analyzing such complexities, my aim is to present a case for appreciating various dimensions of vulnerability and, correspondingly, for exposing the importance of emotional vulnerability for agential autonomy. This view is rooted in a general account of agential autonomy marked by mutual respect and recognition of others, as a normative response to constitutive vulnerability, understood as the capacity to affect and be affected by others as well as by external agentive and non-agentive causes. (shrink)

Feinberg and Mallatt, in their presentation of neurobiological naturalism, have suggested that visual consciousness was acquired by early vertebrates and inherited by a wide range of descendants, and that its neural basis has shifted to nonhomologous nervous structures during evolution. However, their evolutionary scenario of visual consciousness relies on the assumption that visual consciousness is closely linked with survival, which is not commonly accepted in current consciousness research. We suggest an alternative idea that visual consciousness is linked to a (...) specific class of agency, consequently justifying their phylogenetic claim. We also examine the implication of their phylogenetic claim: visual consciousness is homologous across vertebrates, but its neural basis is not. This apparent incongruence illustrates a general phenomenon of homology, and that the resulting hierarchical view of visual consciousness and its neural basis can be straightforwardly accommodated by neurobiological naturalism. Throughout these discussions, we aim to address the potential theoretical issues in neurobiological naturalism and refine the picture illustrated by Feinberg and Mallatt regarding phylogenetic distribution and trajectories of visual consciousness. (shrink)

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich's recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and (...) argues that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice. (shrink)

Given that one-million species are currently threatened with extinction and that humans are undermining the entire natural infrastructure on which our modern world depends (IPBES, 2019), this dissertation will show that there is a need to provide an alternative approach to wildlife conservation, one that avoids anthropocentrism and wildlife valuation on an instrumental basis to provide meaningful and tangible success for both wildlife conservation and human well-being in an inclusive way. In this sense, The Value of Being Wild will showcase (...) the concept of eco-phenomenology as an important non-anthropocentric alternative to the current approach to wildlife conservation, namely sustainable development. The problem with this dominant paradigm, as Chapter Two will reveal, is that sustainable development has not only failed to provide humans and future generations of humans with their own needs but, as per the latest IPBES report, failed in arresting the freefall decline of wild species. The situation currently requires a radical overhaul of the current system. As emerged from the later work of French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), eco-phenomenology is particularly well-suited as a practical alternative to sustainable development. The core reason is that eco-phenomenology moves away from a human-centred framework toward a far more inclusive approach that embraces the conservation of wild animals as well the wild environment they dwell in, beyond any human needs (although humans are embraced within the approach too). Merleau-Ponty helps us to move away from anthropocentrism to a more inclusive approach in conserving wildlife, since his phenomenology does not consider the human animal’s relationship in the world as exclusive (to use and exploit wild animals solely for their benefit), but inclusive (as an interconnected biological component in a broad ecological system). The strength of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of phenomenology is that it facilitates an understanding of all living and even non-living entities, such as air, water and soil, as interconnected and interrelated within a broad biosphere. While Merleau-Ponty did not address the concept of wild animals or the biosphere directly, his later work points to the fact that human animals cannot exist outside a world that provides life-giving force to all living beings. Phenomenology, as developed by Merleau-Ponty, is a concept that recognises the axiological qualities of the natural world are inherent and ineliminable from the discipline of traditional phenomenology, hence the term ‘eco-phenomenology’, developed in one reception of his thinking. Eco-phenomenology offers a return to a world that humans have tried hard to alienate themselves from, in that it approaches the natural environment and wild animals, not as a complex set of objects and objective processes, but rather as they are experienced and lived from within by the attentive animal who is entirely a part of the world that he or she experiences. Merleau-Pontian eco-phenomenology thus emphasises a holistic dialogue within a more-than-human world (Abram, 1996: 65). Eco-phenomenology is a concept that points toward an applied strategy but so far this has not been attempted in earnest. This is specifically true when it comes to wildlife conservation. The Value of Being Wild, therefore, sets out to employ the concept of eco-phenomenology in order to provide a new practical wildlife conservation approach that challenges, and potentially replaces, the current prevailing policies as employed by global governmental and inter-governmental agencies. In particular, this alternative frame is posed as a replacement for the failing anthropocentric conservation practices currently in place in South Africa. This dissertation will therefore conclude by exploring strategies where conservation of wildlife is not taken as instrumentally-valued, or even intrinsically-valued, but rather as wild-valued in that the existence of wild animals as wild is conserved within a broader, more inclusive overall ecology that supports the survival and flourishing of all living beings that include plants, wild animals and human beings. (shrink)

This paper explores the laborious and intimate work of turning bodies of research animals into models of human patients. Based on ethnographic research in the interdisciplinary Danish research centre NEOMUNE, we investigate collaboration across species and disciplines, in research aiming at improving survival for preterm infants. NEOMUNE experimental studies on piglets evolved as a platform on which both basic and clinical scientists exercised professional authority. Guided by the field of multi-species research, we explore the social and material agency (...) of research animals in the production of human health. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s concept of “collaborative survival”, we show that sharing the responsibility of the life and death of up to twenty-five preterm piglets fostered not only a collegial solidarity between basic and clinical scientists, but also a transformative cross-fertilization across species and disciplines—a productive “contamination”—facilitating the day-to-day survival of piglets, the academic survival of scientists and the promise of survival of preterm infants. Contamination spurred intertwined identity shifts that increased the porosity between the pig laboratory and the neonatal intensive care unit. Of particular significance was the ability of the research piglets to flexibly become animal-infant-patient hybrids in need of a united effort from basic and clinical researchers. However, ‘hybrid pigs’ also entailed a threat to the demarcation between humans and animals that consolidates the use of animals in biomedical research, and efforts were continuously done to keep contamination within spatial limits. We conclude that contamination facilitates transformative encounters, yet needs spatial containment to materialize bench-to-bedside translation. (shrink)