Background:New graduate transition into the workforce is challenging and can involve managing ethical tensions. Ethical tensions cause new graduates to doubt their capabilities due to their lack of experience. To support new graduates, we need to know what these ethical tensions are.Objectives:To explore the ethical tensions perceived to occur in practice for new graduate health professionals.Research design:This qualitative systematic review involved a search of five databases (Medline, EMBASE, AMED, CINAHL and Scopus) which resulted in the retrieval of 3554 papers. After (...) the two-phased screening process, eight studies were identified that met the inclusion criteria and had rich data on the review question. Articles were read several times, critically appraised and analysed through thematic analysis.Ethical considerations:No ethical approval was required for the systematic review. The review was conducted following well-established reporting guidelines enabling transparency and rigour.Findings:Studies originated from Australia, United States, Iran and China. One study included speech pathologists and seven were with nurses. Four themes included the following: (1) enduring an unknown workplace culture that generates uncertainty without support for new graduates; (2) being vulnerable because of distress from bullying, exclusion and being a scapegoat; (3) constraining systems and institutional restrictions that cause dilemmas; and (4) experiencing disillusionment from lost ideals about ethical practice.Discussion:This review has brought to light the vulnerability of new graduates to negative workplace culture and collegial incivility. In addition, new graduates are subjected to ethical tensions created by institutional constraints which can create dilemmas and uncertainties through practice that does not align with what they anticipated.Conclusion:Understanding ethical tensions experienced by new graduates enables provision of informed support. There needs to be considerable cultural change for orientation and socialisation of new graduates to enable them to learn and manage ethical tensions. (shrink)

A summary of the philosophical literature on trust.

Respect for patients’ autonomy has taken a central place in the practice of medicine. Received wisdom holds that respect for autonomy allows overriding a patient’s treatment preferences only if the patient has been found to lack capacity. This understanding of respect for autonomy requires a dichotomous approach to assessing capacity, whereby a patient must be found either to have full capacity to make some particular treatment decision or must be found to lack capacity to make that decision. However, clinical reality (...) is more complicated, and, in borderline cases, different physicians may arrive at disparate judgments of capacity. In such cases, when capacity-determination protocols fail to achieve consensus, physicians would benefit from guidance regarding the clinical decision-making process necessary to elucidate the most ethically sound course of action. This article considers one such case and argues that, in a limited number of cases, respect for autonomy may require overriding a patient’s stated treatment preference when a capacity determination is equivocal, even though the patient has not clearly demonstrated a lack of capacity. (shrink)

Attention is essential to the life of the mind, a central topic in cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. Traditional debates in philosophy stand to benefit from greater understanding of the phenomenon, whether on the nature of the self, the foundation of knowledge, the natural basis of consciousness, or the origins of action and responsibility. This book is at the crossroads of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, offering a new theoretical stance on the concept of attention and how it intersects (...) with other functions of the mind, such as perception, consciousness, and action. It presents attention as directed by a subject, essential for perception, but not consciousness or action. By taking seriously the existence of a subject it stands against current trends in philosophy and cognitive science. This book offers an account of the subject and its role in attention that will both help motivate a subject-centered account and avoid some of the common criticisms regarding its existence. It engages with work by many philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, including Block, Campbell, Dickie, Husserl, James, Koch, Mack and Rock, Merleau-Ponty, Treisman, and Wu. (shrink)

Decades before the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, Adorno condemned our destructive and self-destructive relationship to the natural world, warning of the catastrophe that may result if we continue to treat nature as an object that exists exclusively for our own benefit. "Adorno on Nature" presents the first detailed examination of the pivotal role of the idea of natural history in Adorno's work. A comparison of Adorno's concerns with those of key ecological theorists - social ecologist Murray Bookchin, (...) ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant, and deep ecologist Arne Naess - reveals how Adorno speaks directly to many of today's most pressing environmental issues. Ending with a discussion of the philosophical conundrum of unity in diversity, "Adorno on Nature" also explores how social solidarity can be promoted as a necessary means of confronting environmental problems. (shrink)

My primary target in this paper is a puzzle that emerges from the conjunction of several seemingly innocent assumptions in action theory and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. The puzzle I have in mind is this. On one widely held account of moral responsibility, an agent is morally responsible only for those actions or outcomes over which that agent exercises control. Recently, however, some have cited cases where agents appear to be morally responsible without exercising any control. This leads some (...) to abandon the control-based account of responsibility and replace it with an alternative account. It leads others to deny the intuition that agents are responsible in these troublesome cases. After outlining the account of moral responsibility I have in mind, I look at some of the arguments made against the viability of this theory. I show that there are conceptual resources for salvaging the control account, focusing in particular on the nature of vigilance. I also argue that there is empirical data that supports the control account so conceived. (shrink)

There are a wide variety of potential applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in Defence settings, ranging from the use of autonomous drones to logistical support. However, limited research exists exploring how the public view these, especially in view of the value of public attitudes for influencing policy-making. An accurate understanding of the public’s perceptions is essential for crafting informed policy, developing responsible governance, and building responsive assurance relating to the development and use of AI in military settings. This study is (...) the first to explore public perceptions of and attitudes towards AI in Defence. A series of four focus groups were conducted with 20 members of the UK public, aged between 18 and 70, to explore their perceptions and attitudes towards AI use in general contexts and, more specifically, applications of AI in Defence settings. Thematic analysis revealed four themes and eleven sub-themes, spanning the role of humans in the system, the ethics of AI use in Defence, trust in AI versus trust in the organisation, and gathering information about AI in Defence. Participants demonstrated a variety of misconceptions about the applications of AI in Defence, with many assuming that a variety of different technologies involving AI are already being used. This highlighted a confluence between information from reputable sources combined with narratives from the mass media and conspiracy theories. The study demonstrates gaps in knowledge and misunderstandings that need to be addressed, and offers practical insights for keeping the public reliably, accurately, and adequately informed about the capabilities, limitations, benefits, and risks of AI in Defence. (shrink)

This paper explores whether consciousness can exist without attention. This is a hot topic in philosophy of mind and cognitive science due to the popularity of theories that hold attention to be necessary for consciousness. The discovery of a form of consciousness that exists without the influence of attention would require a change in the way that many global workspace theorists, for example, understand the role and function of consciousness. Against this understanding, at least three forms of consciousness have been (...) argued to exist without attention: perceptual gist, imagistic consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness. After first arguing that the evidence is inconclusive on the question of whether these forms of consciousness exist without attention, I here present a fourth form of consciousness that is likely to be more successful: conscious entrainment. I argue that conscious entrainment is a form of consciousness associated with skilled behavior in which attention is sometimes absent. (shrink)

Wayne Wu argues that attention is necessary for action: since action requires a solution to the ‘Many–Many Problem’, and since only attention can solve the Many–Many Problem, attention is necessary for action. We question the first of these two steps and argue that it is based on an oversimplified distinction between actions and reflexes. We argue for a more complex typology of behaviours where one important category is action that does not require a solution to the Many–Many Problem, and so (...) does not require attention. (shrink)

How does attention contribute to perceptual experience? Within cognitive science, attention is known to contribute to the organization of sensory features into perceptual objects, or “object-based organization.” The current paper tackles a different type of organization and thus suggests a different role for attention in conscious perception. Within every perceptual experience we find that more subjectively interesting percepts stand out in the foreground, whereas less subjectively interesting percepts are relegated to the background. The sight of a sycamore often gains the (...) visual foreground for a nature lover, whereas the sound of a violin often gains the auditory foreground for a music lover, but not necessarily vice versa. How does the perceptual system organize early sensory processing according to the subject’s interests? The current paper reveals how this subject-based organization is brought about and maintained through top-down attention. In fact, the current paper argues that top-down attention is necessary for conscious perception in so far as it is necessary for bringing about and maintaining the subject-based organization of perceptual experience. (shrink)

In 2018 Academic Placement Data and Analysis ran a survey of doctoral students and recent graduates on the topics of diversity and inclusivity in collaboration with the Graduate Student Council and Data Task Force of the American Philosophical Association. We submitted a preliminary report in Fall 2018 that describes the origins and procedure of the survey [1]. This is our final report on the survey. We first discuss the demographic profile of our survey participants and compare it to the United (...) States general population, its doctoral students, and APA membership, finding several areas of underrepresentation (i.e. gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic, and veteran status). We then discuss the results of questions regarding diversity and inclusivity. We find, for instance, that participant comfort in philosophy depends on gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, and language status and that participants most often mentioned the theme of diversity when asked how philosophy could be more inclusive. Finally, we discuss the results of questions related to graduate program and placement. We find, for example, that underrepresented graduates are both less likely to recommend their graduate program to others and less likely to prefer an academic job. We close by making some recommendations for the APA and for the discipline based on our findings. (shrink)

Some stem cell researchers believe that it is easier to derive human embryonic stem cells from fresh rather than frozen embryos and they have had in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinicians invite their infertility patients to donate their fresh embryos for research use. These embryos include those that are deemed 'suitable for transfer' (i.e. to the woman's uterus) and those deemed unsuitable in this regard. This paper focuses on fresh embryos deemed suitable for transfer - hereafter 'fresh embryos'- which IVF patients (...) have good reason not to donate. We explain why donating them to research is not in the self-interests specifically of female IVF patients. Next, we consider the other-regarding interests of these patients and conclude that while fresh embryo donation may serve those interests, it does so at unnecessary cost to patients' self-interests. Lastly, we review some of the potential barriers to the autonomous donation of fresh embryos to research and highlight the risk that female IVF patients invited to donate these embryos will misunderstand key aspects of the donation decision, be coerced to donate, or be exploited in the consent process. On the basis of our analysis, we conclude that patients should not be asked to donate their fresh embryos to stem cell research. (shrink)

In philosophy, the textbook case for the discussion of human motivation is the examination (and almost always, the refutation) of psychological egoism. The arguments have become part of the folklore of our tribe, from their inclusion in countless introductory texts. [...] One of my central aims has been to define the issues empirically, so we do not just settle them by definition. Although I am inclined at present to put my bets on the reward-event theory, with its internalism, monism, and (...) causal primacy of satisfaction, I think we are very far from knowing enough to settle these questions concerning motivation, human or otherwise. The winds of science will blow where they may. In the meantime, we can be a bit more circumspect about what we put in our tribal folklore. (shrink)

This book concerns the ethics of having children through adoption or technologically-assisted reproduction. Some people who choose between these methods struggle between them. Others do not agonize in this way, perhaps because they have a profound desire for a genetic link to the child(ren) they will parent and so prefer assisted reproduction, they view adoption as the only morally decent choice in an overcrowded world, or for some other reason. This book critically examines moral choices that involve each of these (...) ways of making or expanding families with children. The contributors discuss how adoption and assisted reproduction are morally distinct from one another, but also emphasize how they are morally similar, given that both are forms of family‐making. (shrink)

The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, published in 1980, presented a view of the Scientific Revolution that challenged the hegemony of mechanistic science as a marker of progress. It argued that seventeenth‐century science could be implicated in the ecological crisis, the domination of nature, and the devaluation of women in the production of scientific knowledge. This essay offers a twenty‐five‐year retrospective of the book’s contributions to ecofeminism, environmental history, and reassessments of the Scientific Revolution. It also (...) responds to challenges to the argument that Francis Bacon’s rhetoric legitimated the control of nature. Although Bacon did not use terms such as “the torture of nature,” his followers, with some justification, interpreted his rhetoric in that light. (shrink)

Beginning with a focus on the ethical foundations of caregiving in health and expanding towards problems of ethics and justice implicated in a range of issues, this book develops and expands the notion of care itself and its connection to practice. Organised around the themes of culture as a restraint on caregiving in different social contexts and situations, innovative methods in healthcare, and the way in which culture works to position care as part of a rhetorical approach to dependency, responsibility, (...) and justice, The Ethics of Carepresents case studies examining institutional responses to end-of-life issues, the notion of informed consent, biomedicine, indigenous rights and postcolonialism in care and theoretical approaches to the concept of care. Offering discussions from a variety of disciplinary approaches, including sociology, communication, and social theory, as well as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and deconstruction, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in healthcare, medicine, justice and the question of how we think about care as a notion and social form, and how this is related to practice. (shrink)

This journal article reflects on the conceptualization of a three-day meeting convened to open space for thinking differently about the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, and to begin to explore the possibility of working beyond the constraints of standard urban studies and regimes of spatial planning through which the city is conventionally viewed and researched. The incentive underpinning the 2015 Performative Urbanisms workshop was the desire to find areas of correspondence and overlap in the often widely separated realms of scholarly (...) research and grassroots urban activism. To this end, a group of international and Johannesburg-based academics, writers, artists, analysts, and activists came together to explore a range of themes around the city and its visual, spatial, textual, and especially performative, representations, in the context of its functioning as a global city in comparative perspective. As the contents of this Special Issue show, the workshop provided space to consider diverse research methodologies, creative writings, and artistic strategies aimed at moving beyond formulaic constructs of Johannesburg, and instead to offer an accounting of its novelties, complexities, and originalities. (shrink)

The first sustained exploration of Simondon's work to be published in English. This collection of essays, including one by Simondon himself, outlines the central tenets of Simondon's thought, the implication of his thought for numerous disciplines and his relationship to other thinkers such as Heidegger, Deleuze and Canguilhem.Complete with a contextualising introduction and a glossary of technical terms, it offers an entry point to this important thinker and will appeal to people working in philosophy, philosophy of science, media studies, social (...) theory and political philosophy.Gilbert Simondon's work has recently come to prominence in America and around the Anglophone world, having been of great importance in France for many years. (shrink)

The introduction to a special issue of the journal Bioethics that we edited.

The article aims to distinguish autonomy from integrity. I claim that integrity is different from a form of autonomy at least, but that integrity and autonomy overlap considerably. Integrity itself is a form of autonomy: what ethicists call ‘moral autonomy.’ (They tend to distinguish between personal and moral autonomy.) Autonomy is the genus, one might say, with integrity (i.e., moral autonomy) and personal autonomy being species of it.

Self-protection seems to be negatively correlated with integrity on the standard conception of that virtue. To be self-protective is to lose some of our integrity. In this paper, I pursue the somewhat unlikely claim that a certain amount of self-protection is consistent with integrity and is even required by it in many circumstances.

In Explaining Attitudes, Baker argues that we should treat our everyday practices as relevant to metaphysical debates, resulting in a stance of realism with respect to intentional explanations. In this chapter I will argue that if one is going to be a practical realist about anything, it should be the self, or subject of attention. I will use research on attention combined with the stance of practical realism to argue in favor of a substantive self. That is, I will present (...) an account of the self that directs and controls attention, in line with our everyday view of the self. I will contrast this account with what I call the “illusion view,” which presents the self and its apparent causal power in the case of attention as an illusion. My account of the self will make use of several of Baker's ideas, including non-reductive materialism and broad supervenience. (shrink)

(2010). Levels of Intervention: Communicating with More Precision About Planned Use of Critical Interventions. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 78-79.

Costly signaling theories of religion contend that religious belief and behaviors function as costly signals of cooperative intent. Such signals are evolvable because they allow likely cooperators to find one another, while excluding potential cheats or free riders that would be unwilling to pay the price associated with sending the signal. As a result, under the right conditions, religious costly signaling can emerge as an evolutionary stable strategy. However, reliability certifying costly signaling can evolve and stabilize only when certain necessary (...) conditions are satisfied. In this paper we argue that current versions of the theory do not adequately demonstrate that these conditions are met. (shrink)

Among the many puzzling features of Leibniz’s philosophy, none has received more attention in the recent literature than his position on freedom. Leibniz makes his views on freedom a central theme in his philosophical writings from early in his career until its close. And yet while significant efforts have been concentrated on decoding his views on this issue, much of the discussion has focused on only one facet of Leibniz’s treatment of it. I have argued elsewhere that there are at (...) least three distinct avenues by which Leibniz approaches the issue of freedom and consequently three avenues we can follow in an attempt to understand his view. I call these the three axes of the problem of freedom. (shrink)

The mature Leibniz frequently uses the phrase “moral necessity” in the context of discussing free choice. In this essay I provide a seventeenth century geneology of the phrase. I show that the doctrine of moral necessity was developed by scholastic philosophers who sought to retain a robust notion of freedom while purging bruteness from their systems. Two sorts of bruteness were special targets. The first is metaphysical bruteness, according to which contingent events or states of affairs occur without a sufficient (...) explanation. The second is semantic bruteness according to which a proposition can be true without a truth maker. Denying eithersort of bruteness was thought by some to raise problems for freedom. Defenders of moral necessity thought the notion solved these problems without having to invoke bruteness. (shrink)

You have thoughts, feelings and desires. You remember your past and imagine your future. Sometimes you make a special effort, other times you are content to simply relax. All of these things are true about you. But do you exist? Is your sense of self an illusion, or is there something in the world that we can point to and say: ‘Ah, yes – that is you’? If you are familiar with the contemporary science of mind, you will know that (...) the concept of a substantive self, separate from the mere experience of self, is unpopular. But this stance is unwarranted. Research on attention points to a self beyond experience, with its own powers and properties. (shrink)

One understanding of conscience dominates bioethical discussion about conscience. On this view, to have a conscience is to be compelled to act in accordance with one’s own moral values for the sake of one’s “integrity,” where integrity is understood as inner or psychological unity. Conscience is deemed valuable because it promotes this quality. In this paper, I describe the dominant view, attempt to show that it is flawed, and sketch a positive alternative to it. In my opinion, conscience often fails (...) to promote inner unity (regardless of the degree of inner unity we have in mind); acting with a conscience leaves many people broken rather than unified. A better view about the value of conscience is that having a conscience encourages morally responsible agency. My goal is to prove that this alternative explains better what it means to value conscience in health care and the extent to which we ought to value it. (shrink)

Contemporary society operates beyond safe boundaries of the Earth system. Returning to a safe operating space for humanity within Earth system boundaries is a question of justice. The relevance of the economy—and thus of business—for bringing society back to a safe and just operating space highlights the importance of business ethics research for understanding the role of business in Earth system justice. In this commentary, we explore the relevance of business ethics research for understanding the crucial role of business in (...) the dynamics of the Earth system. We do so by integrating the perspectives of business ethics and system-oriented sustainability science on the basis of the theory of metabolic rift, which explains how the dynamics of capitalism result in the destruction of the natural environment. On this basis, we argue that a mutually reinforcing relationship between perpetual economic growth and profit seeking behaviour of business, which we call the _loop of unsustainability_, continually deepens the metabolic rift and keeps business from effectively contributing to Earth system justice. This perspective allows us to formulate firm-level and system-level preconditions for attaining Earth system justice, and to sketch a research agenda that links business ethics scholarship with questions of Earth system justice. (shrink)

Some feminists have been critical about the dominant conception of autonomy, questioning, for example, its conception of persons and ideal of personhood. Tom Beauchamp and James Childress (BC), the major proponents of the dominant conception of autonomy, believe that these feminists have misunderstood their theory and, moreover, that their theory is immune to feminist attack. Their response to feminist critics, however, has been dismissive and does nothing to assuage these critics concerns. In this paper I briefly review the state of (...) play in this debate about autonomy, showing that BC are not without positive rejoinders to objections raised by feminist critics. These rejoinders rest on the notion that feminist concerns are a matter of what is logically entailed by BCs theory of autonomy and attempt to show that feminist commitments are logically consistent with that theory. However, these rejoinders are less than convincing for reasons illuminated by Cheshire Calhoun. Calhoun reminds us that feminists are sensitive to ways in which the shape of discourse is influenced by non-epistemic considerations. In particular, Calhoun draws our attention to the cumulative effect of a whole tradition of moral reasoning that focuses on too narrow a range of moral problems and too narrow an understanding of people and the human condition. BCs conception of autonomy relies on and reinforces ideologies of the moral life created in just this way. Following Calhoun, I show that criticism of their theory as ideology is not criticism of its logical implications, but something far more damaging, something without available rejoinders. (shrink)

Currently, the preferred accommodation for conscientious objection to abortion in medicine is to allow the objector to refuse to accede to the patient’s request so long as the objector refers the patient to a physician who performs abortions. The referral part of this arrangement is controversial, however. Pro-life advocates claim that referrals make objectors complicit in the performance of acts that they, the objectors, find morally offensive. McLeod argues that the referral requirement is justifiable, although not in the way that (...) people usually assume. (shrink)

The main aims of the paper are to explain how objectification admits of degrees and why a significant portion of the objectification of women in contemporary Western society - objectification that contributes to their oppression - is what I call "partial objectification." To acknowledge the full range of objectification in women's lives, feminists need a theory of how objectification can be degreed. They need to be able to say that women can be both bosom and legitimate job candidate, both breeder (...) and health care patient, both sex object and intimate partner. (shrink)

A developing neurobiological/psychological theory of positive motivation gives a key causal role to reward events in the brain which can be directly activated by electrical stimulation (ESB). In its strongest form, this Reward Event Theory (RET) claims that all positive motivation, primary and learned, is functionally dependent on these reward events. Some of the empirical evidence is reviewed which either supports or challenges RET. The paper examines the implications of RET for the concepts of 'motivation', 'desire' and 'reward' or 'pleasure'. (...) It is argued (1) that a 'causal base' as opposed to a functional' concept of motivation has theoretical advantages; (2) that a causal distinction between the focus' and the 'anchor' of desire suggests an ineliminable 'opacity' of desire; and (3) that some affective concept, such as 'pleasure', should play a key role in psychological explanation, distinct from that of motivational (or cognitive) concepts. A concept of 'reward' or 'pleasure' as intrinsically positive affect is defended, and contrasted with the more 'operational' definitions of 'reward' in some of the hypotheses of Roy Wise. (shrink)