Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a relatively recent incarnation in social work's long history of valuing evidence as a basis for practice. Few argue with the ethics and usefulness of grounding practice in empirically tested interventions. Critics of EBP instead focus on how it is defined and implemented. Critiques include what counts as evidence, who makes decisions regarding research agendas and processes, and the lack of attention to context. This essay reflects on such critiques and suggests that social work, as a (...) profession that values human diversity, equality, and self-determination, is well situated to shed light on such debates about EBP. As a profession that supports a person-in-environment perspective, we must examine not only the theory but the practice of EPB in academic, institutional, and societal settings. It is also argued that, owing to our professional mission, it is not enough to acknowledge the risk of oppression and harm; we are obligated to take them seriously and include such potential for harm in our assessment of so-called best practices. (shrink)

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law. ACA aims to improve access to care and health outcomes through a number of mechanisms, including requiring most individuals to carry health insurance, prohibiting insurers from denying health insurance coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and creating exchanges through which individuals and families not eligible for employer- or government-sponsored health insurance may purchase coverage. While the Act is aimed primarily at improving individual health by increasing (...) access to health insurance, it also contains a number of provisions targeted directly at improving health at the population level. Most of these provisions, which encompass a variety of disease prevention and access-to-care initiatives, are found in ACA Title IV. (shrink)

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law. ACA aims to improve access to care and health outcomes through a number of mechanisms, including requiring most individuals to carry health insurance, prohibiting insurers from denying health insurance coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and creating exchanges through which individuals and families not eligible for employer- or government-sponsored health insurance may purchase coverage. While the Act is aimed primarily at improving individual health by increasing (...) access to health insurance, it also contains a number of provisions targeted directly at improving health at the population level. Most of these provisions, which encompass a variety of disease prevention and access-to-care initiatives, are found in ACA Title IV. (shrink)

States are rapidly modifying law and policy to increase access to the opioid antidote naloxone, and the provision of naloxone rescue kits for use in the event of overdose is becoming increasingly common. As of late 2014 the majority of states had passed laws increasing naloxone access, and nearly as many have modified emergency responder scope of practice protocols to permit Emergency Medical Technicians and law enforcement officers to administer the medication. While the text of these laws is generally similar, (...) their implementation varies among states.This article outlines experiences and lessons learned from two diverse states, Massachusetts and North Carolina. In Massachusetts naloxone access initiatives were well underway before formal legislative action occurred, while in North Carolina the passage of a naloxone access law served as a catalyst for the creation of new programs and facilitated the scale-up of existing ones. In both states legislative action was necessary to permit the prescription and dispensing of naloxone to the friends and family members of people who use opioids, a key legal change. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent discussions in the field of moral cognition suggest that the relationship between emotion and judgment-formation can be described in three separate ways: firstly, it narrows our atte...

For those who subscribe to a pro-Black political ideology, like that of Pan-Africanism or Black Nationalism, is there a specific moral obligation between Black agents to protect one another against intersectional/multidimensional oppressions? Africana people are often subjugated to other forms of domination outside of anti-Black racism exclusively. When examining offenses against Black women, queer Black people, poor Black people, etc., both Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist ethics suggest a moral obligation of protection to all Africana people, but there are varying ways (...) that obligation is explicated. In this argument, I assert that Amílcar Cabral’s text Resistance and Decolonization provides a critical framework for the ways in which disenfranchised, Africana people should be advocated for by their Africana counterparts that take Black collectivity seriously. This argument, as a starting point, conceptualizes Africana people defending one another as a form of decolonization, and it describes four dimensions of moral obligation for defense both within and outside of Black communities: political, economic, cultural, and armed defense. (shrink)

Representation is central to contemporary theorizing about the mind/brain. But the nature of representation--both in the mind/brain and more generally--is a source of ongoing controversy. One way of categorizing representational types is to distinguish between the analog and the digital: the received view is that analog representations vary smoothly, while digital representations vary in a step-wise manner. I argue that this characterization is inadequate to account for the ways in which representation is used in cognitive science; in its place, I (...) suggest an alternative taxonomy. I will defend and extend David Lewis's account of analog and digital representation, distinguishing analog from continuous representation, as well as digital from discrete representation. I will argue that the distinctions available in this four-fold account accord with representational features of theoretical interest in cognitive science more usefully than the received analog/digital dichotomy. (shrink)

Corey W. Dyck presents a new account of Kant's criticism of the rational investigation of the soul in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason, in light of its eighteenth-century German context. When characterizing the rational psychology that is Kant's target in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason chapter of the Critique commentators typically only refer to an approach to, and an account of, the soul found principally in the thought of Descartes and Leibniz. But Dyck argues that to do so (...) is to overlook the distinctive rational psychology developed by Christian Wolff, which emphasized the empirical foundation of any rational cognition of the soul, and which was widely influential among eighteenth-century German philosophers, including Kant. In this book, Dyck reveals how the received conception of the aim and results of Kant's Paralogisms must be revised in light of a proper understanding of the rational psychology that is the most proximate target of Kant's attack. In particular, he contends that Kant's criticism hinges upon exposing the illusory basis of the rational psychologist's claims inasmuch as he falls prey to the appearance of the soul as being given in inner experience. Moreover, Dyck demonstrates that significant light can be shed on Kant's discussion of the soul's substantiality, simplicity, personality, and existence by considering the Paralogisms in this historical context.Readership: Scholars and advanced students in history of philosophy, especially those working on Kant. (shrink)

This paper brings empirical and theoretical studies of ethical leadership into conversation with one another in an effort to determine the antecedent to perceived ethical leadership. Employing a Levinasian perspective, I argue that ethical leadership entails being faced with the impossible task of realizing the needs of many individual others. For this reason, I argue, perceived ethical leadership is grounded in an employee’s perception that a leader struggles to make decisions based on the conflicting demands placed upon her. More important (...) than the result of a leader’s decision is the degree to which the leader demonstrates concern for the well-being of others in her decision-making process. I ground my discussion through reference to results of empirical studies on behaviors associated with ethical leadership, including Brown, Treviño, and Harrison, Kalshoven, Den Hartog, and De Hoogh, and Treviño, Hartman, and Brown. I identify several mediating factors which may influence employee perception of ethical leadership, proposing avenues for further research which can help to clarify the relationship between concrete leadership behaviors and perceived ethical leadership. (shrink)

When faced with a dilemma between believing what is supported by an impartial assessment of the evidence (e.g., that one's friend is guilty of a crime) and believing what would better fulfill a moral obligation (e.g., that the friend is innocent), people often believe in line with the latter. But is this how people think beliefs ought to be formed? We addressed this question across three studies and found that, across a diverse set of everyday situations, people treat moral considerations (...) as legitimate grounds for believing propositions that are unsupported by objective, evidence-based reasoning. We further document two ways in which moral considerations affect how people evaluate others' beliefs. First, the moral value of a belief affects the evidential threshold required to believe, such that morally beneficial beliefs demand less evidence than morally risky beliefs. Second, people sometimes treat the moral value of a belief as an independent justification for belief, and on that basis, sometimes prescribe evidentially poor beliefs to others. Together these results show that, in the folk ethics of belief, morality can justify and demand motivated reasoning. (shrink)

Legal theorists have characterized physical evidence of brain dysfunction as a double-edged sword, wherein the very quality that reduces the defendant’s responsibility for his transgression could simultaneously increase motivations to punish him by virtue of his apparently increased dangerousness. However, empirical evidence of this pattern has been elusive, perhaps owing to a heavy reliance on singular measures that fail to distinguish between plural, often competing internal motivations for punishment. The present study employed a test of the theorized double-edge pattern using (...) a novel approach designed to separate such motivations. We asked a large sample of participants (N = 330) to render criminal sentencing judgments under varying conditions of the defendant’s mental health status (Healthy, Neurobiological Disorder, Psychological Disorder) and the disorder’s treatability (Treatable, Untreatable). As predicted, neurobiological evidence simultaneously elicited shorter prison sentences (i.e., mitigating) and longer terms of involuntary hospitalization (i.e., aggravating) than equivalent psychological evidence. However, these effects were not well explained by motivations to restore treatable defendants to health or to protect society from dangerous persons but instead by deontological motivations pertaining to the defendant’s level of deservingness and possible obligation to provide medical care. This is the first study of its kind to quantitatively demonstrate the paradoxical effect of neuroscientific trial evidence and raises implications for how such evidence is presented and evaluated. (shrink)

Current orthodoxy takes representation to be essential to computation. However, a philosophical account of computation that does not appeal to representation would be useful, given the difficulties involved in successfully theorizing representation. Piccinini's recent mechanistic account of computation proposes to do just that: it couches computation in terms of what certain mechanisms do without requiring the manipulation or processing of representations whatsoever (Piccinini 2015). Most crucially, mechanisms must process medium-independent vehicles. There are two ways to understand what "medium-independence" means on (...) this account; however, on either understanding, the account fails. Either too many things end up being counted as computational, or purportedly natural computations (e.g., neural computations) cannot be counted at all. In the end, illustrating this failure sheds some light on the way to revise the orthodoxy in the hope of a better account of computation. (shrink)

Representation is typically taken to be importantly separate from its physical implementation. This is exemplified in Marr’s three-level framework, widely cited and often adopted in neuroscience. However, the separation between representation and physical implementation is not a necessary feature of information-processing systems. In particular, when it comes to analog computational systems, Marr’s representational/algorithmic level and implementational level collapse into a single level. Insofar as analog computation is a better way of understanding neural computation than other notions, Marr’s three-level framework must (...) then be amended into a two-level framework. However, far from being a problem or limitation, this sheds lights on how to understand physical media as being representational, but without a separate, medium-independent representational level. (shrink)

The task of theologizing literature in the twentieth century -- Bergonsian conceptions of time : duration, dualism, intention -- Meeting the eternal in the present : Bergsonsism and the theology of present time in C.S. Lewis's The great divorce -- T.S. Eliot's Bergonsian "always present" : incarnation and duration in Four quartets -- W.H. Auden's themes of time and dualism : the Bergsonsian theology of "kairos and logos.".

Over the last twenty-five years, climate scientists working on the attribution of climate change to humans have developed increasingly sophisticated statistical models in a process that can be understood as a kind of calibration: the gradual changes to the statistical models employed in attribution studies served as iterative revisions to a measurement(-like) procedure motivated primarily by the aim of neutralizing particularly troublesome sources of error or uncertainty. This practice is in keeping with recent work on the evaluation of models more (...) generally that views models as tools for particular tasks: what drives the process is the desire for models that provide more reliable grounds for inference rather than accuracy to the underlying mechanisms of data-generation. (shrink)

According to the widely accepted principles of beneficence and distributive justice, I argue that healthcare providers and facilities have an ethical duty to reduce the ecological footprint of the services they provide. I also address the question of whether the reductions in footprint need or should be patient-facing. I review Andrew Jameton and Jessica Pierce’s claim that achieving ecological sustainability in the healthcare sector requires rationing the treatment options offered to patients. I present a number of reasons to think that (...) we should not ration health care to achieve sufficient reductions in a society’s overall consumption of ecological goods. Moreover, given the complexities of ecological rationing, I argue that there are good reasons to think that the ethical duty to reduce the ecological footprint of health care should focus on only nonpatient-facing changes. I review a number of case studies of hospitals who have successfully retrofitted facilities to make them more efficient and reduced their resource and waste streams. (shrink)

Some have recently argued that the current generation dominates future generations by causing long-term climate change. They relate these claims to Philip Pettit and Frank Lovett's neorepublican theory of domination. In this paper, I examine their claims and ask whether the neorepublican conception of domination remains theoretically coherent when the relation is between current agents and nonoverlapping future subjects. I differentiate between an ‘outcome’ and a ‘relational’ conception of domination. I show how both are theoretically coherent when extended to posterity (...) but only if we make different definitional and normative choices than those made by Pettit and Lovett. (shrink)

Pierre Duhem’s influential argument for holism relies on a view of the role that background theory plays in testing: according to this still common account of “auxiliary hypotheses,” elements of background theory serve as truth-apt premises in arguments for or against a hypothesis. I argue that this view is mistaken. Rather than serving as truth-apt premises in arguments, auxiliary hypotheses are employed as “epistemic tools”: instruments that perform specific tasks in connecting our theoretical questions with the world but that are (...) not premises in arguments. On the resulting picture, the acceptability of an auxiliary hypothesis depends not on its truth but on contextual factors such as the task or purpose it is put to and the other tools employed alongside it. (shrink)

The way people experience time is a major theme in the film Doctor Strange, which traces the spiritual metamorphosis of the title character as he moves from self‐centered materialism to selfless spirituality. The revolutionary philosopher Henri Bergson argued that time had suffered from the scientific rationality of the late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth centuries, because scientific approaches to time failed to get at time's essence. For Bergson, scientifically closed mechanism, which views reality as nothing more than the inner workings of a clock, (...) distorted the truth of time and eliminated the possibility of living meaningfully within it. According to Bergson, the purpose of life is to move from Doctor Stephen Strange's experience of time to the Ancient One's, to go from what Bergson called quantitative multiplicity to qualitative multiplicity. Kaecilius' rejection of time serves to emphasize Strange's qualitative progression, which reaches a tipping point at the film's emotional apex, the Ancient One's moment of death. (shrink)

Raters may introduce construct-irrelevant variance when evaluating written responses to performance assessments, threatening the validity of students’ scores. Numerous factors in the rating process, including the content of students’ responses, the characteristics of raters, and the context in which the scoring occurs, are thought to influence the quality of raters’ scores. Despite considerable study of rater effects, little research has examined the relative impacts of the factors that influence rater accuracy. In practice, such integrated examinations are needed to afford evidence-based (...) decisions of rater selection, training, and feedback. This study provides the first naturalistic, integrated examination of rater accuracy in a large-scale assessment program. Leveraging rater monitoring data from an English language arts summative assessment program, I specified cross-classified, multilevel models via Bayesian estimation to decompose the impact of response content, rater characteristics, and scoring contexts on rater accuracy. Results showed relatively little variation in accuracy attributable to teams, items, and raters. Raters did not collectively exhibit differential accuracy over time, though there was significant variation in individual rater’s scoring accuracy from response to response and day to day. I found considerable variation in accuracy across responses, which was in part explained by text features and other measures of response content that influenced scoring difficulty. Some text features differentially influenced the difficulty of scoring research and writing content. Multiple measures of raters’ qualification performance predicted their scoring accuracy, but general rater background characteristics including experience and education did not. Site-based and remote raters demonstrated comparable accuracy, while evening-shift raters were slightly less accurate, on average, than day-shift raters. This naturalistic, integrated examination of rater accuracy extends previous research and provides implications for rater recruitment, training, monitoring, and feedback to improve human evaluation of written responses. (shrink)

Hilbert’s choice operators τ and ε, when added to intuitionistic logic, strengthen it. In the presence of certain extensionality axioms they produce classical logic, while in the presence of weaker decidability conditions for terms they produce various superintuitionistic intermediate logics. In this thesis, I argue that there are important philosophical lessons to be learned from these results. To make the case, I begin with a historical discussion situating the development of Hilbert’s operators in relation to his evolving program in the (...) foundations of mathematics and in relation to philosophical motivations leading to the development of intuitionistic logic. This sets the stage for a brief description of the relevant part of Dummett’s program to recast debates in metaphysics, and in particular disputes about realism and anti-realism, as closely intertwined with issues in philosophical logic, with the acceptance of classical logic for a domain reflecting a commitment to realism for that domain. Then I review extant results about what is provable and what is not when one adds epsilon to intuitionistic logic, largely due to Bell and DeVidi, and I give several new proofs of intermediate logics from intuitionistic logic+ε without identity. With all this in hand, I turn to a discussion of the philosophical significance of choice operators. Among the conclusions I defend are that these results provide a finer-grained basis for Dummett’s contention that commitment to classically valid but intuitionistically invalid principles reflect metaphysical commitments by showing those principles to be derivable from certain existence assumptions; that Dummett’s framework is improved by these results as they show that questions of realism and anti-realism are not an “all or nothing” matter, but that there are plausibly metaphysical stances between the poles of anti-realism and realism, because different sorts of ontological assumptions yield intermediate rather than classical logic; and that these intermediate positions between classical and intuitionistic logic link up in interesting ways with our intuitions about issues of objectivity and reality, and do so usefully by linking to questions around intriguing everyday concepts such as “is smart,” which I suggest involve a number of distinct dimensions which might themselves be objective, but because of their multivalent structure are themselves intermediate between being objective and not. Finally, I discuss the implications of these results for ongoing debates about the status of arbitrary and ideal objects in the foundations of logic, showing among other things that much of the discussion is flawed because it does not recognize the degree to which the claims being made depend on the presumption that one is working with a very strong logic. (shrink)

This contemporary, comprehensive, and practical text helps you discover and determine your own guidelines for helping within the broad limits of professional codes of ethics and divergent theoretical positions. This text is the relied-upon, essential text for students in any helping field-the book many students return to well into their professional careers. The authors raise what they consider to be central issues, present a range of diverse views on the issues, discuss their position, and present opportunities for you to refine (...) your own thinking and actively develop your own informed position. Questions explored include: What role do the therapist's personal values play in the counseling relationship? What ethical responsibilities and rights do clients and therapists have? What considerations are involved in adapting counseling practice to diverse client populations? And more... (shrink)

Up-to-date and comprehensive, this practical best seller provides students with the basis for discovering their own guidelines for helping within the broad limits of professional codes of ethics and divergent theoretical positions. Respected authors Gerald Corey, Marianne Corey, and Cindy Corey raise what they consider to be central issues, present a range of diverse views on the issues, discuss their position, and provide opportunities for students to refine their thinking and develop an informed position. With new material (...) in every chapter and an emphasis on critical thinking, ISSUES AND ETHICS IN THE HELPING PROFESSIONS, 10th Edition, is useful for students as well as practicing professionals. This edition features MindTap®, the digital learning solution that helps instructors engage and transform today's students into critical thinkers and successful helpers. (shrink)

Functionalism is a popular solution to the mind–body problem. It has a number of versions. We outline some of the major releases of functionalism, listing some of their important features as well as some of the bugs that plagued these releases. We outline how different versions are related. Many have been pessimistic about functionalism’s prospects, but most criticisms have missed the latest upgrades. We end by suggesting a version of functionalism that provides a complete account of the mind.

In this essay I develop and defend a theory of state punishment within a wider conception of political legitimacy. While many moral theories of punishment focus on what is deserved by criminals, I theorize punishment within the specific context of the state's relationship to its citizens. Central to my account is Rawls's “liberal principle of legitimacy,” which requires that all state coercion be justifiable to all citizens. I extend this idea to the justification of political coercion to criminals qua citizens. (...) I argue that the liberal principle of legitimacy implicitly requires states to respect the basic political rights of those who are guilty of committing crimes, thus prohibiting capital punishment. (shrink)

This article analyses the gazes, looks, stares and glares in Laurence Anyways, and examines their affective, interpretive, and symbolic qualities, and their potential to create viewer empathy through affect. The cinematic gaze can produce sensations of shame and fear, by offering a sequence of varied “encounters” to which viewers can react, before we have been given a character onto which we can deflect them, thus bypassing the representational, narrative and even the sympathetic power of the medium to create “raw”, apparently (...) unmediated sensations. Through the point-of-view shot and direct address, the viewer is the object of the gazes it receives, and experiences their hate and rejection before actually being presented with the film's narrative object of the gaze – the film's protagonist, a transgender woman named Laurence. It examines how the viewer, after being affected, interprets and misinterprets the emotions behind the gazes, and then cognitively attaches the gazes' importance... (shrink)

Previous research has alluded to the predominance of atheism in participant pools of the Nonhuman Animal rights movement (Galvin and Herzog 1992; Guither 1998), as well as the correlation between atheism and support for anti-speciesism (Gabriel et al. 2012; The Humane League 2014), but no study to date has independently examined this demographic. This article presents a profile of 210 atheists and agnostics, derived from a larger survey of 287 American vegans conducted in early 2017. Results demonstrate that atheists constitute (...) one of the movement's largest demographics, and that atheist and agnostic vegans are more likely to adopt veganism out of concern for other animals. While these vegans did not register a higher level of social movement participation than religious vegans, they were more intersectionally oriented and more likely to politically identify with the far left. Given the Nonhuman Animal rights movement's overall failure to target atheists, these findings suggest a strategic oversight in overlooking the movement's potentially most receptive demographic. (shrink)

In this article, I outline a framework for the sociological study of culture that connects three intertwined elements of human culture and demonstrates the concrete contexts under which each most critically influences actions and their subsequent outcomes. In contrast to models that cast motivations, resources, and meanings as competing explanations of how culture affects action, I argue that these are fundamental constituent elements of culture that are inseparable, interdependent, and simultaneously operative. Which element provides the strongest link to action, and (...) how this link operates, must be understood as a function of the actor's position within wider social contexts. I argue that on average motivations have the most discernable link to action within a social strata, cultural resources provide the strongest link across strata, and meanings have the greatest direct influence when codified and sanctioned. I then offer a reframing and synthesis that reintegrates previously “competing” theories of culture into a more holistic context-dependent model of culture in action. Finally, I use evidence from prior empirical research, as well as new data from an ongoing ethnographic study of health behaviors among the aged, to show how various elements of culture are concretely linked to action in eight different social contexts. In doing so, I provide a roadmap for the transition out of the “either-or” logic underlying much of cultural theory and reemphasize the importance of the classical sociological concern for “when” and “how” various aspects of culture influence action and outcomes in concrete social contexts. (shrink)

Wilson [Dialectica 63:525–554, 2009], Moore [Int Stud Philos Sci 26:359–380, 2012], and Massin [Br J Philos Sci 68:805–846, 2017] identify an overdetermination problem arising from the principle of composition in Newtonian physics. I argue that the principle of composition is a red herring: what’s really at issue are contrasting metaphysical views about how to interpret the science. One of these views—that real forces are to be tied to physical interactions like pushes and pulls—is a superior guide to real forces than (...) the alternative, which demands that real forces are tied to “realized” accelerations. Not only is the former view employed in the actual construction of Newtonian models, the latter is both unmotivated and inconsistent with the foundations and testing of the science. (shrink)

The question of whether faith in God is reasonable is of renewed interest in today’s academy. In light of this interest, as well as the rise of militant religion and terrorism and the emergent reaction by neo-atheism, this volume considers this important question from the views of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and in a more novel fashion, of rhetoricians. It is comprised of a public debate between William Lane Craig, supporting the position that faith in God is reasonable and Alex Rosenberg, (...) arguing against that position. Scholars in the aforementioned fields then respond to the debate, representing both theistic and atheistic positions. The book concludes with rejoinders from Craig and Rosenberg. (shrink)

When information is transformed from what has traditionally been a paper-based format into digitized elements with meaning associated to them, new and intriguing discussions begin surrounding proper and improper uses of this codified and easily transmittable information. As these discussions continue, some health care providers, insurers, laboratories, pharmacies, and other healthcare stakeholders are creating and retroactively digitizing our medical information with the unambiguous endorsement of the federal government.Some argue that these enormous databases of medical information offer improved access to timely (...) information, evidence-based treatments, and complete records from which to provide care. To the extent that these claims are true, it would seem that this is a valuable asset that offers immeasurable benefit to all. Others believe this digitization to be an egregious invasion of privacy. In this article, I investigate the broad research questions of whether the public good aspect of capturing private health information outweighs individual interests and whether it is ethical to mandate participation in health information exchanges by all individuals who use the U.S. health system. (shrink)

Hartry Field, Jerry Fodor and others differ with Donald Davidson over the question of how a theory of content should be structured. Field and Fodor maintain that a theory should begin by following the compositional structure of a sentence in reducing the semantic properties of complex expressions to the semantic properties of their simplest parts and complete the job by reducing the semantic properties of the parts to non-semantic ones. Davidson describes this approach as the ‘Building-Block method’ and maintains that (...) it cannot possibly succeed. He holds that a theory of content should ‘give up reference’ by treating the semantic properties of basic expressions as a purely technical devices with no direct relation to non-semantic phenomenon. In this essay, I examine what I call “Davidson’s Dilemma”, the conflict between the apparent soundness the arguments for the view that a theory must treat reference as a point where linguistic and non-linguistic reality meet and the equally apparent soundness his argument that reference cannot possibly play this role. I propose a resolution to the dilemma that grants the validity of Davidson’s arguments against the building-block theories but is, I believe, more palatable to mainstream semanticists than Davidson’s solution. This solution, which I call ‘content partialism’ treats the reference of terms as regularities across propositional contents. I show how content partialism is consistent with a Kripkean theory of reference fixing, the touchstone of those who advocate building-block theories. (shrink)

In an influential paper, Wendy Parker argues that agreement across climate models isn’t a reliable marker of confirmation in the context of cutting-edge climate science. In this paper, I argue that while Parker’s conclusion is generally correct, there is an important class of exceptions. Broadly speaking, agreement is not a reliable marker of confirmation when the hypotheses under consideration are mutually consistent—when, e.g., we’re concerned with overlapping ranges. Since many cutting-edge questions in climate modeling require making distinctions between mutually consistent (...) hypotheses, agreement across models will be generally unreliable in this domain. In cases where we are only concerned with mutually exclusive hypotheses, by contrast, agreement across climate models is plausibly a reliable marker of confirmation. (shrink)

A number of theorists have argued that Scanlon's contractualist theory both "gets around" and "solves" the non-identity problem. They argue that it gets around the problem because hypothetical deliberation on general moral principles excludes the considerations that lead to the problem. They argue that it solves the problem because violating a contractualist moral principle in one's treatment of another wrongs that particular other, grounding a person-affecting moral claim. In this paper, I agree with the first claim but note that all (...) it shows is that the act is impersonally wrong. I then dispute the second claim. On Scanlon's contractualist view, one wrongs a particular other if one treats the other in a way that is unjustifiable to that other on reasons she could not reasonably reject. We should think of person-affecting wronging in terms of the reasons had by the actual agent and the actual person affected by the agent's action. In non-identity cases, interpersonal justifiability is therefore shaped both by the reason to reject the treatment provided by the bad suffered and the reason to affirm the treatment provided by the goods had as a result of existing. I argue it would be reasonable for the actual person to find the treatment justifiable, and so I conclude that Scanlon's contractualist metaethics does not provide a narrow person-affecting solution to the non-identity problem on its own terms. I conclude that the two claims represent a tension within Scanlon's contractualist theory itself. (shrink)

The author argues non-human, sentient animals have aggregation-trumping rights by explaining why and how they should be included in the scope of Kantian contractualism. He explains that the beings to whom we owe duties—who can be wronged by our treatment—are all those with the capacity for first-person, subjective experience; i.e., all sentient beings. To determine what duties we owe to such beings, we should reflect on the principles for the general regulation of behavior that could be hypothetically justified to their (...) imaginary perfectly reasonable counterparts; i.e., even though animals actually cannot understand or reflect on the reasons we have for treating them in a particular way, burdening them unjustifiably is wrong to them. The author argues this inclusive contractualist theory can explain all the distinctive moral phenomena that T. M. Scanlon’s approach does and so is a more attractive contractualist moral theory. (shrink)

William Whewell’s account of induction differs dramatically from the one familiar from twentieth-century debates. I argue that Whewell’s induction can be usefully understood by comparing the difference between his views and more standard accounts to contemporary debates between semantic and syntactic views of theories: rather than understanding inductive inference as capturing a relationship between sentences or propositions, Whewell understands it as a method for constructing a model of the world. The difference between this view and the more familiar picture of (...) induction is reflected in other aspects of Whewell’s philosophy of science, particularly his treatment of consilience and the order of discovery. (shrink)

The best and most popular argument for probabilism is the accuracy-dominance argument, which purports to show that alethic considerations alone support the view that an agent’s degrees of belief should always obey the axioms of probability. I argue that extant versions of the accuracy-dominance argument face a problem. In order for the mathematics of the argument to function as advertised, we must assume that every omniscient credence function is classically consistent; there can be no worlds in the set of dominance-relevant (...) worlds that obey some other logic. This restriction cannot be motivated on alethic grounds unless we’re also willing to accept that rationality requires belief in every metaphysical necessity, as the distinction between a priori logical necessities and a posteriori metaphysical ones is not an alethic distinction. To justify the restriction to classically consistent worlds, non-alethic motivation is required. And thus, if there is a version of the accuracy-dominance argument in support of probabilism, it isn’t one that is grounded in alethic considerations alone. (shrink)

Because of the “problem of individual causal inefficacy,” it has been difficult to explain why a purchase that will make little to no difference to a producer’s wrongdoing is itself morally wrong. Some have recently appealed to the concept of complicity in order to support the idea that consumers have a moral reason to avoid purchasing from companies engaged in wrongdoing. In this paper, I contribute to the development of this direction in consumer ethics. First, I explore how we should (...) define moral complicity in such situations. Some have claimed that an individual’s purchase makes her complicit, even though it makes no difference to the wrongdoing, because she is still knowingly joining in with the wrong that the company or other consumers are doing. I argue, however, that it is difficult to see making a purchase as a form of joining in a joint or group action. Instead, I respond to the causal inefficacy problem directly. I argue that even when the outcome is massively overdetermined, an individual purchase still makes a causal contribution to the principal wrongdoing and thus a basic condition for an act of moral complicity is met. Yet, this does not resolve the deeper question of whether and why consumers should morally avoid purchases that make them complicit in these cases. The issue is with how small the causal contribution such an individual purchase makes. That is, an individual purchase in such a situation may only make one a little bit complicit. I argue that for the concept of moral complicity to gain traction here, we will have to appeal to normative concerns besides the outcome of the complicit action. Still, even with this account, purchases in such overdetermination cases may not often be all things considered wrong because the reasons against them may be outweighed by other relevant reasons. (shrink)

Gregory Bateson’s work on play led him to conclude that paradox is the ground of propositions and denotation. Working through the concepts of analog and digital communication, logical typing problems, and various dimensions of “framing” and meta-discourse, I broadly illustrate how what Bateson came to call “the paradoxes of abstraction” inevitably arise within denotative utterances. In addressing the root paradoxes of framing and denotation which Bateson’s work on play identified and sought to elucidate, this manuscript outlines and advances some of (...) Bateson’s main contributions to communication theory. (shrink)

This paper explores the meaning of dreamless sleep. First, I consider four reasons why we commonly pass over sleep's ontological significance. Second, I compare and contrast death and sleep to show how each is oriented to questions regarding the possibilities of "being-a-whole." In the third and final part, I explore the meaning and implications of "being-toward-sleep," arguing that human existence emerges atop naturally anonymous corporeality (i.e. living being). In sum, I try to show that we can recover an authentic — (...) if somewhat ambiguous — sense of "being-a-whole" only by recognizing the ontological significance of dreamless sleep. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider Baumgarten’s views on the soul in the context of the Pietist critique of Wolff’s rational psychology. My primary aim is to account for the largely unacknowledged differences between Wolff’s and Baumgarten’s rational psychology, though I also hope to show that, in some cases, the Pietists were rather more perceptive in their reading of Wolff than they are typically given credit for as their criticisms frequently succeed in drawing attention to significant omissions in Wolff’s discussion.

This chapter contains sections titled: Contractualist Justification and Private Property Three Models of Welfare Rights The Proposals as Reasonable Alternatives Objections Conclusion References.

Since its inception in September 2010, the Network for Public Health Law has responded to hundreds of public health legal technical assistance claims from around the country. Based on a review of these data, a series of major trends in public health practice and the law are analyzed, including issues concerning: the Affordable Care Act, tobacco control, emergency legal preparedness, health information privacy, food policy, vaccination, drug overdose prevention, sports injury law, public health accreditation, and maternal breastfeeding. These and other (...) emerging themes in public health law demonstrate the essential role of law and practice in advancing the public's health. (shrink)