This paper investigates the process of moral agency development as a community-supported process. Based on a multimethod qualitative inquiry, including diaries, focus groups, and documentary analysis, we analyze the experiences of middle managers in two Norwegian hospitals during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that moral agency is developed through a community-embedded value inquiry, emerging in three partially overlapping steps. The first step is marked by moral reflex, an intuitive, value-driven, pre-reflective response to a crisis situation. In (...) the second step, the managers involved the community in value calibration, a collective-ethical sensemaking. In the third step, they took active stances to translate values into actions, with an increased awareness of values and an ability to explain and justify their actions. We label the steps, respectively: value inquiry-in-action, value inquiry-on-action and reflective enactment of value. An analysis of the process reveals two aspects critical for moral agency development: it happens through confrontation with uncertainty, and it is relational, that is, embedded in a community. While uncertainty forces an intuitive moral response, dialogical reflection in the community develops value awareness and relationships of mutual care and support. (shrink)

Each year in the UK there are approximately 250,000 miscarriages, 3,000 stillbirths and 3,000 terminations following a diagnosis of fetal-abnormality. This paper draws from original empirical research into the experience of pregnancy loss and the accompanying decisionmaking processes. A key finding is that there is considerable variation across England in the range of options that are offered for disposal of pregnancy remains and the ways in which information around disposal are communicated. This analysis seeks to outline the key features of (...) what constitutes effective communication in this context, where effective communication is taken to mean that patients are provided with the key information necessary, in an appropriate manner, so that they are fully able to make a decision. A primary source of evidence includes interviews with the bereaved and pregnancy-loss support workers, in order to understand how the options available, and associated necessary procedures, are communicated. In addition, patient information leaflets are also analyzed as they offer an important tool for information delivery at a difficult and emotionally charged time. Following this, an overview is provided of the information that these leaflets should contain, along with guidance on effective presentation of this information. (shrink)

What kind of thing is a psychiatric disorder? At present, this is the central question in the philosophy of psychiatry. Answers tend toward one of two opposing views: realism, the view that psychiatric disorders are natural kinds, and constructivism, the view that disorders are products of classificatory conventions. The difficulties with each are well rehearsed. One compelling third-way solution, developed by Peter Zachar, holds that disorders are practical kinds. Proponents of this view are left with the difficult task of explaining (...) what makes practical kinds practical. Kendler, Zachar, and Craver have recently developed a new third-way solution, according to which psychiatric disorders are mechanistic property cluster kinds. This account, already influential in the philosophy of psychiatry, holds that the usefulness of psychiatric kinds is explained by the stability of multilevel mechanisms that generate psychiatric symptoms. We argue that this account, like any that purports to address the central question in the philosophy of psychiatry without first attending carefully to the nature of psychiatry and the difference between its constituent scientific and philosophical parts, will ultimately be committed to untenable views about the nature of psychiatric science, the aims and limitations of scientific inquiry and mechanistic explanations, and the role of values in psychiatry. (shrink)

In the Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan considers a scenario where one must choose between killing either a human being or any number of dogs by throwing them from a lifeboat. Regan chooses the human being. His justification for this prescription is that the human being will suffer a greater harm from death than any of the dogs would. This prescription has met opposition on the grounds that the combined intrinsic value of the dogs’ experiences outweighs those of a (...) human being. This objection assumes that the intrinsic value of a whole is simply the sum of the intrinsic values of its parts. This paper offers a justification for Regan’s prescription that rejects this assumption. It argues that the combined intrinsic value of a human being’s possible experiences might be greater than those of any number of dogs’ because the experiences of dogs do not exhibit sufficient variety for their intrinsic value to be additive. (shrink)

This article reports the findings of a qualitative study that explored the organizational influences on moral distress for health professionals working in pediatric intensive care units across Canada. Participants were recruited to the study from PICUs across Canada. The PICU is a high-tech, fast-paced, high-pressure environment where caregivers frequently face conflict and ethical tension in the care of critically ill children. A number of themes including relationships with management, organizational structure and processes, workload and resources, and team dynamics were identified. (...) This study provides a rare and important multi-disciplinary perspective on this topic and the findings have implications for administrators and leaders who seek to improve the moral climate of healthcare delivery. (shrink)

BackgroundThe objective of this study was to evaluate the nature and extent of reproducible and transparent research practices in neurology publications.MethodsThe NLM catalog was used to identify MEDLINE-indexed neurology journals. A PubMed search of these journals was conducted to retrieve publications over a 5-year period from 2014 to 2018. A random sample of publications was extracted. Two authors conducted data extraction in a blinded, duplicate fashion using a pilot-tested Google form. This form prompted data extractors to determine whether publications provided (...) access to items such as study materials, raw data, analysis scripts, and protocols. In addition, we determined if the publication was included in a replication study or systematic review, was preregistered, had a conflict of interest declaration, specified funding sources, and was open access.ResultsOur search identified 223,932 publications meeting the inclusion criteria, from which 400 were randomly sampled. Only 389 articles were accessible, yielding 271 publications with empirical data for analysis. Our results indicate that 9.4% provided access to materials, 9.2% provided access to raw data, 0.7% provided access to the analysis scripts, 0.7% linked the protocol, and 3.7% were preregistered. A third of sampled publications lacked funding or conflict of interest statements. No publications from our sample were included in replication studies, but a fifth were cited in a systematic review or meta-analysis.ConclusionsCurrently, published neurology research does not consistently provide information needed for reproducibility. The implications of poor research reporting can both affect patient care and increase research waste. Collaborative intervention by authors, peer reviewers, journals, and funding sources is needed to mitigate this problem. (shrink)

The author confronts the idea of responsibility by mapping the work of J. L. Austin onto the criminal law. Doing so entails considering the extent to which the language of criminal law can be reconciled with ordinary language, a project that entails considering whether the language of criminal law is ordinary language.

Although Daniel Engster's “caring” human rights are, on the surface, a compelling way to bring the concept of care into the international political realm, I argue they actually serve to perpetuate some of the same problems of mainstream human-rights discourses. The problem is twofold. First, Engster's particular care theory relies on an uncritical acceptance of our dependence relations. It can, therefore, not only overlook how local and global institutions, norms, and the marketplace shape our relations of dependence, but also (...) serve to further naturalize our current dependence relations. Second, Engster's caring human rights are only minimally feminist, which means that they do not pay attention to the way in which women's full and equal political participation is a necessary component to challenging and overcoming the oppression, marginalization, and exploitation of women and their caring labor worldwide. Although I am sympathetic to Engster's goals and some of his proposed policy solutions, I argue that we should not abandon the critical, feminist lens of care ethics in favor of “caring” human rights that cannot overcome the care critique of mainstream human-rights discourses. (shrink)

Many philosophers have assumed, without argument, that Wittgenstein influenced Austin. More often, however, this is vehemently denied, especially by those who knew Austin personally. We compile and assess the currently available evidence for Wittgenstein’s influence on Austin’s philosophy of language. Surprisingly, this has not been done before in any detail. On the basis of both textual and circumstantial evidence we show that Austin’s work demonstrates substantial engagement with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. In particular, Austin’s 1940 paper, (...) ‘The Meaning of a Word’, should be construed as a direct response to and development of ideas he encountered in Wittgenstein’s Blue Book. Moreover, we argue that Austin’s mature speech-act theory in How to Do Things with Words was also significantly influenced by Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Integrated developmental and elemental information in teeth provide a unique framework for documenting breastfeeding histories, physiological disruptions, and neurotoxicant exposure in humans and our primate relatives, including ancient hominins. Here we detail our method for detecting the consumption of mothers’ milk and exploring health history through the use of laser ablation‐inductively coupled plasma‐mass spectrometry (LA‐ICP‐MS) mapping of sectioned nonhuman primate teeth. Calcium‐normalized barium and lead concentrations in tooth enamel and dentine may reflect milk and formula consumption with minimal modification during (...) subsequent tooth mineralization, particularly in dentine. However, skeletal resorption during severe illness, and bioavailable metals in nonmilk foods, can complicate interpretations of nursing behavior. We show that explorations of the patterning of multiple elements may aid in the distinction of these important etiologies. Targeted studies of skeletal chemistry, gastrointestinal maturation, and the dietary bioavailability of metals are needed to optimize these unique records of human health and behavior. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage propose une lecture originale du projet foucaldien d'une histoire de la vérité qui vise à en mettre clairement en lumière les enjeux éthiques et politiques, grâce à l'établissement d'une confrontation entre les analyses de Foucault sur la parrêsia antique, les travaux de J.L. Austin sur l'énoncé performatif et l'étude de l'énoncé passionné par Stanley Cavell. Le problème qui est ainsi posé, en lien mais également en décalage avec les réflexions traditionnelles sur le pouvoir des mots, est celui (...) de la force du vrai : est-il possible ou légitime d'affirmer que la vérité est une force qui s'inscrit, de manière toujours " stratégique ", à l'intérieur d'un champ de bataille? En répondant par l'affirmative, cet ouvrage entreprend d'interroger sous un angle inédit les rapports entre vérité, critique et vie au sein d'une éthique et d'une politique du dire-vrai. (shrink)

Two strikingly similar critiques of epistemological foundationalism are examined: J. L. Austin's critique of A. J. Ayer in the former's "Sense and Sensibilia," and part of Candrakīrti's critique of Dignāga in the first chapter of the "Prasannapadā." With respect to Austin, it is argued that his writings on epistemology in fact relate quite closely to his better-known philosophy of speech acts, and that the appeal to ordinary language is part of a transcendental argument against the possibility of radical (...) skepticism. It is then argued that Candrakīrti makes some very similar moves, and that his argument against Dignāga makes still clearer the sense in which both Austin and Candrakīrti can be characterized as making transcendental arguments. In particular, if a condition of the possibility of meaningful discourse is the making of certain kinds of assents, then the epistemologist's demand for the justification of those assents is unreasonable. (shrink)

Are there universal transcendent features that any natural language must possess in order to provide for its human speakers adequate means of expression and of communication of their conceptual thoughts? As Frege, Austin and Searle pointed out, complete speech acts of the type called illocutionary acts, and not isolated propositions, are the primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of language. Thus it is in the very performance of illocutionary acts that speakers express and communicate their thoughts. (...) For this reason, speech act theory contributes to the theory of linguistic universals in formulating the necessary and universal laws governing the successful performance and satisfaction of illocutionary acts in language use and comprehension. I will argue that the logical form of illocutionary acts imposes certain formal constraints on the logical structure of a possible natural language as well as on the mind of competent speakers. In particular, certain syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features are universal because they are indispensable. Moreover, in order to perform and understand illocutionary acts, competent speakers and hearers must have certain mental states and abilities which are in general traditionally related to the faculty of reason.Há características transcendentes universais que qualquer linguagem natural tem que possuir para fornecer meios adequados de expressão e de comunicação de pensamentos conceituais aos seus falantes humanos? Como Frege, Austin e Searle mostraram, atos de fala completos do tipo denominado atos ilocucionários, e não proposições isoladas, são as unidades primárias de significado no uso e compreensão da linguagem. Assim, é no exato desempenho dos atos ilocucionários que os falantes expressam e comunicam os seus pensamentos. Por esta razão, a teoria dos atos de fala contribui para a teoria dos universais lingüísticos, formulando as leis necessárias e universais que governam o desempenho bem-sucedido e a satisfação dos atos ilocucionários no uso e compreensão da linguagem. Eu argumentarei que a forma lógica dos atos ilocucionários impõe certas restrições formais na estrutura lógica de uma possível linguagem natural como também na mente de falantes competentes. Em particular, certos aspectos sintáticos, semânticos e pragmáticos são universais porque eles são indispensáveis. Além disso, a fim de desempenhar e entender os atos ilocucionários, os falantes e ouvintes competentes têm que ter certos estados mentais e habilidades que estão, em geral, tradicionalmente relacionadas à faculdade de razão. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a serious philosophical investigation of the domain of the perlocutionary is both possible and desirable, and I show that it possesses a distinctively moral dimension that has so far been overlooked. I start, in Section II, by offering an original characterisation of the distinction between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary derived from the degree of predictability and stability that differentiates their respective effects. In Section III, I argue that, in order to grasp the specificity (...) of the perlocutionary, we must focus on the total speech situation, which I define as conversation. Then, in Section IV, I show that an investigation of the domain of the perlocutionary requires us to draw a conceptual distinction between recognition and acknowledgment. This distinction proves to be crucial, because the success of perlocutions normally depends on something more than what Austin calls the ‘securing of uptake’: the reciprocity condition for illocutions needs to be supplemented, in the case of perlocutions, with an analysis of what I call the ‘grammar of acknowledgment.’ Lastly, in Section V, I elaborate the notion of ‘perlocutionary responsibility,’ a specific form of moral responsibility for the consequences of utterances that are not (entirely) predictable. (shrink)

John Austin's masterpiece, How to Do Things with Words, was not just a contribution to philosophy; it has proven to be a major contribution to linguistics, one of the founding documents o pragmatics, the investigation of how we use words to accomplish various ends in the social world. Strangely, not much attention has been paid by philosophers — or by psychologists and linguists — to how we use words in private, you might say, to think. As Wittgenstein once noted, (...) ‘It is very noteworthy that what goes on in thinking practically never interests us.’. (shrink)

Dans cet article, en commençant par une analyse inédite de l’ Œdipe Roi de Sophocle, nous abordons le problème du statut du témoin oculaire et de sa prise de parole, ou mieux, de son « dire-vrai » en tant qu’acte de langage spécifique, notamment au sein de la littérature de témoignage. Nous soutenons que la question cruciale à poser à ce propos est celle de l’engagement du locuteur dans son discours, et que l’acte de témoigner va donc bien au-delà de (...) la simple transmission d’une série de contenus ou d’informations. Cet acte se situe en effet sur deux plans : celui du lien éthique entre le locuteur et ce qu’il dit et celui du lien social entre le locuteur et ses interlocuteurs ou auditeurs. En nous inspirant des analyses de Michel Foucault sur la parrêsia et de J. L. Austin sur la dimension perlocutoire du langage, nous concluons alors que les récits de témoignage relèvent d’une « dramatique du discours » qui joue le plus souvent le rôle d’un véritable acte de résistance. (shrink)

J.L. Austin’s insight that language should be treated as a domain of human action, rather than merely as a tool for the transmission of information, has been enormously influential. His analysis of speech acts continues to be widely utilised in a vast number of fields, from the philosophy of language to social and political philosophy, the philosophy of law, gender and literary studies, as well as a variety of social sciences. Yet scholars have so far focused on performative utterances (...) and illocutionary acts, while the perlocutionary dimension of speech has generally been dismissed as unessential. This special issue, drawing inspiration from Stanley Cavell’s seminal work on passionate utterance, aims to shed new light on the philosophical, moral and political relevance of the perlocutionary. (shrink)

Incompatibilism, the view that free will and determinism are incompatible, subsists on two widely accepted, but deeply confused, theses concerning possibility and causation: (1) in a deterministic universe, one can never truthfully utter the sentence “I could have done otherwise,” and (2) in such universes, one can never really receive credit or blame for having caused an event, since in fact all events have been predetermined by conditions during the universe’s birth. Throughout the free will literature one finds variations on (...) these two themes, often intermixed in various ways. When Robert Nozick2 describes our longing for “originative value” he apparently has thesis (2) in mind, and thesis (1) may underlie his assertion that “we want it to be true that in that very same situation we could have done (significantly) otherwise.” John Austin, in a famous footnote, flirts with thesis (1). (shrink)

The majority of people show persistent poor performance in reasoning about “stock-flow problems” in the laboratory. An important example is the failure to understand the relationship between the “stock” of CO2 in the atmosphere, the “inflow” via anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and the “outflow” via natural CO2 absorption. This study addresses potential causes of reasoning failures in the CO2 accumulation problem and reports two experiments involving a simple re-framing of the task as managing an analogous financial budget. In Experiment 1 a (...) financial version of the task that required participants to think in terms of controlling debt demonstrated significant improvements compared to a standard CO2 accumulation problem. Experiment 2, in which participants were invited to think about managing savings, suggested that this improvement was fortuitous and coincidental rather than due to a fundamental change in understanding the stock-flow relationships. The role of graphical information in aiding or abetting stock-flow reasoning was also explored in both experiments, with the results suggesting that graphs do not always assist understanding. The potential for leveraging the kind of reasoning exhibited in such tasks in an effort to change people's willingness to reduce CO2 emissions is briefly discussed. (shrink)

This paper is about the opposite of judgement and calculation. This opposition has been a traditional anchor of critiques concerned with the rise of AI decision making over human judgement. Contrary to these approaches, it is argued that human judgement is not and cannot be replaced by calculation, but that it is human judgement that contextualises computational structures and gives them meaning and purpose. The article focuses on the epistemic structure of algorithms and artificial neural networks to find that they (...) always depend on human judgement to be related to real life objects or purposes. By introducing the philosophical concept of judgement, it becomes clear that the property of judgement to provide meaning and purposiveness is based on the temporality of human life and the ambiguity of language, which quantitative processes lack. A juxtaposition shows that calculations and clustering can be used and referred to in more or less prejudiced and reflecting as well as opaque and transparent ways, but thereby always depend on human judgement. The paper clearly asserts that the transparency of AI is necessary for their autonomous use. This transparency requires the explicitness of the judgements that constitute these computational structures, thereby creating an awareness of the conditionality of such epistemic entities. (shrink)

The subject of this paper, Excuses, is one not to be treated, but only to be introduced, within such limits. It is, or might be, the name of a whole branch, even a ramiculated branch, of philosophy, or at least of one fashion of philosophy. I shall try, therefore, first to state what the subject is, why it is worth studying, and how it may be studied, all this at a regrettably lofty level: and then I shall illustrate, in more (...) congenial but desultory detail, some of the methods to be used, together with their limitations, and some of the unexpected results to be expected and lessons to be learned. Much, of course, of the amusement, and of the instruction, comes in drawing the coverts of the microglot, in hounding down the minutiae, and to this I can do no more here than incite you. But I owe it to the subject to say, that it has long afforded me what philosophy is so often thought, and made, barren of -- the fun of discovery, the pleasures of co-operation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement. (shrink)

En los escenarios universitarios cada vez resulta menos extraño toparse con investigaciones que indagan por la escritura filosófica proveniente de centros no hegemónicos de producción de conocimiento. Nosotros, que hemos tenido la oportunidad de acercarnos al pasado del ejercicio de la filosofía en el actual territorio colombiano, quisimos hacer una convocatoria pública de escritos dedicados a identificar temas, preguntas y formas en que la variopinta comunidad de la filosofía local está escribiendo su propia historia.

Scholars have critiqued mainstream economic approaches to environmental valuation for decades. These critiques have intensified with the increased prominence of environmental valuation in decision-making. This paper has three goals. First, we summarise prominent critiques of monetary valuation, drawing mostly on the work of Clive Spash, who worked extensively on cost–benefit analysis early in his career and then became one of monetary valuation's most thorough and ardent critics. Second, we, as a group of scholars who study relational values, describe how relational (...) values research engages with and addresses many of the critiques of monetary valuation. Third, we offer suggestions for relational values research that continues and deepens its ability to respond to critiques of monetary valuation and contributes to transformative change towards sustainability. (shrink)

The book uses Zen Buddhism as the opening wedge for an extraordinarily wide-ranging exploration of consciousness.

The paper offers a critique of ontological individualism as a framework for social ontology. The phrase gives unjustified priority to facts about individuals over facts about higher-level social features. The paper reviews several important contributions to more nuanced views, including Giddens, Archer, Granovetter, Mahoney, and Thelen. It is argued that our guiding “map” of the social world needs to reflect the unavoidable reciprocal dependency over time between individual actors and social entities. The ideas of methodological localism (Little) and the diachronic (...) character of the actor-social nexus explore the inherent interdependency between actor and structure. (shrink)

La anomalía de la uniformidad plantea la forma como el poder que constituyen el saber y las prácticas sociales dan lugar a una serie de formas de vida habituales que, de ser violadas o transgredidas, dan paso a diversas formas de la monstruosidad. El monstruo es, más que una entidad, un operador conceptual que pone en evidencia las categorías, los cánones y formas habituales de la vida que una sociedad exige, forma, interioriza y difunde entre sus individuos a través de (...) sus visiones del mundo. A partir del siglo XVIII estos hechos dieron paso a una gran preocupación por lo anormal expresada en diversos estudios de la biología, la psiquiatría, la medicina y la política. Este artículo sugiere cómo las concepciones desarrolladas por Michel Foucault acerca del poder, la dominación y la criminalidad explican cómo se construyeron nuestras concepciones de la monstruosidad y la anormalidad. En un desarrollo futuro la presente investigación se pondrá en relación con algunas de las principales novelas góticas. (shrink)

BackgroundFollowing the increased presence of the Right-to-Die Movement, improved end-of-life options, and the political and legal status of aid-in-dying around the globe, suicide tourism has become a promising alternative for individuals who wish to end their lives. Yet, little is known about this from the perspective of those who engage in the phenomenon.MethodsThis study applied the qualitative research approach, following the grounded theory tradition. It includes 11 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Israeli members of the Swiss non-profit Dignitas who contemplated traveling (...) to Switzerland for aid-in-dying.ResultsSeven themes emerged from the data analysis, including health and functioning; feelings regarding survivorship and existence; interacting with the health sector; attitudes regarding death and dying; suicide; choosing death; and choosing suicide tourism. A significant portion of the participants had experienced suicidal thoughts and had even previously attempted suicide, some more than once. Most of them referred to chronic illnesses, functional disability, and social isolation. They understand suffering within the subjective dimension, namely only by the person who is actually subjected to the disease, ailments, and disability. Participants regarded aid-in-dying in Switzerland as positive thanks to its guaranteed outcome: "beautiful death", compared to "disadvantaged dying" which places a burden on the participants' loved ones throughout the prolonged dying. Most of them do not necessarily want to have their loved ones beside them when they die, and they see no significant meaning in dying in a foreign country to which they have no emotional or civil attachment.ConclusionThe desirable approval or tragic refusal by Dignitas to participants' requests for suicide tourism enhances the paradox between the perception of aid-in-dying as a mechanism for fulfilling controlled death and its bureaucratic and materialistic characteristics specifically reflected in a paid, formalized approach to aid-in-dying that cultivate dependency and collaboration. (shrink)

L'histoire n'est pas avare de paradoxe. C'est à Alger qu'est signée l'ordonnance du 21 avril 1944 qui accorde aux femmes françaises le droit de vote, mais c'est aussi à Alger, ou plus exactement en Algérie, que son champ d'application fut le plus restreint : si les Algériennes de souche européenne ont bénéficié des dispositions nouvelles, les Algériennes musulmanes, soit environ un million et demi de femmes, ont été privées du droit de vote. Si l'ordonnance du 7 mars 1944 qui proclam...