Plato seems to have been pessimistic about how most people stand with regard to virtue. However, unlike the Stoics, he did not conclude that most people are vicious. Rather, as we know from discussions across several dialogues, he countenanced decent ethical conditions that fall short of genuine virtue, which he limited to the philosopher. Despite Plato's obvious interest in this issue, commentators rarely follow his lead by investigating in detail such conditions in the dialogues. When scholars do investigate what kind (...) of virtue, if any, Plato thinks is open to non-philosophers, they typically look to the Republic. But in the Republic Plato sets out an ideal city; therefore, the virtue available to non-philosophers there is likely different from what he thinks is available to them in the real world. If we want to determine Plato's thoughts about the virtue of actual non-philosophers, we must look elsewhere. In this paper, I set my sights on the Phaedo. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 4, Page 414-429, October 2022.

Current mainstream approaches to conscientious objection either uphold the standards of public health care by preventing objections or protect the consciences of health‐care professionals by accommodating objections. Public justification approaches are a compromise position that accommodate conscientious objections only when objectors can publicly justify the grounds of their objections. Public justification approaches require objectors and assessors to speak a common normative language and to this end it has been suggested that objectors should be required to cast their objection in terms (...) of public reason. We provide critical support for such a public reason condition and argue that it would be neither too demanding nor too permissive. We also respond to objections that it unfairly favours secular over religious objectors and that public reasons cannot be held with the kind of sincerity thought to characterize conscientious objections. (shrink)

In this essay, I investigate the longstanding philosophical problem of whether we have control over our actions in a deterministic world. In working through a range of everyday situations in which this problem could arise, I come to the realisation that determinism has no bearing on whether we have control over our actions, because having control over our actions and determinism only make sense under different aspects.

Robert Card’s “Reasonability View” is a significant contribution to the debate over the place of conscientious objection in health care. In his view, conscientious objections can only be accommodated if the grounds for the objection meet a reasonability standard. I identify inconsistencies in Card’s description of the reasonability standard and argue that each version he specifies is unsatisfactory. The criteria for reasonability that Card sets out most frequently have no clear underpinning principle and are too permissive of immoral objections. Card (...) has also claimed that petitioners must justify their positions with Rawlsian public reason. I argue that, although the resulting reasonability standard is principled, it is overly restrictive. I also show that a reasonability standard built on Rawls’ more lenient conception of reasonableness would be overly permissive of objections at odds with professional healthcare standards. Finally, I argue for my favored solution, which bases the reasonability standard on minimal professional standards. (shrink)

It is common to think of medical and ethical modes of thought as different in kind. In such terms, some clinical situations are made more complicated by an additional ethical component. Against this picture, we propose that medical and ethical modes of thought are not different in kind, but merely different aspects of what it means to be human. We further propose that clinicians are uniquely positioned to synthesise these two aspects without prior knowledge of philosophical ethics.

Priority setting (also known as resource allocation or rationing) occurs at every level of every health system and is one of the most significant health care policy questions of the 21st century. Because it is so prevalent and context specific, improving priority setting in a health system entails improving it in the institutions that constitute the system. But, how should this be done? Normative approaches are necessary because they help identify key values that clarify policy choices, but insufficient because different (...) approaches lead to different conclusions and there is no consensus about which ones are correct, and they are too abstract to be directly used in actual decision making. Empirical approaches are necessary because they help to identify what is being done and what can be done, but are insufficient because they cannot identify what should be done. Moreover, to be really helpful, an improvement strategy must utilize rigorous research methods that are able to analyze and capture experience so that past problems are corrected and lessons can be shared with others. Therefore, a constructive, practical and accessible improvement strategy must be research-based and combine both normative and empirical methods. In this paper we propose a research-based improvement strategy that involves combining three linked methods: case study research to describe priority setting; interdisciplinary research to evaluate the description using an ethical framework; and action research to improve priority setting. This describe-evaluate-improve strategy is a generalizable method that can be used in different health care institutions to improve priority setting in that context. (shrink)

This essay explores the process and issues related to community collaborative research that involves Native Americans generally, and specifically examines the Navajo Nation’s efforts to regulate research within its jurisdiction. Researchers need to account for both the experience of Native Americans and their own preconceptions about Native Americans when conducting research about Native Americans. The Navajo Nation institutionalized an approach to protecting members of the nation when it took over Institutional Review Board (IRB) responsibilities from the US Indian Health Service (...) (IHS) in 1996. While written regulations for the Navajo Nation IRB are not dissimilar, and in some ways are less detailed than those of the IHS IRB, in practice the Navajo Nation allows less flexibility. Primary examples of this include not allowing expedited review and requiring prepublication review of all manuscripts. Because of its broad mandate, the Navajo Nation IRB may also require review of some projects that would not normally be subject to IRB approval, including investigative journalism and secondary research about Navajo People that does not involve direct data collection from human subjects. (shrink)

We conducted and analyzed qualitative interviews with 12 persons working on the Healthy Public Housing Initiative in Boston, Massachusetts in 2001. Our goal was to generate ideas and themes related to the ethics of the community-based participatory research in which they were engaged. Specifically, we wanted to see if we found themes that differed from conventional research that is based on an individualistic ethics. There were clearly distinct ethical issues raised with respect to projects and individuals who engage in community-based (...) collaborations. The differences that arose from the interviews were seeking equality between the partners, the need for the community partner to defend the community, dealing with unflattering data, meeting community expectations and producing tangible benefits to the community. (shrink)

This full-color guide explains how to get better photos from an SL1. Written by professional photographer Doug Sahlin, this book explains the camera?s controls and shooting modes.

I argue that Aristotle believes that virtue comes in degrees. After dispatching with initial concerns for the view, I argue that we should accept it because Aristotle conceives of heroic virtue as the highest degree of virtue. I support this interpretation of heroic virtue by considering and rejecting alternative readings, then showing that heroic virtue characterized as the highest degree of virtue is consistent with the doctrine of the mean.

Among the most noteworthy and impressive aspects of A.P. Simester’s monumental Fundamentals of Criminal Law is its pervasive pluralism. Many philosophers of criminal law, I have frequently complained, are excessively monistic on a number of basic questions about which pluralism is the more defensible option. I fear, however, that Simester’s views are sometimes too pluralistic. In particular, he assigns five separate functions to mens rea, and advances the novel claim that “mens rea is not, uniquely or even predominately, about culpability.” (...) He alleges that “the so-called ‘fault’ requirements plays an important role in mediating the scope of prohibitions.? My central objective is to challenge whether Simester is correct about whether mens rea has this alleged. (shrink)

In this paper, we explicate the method of Investigative Ordinary Language Philosophy (IOLP). The term was coined by John Cook to describe the unique philosophical approach of Frank Ebersole. We argue that (i) IOLP is an overlooked yet valuable philosophical method grounded in our everyday experiences and concerns; and (ii) as such, Frank Ebersole is an important but neglected figure in the history of ordinary language philosophy.

Harold Shapiro, the former president of Princeton, ventured to say that theology had been divorced from the liberal. Professor Doug Dix's book is about arranging a remarriage. His analysis suggests the divorce goes deeper than Shapiro may have realized. Love has been divorced from learning because money has replaced truth as the object of affection. Now students learn to earn. Natural Literacy strives to motivate students and faculty to instead learn to love.

The 2023 doctors’ strikes in the UK have elicited a familiar moral outcry that such strikes are morally wrong. We consider five arguments that might be thought to show doctors’ strikes are morally impermissible but show that they all fail. The most we can conclude from such arguments is that doctors’ strikes are morally permissible in a narrower range of circumstances than strikes in other sectors.We then outline two independent but compatible justifications for doctors’ strikes, one that appeals to doctors’ (...) interests in fair pay and working conditions and one that appeals to doctors’ duty to protect public health. We also suggest that doctors’ strikes can be supererogatory when they aim to correct a government failing in its own duty to protect public health. Finally, we assess the 2023 UK doctors’ strikes. We conclude that they are justified and there is a case for considering them supererogatory. (shrink)

On one hand, it is commonly accepted that clinicians should not deceive their patients, yet on the other there are many instances in which deception could be in a patient’s best interest. In this paper, I propose that this conflict is in part driven by a narrow conception of deception as contingent on belief. I argue that we cannot equate non-deceptive care solely with introducing or sustaining a patient’s true belief about their condition or treatment, because there are many instances (...) of clinical care which are non-doxastic and non-deceptive. Inasmuch as this is true, better understanding of non-doxastic attitudes, such as hope and pretence, could improve our understanding of deception in clinical practice. (shrink)

When parents see their children’s problems as opportunities to build the relationship instead of as a negative, burdensome irritation, it totally changes the nature of parent-child interaction.... When a child comes to them with a problem ... their paradigm is, “Here is a great opportunity for me to really help my child and to invest in our relationship.”... [S]trong bonds of love and trust are created as children sense the value parents give to their problems and to them as individuals (...) .Many of us will know the scenario: sitting peacefully in a chair after a hard day’s work, reading a novel and listening to some music, when in comes a teenager with a tale to tell, perhaps a burden to share. Our relaxed restfulness is interrupted, a problem is presented: how do we respond? Parents such as Covey describes focus on building the bonds of trust: they choose to know the situation as ethically-qualified; they are responsive to the “pedagogical moment” . While entering empathically into their child’s concerns, they continue to attend to the norms of faithfulness that obtain in such a situation with a special force. (shrink)

Addiction involves a chronic deficit in self-governance that treatment aims to restore. We draw on our interviews with addicted people to argue that addiction is, in part, a problem of self-narrative change. Over time, agents come to strongly identify with the aspects of their self-narratives that are consistently verified by others. When addiction self-narratives become established, they shape the addicted person’s experience, plans, and expectations so that pathways to recovery appear implausible and feel alien. Therefore, the agent may prefer to (...) enact her disvalued self-narrative because at least it represents who she takes herself to be. To recover, the agent needs to conduct narrative work, adjusting her existing self-narrative so that it better supports recovery-directed narrative projections. Reducing cravings, managing withdrawals, increasing self-control, and developing goals are all important for recovery but those approaches will often be in vain if the influence of self-narrative is ignored. If our analysis is correct, addiction treatment will typically be more effective if it incorporates support for self-narrative change. (shrink)

Sometimes healthcare professionals conscientiously refuse to treat patients despite the patient requesting legal, medically indicated treatments within the professionals’ remit. Recently, there has been a proliferation of views using the concept of public reason to specify which conscientious refusals of treatment should be accommodated. Four such views are critically assessed, namely, those of Robert Card, Massimo Reichlin, David Scott, and Doug McConnell. This paper argues that McConnell’s view has advantages over the other approaches because it combines the requirement that (...) healthcare professionals publicly justify the grounds of their conscientious refusals of treatment with the requirement that those grounds align with minimally decent healthcare. This relatively restrictive approach accommodates conscientious refusals from minimally decent healthcare professionals while still protecting good healthcare, the independence of the healthcare professions, and the fiduciary relationships. (shrink)

Family Drug and Alcohol Courts (FDAC) were introduced to England in 2008 following their development in the USA. Pilots launched across the country adopted a family-based strategy with the aim to improve outcomes for children that live with parents who misuse substances or alcohol. The numbers of children entering the care system has increased with ‘subsequent new borns’ being a particular concern frequently becoming ‘looked after’ by the state at birth. This article will focus upon an initial phase of a (...) study that tracked the establishment of an FDAC pilot. It reveals how the FDAC team collaborated with Judges and a diversity of professionals and parents to create conditions through which ground-breaking practice was forged. The environment created is unique as it is one fully set within the context of each family’s lived experience. Through this approach parents have become full participants in court proceedings as opposed to purely subject to them. As a result, significant numbers of children have remained with or been returned to their families. (shrink)

Psychiatric involvement in patient morality is controversial. If psychiatrists are tasked with shaping patient morality, the coercive potential of psychiatry is increased, treatment may be unfairly administered on the basis of patients’ moral beliefs rather than medical need, moral disputes could damage the therapeutic relationship and, in any case, we are often uncertain or conflicted about what is morally right. Yet, there is also a strong case for the view that psychiatry often works through improving patient morality and, therefore, should (...) aim to do so. Our goal is to offer a practical and ethical path through this conflict. We argue that the default psychiatric approach to patient morality should be procedural, whereby patients are helped to express their own moral beliefs. Such a procedural approach avoids the brunt of objections to psychiatric involvement in patient morality. However, in a small subset of cases where patients’ moral beliefs are sufficiently distorted or underdeveloped, we claim that psychiatrists should move to a substantive approach and shape thecontentof those beliefs when they are relevant to psychiatric outcomes. The substantive approach is prone to the above objections but we argue it is nevertheless justified in this subset of cases. (shrink)

Why do some addicted people chronically fail in their goal to recover, while others succeed? On one established view, recovery depends, in part, on efforts of intentional planning agency. This seems right, however, firsthand accounts of addiction suggest that the agent’s self-narrative also has an influence. This paper presents arguments for the view that self-narratives have independent, self-fulfilling momentum that can support or undermine self-governance. The self-narrative structures of addicted persons can entrench addiction and alienate the agent from practically feasible (...) recovery plans. Strategic re-narration can redirect narrative momentum and therefore support recovery in ways that intentional planning alone cannot. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘Self-ambiguity’, we suggest, is best understood as an uncertainty about how strongly a given feature reflects who one truly is. When this understanding of self-ambiguity is applied to a view of the self as having both essential and shapable components, self-ambiguity can be seen to have two aspects: (1) uncertainty about one's essential or relatively unchangeable characteristics, e.g. one's sexuality, and (2) uncertainty about how to shape oneself, e.g. which values to commit to, actions to pursue, or essential features to (...) identify with. We explain how a narrative account of agency can accommodate these forms of self-ambiguity and argue that such an account also reveals another kind of self-ambiguity, namely, (3) uncertainty about whether one's established self-narrative represents who one really is. We illustrate this third form of self-ambiguity in the context of addiction where people's established addiction self-narratives make it difficult to identify with recovery. We argue that recovery will require embracing, especially, our third form of self-ambiguity as a chance for positive self-transformation. Treatment for addiction should, therefore, support people in going through and ultimately narratively resolving the inevitable self-ambiguities of the recovery process. (shrink)

Daniel Sulmasy has recently argued that good medicine depends on physicians having a wide discretionary space in which they can act on their consciences. The only constraints Sulmasy believes we should place on physicians’ discretionary space are those defined by a form of tolerance he derives from Locke whereby people can publicly act in accordance with their personal religious and moral beliefs as long as their actions are not destructive to society. Sulmasy also claims that those who would reject physicians’ (...) right to conscientious objection eliminate discretionary space thus undermining good medicine and unnecessarily limiting religious freedom. I argue that, although Sulmasy is correct that some discretionary space is necessary for good medicine, he is wrong in thinking that proscribing conscientious objection entails eliminating discretionary space. I illustrate this using Julian Savulescu and Udo Schuklenk’s system for restricting conscientious objections as a counter-example. I then argue that a narrow discretionary space constrained by professional ideals will promote good medicine better than Sulmasy’s wider discretionary space constrained by his conception of tolerance. Sulmasy’s version of discretionary space would have us tolerate actions that are at odds with aspects of good medicine, including aspects that Sulmasy himself explicitly values, such as fiduciary duty. Therefore, if we want the degree of religious freedom in the public sphere that Sulmasy favours then we must decide whether it is worth the cost to the healthcare system. (shrink)

Many different versions of cultural studies have emerged in the past decades. While during its dramatic period of global expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, cultural studies was often identified with...

Doug McGill published several articles about the massacre of 425 members of the Anuak tribe by the Ethiopian military in 2003 and 2004 on his Web site, The McGill Report. The mainstream news media ignored it. McGill's narrative demonstrates the impact of his reporting on the Anuak community worldwide, its impact on several beneficiary groups in the United States, and the lack of interest by the mainstream news media that failed to fulfill journalism's primary purpose. Two responses follow McGill's (...) narrative. Jeremy Iggers examines the social and economic realities that make it difficult for journalists to fulfill their primary purpose. He suggests that partnerships between journalists and engaged citizens may provide a new model for journalism. Andrew Cline examines the rhetorical and ethical nature of the journalistic transaction between journalist and audience. Who counts as a journalist arises from the experiences of an audience that uses a journalist's work as a civically important text. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate whether in the 'Phaedo' the body or the soul is the subject of bodily desires. By analyzing Plato’s portrayal of the disembodied soul in the dialogue, I argue that because many souls are shown possessing bodily desires after death, the soul can possess bodily desires. Part of my analysis is built on my argument that the best way to understand afterlife punishment in the dialogue is as the necessary frustration of persistent bodily desires. Finally, I (...) end the paper by offering some reasons to think that the soul is the only subject of bodily desires in the dialogue. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate Socrates as a friend in Plato's 'Phaedo'. I begin by setting out his friends' request for reassurance of how they will fare after Socrates dies. I argue that by structuring the discussion as he does, Socrates provides one final opportunity for his friends to prepare themselves for life without him, thus offering them the best kind of reassurance they could ask for.

A rich exhibition of Minnesota’s beloved libraries, with stunning photographs by the popular Doug Ohman and library stories by seven of Minnesota’s best-known writers of books for children and young adults.

Drawing on Charles Peirce’s descriptions of his correspondence course on the “Art of Reasoning,” I argue that Peirce believed that the study of logic stands at the center of a liberal arts education. However, Peirce’s notion of logic included much more than the traditional accounts of deduction and syllogistic reasoning. He believed that the art of reasoning required a study of both abductive and inductive inference as well the practice of observation and imagination. Employing these other features of logic, his (...) course foreshadowed a number of developments in twentieth century educational theory: the belief that non-traditional students should be educated, the claim that the art of reasoning was important to all theoretical practices, and that the art of reasoning was important to the overall growth of a person. The upshot is that Peirce’s course in the art of reasoning should make us reconsider making logic courses, under Peirce’s broad conception of logic, required courses in high school and higher education. (shrink)

RésuméDans ce dialogue, deux personnages principaux, Philopolis et Éleuthérios, proposent la position communautarienne et la position contractualiste libérale comme fondements de la théorie politique. Le débat se déroule, comme tout bon débat devrait lefaire, autour d'une bouteille de Chardonnay.

The placebo effect is now generally defined widely as an individual’s response to the psychosocial context of a clinical treatment, as distinct from the treatment’s characteristic physiological effects. Some researchers, however, argue that such a wide definition leads to confusion and misleading implications. In response, they propose a narrow definition restricted to the therapeutic effects of deliberate placebo treatments. Within the framework of modern medicine, such a scope currently leaves one viable placebo treatment paradigm: the non-deceptive and non-concealed administration of (...) “placebo pills” or open-label placebo (OLP) treatment. In this paper, I consider how the placebo effect occurs in OLP. I argue that a traditional, belief-based account of OLP is paradoxical. Instead, I propose an account based on the non-doxastic attitude of pretence, understood within a fictionalist framework. (shrink)

The field of social movement studies has expanded dramatically over the past three decades. But as it has done so, its focus has become increasingly narrow and 'movement-centric'. When combined with the tendency to select successful struggles for study, the conceptual and methodological conventions of the field conduce to a decidedly Ptolemaic view of social movements: one that exaggerates the frequency and causal significance of movements as a form of politics. This book reports the results of a comparative study, not (...) of movements, but of communities earmarked for environmentally risky energy projects. In stark contrast to the central thrust of the social movement literature, the authors find that the overall level of emergent opposition to the projects has been very low, and they seek to explain that variation and the impact, if any, it had on the ultimate fate of the proposed projects. (shrink)