Drawing on the work of Jurgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib has developed a system of communicative or discourse ethics. Her approach is said to respect differences and to count context as important but she also claims that it is postmetaphysical. I dispute this claim on two grounds. First, I argue that any system of ethics must be grounded by metaphysical commitments. Second, I show that in using elements of both Kantian and Aristotelian theory, Benhabib has imported metaphysical underpinnings into her theory (...) and that these implicit understandings of what the moral enterprise is about, ought to be made explicit. Finally, a brief exploration of some contemporary ethical reflection and problem solving suggests that a shared metaphysical foundation is essential to ethical discourse. (shrink)

Hepburn, Elizabeth In my years working with healthcare professionals trying to figure out how we can make ethical decisions reliably, I have often been confronted by the reality that those I have come to think of as wise and just, analyse matters differently from others. It seems to me that what sets such people apart is a capacity to reflect on experience and interpolate that into their decision making. What follows is my attempt to identify those processes, and (...) to suggest ways that we can all access this sort of wisdom. It is not to suggest that one approach is superior, but rather to supplement the standard approaches with another sort of information that is frequently overlooked by adhering strictly to one method. (shrink)

Deals with issues including - Euthansia - Organ transplantation - Experimentation and research - Genetic manipulation - Embryo experiments - Surrogacy - Contraception - Abortion - HIV/AIDS - Resource allocation.

This article explores the relation between the concept of symmetry and its formalisms. The standard view among philosophers and physicists is that symmetry is completely formalized by mathematical groups. For some mathematicians however, the groupoid is a competing and more general formalism. An analysis of symmetry that justifies this extension has not been adequately spelled out. After a brief explication of how groups, equivalence, and symmetries classes are related, we show that, while it’s true in some instances that groups are (...) too restrictive, there are other instances for which the standard extension to groupoids is too un restrictive. The connection between groups and equivalence classes, when generalized to groupoids, suggests a middle ground between the two. *Received July 2007. †To contact the authors, please write to: Alexandre Guay, UFR Sciences et Techniques, Université de Bourgogne, 9 Avenue Alain Savary, 21078 Dijon Cedex, France; e‐mail: [email protected] ; or to Brian Hepburn, Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, 1866 Main Mall E370, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Aesthetic theories, like theories of morals, are roughly divisible into those that maintain an analytic neutrality and those that attempt to arrive at “first-order”, practical judgments. A philo sopher of language may confine the legitimate task of aesthetics to the clarification of talk about works of art and about the fashioning of works of art. But other aestheticians, perhaps a more numerous group, see their study as far more intimately related to art criticism, and as able, without the committing of (...) naturalistic or any other fallacies, to reach particular aesthetic value-judgments. Between these extreme positions lies a great diversity of theories which, while clearly differentiating aesthetics from art criticism, still carry practical implications of a general kind. The conceptual scaffolding into which they fit the art-forms, their notion of what is central to aesthetic experience and what peripheral, their account of artistic creativity-all these can be indirectly evaluative, can subtly influence and alter one's responses to actual aesthetic objects. (shrink)

Fr. Bernard Lonergan's writings have not so far received much discussion in British philosophical journals, although they contain one of the most fully-developed contemporary presentations of Catholic Christianity and have a substantial and distinctive philosophical content. They have not lacked theological commentators, both in print and in conferencediscussions. The present article has three aims: to draw attention to Lonergan's work and its philosophical relevance; to notice the publication of his latest book, Method in Theology, and to venture some critical comments (...) on certain arguments about the intelligibility of being, being and the good, and God, in his book Insight. These arguments are central to Lonergan's account of theism, a theism which, in its orthodox Roman Catholic form, is presupposed by Method in Theology. The books are organically interrelated. One admirer of Lonergan described the newer book as ‘the book [Lonergan] originally set out to write’. (shrink)

An utterer may convey a message to her intended audience by means of an explicit statement; or by a non‐conventionally mediated one‐off signal from which the audience is able to work out the intended message; or by conversational implicature. I investigate whether the last two are equivalent to explicit testifying, as communicative act and epistemic source. I find that there are important differences between explicit statement and insinuation; only with the first does the utterer assume full responsibility for the truth (...) of what she communicates to her audience. (shrink)

What exactly does it mean to “trust your gut”? What use are gut-level insights when a person is attempting to consciously and deliberately navigate life altering decisions, such as those surrounding marriage, divorce, job changes, home buying, etc.? This essay provides a partial answer to those questions by leveraging the account of “emotional bodily feelings” offered in Tom Cochrane’s The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States. This essay shows why “trusting your gut” is a reasonably good path to (...) emotional self-awareness in decision-making. The first half of the essay offers an analysis of what many people mean by the colloquial advice to “trust your gut,” at least when they deploy that advice in context of an ongoing dialogue about a friend or family member’s major life-decision. In the second half, this article briefly summarizes Cochrane’s account of emotions and emotional bodily feelings, and spells out how these concepts might be deployed to understand the advice to “trust your gut” as nearly tantamount to saying “pursue emotional self-awareness.”. (shrink)

In this project I am concerned with the extent to which conceptual engineering happens in domains outside of philosophy, and if so, what that might look like. Specifically, I’ll argue that...

Empathy is an important way for doctors to demonstrate their understanding of patients’ subjective experiences. This research considers the role of empathy in 37 doctor–patient palliative or end-of-life care consultations recorded in a hospice. Specifically, it focuses on four contexts in which there is a disparity between patients’ displayed experience of their illness and the doctor’s biomedical, expertise-driven perspective on their illness. These include cases in which the patient is sceptical of the medical perspective, cases in which the patient’s expectations (...) exceed what can realistically be provided and cases in which patients have an overly pessimistic view of their condition. The analysis shows how doctors can use empathic statements to display that they are attentive to the patient’s subjective experience even when the task at hand is, ostensibly, an expertise-driven, biomedical one. It thus demonstrates that empathy is of importance throughout palliative care consultations, even in those phases which might seem biomedical or task-driven. (shrink)

We argue for the addition of trauma informed awareness, training, and skill in clinical ethics consultation by proposing a novel framework for Trauma Informed Ethics Consultation (TIEC). This approach expands on the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) framework for, and key insights from feminist approaches to, ethics consultation, and the literature on trauma informed care (TIC). TIEC keeps ethics consultation in line with the provision of TIC in other clinical settings. Most crucially, TIEC (like TIC) is systematically sensitive (...) to culture, history, difference, power, social exclusion, oppression, and marginalization. By engaging a neonatal intensive care ethics consult example, we define our TIEC approach and illustrate its application. Through TIEC we argue it is the role of ethics consultants to not only hold open moral spaces, but to furnish them in morally habitable ways for all stakeholders involved in the ethics consultation process, including patients, surrogates, and practitioners. (shrink)

Claims about ‘the meaning of life’ have tended to be made and discussed in conjunction with bold metaphysical and theological affirmations. For life to have meaning, there must be a comprehensive divine plan to give it meaning, or there must be an intelligible cosmic process with a ‘telos’ that a man needs to know if his life is to be meaningfully orientated. Or, it is thought to be a condition of the meaningfulness of life, that values should be ultimately ‘conserved’ (...) in some way, that no evil should be unredeemable and irrational. And it may be claimed that if death were to end our experience, meaninglessness would triumph. (shrink)

Many problems of inequality in developing countries resist treatment by formal egalitarian policies. To deal with these problems, we must shift from a distributive to a relational conception of equality, founded on opposition to social hierarchy. Yet the production of many goods requires the coordination of wills by means of commands. In these cases, egalitarians must seek to tame rather than abolish hierarchy. I argue that bureaucracy offers important constraints on command hierarchies that help promote the equality of workers in (...) bureaucratic organizations. Bureaucracy thus constitutes a vital if limited egalitarian tool applicable to developing and developed countries alike. (shrink)

The Dynamics of Social Practice -- Introducing Theories of Practice -- Materials and Resources -- Sequence and Structure -- Making and Breaking Links -- Material, Competence and Meaning -- Car-Driving: Elements and Linkages Making Links -- Breaking Links -- Elements Between Practices -- Standardization and Diversity -- Individual and Collective Careers -- The Life of Elements -- Modes of Circulation -- Transportation and Access: Material -- Abstraction, Reversal and Migration: Competence -- Association and Classification: Meaning -- Packing and Unpacking -- (...) Emergence, Disappearance and Persistence -- Recruitment, Defection and Reproduction -- First Encounters: Networks and Communities -- Capture and Commitment: Careers and Carriers -- Collapse and Transformation: The Dynamics of Defection -- Daily Paths, Life Paths and Dominant Projects -- Connections Between Practices -- Bundles and Complexes -- Collaboration and Competition -- Selection and Integration -- Coordinating Daily Life -- Circuits of Reproduction -- Monitoring Practices-as-Performances -- Monitoring Practices-as-Entities -- Cross-Referencing Practices-as-Performances -- Cross-Referencing Practices-as-Entities -- Aggregation -- Elements of Coordination -- Intersecting Circuits -- Representing the Dynamics of Social Practice -- Representing Elements and Practices -- Characterizing Circulation -- Competition, Transformation and Convergence -- Reproducing Elements, Practices and Relations between Them -- Time and Practice -- Space and Practice -- Dominant Projects and Power -- Promoting Transitions in Practice -- Climate Change and Behaviour Change -- Basis of Action -- Processes of Change -- Positioning Policy -- Transferable Lessons -- Practice Theory and Climate Change Policy -- Configuring Elements of Practice -- Configuring Relations between Practices -- Configuring Careers: Carriers and Practices -- Configuring Connections -- Practice Oriented Policy Making. (shrink)

In support of a recent conjecture by Nielsen (1999), we prove that the phenomena of ‘incomparable entanglement’— whereby, neither member of a pair of pure entangled states can be transformed into the other via local operations and classical communication (LOCC)—is a generic feature when the states at issue live in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Overview and organizing themes 2. Historical Review: Aristotle to Mill 3. Logic of method and critical responses 3.1 Logical constructionism and Operationalism 3.2. H-D as a logic of confirmation 3.3. Popper and falsificationism 3.4 Meta-methodology and the end of method 4. Statistical methods for hypothesis testing 5. Method in Practice 5.1 Creative and exploratory practices 5.2 Computer methods and the ‘third way’ of doing science 6. Discourse on scientific method 6.1 “The scientific method” in science education and as seen (...) by scientists 6.2 Privileged methods and ‘gold standards’ 6.3 Scientific method in the court room 6.4 Deviating practices 7. Conclusion Bibliography Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries . (shrink)

The idea of aesthetic disinterestedness has been a central concept in aesthetics since the late eighteenth century. This exchange offers a contemporary reconsideration of disinterestedness from different sides of the question.

This editorial to the special issue addresses the often overlooked question of the ethical nature of social enterprises. The emerging social entrepreneurship literature has previously been dominated by enthusiasts who fail to critique the social enterprise, focusing instead on its distinction from economic entrepreneurship and potential in solving social problems. In this respect, we have found through the work presented herein that the relation between social entrepreneurship and ethics needs to be problematized. Further, we find that a range of conceptual (...) lenses and methodological approaches is valuable as the social entrepreneurship field matures. (shrink)

Many problems of inequality in developing countries resist treatment by formal egalitarian policies. To deal with these problems, we must shift from a distributive to a relational conception of equality, founded on opposition to social hierarchy. Yet the production of many goods requires the coordination of wills by means of commands. In these cases, egalitarians must seek to tame rather than abolish hierarchy. I argue that bureaucracy offers important constraints on command hierarchies that help promote the equality of workers in (...) bureaucratic organizations. Bureaucracy thus constitutes a vital if limited egalitarian tool applicable to developing and developed countries alike. (shrink)