Recent defenses of same-sex marriage and polygamy have invoked the liberal doctrines of neutrality and public reason. Such reasoning is generally sound but does not go far enough. This paper traces the full implications of political liberalism for marriage. I argue that the constraints of public reason, applied to marriage law, entail ‘minimal marriage’, the most extensive set of state-determined restrictions on marriage compatible with political liberalism. Minimal marriage sets no principled restrictions on the sex or number of spouses and (...) the nature and purpose of their caring relationships, nor on which marital rights are exchanged, and whether they are exchanged reciprocally or asymmetrically. Minimal marriage supports adult care networks, urban tribes, friendships, and other forms of relationships as well as ‘traditional’ marriages. I provide a publically justifiable rationale for a legal framework supporting non-dependent caring relationships between adults. The argument is that caring relationships are primary goods, and that liberal justice accordingly requires legal frameworks supporting caring relationships. Minimal marriage is one such framework. (shrink)

Marking a ground-breaking moment in the debate surrounding bodies and "body politics," Elizabeth Grosz's Space, Time and Perversion contends that only by resituating and rethinking the body will feminism and cultural analysis effect and unsettle the knowledges, disciplines and institutions which have controlled, regulated and managed the body both ideologically and materially. Exploring the fields of architecture, philosophy, and--in a controversial way--queer theory, Grosz shows how these fields have conceptually stripped bodies of their specificity, their corporeality, and the vestigal (...) traces of their production as bodies. Her tour de corpe investigates the work of Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingis. Grosz considers their work by examining the ways in which the functioning of bodies transforms understandings of space and time, knowledge and desire. Begining with an exposition of the epistemological implications of bodily and sexual difference, Grosz examines the effects such knowledge have on the reception of meaning. She looks at the relationship between the knowledge of difference and the way that knowledge validates, affirms, avows and valorizes subjects. Grosz then extends this analysis to an investigation of the relationship between space, time, bodies and the spatial "arts" such as architecuture, urban planning and geography. In the last section, Grosz moves toward a radical consideration of bodies and their relationship to transgression and perversity. Controversially showing the ways in which "queer" theory fails to offer a truly transformative conception of bodies and their politics, Grosz finds "queer" a reactive category "which sees itself in opposition to a straight norm and thus defines itself in terms of this norm." Consequentially, "queer" theory inherits the acceptance of an entire range of sexual practices, without "asking what they share and without taking into account the profound tension that may exist among these practices." Grosz's Space, Time and Perversity is a diverse and incisive collection of essays from a renowned feminist philosopher. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to advances research on walking, at a neighbourhood level of analysis for people with disabilities, by proposing a theoretical model that combines the knowledge of two disciplines: traffic planning and environmental psychology. The aim is to provide a guidance for a discussion and a planning of future interdisciplinary investigations, by proposing a model that accounts for the dynamic interaction between environmental characteristics, human processes, and walking experience among individuals with a disability. For this purpose, traffic (...) planners and environmental psychologists came together to discuss theories, concepts, and thematic of relevance in a series of focus group meetings. These meetings led to the selection of the Human Environment Interaction (HEI) model, originally developed from the field of environmental psychology, and operationalised to describe how walking experiences result from the interplay between individual abilities, emotional processes and physical and social characteristics of the environment (Küller, 1991). The proposed model aims to sustain interdisciplinary discussion and research planning around the topic of neighbourhood walking for people with disabilities. By operationalising each dimension in the model, a good fit between groups with disabilities and individual differences associated with walking experiences is assumed, which in turn will have the potential to provide a more conscious analysis of wellbeing-related outcomes such as, usability of the environment, frequency of mobility, and quality of life. However, to improve understanding of urban walking at a neighbourhood level for people with disabilities, empirical studies must be carried out to test the proposed model. (shrink)

John Dewey (1859-1952) lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, a period of extraordinary social, economic, demographic, political and technological change. During his lifetime the United States changed from a rural to an urban society, from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from a regional to a world power. It emancipated its slaves, but subjected them to white supremacy. It absorbed millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, but faced wrenching conflicts between capital and labor as they (...) were integrated into the urban industrial economy. It granted women the vote, but resisted their full integration into educational and economic institutions. As the face-to-face communal life of small villages and towns waned, it confronted the need to create new forms of community life capable of sustaining democracy on urban and national scales. Dewey believed that neither traditional moral norms nor traditional philosophical ethics were up to the task of coping with the problems raised by these dramatic transformations. Traditional morality was adapted to conditions that no longer existed. Hidebound and unreflective, it was incapable of changing so as to effectively address the problems raised by new circumstances. Traditional philosophical ethics sought to discover and justify fixed moral goals and principles by dogmatic methods. Its preoccupation with reducing the diverse sources of moral insight to a single fixed principle subordinated practical service to ordinary people to the futile search for certainty, stability, and simplicity. In practice, both traditional morality and philosophical ethics served the interests of elites at the expense of most people. To address the problems raised by social change, moral practice needed to be thoroughly reconstructed, so that it contained within itself the disposition to respond intelligently to new circumstances. Dewey saw his reconstruction of philosophical ethics as a means to effect this practical reconstruction. (shrink)

An internationally famous philosopher and best-selling author during his lifetime, Georg Simmel has been marginalized in contemporary intellectual and cultural history. This neglect belies his pathbreaking role in revealing the theoretical significance of phenomena--including money, gender, urban life, and technology--that subsequently became established arenas of inquiry in cultural theory. It further ignores his philosophical impact on thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Musil, and Heidegger. Integrating intellectual biography, philosophical interpretation, and a critical examination of the history of academic disciplines, this (...) book restores Simmel to his rightful place as a major figure and challenges the frameworks through which his contributions to modern thought have been at once remembered and forgotten. (shrink)

This article seeks to investigate art in public urban space via a process of activating aesthetics as a way of enhancing pedagogies of engagement. It does this firstly by addressing the question of aesthetics in Enlightenment and twentieth-century frames; then it seeks to understand how artworks may be approached ontologically and epistemologically. The discussion works with the philosophical lenses of two different thinkers: Heidegger, in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ and ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, and Marxist sociologist, Bourdieu (...) with his work on a theory of practice and habitus. It asks how art may work in the meaning-making processes of place and the human subject in terms of ontological difference and dispositional capital. In bringing these different organising principles of interpretation to specific works of art, the discussion draws from locational research undertaken in Newcastle/gateshead and Melbourne. (shrink)

Moral distress has been written about extensively in nursing and other fields. Often, however, it has not been used with much theoretical depth. This paper focuses on theorizing moral distress using feminist ethics, particularly the work of Margaret Urban Walker and Hilde Lindemann. Incorporating empirical findings, we argue that moral distress is the response to constraints experienced by nurses to their moral identities, responsibilities, and relationships. We recommend that health professionals get assistance in accounting for and communicating their values (...) and responsibilities in situations of moral distress. We also discuss the importance of nurses creating “counterstories” of their work as knowledgeable and trustworthy professionals to repair their damaged moral identities, and, finally, we recommend that efforts toward shifting the goal of health care away from the prolongation of life at all costs to the relief of suffering to diminish the moral distress that is a common response to aggressive care at end-of-life. (shrink)

This article provides a broad survey of issues facing rural communities and suggests that medicalization of poverty concepts and interventions need to be tailored to those populations. Rural poverty may be both broader and deeper than in urban areas. Those challenges seem to produce a constellation of health conditions, as rural residents struggle with unemployment and lack of opportunities. Relatedly, rural communities struggle to maintain financially viable hospitals and specialty providers. The article closes by offering a snapshot of rural-specific (...) strategies to address these issues. (shrink)

One might say that Clare is almost by virtue of that label alone a political poet. “Peasant poet” is a contradiction in terms from the perspective of English literary history, or of the longer history of the literary pastoral. The phrase must refer to two different social locations, and as such makes social place an explicit, problematic concern for the middle-class readers of that poet’s work. To Clare’s publisher and patrons in the 1820s, as to his editors in the 1980s, (...) the language, the forms, the sentiments, and even the punctuation of his poetry are further markers of class difference for an audience invited to read him as a peasant poet. In recent collections concerned to recover the politics of English poetry these signs of difference are highly valued.2 They seem to mark Clare’s work as what Fredric Jameson terms “strong” political art, that is, “authentic cultural creation … dependent for its existence on authentic collective life, on the vitality of the ‘organic’ social group.”3At the time his poems were published class difference in English rural life was a political issue sufficiently charged to make publisher and patrons wish to minimize its marks in Clare’s poetry. On the one hand, a clearly understood hierarchy was the form of social stability that rural scenes staged for their urban middle-class audiences. Evidence of class difference confirmed the survival of this hierarchy and the reader’s position in it. Clare’s poetry of place affirmed a system of social as well as geographical differences felt as a traditional—and essential—aspect of English national identity. On the other hand, however, the countryside was precisely where the erosion of the hierarchical relations of deference and responsibility was particularly noticeable, and disturbing, in the years after 1815. Sporadic outbreaks of protest against low wages and unemployment in 1816, 1822, and 1830 realized dramatically for the middle and upper classes what one might call a rural version of the process Marx was later to term alienation: the known and familiar inhabitants of the rural scene—laborers, village artisans—were suddenly made strange to their middle- and upper-class neighbors, so much so that many observers were convinced that they must be strangers, intruders from another pace .4 The elements of difference, or strangeness, in Clare’s poetry—the marks of his identity as rural laborer—thus also risked awaking specific anxieties among his early readers. Clare’s editor and publisher, John Taylor, punctuated, regularized meter, and replaced some of Clare’s unfamiliar local vocabulary. Nonetheless, his two most important early patrons, the evangelical aristocrat Lord Radstock and the middle-class Mrs. Emmerson, objected to some lines as “radical slang” and others as “vulgar.” The language of class risked rejection as politically subversive. Especially in an already politicized rural scene, the peasant poet could not be a neutral figure. 2. Both A Book of English Pastoral Verse, ed. John Barrell and John Bull and The Faber Book of Political Verse, ed. Tom Paulin restore Clare’s original orthography and lack of punctuation to support the label “peasant poet.”3. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 : 140. Elizabeth Helsinger is associate professor of English and general studies at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. Her Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder was published in 1982. The present essay is part of a book in progress on representations of the rural scene in Victorian England. (shrink)

It may be the case that the most challenging moral problem of the twenty‐first century will be the relationship between the individual moral agent and the practices and institutions in which the moral agent is embedded. In this paper, we continue the efforts that one of us, Joan Liaschenko, first called for in 1993, that of using feminist ethics as a lens for viewing the relationship between individual nurses as moral agents and the highly complex institutions in which they do (...) the work of nursing. Feminist ethics, with its emphasis on the inextricable relationship between ethics and politics, provides a useful lens to understand the work of nurses in context. Using Margaret Urban Walker's and Hilde Lindemann's concepts of identity, relationships, values, and moral agency, we argue that health care institutions can be moral communities and profoundly affect the work and identity and, therefore, the moral agency of all who work within those structures, including nurses. Nurses are not only shaped by these organizations but also have the power to shape them. Because moral agency is intimately connected to one's identity, moral identity work is essential for nurses to exercise their moral agency and to foster moral community in health care organizations. We first provide a brief history of nursing's morally problematic relationship with institutions and examine the impact institutional master narratives and corporatism exert today on nurses’ moral identities and agency. We close by emphasizing the significance of ongoing dialogue in creating and sustaining moral communities, repairing moral identities, and strengthening moral agency. (shrink)

This article considers the design and ideation of early modern Palermo’s urban waterscape, which traced the contours of a hybrid fluvial-maritime system surviving from antiquity. Framing the city’s port as a repository of collective memory and a site of self-construction, it questions how interventions undertaken between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries - culminating in the ill-fated construction of the Molo Nuovo - recalibrated the interface between city and sea, and with it, Palermo’s identity. The port anchored the city’s cultural (...) and political ecologies, challenging the traditional divide between urban morphology and port planning. Using early modern Palermo as a guide, the article proposes a reinvestment in the interdisciplinary model of the urban waterscape, which regards water as a contested, socio-natural space. (shrink)

Background:While there have been studies exploring moral habitability and its impact on the work environments of nurses in Western countries, little is known about the moral habitability of the work environments of nurses and midwives in resource-constrained settings.Research objective:The purpose of this research was to examine the moral habitability of the work environment of nurses and midwives in Ghana and its influence on their moral agency using the philosophical works of Margaret Urban Walker.Research design and participants:A critical moral ethnography (...) was conducted through the analysis of interviews with 30 nurses and midwives, along with observation, and documentary materials.Ethical considerations:After receiving ethics approval, signed informed consent was obtained from participants before data collection.Results:Five themes were identified: (1) holding onto the values, identities, and responsibilities of being a midwife/nurse; (2) scarcity of resources as limiting capacity to meet caring responsibilities; (3) gender and socio-economic inequities shaping the moral-social context of practice; (4) working with incoherent moral understandings and damaged identities in the context of inter- and intra-professional relationships; and (5) surviving through adversity with renewed commitment and courage.Discussion:The nurses and midwives were found to work in an environment that was morally uninhabitable and dominated by the scarcity of resources, overwhelming and incoherent moral responsibilities, oppressive conditions, and workplace violence. These situations constrained their moral agency and provoked suffering and distress. The nurses and midwives negotiated their practice and navigated through morally uninhabitable work environment by holding onto their moral values and commitments to childbearing women.Conclusion:Creating morally habitable workplaces through the provision of adequate resources and instituting interprofessional practice guidelines and workplace violence prevention policies may promote safe and ethical nursing and midwifery practice. (shrink)

Background: There are numerous benefits to ethics consultation services, but little is known about the reasons different professionals may or may not request an ethics consultation. Inter-professional differences in the perceived utility of ethics consultation have not previously been studied.Methods: To understand profession-specific perceived benefits of ethics consultation, we surveyed all employees at an urban tertiary children’s hospital about their use of ethics committee services (n = 842).Results: Our findings suggest that nurses and physicians find ethics consultations useful for (...) different reasons; physicians were more likely to report normative benefits, while nurses were more likely to report communicative and relational benefits.Conclusions: These findings support an open model of ethics consultation and may also help ethics committees to better understand consultation requests and remain attuned to the needs of various professional groups. (shrink)

Much research supports the existence of an Approximate Number System (ANS) that is recruited by infants, children, adults, and non-human animals to generate coarse, non-symbolic representations of number. This system supports simple arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, and ordering of amounts. The current study tests whether an intuition of a more complex calculation, division, exists in an indigene group in the Amazon, the Mundurucu, whose language includes no words for large numbers. Mundurucu children were presented with a video event (...) depicting a division transformation of halving, in which pairs of objects turned into single objects, reducing the array's numerical magnitude. Then they were tested on their ability to calculate the outcome of this division transformation with other large-number arrays. The Mundurucu children effected this transformation even when non-numerical variables were controlled, performed above chance levels on the very first set of test trials, and exhibited performance similar to urban children who had access to precise number words and a surrounding symbolic culture. We conclude that a halving calculation is part of the suite of intuitive operations supported by the ANS. (shrink)

Rosario, Argentina, a city of more than one million people strategically located on the Paraná River in the heart of a fertile agricultural region, is home to a significant industrial corridor where ongoing urbanization for industry, including that associated with the port complex and agroexport industries, vies for real estate space with peri-urban and urban farming production. The city is also the site of thriving municipal programs seeking to change food production and consumption outcomes through urban and (...) peri-urban agriculture projects rooted in agroecology. This paper identifies the socio-natures critical for the formation and endurance of these agroecology assemblages. Based on interviews with 30 stakeholders in government, civil society, and agricultural production, we describe the integrated approach to environmental, social, and economic sustainability embedded in Rosario’s institutional agroecology programs. In particular, we discuss the actors and strategies, discursive renderings of socio-natures, and the marketing of agroecological materialities that form and are formed by these assemblages. We also discuss the power dynamics embedded in sustaining urban and peri-urban agroecological projects through institutional means. This research contributes to literature on agroecology, urban agriculture, and the urban metabolism through providing empirical examples of socio-natural entanglements in urban agroecological assemblages. (shrink)

Food security scholarship and policy tends to embrace the nutrition status of individual men, women and children as the end-goal of food security efforts. While there has been much value in investigating and trying to ensure sufficient nutrition for struggling households around the world, this overriding emphasis on nutrition status has reduced our understandings of what constitutes food adequacy. While token attention has been paid to more qualitative ideas like “cultural appropriateness,” food security scholars and policy makers have been unable (...) to understand the broader value of food, which exceeds its caloric and nutrient counts. Drawing on empirical work from Medellín, Colombia, the paper argues that having adequate food means much more than simply sufficient nutrient intake, perhaps especially among marginalized groups. Exploring the case of food insecure women from Colombia who were forcibly displaced from rural to urban, we demonstrate how understandings of food adequacy must consider the social and environmental imaginaries of marginalized groups. (shrink)

El propósito del artículo es reflexionar sobre las políticas públicas implementadas desde el gobierno nacional hacia los movimientos sociales en el contexto argentino actual. El interés es debatir la influencia de los programas sociales –en particular el Programa de Ingreso Social con Trabajo (en adelante PAT)– en la situación de los jóvenes de sectores urbanos populares. Lo haremos a partir de abordar la compleja relación entre los emprendimientos cooperativos, las políticas de subsidio y las estrategias de los jóvenes participantes en (...) una experiencia territorial. La base empírica resulta de una investigación cualitativa con militantes de un movimiento de trabajadores desocupados. Los hallazgos dan cuenta de múltiples tensiones; mientras que su adscripción a la acción colectiva promueve la autogestión y mediatiza el acceso a planes sociales, como componentes de la fuerza de trabajo en período activo y de formación, los trabajadores desocupados siguen ubicados en posiciones marginales respecto al mercado de empleo. The purpose of this article is to reflect on the public policies implemented from the national government to the social movements in Argentina’s current context. The interest is to discuss the influence of social programs, including Social Program Income through Work (hereafter pat) in the situation of young people from urban areas. We will address it from the complex relationship established among cooperative ventures, social policies and strategies of the young participants in a territorial experience. The empirical basis is a qualitative research with a militant movement of unemployed workers. The findings realize multiple stresses; while its allegiance to collective action promotes self–management and mediates access to social programs as components of the active labor force and training period, which are located in marginal positions on the labor market. (shrink)

This article critically examines the origins and evolution of China’s unique land institutions and situates land policy in the larger context of China’s reforms and pursuit of economic growth. It argues that the Chinese Communist Party has strengthened the institutions that permit land expropriation—namely, urban/rural dualism, decentralized land ownership, and hierarchical land management—in order to use land as a key instrument of macroeconomic regulation, helping the CCP respond to domestic and international economic trends and manage expansion and contraction. Key (...) episodes of macroeconomic policymaking are analyzed, with the use of local and central documents, to show how the CCP relied on the manipulation and distribution of the national land supply either to stimulate economic growth or to rein in an overheating economy. China’s land institutions, therefore, share “complementarities” with fiscal and financial institutions and benefit powerful political actors while imposing costs on marginal ones. (shrink)

This study aims are to compare the characteristics of the Greek Polis of Metaponto and Poseidonia water collecting and distribution systems. And also, display the differences and similarities between the water management systems used, as to better understand the criteria developed to orientate the place of settlements and also of certain urban characteristics chosen by the Greeks, between the VIII and IV centuries B.C.

Nearly all psychological research on basic cognitive processes of category formation and reasoning uses sample populations associated with large research institutions in technologically-advanced societies. Lopsided attention to a select participant pool risks biasing interpretation, no matter how large the sample or how statistically reliable the results. The experiments in this article address this limitation. Earlier research with urban-USA children suggests that biological concepts are thoroughly enmeshed with their notions of naive psychology, and strikingly human-centered. Thus, if children are to (...) develop a causally appropriate model of biology, in which humans are seen as simply one animal among many, they must undergo fundamental conceptual change. Such change supposedly occurs between 7 and 10 years of age, when the human-centered view is discarded. The experiments reported here with Yukatek Maya speakers challenge the empirical generality and theoretical importance of these claims. Part 1 shows that young Maya children do not anthropocentrically interpret the biological world. The anthropocentric bias of American children appears to owe to a lack of cultural familiarity with non-human biological kinds, not to initial causal understanding of folkbiology as such. Part 2 shows that by age of 4-5 Yukatek Maya children employ a concept of innate species potential or underlying essence much as urban American children seem to, namely, as an inferential framework for understanding the affiliation of an organism to a biological species, and for projecting known and unknown biological properties to organisms in the face of uncertainty. Together, these experiments indicate that folkpsychology cannot be the initial source of folkbiology. They also underscore the possibility of a species-wide and domain-specific basis for acquiring knowledge about the living world that is constrained and modified but not caused or created by prior non-biological thinking and subsequent cultural experience. (shrink)

Louise I. Shelley, Crime and Modernization: The Impact of Industrialization and Urbanization on Crime. Carbon?dale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Press, 1981, 224 pp. Rosemary and Gary Brana?Shute, eds., Crime and Punishment in the Caribbean. Gainesville, Fla.: The Center for Latin American Studies, 1980, 146 pp.

The first annual Alchemy Lecture brings four deep and agile writers from different geographies and disciplines into vibrant conversation on a topic of urgent relevance: humans and borders. Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation captures and expands those conversations in insightful, passionate ways. Architect, artist, and urban theorist Dele Adeyemo (UK/Nigeria) calls attention to the complexity of Black infrastructures, questioning how "the environments that surround us condition the possibility of our being." Poet Natalie Diaz (US/Mojave/Akimel O'otham) writes: "Like (...) story, migration is the sensual movement of knowledge," and asks, "What is the language we need to live right now?" Philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi (France) suggests there is no diasporic life "without the dynamics of fabulation, where we pass down, from generation to generation, the stories of our ancestors who walked barefoot for many months." And cultural theorist Rinaldo Walcott (Canada) asks us to consider inheritances beyond white supremacist logics: "What might it mean to live a life, if we can't risk desiring and working towards utopia?" As each Alchemist considers the legacies of anticolonial struggle, the future of the planet, and the textures of Black and Indigenous life, their essays speak to each other in multiple ways, creating something startling and revelatory: a vision of the world as it is, and as it could be. (shrink)

We citizens of the 21st century live in a world where division of epistemic labour rules. Most of what we know we learned from the spoken or written word of others, and we depend in endless practical ways on the technological fruits of the dispersed knowledge of others—of which we often know almost nothing—in virtually every moment of our lives. Interest has been growing in recent years amongst philosophers, in the issues in epistemology raised by this fact. One issue concerns (...) the depth and extent of our epistemic dependence on testimony, as we may label this broad epistemic source: Do we have any knowledge at all that is free of epistemic dependence on what we have learned from others? A related question is whether our entitlement to believe what we have learned from others can be explained without invoking any epistemic principles special to testimony. These questions concern, as it were, the macro-epistemology of testimony. In the present discussion I shall focus instead on the micro foundations. Testimony, in our broad sense, can occur through an extensive range of types of spoken and written means of purportedly factual communication, including telephone calls, e-mails and personal letters, lectures and radio broadcasts, newspapers, textbooks and encyclopaedias, personal diaries, and public records of all kinds. But the central paradigm—what started the whole communication thing off—is surely that of face-to-face spoken encounter, when one person tells something to another, thereby intending and hoping to share her knowledge with her audience. I begin by describing the speech act of telling, identifying what takes place in a felicitous act of telling. From the nature of the speech act of telling, we see precisely how it is that knowledge is, when all goes as it should, acquired from teller by trusting hearer, in such an act, and in acts of testimony more broadly. (shrink)

Permissivism is the thesis that, for some body of evidence and a proposition p, there is more than one rational doxastic attitude any agent with that evidence can take toward p. Proponents of uniqueness deny permissivism, maintaining that every body of evidence always determines a single rational doxastic attitude. In this paper, we explore the debate between permissivism and uniqueness about evidence, outlining some of the major arguments on each side. We then consider how permissivism can be understood as an (...) underdetermination thesis, and show how this moves the debate forward in fruitful ways: in distinguishing between different types of permissivism, in dispelling classic objections to permissivism, and in shedding light on the relationship between permissivism and evidentialism. (shrink)

What attitude should philosophers take toward their favorite philosophical theories? I argue that the answer is belief and middling to low credence. I begin by discussing why disagreement has motivated the view that we cannot rationally believe our philosophical theories. Then, I show why considerations from disagreement actually better support my view. I provide two additional arguments for my view: the first concerns roles for belief and credence and the second explains why believing one’s philosophical theories is superior to accepting (...) them. I close by addressing objections, including implications my view has for the Lockean thesis, the view that there is a normative connection between belief and high credence. (shrink)

Traditional theistic arguments conclude that God exists. Pragmatic theistic arguments, by contrast, conclude that you ought to believe in God. The two most famous pragmatic theistic arguments are put forth by Blaise Pascal (1662) and William James (1896). Pragmatic arguments for theism can be summarized as follows: believing in God has significant benefits, and these benefits aren’t available for the unbeliever. Thus, you should believe in, or ‘wager on’, God. This article distinguishes between various kinds of theistic wagers, including finite (...) vs. infinite wagers, premortem vs. postmortem wagers, and doxastic vs. acceptance wagers. Then, we’ll turn to the epistemic-pragmatic distinction, and discusses the nuances of James’ argument, and how views like epistemic permissivism and epistemic consequentialism provide unique “hybrid” wagers. Finally, we’ll cover outstanding objections and responses. (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...

Zusammenfassung Die Forschungs- und Regulierungsebene bei datenintensiver Forschung in der Medizin liegen auseinander. Ein heterogenes Feld aus regulierenden Institutionen mit regional ungleichen Regelungen, sowohl hinsichtlich der Dichte als auch der Restriktivität von Regelungen, steht einer globalen Entwicklung der Technologien entgegen. Trotz oder gerade wegen mangelnder global-gültiger Regulierungen können auch unverbindliche oder nur bedingt verbindliche normative Vorgaben der Orientierung dienen. Doch wie soll eine solche normative Regulierung angesichts datenintensiver Forschung in der Medizin ausgestaltet werden und woran soll sie sich orientieren? Die (...) Frage, wie konkret und detailliert man eine solche Forschung regulieren sollte, lässt sich nur im Einzelfall für bestimmte Situationen und Institutionen beantworten. Ob dabei neue Normen oder Gewichtungen von Normen vorgenommen werden sollen, oder ob die Normen und deren Gewichtung weiterhin bestehen bleiben sollen, lässt sich nur mit Verweis auf starke normative Argumente beantworten. An zwingenden Argumenten für neue Normen angesichts der datenintensiven medizinischen Forschung mangelt es bisher. Dennoch ist eine Umsetzungsarbeit von Normen, egal ob neue oder alte, und deren Anwendung auf eine neue Methode oder Technologie allemal zu erbringen. Es bedarf daher – wie schon bisher – beider: sowohl etablierter und transparent kommunizierter Normen als auch des unabhängigen Urteils zur Anwendung dieser Normen. Angesichts der besonderen Eignung für diese Aufgabe sollten auch weiterhin Ethik-Kommissionen als prozedurale Instanz bei der Bewilligung von datenintensiver Forschung in der Medizin gefordert und befähigt werden, die als unabhängige Institution ein Urteil im Einzelfall anhand vorgegebener Normen fällen. Nichtsdestotrotz können sich die veränderten Praktiken datenintensiver Forschungsprojekte auch in neuen Anforderungen an Ethik-Kommissionen niederschlagen, denen mit Reformen der Arbeitsweise begegnet werden sollte. (shrink)

On a rainy day in May 1988, a lowland gorilla named Willie B. stepped outdoors for the first time in twenty-seven years, into a new landscape immersion exhibit. Born in Africa, Willie B. had been captured by an animal collector and sold to a zoo. During the decades he spent in a cage, zoos stopped collecting animals from the wild and Americans changed the ways they wished to view animals in the zoo. Zoos developed new displays to simulate landscapes like (...) the Amazon River basin and African forests. Exhibits similar to animals' natural habitats began to replace old-fashioned animal houses. But such displays are only the most recent effort of zoos to present their audiences with an authentic experience of nature. Since the first zoological park opened in the United States in Philadelphia in 1874, zoos have promised their visitors a journey into the natural world. And for more than a century they have been popular places for education and recreation: every year more than 130 million Americans go to zoos to look at the animals and enjoy a day outdoors. The first book-length history of American zoos, Animal Attractions examines the meaning of nature in the city by looking at the ways zoos have assembled and displayed their animal collections. Situated literally and culturally in the American middle landscape, zoos are concrete expressions of longstanding tensions between wildness and civilization, science and popular culture, education and entertainment. In their efforts to promote nature appreciation, they reveal much about how our culture envisions the natural world and the human place in it and how these ideas have changed. (shrink)

On the phenomenal view of evidence, seemings are evidence. More precisely, if it seems to S that p, S has evidence for p. Here, I raise a worry for this view of evidence; namely, that it has the counterintuitive consequence that two people who disagree would rarely, if ever, share evidence. This is because almost all differences in beliefs would involve differences in seemings. However, many literatures in epistemology, including the disagreement literature and the permissivism literature, presuppose that people who (...) disagree often do share evidence. I conclude that this is a reason to question the phenomenal view of evidence. (shrink)

Credences are similar to levels of confidence, represented as a value on the [0,1] interval. This chapter sheds light on questions about credence, including its relationship to full belief, with an eye toward the empirical relevance of credence. First, I’ll provide a brief epistemological history of credence and lay out some of the main theories of the nature of credence. Then, I’ll provide an overview of the main views on how credences relate to full beliefs. Finally, I’ll turn to the (...) empirical, and suggest some ways that cognitive science does and could answer questions about credence, such as what credences one has, how credences relate to beliefs, and the extent to which we can control our credences. (shrink)

Much of the bioethical literature on parenthood does not address a fact about parenthood which deserves more attention: parental rights and obligations are attached to socially constructed institutional roles. Both the content of these roles, and the way in which they determine who a child’s parents will be, issue from social and legal institutions of parenthood, and this makes a difference to accounts of the moral basis of parenthood. I will argue that this poses a problem for the causal account (...) of parenthood: the variability of parental obligations, and their assignment, underscores the problems the causal account has with defining the relevant notion of cause and with fixing procreative costs. If institutional role obligations arise only through voluntary undertakings, then understanding moral parenthood as an institutional role makes the voluntarist account of parenthood more attractive. However, I must address two questions: whether such role obligations can arise non-voluntarily, and whether the voluntarist account can deal with common cases of parenthood. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Rosen's Argument Objections to Rosen's Argument The Significance of the Narrower Conclusion My Proposed View Objections to the Proposed View Understanding My Disagreement with Rosen Conclusion.

This paper defends the avowal view of self-deception, according to which the self-deceived agent has been led by the evidence to believe that ¬p and yet is sincere in asserting that p. I argue that the agent qualifies as sincere in asserting the contrary of what they in the most basic sense believe in virtue of asserting what they are committed to believing. It is only by recognizing such commitments and distinguishing them from the more basic beliefs whose rational regulation (...) is automatic that the tension between the self-deceived agent’s actions and assertions can be explained in a core subset of cases of self-deception. (shrink)

As algorithms have become ubiquitous in consequential domains, societal concerns about the potential for discriminatory outcomes have prompted urgent calls to address algorithmic bias. In response, a rich literature across computer science, law, and ethics is rapidly proliferating to advance approaches to designing fair algorithms. Yet computer scientists, legal scholars, and ethicists are often not speaking the same language when using the term ‘bias.’ Debates concerning whether society can or should tackle the problem of algorithmic bias are hampered by conflations (...) of various understandings of bias, ranging from neutral deviations from a standard to morally problematic instances of injustice due to prejudice, discrimination, and disparate treatment. This terminological confusion impedes efforts to address clear cases of discrimination. -/- In this paper, we examine the promises and challenges of different approaches to disambiguating bias and designing for justice. While both approaches aid in understanding and addressing clear algorithmic harms, we argue that they also risk being leveraged in ways that ultimately deflect accountability from those building and deploying these systems. Applying this analysis to recent examples of generative AI, our argument highlights unseen dangers in current methods of evaluating algorithmic bias and points to ways to redirect approaches to addressing bias in generative AI at its early stages in ways that can more robustly meet the demands of justice. (shrink)

In this article, we advance the perspective that distinct emotions amplify different moral judgments, based on the emotion’s core appraisals. This theorizing yields four insights into the way emotions shape moral judgment. We submit that there are two kinds of specificity in the impact of emotion upon moral judgment: domain specificity and emotion specificity. We further contend that the unique embodied aspects of an emotion, such as nonverbal expressions and physiological responses, contribute to an emotion’s impact on moral judgment. Finally, (...) emotions play a key role in determining which issues acquire moral significance in a society over time, in a process known as moralization (Rozin, 1999). The implications of these four observations for future research on emotion and morality are discussed. (shrink)

What is faith? How is faith different than belief and hope? Is faith irrational? If not, how can faith go beyond the evidence? This chapter introduces the reader to philosophical questions involving faith and reason. First, we explore a four-part definition of faith. Then, we consider the question of how faith could be rational yet go beyond the evidence.

Attempts to unify Marxist and feminist social critique have been vexed by the fact that ‘patriarchy’ predates the advent of capitalism (its transhistorical status). Feminists within the Marxist, socialist, and materialist traditions have responded to this point by either granting patriarchy a certain autonomy relative to capitalism (the ‘dual/triple systems’ approach), or by suggesting that patriarchal relations have a foundational and necessary status in the history of capitalist development (which we term the ‘origins-subsistence’ approach). This paper offers an alternative account (...) of the relationship between capitalism and the transhistorical status of ‘patriarchy’. In aid of a ‘unitary theory’ of Marxist Feminism, we argue that the transhistorical status of patriarchy is better understood through an application of Marx’s concepts of formal and real subsumption. A modified version of these concepts can illuminate not only capitalist appropriation of antecedent social and economic forms, but also its capacity to produce new forms of gendered exploitation and oppression. (shrink)

This volume presents the theory of culture of the Russian‑born German Jewish social philosopher David Koigen (1879-1933). Heir to Hermann Cohen's neo‑Kantian interpretation of Judaism, he transforms the religion of reason into an ethical Intimitätsreligion. He draws upon a great variety of intellectual currents, among them, Max Scheler's philosophy of values, the historical sociology of Max Weber, the sociology of religion of Émile Durkheim, Ernst Troeltsch and Georg Simmel and American pragmatism. Influenced by his personal experience of marginality in German (...) academia yet the same time unconstrained by the dictates of the German Jewish discourse, Koigen shapes these theoretical strands into an original argument which unfolds along two trajectories: theodicy of culture and ethos. Distinguished from ethics, ethos identifies the non-formal factors that foster a group's sense of collective identity as it adapts to continuous change. From a Jewish perspective, ethos is grounded in the biblical covenant as the paradigm of a social contract and corporate liability. Although the normative content of the covenantal ethos is subject to gradual secularization, its metaphysical and existential assumptions, Koigen argues, continue to inform Jewish self-understanding. The concept of ethos identifies the dialectic of tradition as it shapes Jewish religious consciousness, and, in turn, is shaped by the evolving cultural and axiological sensibilities. In consonance, Jewish identity cannot be reduced to ethnicity or a purely secular culture. Urban develops these fragmentary and inchoate theories into a sociology of religious knowledge and suggests to read Koigen not just as a Jewish sociologist but as the first sociologist of Judaism who proposes to overcome the dogmatic anti-metaphysical stance of European sociology. (shrink)