In this article, we examine the ethical implications of randomised control trials (RCTs) as a practice of quantification in international development. Often referred to as the “gold standard” for the evaluation of development interventions, RCTs are lauded for their ability to generate supposedly objective, unbiased, and rigorous evidence to inform policy decisions for poverty alleviation. At the same time, critiques of quantification within and beyond development challenge claims of objectivity and neutrality, raising epistemological and ethical questions regarding the role (...) of quantitative research, the numbers they produce, and the processes triggered by practices of quantification. Building on these critiques, this study develops a decolonial analysis of the RCT methodology. We argue that RCTs, by enacting the coloniality of being, knowledge, and power, serve to perpetuate global coloniality, and its core organising principle, namely colonial difference. The study contributes to ongoing conversations addressing the ethical stakes of knowledge production and (de)coloniality. (shrink)

Picking up the question of what FLaK might be, this editorial considers the relationship between openness and closure in feminist legal studies. How do we draw on feminist struggles for openness in common resources, from security to knowledge, as we inhabit a compromised space in commercial publishing? We think about this first in relation to the content of this issue: on image-based abuse continuums, asylum struggles, trials of protestors, customary justice, and not-so-timely reparations. Our thoughts take us through the different (...) ways that openness and closure work in struggles against violence, cruel welcomes, and re-arrangements of code and custom. Secondly, we share some reflections on methodological openness and closure as the roundtable conversation on asylum, and the interview with Riles, remind us of #FLaK2016 and its method of scattering sources as we think about how best to mix knowledges. Thirdly, prompted by the FLaK kitchen table conversations on openness, publishing and ‘getting the word out’, we respond to Kember’s call to ‘open up open access’. We explain the different current arrangements for opening up FLS content and how green open access, the sharedit initiative, author request and publisher discretion present alternatives to gold open access. Finally drawing on Franklin and Spade, we show how there are a range of ‘wench tactics’—adapting gifts, stalling and resting—which we deploy as academic editors who are trying to have an impact on the access, use and circulation of our journal, even though we do not own the journal we edit. These wench tactics are alternatives to the more obvious or reported tactic of resignation, or withdrawing academic labour from editing and reviewing altogether. They help us think about brewing editorial time, what ambivalence over our 25th birthday might mean, and how to inhabit painful places. In this, we respond in our own impure, compromised way to da Silva’s call not to forget the native and slave as we do FLaK, and repurpose shrapnel, in our common commitments. (shrink)

A mass casualty (MASCAL) event is different to a major incident. The crux of this difference is that in a major incident, by the adoption of special measures, normal or near-normal standards of care can be maintained. In a MASCAL, irrespective of what special measures are instituted, standards of care inevitably drop. This is a, currently unmet, challenge for medical planning and planning policy. Twenty-First century weaponry is capable of producing thousands of causalities a day over a period of several (...) days in peer-on-peer conflict. In this chapter, we propose that medical planning for military events on this scale should include the following: explicit acceptance that ‘gold standard’ care cannot be given to patients who are triaged for treatment, a better understanding how to identify those patients who will not be triaged for treatment, a focus on ensuring patient flow (which includes diversion, self-care and remote monitoring), and implementation of the principle that care should be given by the lowest capable provider. We attempt to begin to develop some principles for planners to consider drawing on historical precedents and explore some of the ethical implications of our proposals. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of bees in Dickinson’s work, most interpreters denigrate her nature poems. But following several recent scholars, I identify Nietzschean/Dionysian overtones in the bee poems and suggest the figure of bees/hive/queen illuminates as feminist key to her corpus. First, (a) the bee’s sting represents martyred death; (b) its gold, immortality; (c) its tongue, the “lesbian phallus”; (d) its wings, poetic power; (e) its buzz, poetic melody, and (f) its organism, a joyful Dionysian Susan (her sister-in-law and love (...) interest) to Emily’s flower. Second, the hive represents her individual poems (with slants/dashes as stingers, wings as hymn meter, honey as rhymes, variant words as exiled bees, and accompanying flowers their Darwinian coevolution with bees), constituting her writing persona as a multi-voiced self-swarm, as organized in the apiary of her letters and fascicles. And third, the queen represents her Western cultural and religious inheritance wherein bees are symbols of the soul, reincarnation, poetic-philosophical vocation, and a Nietzschean, trans-Dionysian naturalist ontology—symbolized by apiarian Artemis. (shrink)

We describe how the set of tools, practices, and social relations known as “precision agriculture” is defined, promoted, and debated. To do so, we perform a critical discourse analysis of popular and trade press websites. Promoters of precision agriculture champion how big data analytics, automated equipment, and decision-support software will optimize yields in the face of narrow margins and public concern about farming’s environmental impacts. At its core, however, the idea of farmers leveraging digital infrastructure in their operations is not (...) new, as agronomic research in this vein has existed for over 30 years. Contemporary discourse in precision ag tends to favour emerging digital technologies themselves over their embeddedness in longstanding precision management approaches. Following several strands of science and technology studies research, we explore what rhetorical emphasis on technical innovation achieves, and argue that this discourse of novelty is a reinvention of precision agriculture in the context of the growing “smart” agricultural economy. We overview six tensions that remain unresolved in this promotional rhetoric, concerning the definitions, history, goals, adoption, uses, and impacts of precision agriculture. We then synthesize these in a discussion of the extent to which digital tools are believed to displace farmer decision-making and whether digital agriculture addresses the biophysical heterogeneity of farm landscapes or land itself has become an “experimental technology”—a way to advance the general development of artificial intelligence. This discussion ultimately helps us name a larger dilemma: that the smart agricultural economy is perhaps less about supporting land and its stewards than promising future tech and profits. (shrink)

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the (...) first, functioned as a secular religion. Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. (shrink)

Recently there have emerged an assortment of theorems relating to the ‘absoluteness of emerged events,’ and these results have sometimes been used to argue that quantum mechanics may involve some kind of metaphysically radical non-absoluteness, such as relationalism or perspectivalism. However, in our view a close examination of these theorems fails to convincingly support such possibilities. In this paper we argue that the Wigner’s friend paradox, the theorem of Bong et al and the theorem of Lawrence et al are all (...) best understood as demonstrating that if quantum mechanics is universal, and if certain auxiliary assumptions hold, then the world inevitably includes various forms of ‘disaccord,’ but this need not be interpreted in a metaphysically radical way; meanwhile, the theorem of Ormrod and Barrett is best understood either as an argument for an interpretation allowing multiple outcomes per observer, such as the Everett approach, or as a proof that quantum mechanics cannot be universal in the sense relevant for this theorem. We also argue that these theorems taken together suggest interesting possibilities for a different kind of relational approach in which _interaction_ states are relativized whilst observed events are absolute, and we show that although something like ‘retrocausality’ might be needed to make such an approach work, this would be a very special kind of retrocausality which would evade a number of common objections against retrocausality. We conclude that the non-absoluteness theorems may have a significant role to play in helping converge towards an acceptable solution to the measurement problem. (shrink)

There is little agreement about Aristotle’s philosophy of geometry, partly due to the textual evidence and partly part to disagreement over what constitutes a plausible view. I keep separate the questions ‘What is Aristotle’s philosophy of geometry?’ and ‘Is Aristotle right?’, and consider the textual evidence in the context of Greek geometrical practice, and show that, for Aristotle, plane geometry is about properties of certain sensible objects—specifically, dimensional continuity—and certain properties possessed by actual and potential compass-and-straightedge drawings qua quantitative and (...) continuous. For their part, the objects of stereometry are potential sensible three-dimensional figures qua quantitative and continuous. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There has been extensive debate among various disciplines about the nature and value of play. From these discussions it seems clear that play is a phenomenon with more than just one dimension: as a specific type of activity, as a form or structure, as an ontologically distinctive phenomenon, as a type of experience, or as a stance or an attitude towards a particular activity. This article focuses on the importance of the playful attitude in sport. It begins by attempting (...) to describe the underpinning features of a playful attitude, and its relation to Suits’ lusory attitude and the concept of gamification. Finally, it considers and critically evaluates the relationship between play and sport and the importance of the playful attitude in sporting activities. The purpose of this paper is a far deeper analysis of the playful attitude and its relationship to sport than has been previously provided, and a more precise definition as to what the playful attitude is. This will ultimately help to answer questions about the value of sport and how sport ought to be played. (shrink)

In recent years the quantum foundations community has seen increasing interest in the possibility of using retrocausality as a route to rejecting the conclusions of Bell’s theorem and restoring locality to quantum physics. On the other hand, it has also been argued that accepting nonlocality leads to a form of retrocausality. In this article we seek to elucidate the relationship between retrocausality and locality. We begin by providing a brief schema of the various ways in which violations of Bell’s inequalities (...) might lead us to consider some form of retrocausality. We then consider some possible motivations for using retrocausality to rescue locality, arguing that none of these motivations is sufficient to show that local retrocausal theories should always be preferred to nonlocal retrocausal theories, and therefore there is no clear reason to focus research efforts entirely on seeking local retrocausal models. Next, we examine several different conceptions of retrocausality, concluding that ‘all-at-once’ retrocausality is more coherent than the alternative dynamical picture. We then argue that since the ‘all-at-once’ approach requires probabilities to be assigned to entire histories, locality is not playing any crucial role within this picture. Thus we conclude that using retrocausality as a way to rescue locality may not be the right route to retrocausality. Finally, we demonstrate that accepting the existence of nonlocality and insisting on the nonexistence of preferred reference frames leads naturally to the acceptance of a form of retrocausality, albeit one which is not mediated by physical systems travelling backwards in time. We argue that this is the more natural way to motivate retrocausal models of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Research on the specific features of daydreaming compared with mind-wandering and night dreaming is a neglected topic in the philosophy of mind and the cognitive neuroscience of spontaneous thought. The extant research either conflates daydreaming with mind-wandering (whether understood as task-unrelated thought, unguided attention, or disunified thought), characterizes daydreaming as opposed to mind-wandering (Dorsch, 2015), or takes daydreaming to encompass any and all “imagined events” (Newby-Clark & Thavendran, 2018). These dueling definitions obstruct future research on spontaneous thought, and are insufficiently (...) precise to guide empirical studies. They also fail to illuminate the phenomenal core of daydreaming, namely, its dreamlike qualities. Although daydreaming is related to both mind-wandering and narrative imagination, it is not reducible to either. We argue that daydreams are experiences of spontaneous, immersive imagination in the waking state. The main task of our investigation is to distinguish daydreaming, conceptually and phenomenologically, from mind-wandering, on the one hand, and night dreaming, on the other. Although daydream experiences can vary widely, we distinguish prototypical experiences of daydreaming from adjacent imaginative activity, including fleeting imagery and “focused daydreaming,” or crafted visualization. We consider our phenomenological analysis as preparatory work for conceptually distinguishing different spontaneous and imaginative states so that they can be investigated accordingly with questionnaires and qualitative methods. We argue that precision about the phenomenal character of daydreaming can guide neurophenomenological investigations, help delimit studies on individual variance in daydreaming features, and identify differences among daydreaming, mind-wandering, and night dreaming conceptually and phenomenologically, and possibly eventually in terms of neural correlates. (shrink)

Medical ethics assumes a clear boundary between clinical research and clinical medicine: one produces knowledge for the benefit of future patients, while the other provides optimal care to individuals right now. It also assumes that the two cannot be integrated without sacrificing the needs of the current patient to those of future patients. But integration could allow us to provide better care to everyone, now and in the future.

Abstract:Vulnerability is an important criterion to assess the ethical justification of the inclusion of participants in research trials. Currently, vulnerability is often understood as an attribute inherent to a participant by nature of a diagnosed condition. Accordingly, a common ethical concern relates to the participant’s decisionmaking capacity and ability to provide free and informed consent. We propose an expanded view of vulnerability that moves beyond a focus on consent and the intrinsic attributes of participants. We offer specific suggestions for how (...) relational aspects and the dynamic features of vulnerability could be more fully captured in current discussions and research practices. (shrink)

Ontological separation plays a key role in Aristotle’s metaphysical project: substances alone are ontologically χωριστόν. The standard view identifies Aristotelian ontological separation with ontological independence, so that ontological separation is a non-symmetric relation. I argue that there is strong textual evidence that Aristotle employs an asymmetric notion of separation in the Metaphysics—one that involves the dependence of other entities on the independent entity. I argue that this notion allows Aristotle to prevent the proliferation of substance-kinds and thus to secure the (...) unity of his metaphysical system. (shrink)

Abstract:Vulnerability is an important criterion to assess the ethical justification of the inclusion of participants in research trials. Currently, vulnerability is often understood as an attribute inherent to a participant by nature of a diagnosed condition. Accordingly, a common ethical concern relates to the participant’s decisionmaking capacity and ability to provide free and informed consent. We propose an expanded view of vulnerability that moves beyond a focus on consent and the intrinsic attributes of participants. We offer specific suggestions for how (...) relational aspects and the dynamic features of vulnerability could be more fully captured in current discussions and research practices. (shrink)

I argue that the Oxford school Everett interpretation is internally incoherent, because we cannot claim that in an Everettian universe the kinds of reasoning we have used to arrive at our beliefs about quantum mechanics would lead us to form true beliefs. I show that in an Everettian context, the experimental evidence that we have available could not provide empirical confirmation for quantum mechanics, and moreover that we would not even be able to establish reference to the theoretical entities of (...) quantum mechanics. I then consider a range of existing Everettian approaches to the probability problem and show that they do not succeed in overcoming this incoherence. (shrink)

Payment to recruit research subjects is a common practice but raises ethical concerns relating to the potential for coercion or undue influence. We conducted the first national study of IRB members and human subjects protection professionals to explore attitudes as to whether and why payment of research participants constitutes coercion or undue influence. Upon critical evaluation of the cogency of ethical concerns regarding payment, as reflected in our survey results, we found expansive or inconsistent views about coercion and undue influence (...) that may interfere with valuable research. In particular, respondents appear to believe that coercion and undue influence lie on a continuum; by contrast, we argue that they are wholly distinct: whereas undue influence is a cognitive distortion relating to assessment of risks and benefits, coercion is a threat of harm. Because payment is an offer, rather than a threat, payment is never coercive. (shrink)

Despite frequent calls by players, managers and fans, FIFA's resistance to the implementation of goal-line technology (GLT) has been well documented in national print and online media as well as FIFA's own website. In 2010, FIFA president Sepp Blatter outlined eight reasons why GLT should not be used in football. The reasons given by FIFA can be broadly separated into three categories; those dealing with the nature and value of the game of football, those related to issues of justice, and (...) those concerned with the practical implementation of GLT. This paper intends to evaluate these eight reasons in order to assess whether there are, indeed, any good arguments against GLT in football. (shrink)

With the normative demand to attend to social difference and an absence of universal evaluative terms with which to do so, recent theory has increasingly turned to the study of the affective rather than epistemological conditions of ethical encounter. This I call a “dispositional ethics” that construes responsibility as responsiveness. Recent articulations of such an ethics, notably in the most current work of Judith Butler, James Tully, Jade Larissa Schiff, and Ella Myers, highlight its connection to situated practices of concrete (...) bodies-in-relation, but often stop short of developing an account of what such embodied practices might be. Based on interviews with thirteen experts who take the body as their primary vocational and intellectual field and characterize their practice as an art of listening, I distinguish three dimensions of a dispositional ethics in practice and some of the specific strategies available to cultivate the conditions for responsiveness in political life. (shrink)

Frege argues that number is so unlike the things we accept as properties of external objects that it cannot be such a property. In particular, (1) number is arbitrary in a way that qualities are not, and (2) number is not predicated of its subjects in the way that qualities are. Most Aristotle scholars suppose either that Frege has refuted Aristotle's number theory or that Aristotle avoids Frege's objections by not making numbers properties of external objects. This has led some (...) to conclude that Aristotle's accounts of arithmetical and geometrical objects differ substantially. I close this supposed gap by showing that Aristotle's arithmetical objects, like geometrical objects, are just certain sensible things qua certain properties they in fact possess. Specifically, numbers are pluralities qua quantitative or relational properties like ten units or ten. I show that this view is resistant to the Fregean concerns about arbitrariness and numerical predication. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTo date, there has been little philosophical consideration of the concept of shame in sport, yet sport seems to be an environment conducive to the experience of shame due to its public and...

In this article we report relevant data that shed light on the topic of hope and patients’ expectations in the use of DBS, for standard, approved, and established indications, based on a broader qualitative study on the ethical and social challenges that healthcare providers face in the field of DBS.

Some individuals facing dementia contemplate hastening their own death: weighing the possibility of living longer with dementia against the alternative of dying sooner but avoiding the later stages of cognitive and functional impairment. This weighing resonates with an ethical and legal consensus in the United States that individuals can voluntarily choose to forgo life‐sustaining interventions and also that medical professionals can support these choices even when they will result in an earlier death. For these reasons, whether and how a terminally (...) ill individual can choose to control the timing of their death is a topic that cannot be avoided when considering the dementia trajectory. With a focus on the U.S. context, this landscape review considers the status of provisions that would legally permit people facing dementia to hasten death with appropriate support from medical professionals. This review can be used to plan and guide clinical and legal practitioner discussion and policy development concerning evolving questions not fully covered by existing medical decision‐making provisions. (shrink)

Given a rich environment, how do we decide on what information to use? A view of a single entity (e.g., a group of birds) affords many distinct interpretations, including their number, average size, and spatial extent. An enduring challenge for cognition, therefore, is to focus resources on the most relevant evidence for any particular decision. In the present study, subjects completed three tasks—number discrimination, surface area discrimination, and convex hull discrimination—with the same stimulus set, where these three features were orthogonalized. (...) Therefore, only the relevant feature provided consistent evidence for decisions in each task. This allowed us to determine how well humans discriminate each feature dimension and what evidence they relied on to do so. We introduce a novel computational approach that fits both feature precision and feature use. We found that the most relevant feature for each decision is extracted and relied on, with minor contributions from competing features. These results suggest that multiple feature dimensions are separately represented for each attended ensemble of many items and that cognition is efficient at selecting the appropriate evidence for a decision. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 19-30 [Access article in PDF] Bugged Out:A Reflection on Art Experience Christopher Perricone I used to enjoy art. Not all the arts equally. Overall literature spoke to me most clearly. I am not sure exactly why. I guess some combination of inborn and learned dispositions. Whatever is the case, my enjoyment of literature always seemed natural to me, since literature was of (...) a medium I already knew, the vocabulary and grammar of my own language. But I enjoyed paintings and musical pieces as well, some of which I shall never forget even though they have virtually faded from my life, from what I have become.I cannot say that I ever had a favorite artwork. I have always thought the idea foolish, reminiscent of children who think often in terms of favorites, whether colors, candies, or friends. However, there are some works that do stand out in memory, even though, as I say, I cannot bring myself to enjoy them now. They are ghosts whose forms are discernible, but whose flesh is long gone.I had read lots of literature. I even enjoyed the act and the atmosphere of reading. I remember the chair I sat in, the lighting, the room. I also used to love to wake up on weekends, eat a leisurely breakfast, and then get back into bed and read until noon. Of course the setting itself of reading was ultimately not crucial, it was merely a pleasant means of facilitating one's excursion into another world. It was the other world that counted. So many worlds. Of course, I entered joyfully the worlds of Shakespeare and Dante, which Harold Bloom recently has judged at the center of the Western canon, but I entered also lesser but personally not less significant worlds to which I was drawn. 1 I needed some tutoring in Shakespeare and Dante because they did not quite speak my language, my twentieth-century American tongue. I had trouble negotiating their worlds. However, I had none whatsoever when it came to the worlds of James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Graham Greene, Walt Whitman, T.S.Eliot, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, or Joseph Conrad. I was at home in these worlds, different [End Page 19] worlds, but nonetheless home. I loved Conrad's the "Heart of Darkness." For me this was one of the truly haunting tales. After my first reading of the "Heart of Darkness," I can honestly say, my life was changed. I neither talked nor walked the same. I moved among and around people and things differently. I saw myself differently both among others and when I would stand before my mirror alone. And subsequent readings brought about further changes, changes of my comportment in the world. I imagined that I saw, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled the details from the beginning of that story to its very end. I sat on the deck of the Nellie with Marlow, Conrad's character narrator, and his listeners. I watched with them as the sun went down over the Thames. I followed Marlow as he told the story of how he had "set off for the center of the earth," up the Congo perhaps where in his mind all human life had its source; how as he came closer to the center facts became less straightforward, the greed for ivory, the "flavor of mortality in lies," the hollowness of Mr. Kurtz, the final horror of it all. I sweated in the heat of the "Heart of Darkness." Like any experience of a masterpiece, the "Heart of Darkness" was a visceral experience for me. After such experiences one feels emotionally and physically drained. One feels comfort in thinking, as with a dream, it was not real. And yet there is a lingering discomfort: as it were no mere fantasy at all.I often had feelings of the same intensity and profundity in respect to painting and music. They, too, were worlds for me. I enjoyed the varioustouches of the painters. In particular, I enjoyed the gold, the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 19-30 [Access article in PDF] Bugged Out:A Reflection on Art Experience Christopher Perricone I used to enjoy art. Not all the arts equally. Overall literature spoke to me most clearly. I am not sure exactly why. I guess some combination of inborn and learned dispositions. Whatever is the case, my enjoyment of literature always seemed natural to me, since literature was of (...) a medium I already knew, the vocabulary and grammar of my own language. But I enjoyed paintings and musical pieces as well, some of which I shall never forget even though they have virtually faded from my life, from what I have become.I cannot say that I ever had a favorite artwork. I have always thought the idea foolish, reminiscent of children who think often in terms of favorites, whether colors, candies, or friends. However, there are some works that do stand out in memory, even though, as I say, I cannot bring myself to enjoy them now. They are ghosts whose forms are discernible, but whose flesh is long gone.I had read lots of literature. I even enjoyed the act and the atmosphere of reading. I remember the chair I sat in, the lighting, the room. I also used to love to wake up on weekends, eat a leisurely breakfast, and then get back into bed and read until noon. Of course the setting itself of reading was ultimately not crucial, it was merely a pleasant means of facilitating one's excursion into another world. It was the other world that counted. So many worlds. Of course, I entered joyfully the worlds of Shakespeare and Dante, which Harold Bloom recently has judged at the center of the Western canon, but I entered also lesser but personally not less significant worlds to which I was drawn. 1 I needed some tutoring in Shakespeare and Dante because they did not quite speak my language, my twentieth-century American tongue. I had trouble negotiating their worlds. However, I had none whatsoever when it came to the worlds of James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Graham Greene, Walt Whitman, T.S.Eliot, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, or Joseph Conrad. I was at home in these worlds, different [End Page 19] worlds, but nonetheless home. I loved Conrad's the "Heart of Darkness." For me this was one of the truly haunting tales. After my first reading of the "Heart of Darkness," I can honestly say, my life was changed. I neither talked nor walked the same. I moved among and around people and things differently. I saw myself differently both among others and when I would stand before my mirror alone. And subsequent readings brought about further changes, changes of my comportment in the world. I imagined that I saw, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled the details from the beginning of that story to its very end. I sat on the deck of the Nellie with Marlow, Conrad's character narrator, and his listeners. I watched with them as the sun went down over the Thames. I followed Marlow as he told the story of how he had "set off for the center of the earth," up the Congo perhaps where in his mind all human life had its source; how as he came closer to the center facts became less straightforward, the greed for ivory, the "flavor of mortality in lies," the hollowness of Mr. Kurtz, the final horror of it all. I sweated in the heat of the "Heart of Darkness." Like any experience of a masterpiece, the "Heart of Darkness" was a visceral experience for me. After such experiences one feels emotionally and physically drained. One feels comfort in thinking, as with a dream, it was not real. And yet there is a lingering discomfort: as it were no mere fantasy at all.I often had feelings of the same intensity and profundity in respect to painting and music. They, too, were worlds for me. I enjoyed the varioustouches of the painters. In particular, I enjoyed the gold, the... (shrink)

Listening appears as elusive as it is crucial to democratic life, particularly in conditions of structural injustice. Dominant groups benefit from histories and habits of inattention and, when enlisted, common responses of denial, defensiveness, and resentment. What lies behind this pervasive and persistent failure to listen to claims of structural injustice by more advantaged groups, and what does this mean for democratic engagement? This paper addresses this question via three interventions: first, it develops a novel account of listening that reveals (...) why listening to claims of structural injustice often proves difficult. Second, it examines how inhabiting positions of relative advantage shapes whether and how people listen to such claims. Finally, it explores the implications these challenges have for the design of democratic processes that seek to engage advantaged groups regarding structural injustice. To develop this account, I draw together current scholarship regarding listening and structural injustice with original fieldwork of recent and current efforts to engage more advantaged communities regarding a specific form of structural injustice: specifically, interviews and observation of the ten organizations across Aotearoa New Zealand most active in efforts to engage communities regarding socio-economic inequality in the country. (shrink)

Decolonization requires critical attention to settler logics that reinforce settler-colonialism, yet settler communities, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of identity and history. This article, provoked by Māori protocols of encounter, explores the necessity of developing a sense of collective identity as precursor to meeting in settler-Indigenous politics. It argues that the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a social group—apparent in paradigmatic approaches to engaging social difference in settler communities—is at the heart of the particularity (...) of settler group identity and also stands at the heart of countless failures to meet in settler-Indigenous politics. This essay thus seeks to mark the particular ground of this unmarkedness of settler identity in Western philosophies that set being unmarked as both ontology and ideal; the dominance of settler communities in places of settlement; and the willful forgetting of the colonial histories brought about by such dominance. (shrink)

In 2015, the major critical care societies issued guidelines outlining a procedural approach to resolving intractable conflict between healthcare professionals and surrogates over life-sustaining treatments (LST). We report our experience with a resolving conflict procedure. This was a retrospective, single-centre cohort study of ethics consultations involving intractable conflict over LST. The resolving conflict process was initiated eleven times for ten patients over 2,015 ethics consultations from 2000 to 2020. In all cases, the ethics committee recommended withdrawal of the contested LST. (...) In seven cases, the patient died or was transferred or a legal injunction was obtained before completion of the process. In the four cases in which LST was withdrawn, the time from ethics consultation to withdrawal of LST was 24.8 ± 12.2 days. Healthcare provider and surrogate were often distressed during the process, sometimes resulting in escalation of conflict and legal action. In some cases, however, surrogates appeared relieved that they did not have to make the final decision regarding LST. Challenges regarding implementation included the time needed for process completion and limited usefulness in emergent situations. Although it is feasible to implement a due process approach to conflict over LST, there are factors that limit the procedure’s usefulness. (shrink)

A decade after the ‘‘Sokal Hoax,’’ Alan Sokal and Paul Boghossian still claim that postmodern arguments are incoherent attacks on reason and truth. However, both also continue to mischaracterize ‘‘constructivist’’ epistemology, to engage in highly problematic logical gymnastics to defend their own views, and to ignore changes in philosophy of science and science studies since 1996. I offer a brief description of my own, rather different understanding of postmodern science criticism in order to contextualize my dissatisfaction with Sokal and Boghossian’s (...) arguments, and to highlight the value of cross-subfield anthropological collaboration based on the constructivist perspective articulated by Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Downloaded by [New York University] at 03:33 19 July 2011.. (shrink)

Drawing on qualitative interviews with parents of preschool children, the author addresses parental responses to children’s gender nonconformity. The author’s analyses indicate that parents welcome what they perceive as gender nonconformity among their young daughters, while their responses in relation to sons are more complex. Many parents across racial and class backgrounds accept or encourage some tendencies they consider atypical for boys. But this acceptance is balanced by efforts to approximate hegemonic ideals of masculinity. The author considers these patterns in (...) the context of gender as an interactional accomplishment, demonstrating that parents are often consciously aware of their own role in accomplishing gender with and for their sons. Heterosexual fathers are especially likely to be motivated in that accomplishment work by their own personal endorsement of hegemonic masculinity, while heterosexual mothers and gay parents are more likely to be motivated by accountability to others in relation to those ideals. (shrink)

The opening argument in the Metaphysics M.2 series targeting separate mathematical objects has been dismissed as flawed and half-hearted. Yet it makes a strong case for a point that is central to Aristotle’s broader critique of Platonist views: if we posit distinct substances to explain the properties of sensible objects, we become committed to an embarrassingly prodigious ontology. There is also something to be learned from the argument about Aristotle’s own criteria for a theory of mathematical objects. I hope to (...) persuade readers of Metaphysics M.2 that Aristotle is a more thoughtful critic than he is often taken to be. (shrink)

Play is a vital component of the social life and well-being of both children and adults. This book examines the concept of play and considers a variety of the related philosophical issues. It also includes meta-analyses from a range of philosophers and theorists, as well as an exploration of some key applied ethical considerations. The main objective of The Philosophy of Play is to provide a richer understanding of the concept and nature of play and its relation to human life (...) and values, and to build disciplinary and paradigmatic bridges between scholars of philosophy and scholars of play. Including specific chapters dedicated to children and play, and exploring the work of key thinkers such as Plato, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Deleuze and Nietzsche, this book is invaluable reading for any advanced student, researcher or practitioner with an interest in education, playwork, leisure studies, applied ethics or the philosophy of sport. (shrink)

Long histories and entrenched habits of inattention among advantaged groups mean that even minor challenge and concession can provoke subjective perceptions of victimization. How, in such conditions, might claims of structural injustice break through? Drawing on field work with practitioners across conflict mediation, therapy, education, and performance – four sectors that facilitate listening in fraught contexts yet are undertheorized in politics – this article makes the case that among the most overlooked and powerful resources for cultivating receptivity and responsiveness among (...) advantaged groups are the arts of listening. Practices of engagement across these sectors establish listening as potent rather than passive, given the extent to which it constitutes the field of encounter and shapes what emerges within it, both in terms of expression and, more significantly in this context, receptivity of those to whom one listens. Yet this also means that how one listens is a pivotal consideration – particularly when listening might serve to reinforce and normalize unjustly dominant positions. In contrast to progressive politics’ emphasis on finding more forceful forms of voice and conventional reliance on direct communicative practices, this article explores how specific comedic, theatrical, and embodied tactics can generate ‘oblique forms of listening’ potentially useful to social justice struggles. (shrink)

In the article “Nudging and Informed Consent”, Cohen argues that the use of “nudging” by physicians in the clinical encounter may be ethically warranted because it results in an informed consent where obligations for beneficence and respect for autonomy are both met. However, the author's overenthusiastic support for nudging and his quick dismissal of shared decision-making leads him to assume that “soft” manipulation is un-problematic and that “wisdom” on the side of medical professionals will suffice to guard against abuse. Opposing (...) this view, we propose that: 1) patient preferences and values should not be boiled down to rational or irrational decisions based on cognitive reasoning alone, 2) potential threats to the physician-patient must be mitigated and could be minimized by employing alternative strategies that acknowledge the impact of cognitive heuristics in shaping decision-making but maintain transparency and trust, and 3) patient preferences and values can be legitimately influenced only under specific circumstances. The latter include: (1) exhaustion of other means; (2) evidence that nudging is effective in a specific context; (3) evidence of clear and active public misinformation (e.g., industry promoting smoking); (4) explicit pubic dialogue between various stakeholders including medical professional societies about nudging; (5) upholding shared decision-making as a preferred approach; and (6) a rich understanding of clinical reality beyond the simple dichotomy of beneficence-autonomy. (shrink)

Stigma can influence the prevention and identification of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, a leading cause of developmental delay in North America. Understanding the effects of public health practices and policies on stigma is imperative. We reviewed social science and biomedical literatures to understand the nature of stigma in FASD and its relevance from an ethics standpoint in matters of health practices and policies. We propose a descriptive model of stigma in FASD and note current knowledge gaps; discuss the ethical implications (...) of stigma based on two distinct criteria ; and describe two cases and the concerns associated with inadvertent stigmatization by public health initiatives for FASD. We recommend further empirical and ethical analyses to examine whether public health policies and practices inadvertently stigmatize and impact the success of public health initiatives and programs for FASD. (shrink)

Athenian ostracism has long captured democratic imaginations because it seems to present clear evidence of a people (demos) routinely asserting collective power over tyrannical elites. In recent times, ostracism has been particularly alluring to militant democrats, who see the institution as an ancient precursor to modern militant democratic mechanisms such as social media bans, impeachment measures, and lustration procedures, which serve to protect democratic constitutions from anti-democratic threats. Such a way of conceptualizing ostracism ultimately stems from Aristotle’s “rule of proportion,” (...) or the removal of “outstanding” individuals in a polity who threaten to disturb the achievement of communal eudaimonia (Aris. Pol. 1284a). However, this way of interpreting the institution only presents a truncated view, one which is overly centered on the ultimate expulsion of an individual from the polity, rather than on its broader contextual telos—the transformation of the ostracized individual and of the community. To move past this simplified view, this paper considers all elements of ostracism with equal force, and argues that ostracism offered a shared opportunity and shared space for all members of the polis—citizens, non-citizens, and elite members alike—to reform the character of the subject individual and to instill and reaffirm democratic values in the community. (shrink)

To ensure that the information resulting from research is relevant to patients, the Patient‐Centered Outcomes Research Institute eschews the “traditional health research” paradigm, in which investigators drive all aspects of research, in favor of one in which patients assume the role of research partner. If we accept the premise that patient engagement can offer fresh perspectives that shape research in valuable ways, then at least two important sets of questions present themselves. First, how are patients being engaged—and how should they (...) be engaged? Second, which patients are being engaged—and which patients should be? This set has received relatively less attention, and the neglect is surprising, given that the “who” question is conceptually prior to the question of “how.”This article focuses attention on the “who” of patient engagement in research. First, we provide background on the rationale for patient engagement, underscoring the importance of ensuring the representativeness of engaged patients. Second, we present what little is known about patients engaged in PCORI‐funded research. Third, we identify and discuss the ethical implications of ways in which current practices of patient identification and recruitment may lead to a lack of representativeness. These practices include reliance on the well‐connected and well‐informed, reliance on patients who are not well trained or well‐informed, and reliance on patient advocacy organizations. Finally, we consider several strategies for addressing these pitfalls in order to maximize the positive goals of patient engagement. Patient engagement is intended to address the inability of researchers, funders, and others to fully represent patient views and priorities, but without sufficient attention, the patients selected for this role may still leave important gaps. (shrink)

The rule of rescue describes the moral impulse to save identifiable lives in immediate danger at any expense. Think of the extremes taken to rescue a small child who has fallen down a well, a woman pinned beneath the rubble of an earthquake, or a submarine crew trapped on the ocean floor. No effort is deemed too great. Yet should this same moral instinct to rescue, regardless of cost, be applied in the emergency room, the hospital, or the community clinic? (...) -/- In health care, the desire to save lives at any cost must be reconciled with the reality of resource scarcity. As one example, the estimated cost for prophylactic Factor VIII to treat one patient with hemophilia for one year is $300,000. Costs of this magnitude have been accepted by public and private insurers in the developed world, even though, in principle, these sums could provide greater overall health benefit if allocated to pay for the unmet health care needs of many other patients. Looking forward, however, broad application of the rule of rescue will be increasingly untenable. But the moral instinct will remain: the desire to help those weakest among us, especially when their small numbers allow us to see them as unique individuals. What, then, is the ethical framework that can guide coverage and reimbursement decisions for orphan drugs into the future? (shrink)