ArgumentThe Comparative Survey of Freedom, first published by Freedom House in 1973, is now the most widely used indicator of democracy by both academics and the U.S. government alike. However, literature examining the Survey’s origins is virtually nonexistent. In this article, I use archival records to challenge Freedom House’s retrospective account of the indicator’s creation. Rather than the outcome of a scientific methodology by multiple social scientists, the Survey was produced by a single political scientist, Raymond Gastil, according to his (...) own hunches and impressions. How, then, did this indicator rise to such prominence? I argue that the Survey’s notoriety can be attributed to its early promotion in both political science and American foreign policy decision-making, as well as the fact that it fit the dominant scientific and political paradigms of the time. (shrink)

The laws of nature have come a long way since the time of Newton: quantum mechanics and relativity have given us good reasons to take seriously the possibility of laws which may be non-local, atemporal, ‘all-at-once,’ retrocausal, or in some other way not well-suited to the standard dynamical time evolution paradigm. Laws of this kind can be accommodated within a Humean approach to lawhood, but many extant non-Humean approaches face significant challenges when we try to apply them to laws outside (...) the time evolution picture. Thus for proponents of non-Humean approaches to lawhood there is a clear need for a novel non-Humean account which is capable of accommodating these sorts of laws. In this paper we propose such an account, characterizing lawhood in terms of constraints, which are understood as a form of modal structure. We demonstrate that our proposed realist account can indeed accommodate a large variety of laws outside the time evolution paradigm, and describe some possible applications to important philosophical problems. (shrink)

Using medical advances to enhance human athletic, aesthetic, and cognitive performance, rather than to treat disease, has been controversial. Little is known about physicians? experiences, views, and attitudes in this regard. We surveyed a national sample of physicians to determine how often they prescribe enhancements, their views on using medicine for enhancement, and whether they would be willing to prescribe a series of potential interventions that might be considered enhancements. We find that many physicians occasionally prescribe enhancements, but doctors hold (...) nuanced and ambiguous views of these issues. Most express concerns about the potential effects of enhancements on social equity, yet many also believe specific enhancements that are safe and effective should be available but not covered by insurance. These apparently contradictory views might reflect inherent tensions between the values of equity and liberty, which could make crafting coherent social policies on medical enhancements challenging. [Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of American Journal of Bioethics for the following free supplemental resource(s): An additional table (Table 5) referred to on p. 5]. (shrink)

I argue that ML models used in science function as highly idealized toy models. If we treat ML models as a type of highly idealized toy model, then we can deploy standard representational and epistemic strategies from the toy model literature to explain why ML models can still provide epistemic success despite their lack of similarity to their targets.

Quantum mechanics is an extraordinarily successful scientific theory. But more than 100 years after it was first introduced, the interpretation of the theory remains controversial. This Element introduces some of the most puzzling questions at the foundations of quantum mechanics and provides an up-to-date and forward-looking survey of the most prominent ways in which physicists and philosophers of physics have attempted to resolve them. Topics covered include nonlocality, contextuality, the reality of the wavefunction and the measurement problem. The discussion is (...) supplemented with descriptions of some of the most important mathematical results from recent work in quantum foundations, including Bell's theorem, the Kochen-Specker theorem and the PBR theorem. (shrink)

In this article we set out to understand the significance of the process matrix formalism and the quantum causal modelling programme for ongoing disputes about the role of causation in fundamental physics. We argue that the process matrix programme has correctly identified a notion of ‘causal order’ which plays an important role in fundamental physics, but this notion is weaker than the common-sense conception of causation because it does not involve asymmetry. We argue that causal order plays an important role (...) in grounding more familiar causal phenomena. Then we apply these conclusions to the causal modelling programme within quantum foundations, arguing that since no-signalling quantum correlations cannot exhibit causal order, they should not be analysed using classical causal models. This resolves an open question about how to interpret fine-tuning in classical causal models of no-signalling correlations. Finally we observe that a quantum generalization of causal modelling can play a similar functional role to standard causal reasoning, but we emphasize that this functional characterisation does not entail that quantum causal models offer novel explanations of quantum processes. (shrink)

There is a long tradition, in the history and philosophy of science, of studying Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, but recently philosophers have begun to examine the way in which Kant’s reflections on mathematics play a role in his philosophy more generally, and in its development. For example, in the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant outlines the method of philosophy in general by contrasting it with the method of mathematics; in the Critique of Practical Reason , Kant compares the Formula (...) of Universal Law, central to his theory of moral judgement, to a mathematical postulate; in the Critique of Judgement , where he considers aesthetic judgment, Kant distinguishes the mathematical sublime from the dynamical sublime. This last point rests on the distinction that shapes the Transcendental Analytic of Concepts at the heart of Kant’s Critical philosophy, that between the mathematical and the dynamical categories. These examples make it clear that Kant's transcendental philosophy is strongly influenced by the importance and special status of mathematics. The contributions to this book explore this theme of the centrality of mathematics to Kant’s philosophy as a whole. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. (shrink)

Belief polarization occurs when subjects who disagree about some matter of fact are exposed to a mixed body of evidence that bears on that dispute. While we might expect mutual exposure to common evidence to mitigate disagreement, since the evidence available to subjects comes to consist increasingly of items they have in common, this is not what happens. The subjects’ initial disagreement becomes more pronounced because each person increases confidence in her antecedent belief. Kelly aims to identify the mechanisms that (...) underlie this phenomenon and assess whether these processes undermine the justification of polarized beliefs. He concludes that given evidentialism, justification is not undermined by the polarizing mechanisms. I take on board Kelly’s description of the polarizing mechanisms, but challenge his conclusion. I argue that on plausible versions of evidentialism, the beliefs that result from these routes to polarization are not justified. (shrink)

ArgumentMost social scientists today think of data sharing as an ethical imperative essential to making social science more transparent, verifiable, and replicable. But what moved the architects of some of the U.S.’s first university-based social scientific research institutions, the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, and its spin-off, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, to share their data? Relying primarily on archived records, unpublished personal papers, and oral histories, I show that Angus Campbell, Warren Miller, Philip Converse, (...) and others understood sharing data not as an ethical imperative intrinsic to social science but as a useful means to the diverse ends of financial stability, scholarly and institutional autonomy, and epistemological reproduction. I conclude that data sharing must be evaluated not only on the basis of the scientific ideals its supporters affirm, but also on the professional objectives it serves. (shrink)

There is considerable agreement among epistemologists that certain abilities are constitutive of understanding-why. These abilities include: constructing explanations, drawing conclusions, and answering questions. This agreement has led epistemologists to conclude that understanding is a kind of know-how. However, in this paper, I argue that the abilities constitutive of understanding are the same kind of cognitive abilities that we find in ordinary cases of knowledge-that and not the kind of practical abilities associated with know-how. I argue for this by disambiguating between (...) different senses of abilities that are too often lumped together. As a consequence, non-reductionists about understanding—those that claim that understanding-why is not reducible to knowledge-that—need to find another way to motivate the view. In the end, the fact that abilities are constitutive of understanding-why does not give us reason to conclude that understanding is a kind of know-how. (shrink)

For early modern metaphysician Anne Conway, the world comprises creatures. In some sense, Conway is a monist about creatures: all creatures are one. Yet, as Jessica Gordon-Roth has astutely pointed out, that monism can be understood in very different ways. One might read Conway as an ‘existence pluralist’: creatures are all composed of the same type of substance, but many substances exist. Alternatively, one might read Conway as an ‘existence monist’: there is only one created substance. Gordon-Roth has done the (...) scholarship a great favor by illuminating these issues in Conway. However, this article takes issue with Gordon-Roth's further view that Conway ‘oscillates’ between the extremes of existence pluralism and monism. In its place, I argue we should read Conway as a priority monist: the whole of creation is ontologically prior to its parts. (shrink)

Some people oppose abortion on the grounds that fetuses have full moral status and thus a right to not be killed. We argue that special obligations that hold between mother and fetus also hold between parents and their children. We argue that if these special obligations necessitate the sacrifice of bodily autonomy in the case of abortion, then they also necessitate the sacrifice of bodily autonomy in the case of organ donation. If we accept the argument that it is obligatory (...) to override a woman’s bodily autonomy for the sake of an unborn child’s survival, we must continue to override the bodily autonomy of parents to ensure the survival of their living children, until the parent no longer has a special obligation to their child to the same degree as their special obligation to the fetus. And if the life of a child is truly more important than the bodily autonomy of its parents, as must be the case to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, this should remain true until such a time that their children are no longer considered their responsibility. Thus, parity of reasoning suggests that policies compelling the gestation of a fetus should be accompanied by policies compelling organ donation. (shrink)

Children bring intuitive arithmetic knowledge to the classroom before formal instruction in mathematics begins. For example, children can use their number sense to add, subtract, compare ratios, and even perform scaling operations that increase or decrease a set of dots by a factor of 2 or 4. However, it is currently unknown whether children can engage in a true division operation before formal mathematical instruction. Here we examined the ability of 6- to 9-year-old children and college students to perform symbolic (...) and non-symbolic approximate division. Subjects were presented with non-symbolic or symbolic dividends ranging from 32 to 185, and non-symbolic divisors ranging from 2 to 8. Subjects compared their imagined quotient to a visible target quantity. Both children and adults were successful at the approximate division tasks in both dots and numeral formats. This was true even among the subset of children that could not recognize the division symbol or solve simple division equations, suggesting intuitive division ability precedes formal division instruction. For both children and adults, the ability to divide non-symbolically mediated the relation between Approximate Number System acuity and symbolic math performance, suggesting that the ability to calculate non-symbolically may be a mechanism of the relation between ANS acuity and symbolic math. Our findings highlight the intuitive arithmetic abilities children possess before formal math instruction. (shrink)

It's well-known that Kant believed that intuition was central to an account of mathematical knowledge. What that role is and how Kant argues for it are, however, still open to debate. There are, broadly speaking, two tendencies in interpreting Kant's account of intuition in mathematics, each emphasizing different aspects of Kant's general doctrine of intuition. On one view, most recently put forward by Michael Friedman, this central role for intuition is a direct result of the limitations of the syllogistic logic (...) available to Kant. On this view, Kant's reasons for introducing intuition are taken to be logical or mathematical, rather than philosophical. The other tendency, which I shall try to develop here, emphasizes an epistemological or phenomenological role for intuition in mathematics arising out of what may loosely be called Kant's ‘antiformalism.’This paper, which focuses specifically on the case of geometry, falls into two parts. First, I consider Kant's discussion of intuition in the Metaphysical Exposition of the concept of space. (shrink)

Coregulation refers to the process by which relationship partners form a dyadic emotional system involving an oscillating pattern of affective arousal and dampening that dynamically maintains an optimal emotional state. Coregulation may represent an important form of interpersonal emotion regulation, but confusion exists in the literature due to a lack of precision in the usage of the term. We propose an operational definition for coregulation as a bidirectional linkage of oscillating emotional channels between partners, which contributes to emotional stability for (...) both partners. We propose several distinctions and raise unanswered questions that will need to be addressed in order to understand the relevance of coregulation for well-being in adulthood. (shrink)

Explainable AI (xAI) methods are important for establishing trust in using black-box models. However, recent criticism has mounted against current xAI methods that they disagree, are necessarily false, and can be manipulated, which has started to undermine the deployment of black-box models. Rudin (2019) goes so far as to say that we should stop using black-box models altogether in high-stakes cases because xAI explanations ‘must be wrong’. However, strict fidelity to the truth is historically not a desideratum in science. Idealizations (...) – the intentional distortions introduced to scientific theories and models – are commonplace in the natural sciences and are seen as a successful scientific tool. Thus, it is not falsehood qua falsehood that is the issue. In this paper, I outline the need for xAI research to engage in idealization evaluation. Drawing on the use of idealizations in the natural sciences and philosophy of science, I introduce a novel framework for evaluating whether xAI methods engage in successful idealizations or deceptive explanations (SIDEs). SIDEs evaluates whether the limitations of xAI methods, and the distortions that they introduce, can be part of a successful idealization or are indeed deceptive distortions as critics suggest. I discuss the role that existing research can play in idealization evaluation and where innovation is necessary. Through a qualitative analysis we find that leading feature importance methods and counterfactual explanations are subject to idealization failure and suggest remedies for ameliorating idealization failure. (shrink)

I assess various proposals for the source of the intuition that there is something problematic about contextuality, ultimately concluding that contextuality is best thought of in terms of fine-tuning. I then argue that as with other fine-tuning problems in quantum mechanics, this behaviour can be understood as a manifestation of teleological features of physics. Finally I discuss several formal mathematical frameworks that have been used to analyse contextuality and consider how their results should be interpreted by scientific realists. In the (...) course of this discussion I obtain several new mathematical results—I demonstrate that preparation contextuality is a form of fine-tuning, I show that measurement contextuality can be explained by appeal to a global constraint forbidding closed causal loops, and I demonstrate how negative probabilities can arise from a classical ontological model together with an epistemic restriction. (shrink)

Previous research reported that college students' symbolic addition and subtraction fluency improved after training with non-symbolic, approximate addition and subtraction. These findings were widely interpreted as strong support for the hypothesis that the Approximate Number System (ANS) plays a causal role in symbolic mathematics, and that this relation holds into adulthood. Here we report four experiments that fail to find evidence for this causal relation. Experiment 1 examined whether the approximate arithmetic training effect exists within a shorter training period than (...) originally reported (2 vs 6 days of training). Experiment 2 attempted to replicate and compare the approximate arithmetic training effect to a control training condition matched in working memory load. Experiments 3 and 4 replicated the original approximate arithmetic training experiments with a larger sample size. Across all four experiments (N = 318) approximate arithmetic training was no more effective at improving the arithmetic fluency of adults than training with control tasks. Results call into question any causal relationship between approximate, non-symbolic arithmetic and precise symbolic arithmetic. (shrink)

This book draws its inspiration from Hilbert, Wittgenstein, Cavaillès and Lakatos and is designed to reconfigure contemporary philosophy of mathematics by making the growth of knowledge rather than its foundations central to the study of mathematical rationality, and by analyzing the notion of growth in historical as well as logical terms. Not a mere compendium of opinions, it is organised in dialogical forms, with each philosophical thesis answered by one or more historical case studies designed to support, complicate or question (...) it. The first part of the book examines the role of scientific theory and empirical fact in the growth of mathematical knowledge. The second examines the role of abstraction, analysis and axiomatization. The third raises the question of whether the growth of mathematical knowledge constitutes progress, and how progress may be understood. Readership: Students and scholars concerned with the history and philosophy of mathematics and the formal sciences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kant on the Method of MathematicsEmily Carson1. INTRODUCTIONThis paper will touch on three very general but closely related questions about Kant’s philosophy. First, on the role of mathematics as a paradigm of knowledge in the development of Kant’s Critical philosophy; second, on the nature of Kant’s opposition to his Leibnizean predecessors and its role in the development of the Critical philosophy; and finally, on the specific role of intuition (...) in Kant’s philosophy of mathematics. One of the points that I want to make is that recognizing the importance of these first two issues is essential to giving an adequate account of the third. That is, only by appreciating how Kant uses the example of mathematical knowledge, and in particular the objections he had to previous accounts of such knowledge, can we understand the philosophical role that he ascribes to intuition in his own account of mathematics.I don’t propose to explain the details of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, but rather to compare his views on mathematics in the pre-Critical Prize Essay of 1764 to those of the Critique of Pure Reason, with the aim of showing how Kant’s doctrine of construction in pure intuition arises out of a combination of two factors: first, his attempt to ground the distinction between the respective methods of mathematics and philosophy, and second, his concern to defend the reality of mathematical knowledge against the views of those he called ‘the metaphysicians.’ The first factor demands an account of the certainty of mathematics, the second requires an account of its content. I shall argue that there is a possible conflict between Kant’s accounts of these features in the Prize Essay, a possibility which is finally ruled out only by means of the Critical doctrine of pure intuition. So I hope to show that there is a significant philosophical role for intuition in Kant’s account of mathematical knowledge (over and above the more logical role attributed to it on readings [End Page 629] such as those of Friedman, Beth, and Hintikka1) in reconciling the content of mathematics and its certainty.2. THE MATHEMATICIANS VS. THE METAPHYSICIANSThroughout his early writings, Kant appealed to the evidence and certainty of mathematics; his attitude towards metaphysics, however, underwent a dramatic shift. In the Physical Monadology of 1756, Kant asked how metaphysics and geometry can be united,[f] or the former peremptorily denies that space is infinitely divisible, while the latter, with its usual certainty, asserts that it is infinitely divisible. Geometry contends that empty space is necessary for free motion, while metaphysics hisses the idea off the stage. Geometry holds universal attraction or gravitation to be hardly explicable by mechanical causes but shows that it derives from the forces which are inherent in bodies at rest and which act at a distance, whereas metaphysics dismisses the notion as an empty delusion of the imagination [1:475–6].2He attempted in this work to reconcile the respective positions of metaphysics and geometry regarding infinite divisibility, thereby demonstrating that “it is neither the case that the geometer is mistaken nor that the opinion to be found among metaphysicians deviates from the truth” [1:480]. But in a series of works from 1762–3, Kant reveals a markedly different attitude towards metaphysics. For example, in “The only possible argument in support of a demonstration of the existence of God,” Kant says:the mania for method and the imitation of the mathematician, who advances with a sure step along a well-surfaced road, have occasioned a large number of such mishaps on the slippery ground of metaphysics. These mishaps are constantly before one’s eyes, but there is little hope that people will be warned by them, or that they will learn to be more circumspect as a result [2:71].In contrast, Kant describes the geometer as uncovering “with the greatest certainty” the most secret properties of that which is extended [2:70]. But the less conciliatory attitude to metaphysics comes out most clearly in Kant’s actual procedure in “The only possible argument.” In the Seventh Reflection, he presents an attempt to explain the origin of... (shrink)

Political philosophy offers a range of utopian proposals, from open borders to global egalitarianism. Some object that these proposals ought to be constrained by what is feasible, while others insist that what justice demands does not depend on what we can bring about. Currently, this debate is mired in disputes over the fundamental nature of justice and the ultimate purpose of political philosophy. I take a different approach, proposing that we should consider which facts could fill out a feasibility requirement. (...) This search for the facts requires requires looking to the social sciences, but I argue that it turns out that the social sciences will not provide us with findings that rule out, nor even count against, the kinds of proposals that political philosophers actually make, whether ideal or non-ideal. At the least, to deny this requires adopting deeply controversial commitments within the philosophy of social science. Thus, I conclude that a feasibility requirement has little practical use for political philosophers. Disputes over that requirement ought to be replaced by other, more fruitful ways for political philosophers to address both the findings of social science and the debates over non-ideal theory or political realism. (shrink)

Everything is constantly changing. Our emotions are one of the primary ways we track, evaluate, organize, and motivate responsive action to those changes. Furthermore, emotions are inherently interpersonal. We learn what to feel from others, especially when we are children. We “catch” other people’s emotions just by being around them. We get caught in escalating response–counterresponse emotional sequences. This all takes place in time, generating complex patterns of interpersonal emotional dynamics. This review summarizes theory, empirical findings, and key challenges for (...) future research regarding three processes that contribute to interpersonal affective dynamics: (a) Convergence of social partners’ emotional responses to the external world, (b) emotional reactivity of social partners to each other, and (c) interpersonal emotion regulation. (shrink)

What mechanism implements the mutual exclusivity bias to map novel labels to objects without names? Prominent theoretical accounts of mutual exclusivity (e.g., Markman, 1989, 1990) propose that infants are guided by their knowledge of object names. However, the mutual exclusivity constraint could be implemented via monitoring of object novelty (see Merriman, Marazita, & Jarvis, 1995). We sought to discriminate between these contrasting explanations across two preferential looking experiments with 22-month-olds. In Experiment 1, infants viewed three objects: one name-known, two name-unknown. (...) Of the two name-unknown objects, one was novel, and the other had been previously familiarized. The infants responded to hearing a novel label by increasing attention only to the novel, name-unknown object. In a second experiment in which the name-known object was absent, a novel label increased infants’ attention to a novel object beyond baseline preference for novelty. The experiments provide clear evidence for a novelty-based mechanism. However, differences in the time course of disambiguation across experiments suggest that novelty processing may be influenced by contextual factors. (shrink)

Offered here is an interpretation of the ancient Confucian philosopher Mengzi's (372–289 B.C.E.) method of cultivating moral feelings, which he calls "extension." It is argued that this method is both psychologically plausible and an important, but often overlooked, part of moral life. In this interpretation, extending our moral feelings is not a project in logical consistency, analogical reasoning, or emotional intuition. Rather, Mengzi's method of extension is a project in realigning the human heart that harnesses our rational, reflective, and emotional (...) capacities in order to extend the feelings we already have to the appropriate objects for these feelings. It is argued that there are three main features of Mengzi's account that make it an attractive explanation of the cultivation of moral feelings. The first is the way Mengzi sees reasoning and philosophical reflection as an aid to, rather than the foundation for, moral development. The second is Mengzi's precision regarding the relationship between the basic moral feelings we start with (the "sprouts") and their corresponding virtues. The method of extension acts as a well-designed bridge between feelings and virtues. Third, Mengzi's account, unlike that of the Mohist Yi Zhi, whom he criticizes, pays special attention to the complexities and limitations of human psychology. In conclusion it is shown how a Mengzian understanding of the relationship between feelings and morality can answer some traditional challenges, especially Kantian ones, regarding the proper role of emotion in moral life. (shrink)

The author argues for the following as constituents of the moral virtue of open-mindedness: a second-order awareness that is not reducible to first-order doubt; strong moral concern for members of the moral community; and some freedom from reactive habit patterns, particularly with regard to one's self-narratives, or equanimity. Drawing on Buddhist philosophical accounts of equanimity, the author focuses on the third constituent, equanimity, and argues that it is a central, but often ignored, component of the moral virtue of open-mindedness, and (...) its absence can explain many failures of open-mindedness. (shrink)

It’s family games night, and we’re playing a guessing game. My mother—not a physicist—picks up a card and says, ‘A fundamental particle.’.

This essay explores how the distinctively anthropological concept of culture provides uniquely valuable insights into the workings of science in its cultural context. Recent efforts by anthropologists to dislodge the traditional notion of culture as a homogenous, stable whole have opened up a variety of ways of imagining culture that place power differentials, flux, and contradiction at its center. Including attention to a wide variety of social domains outside the laboratory, attending to the ways nonscientists actively engage with scientific knowledge, (...) and focusing on the complex interactions that flow both into and out of research laboratories are ways the activities of both scientists and nonscientists can be situated in the heterogeneous matrtx of culture. Three images—the citadel, the rhizome, and the string figure—allow us to picture the discontinuous ways science both permeates and is permeated by cultural life. (shrink)

This article contributes to a growing conversation about the role of numbers in promoting gendered agendas in potentially contradictory ways. Drawing from interviews with gender advisors—the professionals tasked with mainstreaming gender in development projects—in an East African country, I begin from the paradox that gender advisors articulate a strong preference for qualitative data to best capture the lives of the women they aim to assist while voicing a need for quantitative metrics. I demonstrate that gender advisors come to imagine metrics (...) as expeditious bureaucratic tools able to inspire cooperation from otherwise reluctant coworkers. I argue that development organizations are gendered in ways—acutely seen in how advisors struggle, are sidelined, and attempt to advance their goals with numbers—that lead to the utility of valuing quantitative metrics over qualitative ones. I establish two theoretical contributions: Gendered organizations theory is essential to understanding the adoption and globalization of performance metrics, and in an age of evidence-based decision making, the utility of quantified data to garner resources is heightened, rewarding those who adopt quantified knowledge production. I coin the term “the paradox of quantified utility” to describe how these material advantages encourage even skeptics to value quantitative metrics. (shrink)

This essay interprets changes in how “the political” was employed by a group of political theorists connected to the University of California, Berkeley, from the late 1950s up to the present. Initially, the political names both what students of politics ought to study and invokes a way of studying meant to have broad appeal. In later uses, however, the political takes on an evanescent quality compared to the solid realm of generality represented in earlier work. Also, only from the 1970s (...) on is the political explicitly identified with democracy. Finally, later uses of the political no longer invoke a mode of study with broad appeal but one that even most self-described political theorists fail to practice. Though the changes the author analyzes in how the political was conceived are specific to the work of a small group of theorists, they suggest a more general story about the late twentieth-century development of political theory in the American academy. (shrink)

This paper suggests that the contemporary feminist debate on relational autonomy is best understood as an attempt at ameliorative inquiry—the concept of autonomy is defined in order to secure political and theoretical advantages. Most theorists adopt some sort of constructionist, or relational, account precisely because of the political and theoretical advantages relational accounts are meant to offer. But there are also significant drawbacks to this approach. I argue that there are reasons to be skeptical of ameliorative inquiries into the concept (...) of autonomy: first, the goals of inquiry have not been made explicit and may not be shared; second, because ameliorative inquiries are guided by unclear and unshared goals, the debate will continue to pull feminists in conflicting directions; and finally, the normative and aspirational nature of ameliorative inquiry unacceptably threatens the exclusion of some women from the category of autonomous agents. (shrink)

Uterus transplants provide another treatment for infertility. Some might think that we should embrace such transplants as one more way to assist people to have children. However, in this paper I argue that uterus transplants are not something that we ought to fund, nor something that we should make easy to access. First, I argue that any justification of providing uterus transplants must be based on the value of the experience of gestation, rather than on claims of meeting medical need (...) or promoting normal functioning. Second, I demonstrate that such a justification has limited prospects of success. The value of experiencing gestation is unlikely to be sufficient to justify state funding of uterus transplants and, further, we have reason to refrain from enabling such transplants. (shrink)

In this article I criticize some traditional impartiality practices in Western philosophical ethics and argue in favor of Marilyn Friedman’s dialogical practice of eliminating bias. But, I argue, the dialogical approach depends on a more fundamental practice of equanimity. Drawing on the works of Tibetan Buddhist thinkers Patrul Rinpoche and Khenpo Ngawang Pelzang, I develop a Buddhist-feminist concept of equanimity and argue that, despite some differences with the Western impartiality practices, equanimity is an impartiality practice that is not only psychologically (...) feasible but also central to loving relationships. I conclude by suggesting ways that feminist dialogical practices for eliminating bias and meditative practices are mutually supportive. (shrink)

Empirical psychology documents widespread evidence of bias in the ways that people select, interpret, and selectively interpret evidence in forming and revising their beliefs. These biases can function to create and perpetuate epistemologies of ignorance. I argue that virtue epistemology can help us explain what goes epistemically wrong in these cases, and can offer positive advice, orienting us toward ways to right it. In particular, I defend the virtue approach from epistemic situationist worries about the empirical plausibility of individual agents' (...) ability to develop corrective virtues. I argue that situational virtues are genuine responsibilist virtues, and are one of the tools at our disposal for overcoming epistemologies of ignorance. (shrink)

This article conceptualises theories of ethics relevant to the recognised problem of decision variability in child protection. Within this field, social workers are faced with multiple ethical imperatives when making decisions about children’s care. They must respond to justice principles concerned with duties and consequences, as well as ethical obligations created by the relational and contextual elements of each case. Recent scholarship on decision variability highlights the justice issues that arise when decisions in response to apparently similar cases differ. An (...) ethical imperative is that similar cases should be treated ‘like for like’ so that children’s and family’s rights are upheld consistently. This article contends that ethical concepts relating to both universalist duties such as respect for persons, extended by the concept of interactive universalism, and contextual responses based on an ethic of care, help theorise the complexities of ethical decisions in child protection. These concepts develop a nuanced understanding of the ways social workers resist risk discourses, may make decisions reflecting the participation of service users, and contextual evaluations of risk based on understanding service user’s life histories. Understanding this combination helps explain the reasons behind variability, and evaluate the moral acceptability or otherwise of apparently variable decisions. (shrink)