Goal‐directed cognition is often discussed in terms of specialized memory structures like the “goal stack.” The goal‐activation model presented here analyzes goal‐directed cognition in terms of the general memory constructs of activation and associative priming. The model embodies three predictive constraints: (1) the interference level, which arises from residual memory for old goals; (1) the strengthening constraint, which makes predictions about time to encode a new goal; and (3) the priming constraint, which makes predictions about the role of cues in (...) retrieving pending goals. These constraints are formulated algebraically and tested through simulation of latency and error data from the Tower of Hanoi, a means‐ends puzzle that depends heavily on suspension and resumption of goals. Implications of the model for understanding intention superiority, postcompletion error, and effects of task interruption are discussed. (shrink)

Seite dualität: Anarchismus 121. Konsequenzen der individualitätszerstörenden Gleichheitstheorie: Stellung der Frau 123; unhistorische Denkweise 123; ...

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. This very general characterization gives rise to a whole family of positions. I argue that not all of them are stable. The main argument in the paper is inspired by considerations known as the “collapse problem”, and it aims at the most popular form of logical pluralism advocated by JC Beall and Greg Restall. I argue that there is a more general argument available that challenges all variants (...) of logical pluralism that meet the following three conditions: that there are at least two correct logical systems characterized in terms of different consequence relations, that there is some sort of rivalry among the correct logics, and that logical consequence is normative. The hypothesis I argue for amounts to conditional claim: If a position satisfies all these conditions, then that position is unstable in the sense that it collapses into competing positions. (shrink)

A growing literature documents the existence of individuals who make a living by participating in phase I clinical trials for money. Several scholars have noted that the concerns about risks, consent, and exploitation raised by this phenomenon apply to many (other) jobs, too, and therefore proposed improving subject protections by regulating phase I trial participation as work. This article contributes to the debate over this proposal by exploring a largely neglected worry. Unlike most (other) workers, subjects are not paid to (...) produce or achieve anything but to have things done to them. I argue that this passivity is problematic for reasons of distributive justice. Specifically, it fails to enable subjects to realize what Gheaus and Herzog call “the goods of work”—a failure not offset by adequate opportunities to realize these goods outside of the research context. I also consider whether granting subjects worker-type protections would accommodate this concern. (shrink)

In this article I reconsider David Benatar's primary argument for anti‐natalism—the asymmetry argument—and outline a three‐step process for rejecting it. I begin in Part 2 by reconstructing the asymmetry argument into three main premises. I then turn in Parts 3–5 to explain how each of these premises is in fact false. Finally, I conclude in Part 6 by considering the relationship between the asymmetry argument and the quality of life argument in Benatar's overall case for anti‐natalism and argue that it (...) is the latter argument that is actually doing the work. In this sense, the asymmetry argument is not only unsuccessful in generating Benatar's anti‐natalist conclusion, it is also unnecessary as well. (shrink)

Clinical research is increasingly ‘offshored’ to developing countries, a practice that has generated considerable controversy. It has recently been argued that the prevailing ethical norms governing such research are deeply puzzling. On the one hand, sponsors are not required to offshore trials, even when participants in developing countries would benefit considerably from these trials. On the other hand, if sponsors do offshore, they are required not to exploit participants, even when the latter would benefit from and consent to exploitation. How, (...) it is asked, can it be worse to exploit the global poor than to neglect them when exploitation is voluntary and makes them better off? The present article seeks to respond to this challenge. I argue that mutually beneficial and voluntary exploitation can be worse than neglect when — as is typically true of exploitative international research — it takes advantage of unjust background conditions. This is because, in such cases, exploitation overlaps with another, less familiar wrong: complicity in injustice. Recognising complicity as a distinct wrong should make us judge exchanges arising from background injustice more harshly than we typically do, in research and elsewhere. (shrink)

This paper challenges the view that bans on kidney sales are unjustifiably paternalistic, that is, that they unduly deny people the freedom to make decisions about their own bodies in order to protect them from harm. I argue that not even principled anti-paternalists need to reject such bans. This is because their rationale is not hard paternalism, which anti-paternalists repudiate, but soft paternalism, which they in principle accept. More precisely, I suggest that their rationale is what Franklin Miller and Alan (...) Wertheimer call ‘group soft paternalism’. Group soft paternalistic policies restrict the freedom of autonomous individuals, not for their own good (hard paternalism), but as an unavoidable consequence of seeking to protect other, non-autonomous individuals from harms that they have not voluntarily chosen (soft paternalism). Group soft paternalism supports prohibiting kidney sales on three conditions: (1) that such sales are potentially harmful to vendors, (2) that many vendors would suffer impaired autonomy, and (3) that distinguishing between autonomous and non-autonomous vendors and interfering only with the latter is unfeasible. I provide reasons for thinking that these conditions will often hold. (shrink)

Proponents of permitting living kidney sales often argue as follows. Many jobs involve significant risks; people are and should be free to take these risks in exchange for money; the risks involved in giving up a kidney are no greater than the risks involved in acceptable hazardous jobs; so people should be free to give up a kidney for money, too. This paper examines this frequently invoked but rarely analysed analogy. Two objections are raised. First, it is far from clear (...) that kidney sales and dangerous jobs involve comparable risks on an appropriately broad comparison. Second, and more importantly, even if they do involve comparable risks it does not follow that kidney sales must be permitted because dangerous jobs are. The analogy assumes that kidney sales are banned for paternalistic reasons. But there may be other, non-paternalistic reasons for the ban. And paternalists, too, can consistently defend the ban even if kidney sales are no riskier than occupations that they find acceptable. Soft paternalists may want to protect would-be vendors from harms that they have not voluntarily chosen. Egalitarian hard paternalists may want to protect already badly off vendors from further worsening their situation. For neither species of paternalist is the size of the risk prevented decisive. I conclude that the analogy with dangerous jobs, while rhetorically powerful, pulls little real argumentative weight. Future debates on living kidney sales should therefore proceed without it. (shrink)

Veksler and Gunzelmann make an extraordinary claim, which is that sleep deprivation effects and the vigilance decrement are functionally equivalent. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which is missing from Veksler and Gunzelmann's study. Their behavioral data offer only weak theoretical constraint, and to the extent their modeling exercise supports any position, it is that these two performance impairments involve functionally distinct underlying mechanisms.

What, if anything, is wrong with taking advantage of people’s unjust circumstances when they both benefit from and consent to the exchange? The answer, some believe, is that such exchanges are wrongfully exploitative. I argue that this answer is incomplete at best, and I elaborate a different one: to take advantage of injustice is to become complicit in its reproduction. I also argue that the case for third-party interference with mutually beneficial and consensual exchanges, while normally considered weak, is strengthened (...) once these exchanges are understood as implicated in broader unjust structures. (shrink)

Antibiotic resistance is widely recognized as a major threat to public health and healthcare systems worldwide. Recent research suggests that pollution from antibiotics manufacturing is an important driver of resistance development. Using Sweden as an example, this article considers how industrial antibiotic pollution might be addressed by public actors who are in a position to influence the distribution and use of antibiotics in high-income countries with publicly funded health systems. We identify a number of opportunities for these actors to incentivize (...) industry to increase sustainability in antibiotics production. However, we also show that each alternative would create tensions with other significant policy goals, necessitating trade-offs. Since justifiable trade-offs require ethical consideration, we identify and explore the main underlying normative issues, namely, the weighing of local versus global health interests, the weighing of present versus future health interests, and the role of individualistic constraints on the pursuit of collective goals. Based on this analysis, we conclude that the actors have weighty principled reasons for prioritizing the goal of addressing pollution, but that translating this stance into concrete policy requires accommodating significant pragmatic challenges. (shrink)

The case history in the colonial context was a hybrid form, caught between bureaucratic pressures toward racialization, aggregation, and generalization, on the one hand, and the individualistic bias of the genre, on the other. This tension posed a problem for colonial rulers. In their drive to harvest neat, ideologically reliable knowledge about the minds of colonial subjects, officials and researchers in the 20th-century British Empire read case histories in selective ways, pared them down to simplistic fables, and ultimately bypassed them (...) whenever they could. In other words, although they worked mightily to bend the case history to their purposes, they never fully succeeded. The authority granted to personal testimony and the capaciousness of the detail in case histories always contained a subversive potential. As a result, the politics of the colonial case history were underdetermined, overflowing the categories and resisting the generalizations that colonial rulers sought to impose. (shrink)

According to moral error theory, there are no ethical facts. Error theorists often defend this view with the metaphysical argument from queerness. This argument purports to show that it is most reasonable to believe that ethical facts do not exist, because such facts are metaphysically queer and explanatorily redundant. This paper argues that even if we assume that ethical facts are metaphysically queer and explanatorily redundant, the argument from queerness does not warrant the rejection of ethical facts. It only shows (...) that it is most reasonable to refrain from believing that ethical facts exist. The argument from queerness therefore merely supports metaethical scepticism: that is, it merely supports agnosticism about the existence of ethical facts. This is cause for optimism, because metaethical scepticism is less of a threat to our moral practice than moral error theory. (shrink)

The concept of exploitation and potentially exploitative real-world practices are the subject of increasing philosophical attention. However, while philosophers have extensively debated what exploitation is and what makes it wrong, they have said surprisingly little about what might be required to remediate it. By asking how the consequences of exploitation should be addressed, this article seeks to contribute to filling this gap. We raise two questions. First, what are the victims of exploitation owed by way of remediation? Second, who ought (...) to remediate? Our answers to these questions are connected by the idea that exploitation cannot be fully remediated by redistributing the exploiter's gain in order to repair or compensate the victim's loss. This is because exploitation causes not only distributive but also relational harm. Therefore, redistributive measures are necessary but not sufficient for adequate remediation. Moreover, this relational focus highlights the fact that exploitative real-world practices commonly involve agents other than the exploiter who stand to benefit from the exploitation. Insofar as these third parties are implicated in the distributive and relational harms caused by exploitation, there is, we argue, good reason to assign part of the burden of remediation to them. (shrink)

The notion of functionality is appropriately central to the Newell Test but is also critical at a lower level, in development of cognitive sub-theories. I illustrate, on one hand, how far this principle is from general acceptance among verbal theoreticians, and, on the other hand, how simulation models (here implemented within ACT-R) seem to drive the functional question automatically.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Human consumption of pharmaceuticals often leads to environmental release of residues via urine and faeces, creating environmental and public health risks. Policy responses must consider the normative question how responsibilities for managing such risks, and costs and burdens associated with that management, should be distributed between actors. Recently, the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) has been advanced as rationale for such distribution. While recognizing some advantages of PPP, we highlight important ethical and practical limitations with applying it in this context: PPP (...) gives ambiguous and arbitrary guidance due to difficulties in identifying the salient polluter. Moreover, when PPP does identify responsible actors, these may be unable to avoid or mitigate their contribution to the pollution, only able to avoid/mitigate it at excessive cost to themselves or others, or excusably ignorant of contributing. These limitations motivate a hybrid framework where PPP, which emphasizes holding those causing large-scale problems accountable, is balanced by the Ability to Pay Principle (APP), which emphasizes efficiently managing such problems. In this framework, improving wastewater treatment and distributing associated financial costs across water consumers or taxpayers stand out as promising responses to pharmaceutical pollution from human use. However, sound policy depends on empirical considerations requiring further study. (shrink)

For many areas of philosophy, we lack an understanding of their developments between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. One such area is the development of the notion of final causation. The rejection of final causation is often described as one of the distinguishing hallmarks of so called Early Modern philosophy in relation to the Scholastic philosophical tradition. Our lack of understanding of the development of this notion in philosophy therefore impedes our ability to write an adequate history of philosophy spanning (...) these centuries. In this article, the notion of final causation as treated in the works of Chrysostom Javellus (1472–1538) and Francis Silvestri (of Ferrara) (1474–1526) is presented. It is argued that the treatment of final causation in these thinkers is already shaped by concerns regarding finality that we find in Early Modern philosophy. (shrink)

Even though the philosophy of common sense is not justifi able as such, the assump- tion upon which it rests, namely that there are things which we are not in position to doubt is correct. The reason why Thomas Reid was unable to bring this assumption out in a justifi able manner is that his views, both on knowledge and nature, are to be considered dogmatic. American pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey on the other hand, may (...) be seen as offering us a ‘critical’ and post-Darwinian philosophy of common sense. (shrink)

Can appealing to children’s rights help to solve the non-identity problem in cases of procreation? A number of philosophers have answered affirmatively, arguing that even if children cannot be harmed by being born into disadvantaged conditions, they may nevertheless be wronged if those conditions fail to meet a minimal standard of decency to which all children are putatively entitled. This paper defends the tenability of this view by outlining and responding to five prominent objections that have been raised against it (...) in the contemporary literature: the identifiability objection; the non-existence objection; the waiving of rights objection, the lack of legitimate complaint objection; and the unfairness objection. (shrink)

The paper argues that the relation between the philosophy of common sense and skepticism ought to be perceived of as the relation between the two horns of a dilemma. Each position, it is therefore said, is able to confront the other with a valid objection, something which implies that neither of the two positions are defensible as such. The dilemma is only resolved, it is argued, by the way in which a pragmatic approach to knowledge enables us to incorporate the (...) insights of both common sense and skepticism in a single position. (shrink)

Given the contemporary complexity of cities, landscape and society, urgent social tasks call for an integral, multidisciplinary approach. Rietveld Landscape’s strategic interventions focus and use the forces of existing developments and processes. This design method creates new opportunities for landscape, architecture, the public domain, ecology, recreation and economic activity.

Bioethics, Volume 35, Issue 7, Page 688-695, September 2021.

This study is a contribution to the bioethical debate about new and possibly emerging reproductive technologies. Its point of departure is the intuition, which many people seem to share, that using such technologies to select non-disease traits – like sex and emotional stability - in yet unborn children is morally problematic, at least more so than using the technologies to avoid giving birth to children with severe genetic diseases, or attempting to shape the non-disease traits of already existing children by (...) environmental means, like education. The study employs philosophical analysis for the purpose of making this intuition intelligible and judging whether it is justified. Different ways in which the moral problems posed by reproductive technologies are often framed in bioethical debates are criticised as inadequate for this task. In particular, it is argued that the intuition cannot fully be made sense of in terms of harm to the children that such technologies help create. The study attempts to elaborate an alternative to that broadly consequentialist approach, by drawing on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, Hans Jonas’s ethics, and Aristotle’s practical philosophy, as it has been received and developed in the hermeneutical tradition. It is suggested that reproductive choices, unlike decisions for already born children, are characterised by a peculiar one-sidedness: the future child appears to the parents as something wholly theirs to decide about, not as a concrete other with whom they must interact in a responsive and attuned way. This is problematic because it means that such choices cannot call upon the particularised moral understanding only gained in interpersonal encounters. In particular, it makes them easily shaped by various tendencies, to which parents are always susceptible, to relate to children in instrumentalising ways, and at risk of reinforcing such tendencies. However, this does not mean that all uses of reproductive technologies are equally troubling. When selecting against severe disease the parents can rely on a widely shared illness experience to escape the dangers that one-sidedness involves. It is concluded that the intuition under discussion, thus explicated and in some ways qualified, makes sense morally. (shrink)

Medical therapy, research and technology enable us to make our bodies, or parts of them, available to others in an increasing number of ways. This is the case in organ, tissue, egg and sperm donation as well as in surrogate motherhood and clinical research. Bringing together leading scholars working on the ethical, social and cultural aspects of such bodily exchanges, this cutting-edge book develops new ways of understanding them. Bodily Exchanges, Bioethics and Border Crossing both probes the established giving and (...) selling frameworks for conceptualising bodily exchanges in medicine, and seeks to develop and examine another, less familiar framework: that of sharing. A framework of sharing can capture practices that involve giving up and giving away part of one's body, such as organ and tissue donation, and practices that do not, such as surrogacy and research participation. Sharing also recognizes the multiple relationalities that these exchanges can involve and invites inquiry into the context in which they occur. In addition, the book explores the multiple forms of border crossing that bodily exchanges in medicine involve, from the physical boundaries of the body to relational borders - as can happen in surrogacy - to national borders and the range of ethical issues that these various border-crossings can give rise to. Engaging with anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and feminist and postcolonical perspectives, this is an original and timely contribution to contemporary bioethics in a time of increasing globalization. It will be of use to students and researchers from a range of humanities and social science backgrounds as well as medical and other healthcare professionals with an interest in bioethics. (shrink)

Randomized and double-blind clinical trials are widely regarded as the most reliable way of studying the effects of medical interventions. According to received wisdom, if a new drug or treatment is to be accepted in clinical practice, its safety and efficacy must first be demonstrated in such trials. For ethical and scientific reasons, it is generally considered necessary to monitor a trial in various ways as it proceeds and to analyze data as they accumulate. Monitoring and interim analyses are often (...) conducted by a so-called data monitoring committee (DMC), a group of experts independent of both sponsors and investigators. On the basis of DMC recommendations, sponsors sometimes decide to discontinue trials .. (shrink)

This book contains scholarly contributions to several current debates in the philosophy of medicine and health care regarding the nature of health and health promotion, concepts and measurements of mental illness, phenomenological conceptions of health and illness, allocation of health care resources, criteria for proper medical science, the clinical meeting, and ethical constraints in such a meeting. With one exception, the authors in this book are or have been teachers or graduate students at the interdisciplinary Department of Health and Society (...) (Tema H) at Linköping University, Sweden. While all the texts have a philosophical focus, many other disciplines have influenced the choice of specific perspectives. The university backgrounds of the authors range from medicine, psychology, sociology, and religion to philosophy. What binds the authors together is their deep interest in the theory of medicine and in the pursuit of a philosophy of humanistic medicine and health care. (shrink)

In law and common-sense morality, it is generally assumed that adults who meet a minimum threshold of parental competency have a presumptive right to parent their biological children. But what is the basis of this right? According to one prominent account, the right to parent one’s biological child is best understood as being grounded in an intimate relationship that develops between babies and their birth parents during the process of gestation. This paper identifies three major problems facing this view—the explanatory, (...) adjudicatory, and theoretical problems—and explains how an alternative autonomy-based account is capable of avoiding them. (shrink)