For a variety of reasons, it's difficult to determine, with any accuracy, the number of trans and gender nonbinary folks living in the United States.1 Data are difficult to obtain since neither the U.S. Census Bureau nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey people's gender identity. But even if they did, responses would likely be unreliable. Many members of these two groups are hesitant to answer such questions for fear of their safety, resulting discrimination, or because they disagree (...) on the definition of what it means to be transgender. It's also difficult to obtain accurate numbers on these groups since most medical forms still rely on a two-sex system of... (shrink)

In this article, we analyse the novel case of Phoenix, a non-binary adult requesting ongoing puberty suppression to permanently prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics, as a way of affirming their gender identity. We argue that the aim of OPS is consistent with the proper goals of medicine to promote well-being, and therefore could ethically be offered to non-binary adults in principle; there are additional equity-based reasons to offer OPS to non-binary adults as a group; and the ethical defensibility (...) of facilitating individual requests for OPS from non-binary adults also depends on other relevant considerations, including the balance of potential benefits over harms for that specific patient, and whether the patient’s request is substantially autonomous. Although the broadly principlist ethical approach we take can be used to analyse other cases of non-binary adults requesting OPS apart from the case we evaluate, we highlight that the outcome will necessarily depend on the individual’s context and values. However, such clinical provision of OPS should ideally be within the context of a properly designed research study with long-term follow-up and open publication of results. (shrink)

By applying classical and contemporary insights of the phenomenological tradition to key findings within the literature on stereotype threat, this paper considers the embodied effects of everyday exposure to racism and makes a contribution to the growing field of applied phenomenology. In what follows, the paper asks how a phenomenological perspective can both contribute to and enrich discussions of ST in psychology. In answering these questions, the paper uses evidence from social psychology as well as first personal testimonies from members (...) of marginalized groups to argue that subjectively experienced racial oppression is embodied and thus has effects on selfhood that are harmful. More specifically, it makes the case that what are most often considered to be temporary or context-based consequences of ST are in fact more wide reaching and harmful than assumed in that the harms that result from suffering ST become a part of one’s identity, and thus a background lens through which one experiences the world. (shrink)

John Nolt offers a helpful, albeit rough quantitative analysis of the harmfulness of the average American's greenhouse gas emissions. By examining the lifetime contributions of the average American...

Individuals engage in moral cleansing, a compensatory process to reaffirm one's moral identity, when one's moral self-concept is threatened. However, too much moral cleansing can license individuals to engage in future unethical acts. This study examined the effects of incentives and consequences of one's actions on cheating behavior and moral cleansing. Results found that incentives and consequences interacted such that unethical thoughts were especially threatening, resulting in more moral cleansing, when large incentives to cheat were present and cheating explicitly harmed (...) others. Implications are discussed in terms of ethics training, using incentives as motivators, and the depersonalized norms of science. (shrink)

To call attention to and motivate action on ethical issues in business or society, messengers often criticize groups for wrongdoing and ask these groups to change their behavior. When criticizing target groups, messengers frequently identify and express concern about harm caused to a victim group, and in the process address a target group by criticizing them for causing this harm and imploring them to change. However, we find that when messengers criticize a target group for causing harm to a victim (...) group in this way—expressing _singular concern_ for the victim group—members of the target group infer, often incorrectly, that the messenger views the target group as less moral and unworthy of concern. This inferred lack of moral concern reduces criticism acceptance and prompts backlash from the target group. To address this problem, we introduce _dual concern_ messaging—messages that simultaneously communicate that a target group causes harm to a victim group and express concern for the target group. A series of several experiments demonstrate that dual concern messages reduce inferences that a critical messenger lacks moral concern for the criticized target group, increase the persuasiveness of the criticism among members of the target group, and reduce backlash from consumers against a corporate messenger. When pursuing justice for victims of a target group, dual concern messages that communicate concern for the victim group _as well as_ the target group are more effective in fostering openness toward criticism, rather than defensiveness, in a target group, thus setting the stage for change. (shrink)

The effects of the present COVID-19 crisis transcend national and social borders, requiring all of us to adapt to ever-changing, unprecedented circumstances. While in some respects these experiences are shared, the impact of the crisis has been disproportionately harmful for those who were already socially vulnerable: low-income people and workers who are precariously employed, people with disabilities and chronic health issues, unhoused people, people who depend on now-defunct public services, and, as will be the focus of this paper, incarcerated people.In (...) response to the pandemic, state, local, and federal governments have enacted policies that would be politically unthinkable in normal circumstances. The US... (shrink)

This paper reviews the ethical literature on conflicts between health professionals and parents about medical decision-making for children. We present the results of a systematic review which addressed the question ‘when health professionals and parents disagree about the appropriate course of medical treatment for a child, under what circumstances is the health professional ethically justified in overriding the parents’ wishes?’ We identified nine different ethical frameworks that were put forward by their authors as applicable across various ages and clinical scenarios. (...) Each of these frameworks centred on a different key moral concept including harm, constrained parental autonomy, best interests, medically reasonable alternatives, responsible thinking and rationality. (shrink)

The complexity of chromium chemistry makes it an ideal example of how the Principle of Expediency, first articulated by sanitary pioneer Earle Phelps, can be used in a standard setting. Expediency, defined by Phelps as “the attempt to reduce the numerical measure of probable harm, or the logical measure of existing hazard, to the lowest level that is practicable and feasible within the limitations of financial resources and engineering skill”, can take on negative connotations unless subject to ethical guidance. In (...) this paper we argue that without ethical principles as a rubric for negotiating environmental regulations, communities run the risk of slipping from the Principle of Expediency as defined by Phelps to the alternative usage of expediency meaning that which does not reflect ethical consideration or concern beyond self-serving interest. Three ethical ideals—justice, mercy and humility—are suggested as values to be considered while resolving regulatory issues related to environmental protection. The Principle of Expediency serves as a working principle, but not as a rigid algorithm, for setting regulatory limits for environmental concentrations of waste products like chromium. (shrink)

This paper argues for analyzing the systematic invisibility of persons living with disabilities by temporalizing their oppression within a framework of “productive time,” which I posit as a normative sense of time by which cultural products and practices appear within capitalist economies. I argue that productive time is employed in cultural evaluations of actions that render persons with disabilities as “non-productive agents” who cannot partake in historical processes. My hope is that a theory of productive time will assist social justice (...) efforts in analyzing the oppression of particular minority groups by identifying and combating harmful social values. (shrink)

Predatory grooming is a form of abuse most familiar from high-profile cases of sexual misconduct, for example, the Nassar case at Michigan State. Predatory groomers target individuals in a systematic effort to lead them into relationships in which they are vulnerable to exploitation. This is an example of a broader form of epistemic misconduct that Leydon-Hardy describes as epistemic infringement, where this involves the contravention of social and epistemic norms in a way that undermines our epistemic agency. In this chapter, (...) Leydon-Hardy looks at the distinctive epistemic harm caused by epistemic infringement. She argues that this harm cannot be understood simply as the victim’s having a false belief, or even as her being alienated from her belief-forming mechanisms. A deeper understanding of the harm caused by infringement shows that it stems from damage to one’s epistemic agency, and indeed, to one’s personhood. (shrink)

Background There is ongoing debate regarding whether and under which circumstances secondary findings (SF) should be offered in the pediatric context. Although studies have examined patient perspectives on receiving SF, little research has been conducted examining the experiences of clinicians offering SF to parents of newborns receiving genomic sequencing for a recently diagnosed medical condition.Methods To address this, we conducted qualitative interviews exploring the views and experiences of 12 clinicians who offered SF to parents of infants who had diagnostic exome (...) sequencing (ES) to identify the cause of their hearing loss. Interviews explored clinicians’ accounts of parents’ choices and decision-making about receiving SF, their views on whether and when to offer SF, their experiences returning SF, and any ethical challenges they encountered. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and analyzed using inductive content analysis.Results Clinicians reported parents who declined all SF often felt finding out about future conditions unrelated to their child’s hearing loss may be unhelpful, or even harmful, or were overwhelmed by their child’s diagnosis. Clinicians also reported that some parents chose SF because they felt obliged to, even if they did not want to receive them. They explained that while some parents experienced decision-making regarding SF as positive, for others, this process was challenging or distressing. While clinicians generally agreed SF should be offered, mainly to promote parental choice, most felt SF should be offered after disclosing diagnostic results, primarily to avoid overwhelming parents. Clinicians encountered several ethical challenges, including balancing parental autonomy with non-maleficence, wanting to report or not report certain SF, and questioning whether parents can make an autonomous choice regarding SF.Conclusions Our findings, which are novel as they relate to parents of young infants with a recent diagnosis of hearing loss, add new insights into clinicians’ and parents’ decision-making regarding SF in pediatrics. (shrink)

In the United States, sex education is more than just an uncomfortable rite of passage, it's an amorphous curriculum that varies widely based on the politics, experience, resources, and biases of the people teaching it. Most often, it's a train wreck, overemphasizing or underemphasizing STIs, teen pregnancy, abstinence, and consent. In Touchy Subject, philosopher Lauren Bialystok and historian Lisa M. F. Andersen make the case for thoughtful sex education, explaining why it's worth fighting for and which kind most deserves (...) our fight, despite all the inconveniences and compromises along the way. They argue that democratic and humanistic aims can be used to provide the tools to reason about the content and form of sex education. In practice, this amounts to a curriculum that meets what are currently considered highly comprehensive standards, incorporates ethics and civics education, and substantially modifies some aspects of teacher training and school design; it also assigns different responsibilities to different actors inside and outside schools, and it responds to the salient features of young people's evolving worlds, including the inequities that put some students at much higher risk of sexual harm than others. Throughout their inquiry, the authors show the reader how sex education has progressed and how the very concept of "progress" remains contestable. (shrink)

Curbside ethics consultations occur when an ethics consultant provides guidance to a party who seeks assistance over ethical concerns in a case, without the consultant involving other stakeholders, conducting his or her own comprehensive review of the case, or writing a chart note. Some have argued that curbside consultation is problematic because the consultant, in focusing on a single narrative offered by the party seeking advice, necessarily fails to account for the full range of moral perspectives. Their concern is that (...) any guidance offered by the ethics consultant will privilege and empower one party’s viewpoint over—and to the exclusion of—other stakeholders. This could lead to serious harms, such as the ethicist being reduced to a means to an end for a clinician seeking to achieve his or her own preferred outcome, the ethicist denying the broader array of stakeholders input in the process, or the ethicist providing wrongheaded or biased advice, posing dangers to the ethical quality of decision-making. Although these concerns are important and must be addressed, we suggest that they are manageable. This paper proposes using conflict coaching, a practice developed within the discipline of conflict management, to mitigate the risks posed by curbside consultation, and thereby create new “spaces” for moral discourse in the care of patients. Thinking of curbside consultations as an opportunity for “clinical ethics conflict coaching” can more fully integrate ethics committee members into the daily ethics of patient care and reduce the frequency of ethically harmful outcomes. (shrink)

Discussions of harm are central in the climate ethics literature. Especially in the rapidly emerging body of work addressing the question of whether or not individuals are morally responsible for their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, whether or in what way individuals’ emissions are harmful is a hotly debated question. John Nolt’s recent paper, “How harmful are the average American’s greenhouse gas emissions?” illustrates the prevalence of this framing (Nolt 2011). Here I take a step back and ask what we mean (...) by the concept “harmful” when talking about climate change. I argue, as several respondents to Nolt have suggested (e.g., Attfield 2011, Odenbaugh 2011), that we should not be so quick to apply our standard .. (shrink)

This article draws attention to the ethical complexity researchers may be confronted with during fieldwork should an adult participant with intellectual disabilities disclose that harm or an illegal activity is occurring or has occurred in the past. The need to gain ethical approval and the positioning of people with intellectual disabilities as vulnerable within ethics review procedures can result in the adoption of paternalistic approaches as researchers are encouraged to break confidentiality to report concerns to other professionals. Whilst this may (...) fulfil a researcher’s duty to ensure no harm occurs to participants, if it takes place against the participant’s wishes it may also violate participant autonomy, reinforce unequal relations of power, and may unwittingly contribute to subsequent harm occurring. Whilst the article begins from our experience as two UK-based researchers working with people with intellectual disabilities, it draws on existing literature and guidelines to expose the ethical tensions which may be encountered. It is intended that the paper acts as a starting point for researchers wishing to reflect on their practice and ethical decision-making, whilst contributing to wider debates on the position of people with intellectual disabilities within society. (shrink)

The precautionary principle states, roughly, that it is better to take precautionary measures now than to deal with serious harms to the environment or human health later on. This paper builds on the work of Neil A. Manson in order to show that the precautionary principle, in all of its forms, is fraught with vagueness and ambiguity. We examine the version of the precautionary principle that was formulated at the Wingspread Conference sponsored by the Science and Environmental Health Network (...) in 1998. That version fails to indicate who must bear the cost of precaution; what constitutes a threat of harm; how much precaution is too much; and what should be done when environmental concerns and concern for human health pull in different directions. Whether this vagueness is a strength or weakness of the principle depends on what purpose(s) the precautionary principle is supposed to serve. (shrink)

Curbside ethics consultations occur when an ethics consultant provides guidance to a party who seeks assistance over ethical concerns in a case, without the consultant involving other stakeholders, conducting his or her own comprehensive review of the case, or writing a chart note. Some have argued that curbside consultation is problematic because the consultant, in focusing on a single narrative offered by the party seeking advice, necessarily fails to account for the full range of moral perspectives. Their concern is that (...) any guidance offered by the ethics consultant will privilege and empower one party’s viewpoint over—and to the exclusion of—other stakeholders. This could lead to serious harms, such as the ethicist being reduced to a means to an end for a clinician seeking to achieve his or her own preferred outcome, the ethicist denying the broader array of stakeholders input in the process, or the ethicist providing wrongheaded or biased advice, posing dangers to the ethical quality of decision-making. Although these concerns are important and must be addressed, we suggest that they are manageable. This paper proposes using conflict coaching, a practice developed within the discipline of conflict management, to mitigate the risks posed by curbside consultation, and thereby create new spaces for moral discourse in the care of patients. Thinking of curbside consultations as an opportunity for clinical ethics conflict coaching can more fully integrate ethics committee members into the daily ethics of patient care and reduce the frequency of ethically harmful outcomes. (shrink)

Ethical issues arise in the world’s first population-level treatment of severe lead poisoning caused by small-scale mining for gold in rural Nigeria. Emergency medical intervention and environmental cleanup have reduced the mortality in children younger than 5 years from lead poisoning from over 40 to 2.5 per cent leaving little evidence of the harms caused by lead poisoning. In the absence of obvious sequelae, family adherence to long-term intensive therapy to remove accumulated lead reservoirs in children wanes and some (...) community miners challenge safer mining interventions to prevent recontamination of the environment with lead. This letter raises questions regarding community versus individual rights in public health interventions and patient autonomy. (shrink)

Precaution is usually associated with the intuition that it is better to be safe than sorry, and/or that it is sometimes necessary to act in advance of scientific certainty to prevent harmful outcomes. At this point, we cannot entirely prevent climate change, but we can affect how harmful such change is. Adaptation may therefore be understood as a precautionary measure against the damage due to climate change. 'The' precautionary principle alone is too vague to shape adaptation policy, but a limited (...) catastrophic precautionary principle may productively guide adaptation policy makers. I argue in this paper that an explicit commitment to a precautionary approach based on the catastrophic precautionary principle could and should be made to strengthen the adaptation policies introduced at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (shrink)

Aims and hypothesesIn an environment of absolute silence, researchers have found many of their participants to perceive phantom sounds. With this between-subject experiment, we aimed to elaborate on these research findings, and specifically investigated whether–in line with the fear-avoidance model of tinnitus perception and reactivity–fear or level of perceived threat influences the incidence and perceptual qualities of phantom sound percepts in an anechoic room. We investigated the potential role of individual differences in anxiety, negative affect, noise sensitivity and subclinical hearing (...) loss. We hypothesized that participants who experience a higher level of threat would direct their attention more to the auditory system, leading to the perception of tinnitus-like sounds, which would otherwise be subaudible, and that under conditions of increased threat, narrowing of attention would lead to perceptual distortions.MethodsIn total, N = 78 normal-hearing volunteers participated in this study. In general, the study sample consisted of young, mostly female, university students. Their hearing was evaluated using gold-standard pure tone audiometry and a speech-in-noise self-test, which is a sensitive screening test to identify subclinical hearing loss. Prior to a four-minute stay in an anechoic room, we randomized participants block design-wise in a threat and no-threat condition. Participants in the threat condition were deceived about their hearing and were led to believe that staying in the room would potentially harm their hearing temporarily. Participants were asked whether they perceived sounds during their stay in the room and rated the perceptual qualities of sound percepts. They were also asked to fill-out standardized questionnaires measuring anxiety, affect and noise sensitivity. The internal consistency of the questionnaires used was verified in our study sample and ranged between α = 0.61 and α = 0.90.ResultsIn line with incidence rates reported in the literature, 74% of our participants reported having heard tinnitus-like sounds in the anechoic room. Speech-in-noise identification ability was comparable for both groups of participants. The experimental manipulation of threat was proven to be effective, as indicated by significantly higher scores on a Threat Manipulation Checklist among participants in the threat condition as compared to those in the no-threat condition. Nevertheless, participants in the threat condition were as likely to report tinnitus percepts as participants in the no-threat condition, and tinnitus percepts were not rated as being louder or more unpleasant as a function of level of threat. For participants who did experience tinnitus percepts, a higher level of threat was associated with a higher degree of experienced unpleasantness. These associations were absent in those who did not experience tinnitus. Higher negative affect was only slightly associated with higher ratings of tinnitus unpleasantness.ConclusionWhereas our threat manipulation was successful in elevating the level of fear, it did not contribute to a higher percentage of participants perceiving tinnitus-like sounds in the threat condition. However, higher levels of perceived threat were related to a higher degree of perceived tinnitus unpleasantness. The findings of our study are drawn from a rather homogenous participant pool in terms of age, gender, and educational background, challenging conclusions that are applicable for the general population. Participants generally obtained normophoric scores on independent variables of interest: they were low anxious, low noise-sensitive, and there was little evidence for the presence of subclinical hearing loss. Possibly, there was insufficient variation in scores to find effects. (shrink)

This study is focused on unsustainable agri-food systems, especially intensive livestock farming and its resulting environmental harms. Specifically we focus on the development of technologies that seek to mitigate these environmental harms. These technologies are generally developed as incremental innovations in response to government regulation. Critics of these technological solutions allege that these developments legitimate unsustainable food production systems and are incapable of supporting agri-food systems transformation. At the same time, technology developers and other actors seek to present (...) these technologies as the legitimate solution to agri-environmental harms. Our study seeks to explore the perceptions and constructions of legitimacy for technologies that are developed to reduce ammonia emissions in intensive livestock farming in Flanders (Belgium). We use a qualitative case study, employing semi-structured interviews and workshops, with technology developers of ammonia-emission reducing technologies and stakeholders in the intensive livestock farming industry in Flanders. What our study shows is that technologies developed to reduce emissions are dependent on regulative legitimacy. The normative and cognitive legitimacy of these technologies is lacking, both due to ties to the intensive livestock industry and due to uncertainty over the performance of these technologies. With the delegitimation of intensive livestock farming, the legitimacy of these technologies is also under threat. In response, technology developers are looking to (re-)construct this legitimacy through knowledge claims over the performance of their technologies. We show several ways for other actors to deal with this, centred on either re-legitimising technologies to maintain the status quo, or to contest these knowledge claims and use them to disrupt path dependencies. (shrink)

What might Adam Smith have learned from Jane Austen and other novelists of his moment? This paper finds and examines a serious problem at the center of Adam Smith’s moral psychology, stemming from an unacknowledged tension between the effort of the spectator to sympathize with the feelings of the agent and that of the agent to moderate her feelings. The agent’s efforts will result in her opacity to spectators, blocking their attempts to read her emotions. I argue that we can (...) resolve this tension by looking to developments in eighteenth-century literature, as perfected in the hands of Jane Austen. I focus on two techniques, focalization and free indirect style, and I show that the problems for spectatorship diminish when we see that good Smithian spectators are savvy readers. (shrink)

The God who runs after your friendship -- A short note on gender and language for God -- Clothing -- Smell -- Bread and vine -- Laboring woman -- Laughter -- Flame -- In this poverty of expression, thou findest that He is all -- Dingbat -- A short note from the women's prison -- A bookshelf.

In the last two decades few topics in philosophy of science have received as much attention as mechanistic explanation. A significant motivation for these accounts is that scientists frequently use the term “mechanism” in their explanations of biological phenomena. While scientists appeal to a variety of causal concepts in their explanations, many philosophers argue or assume that all of these concepts are well understood with the single notion of mechanism. This reveals a significant problem with mainstream mechanistic accounts– although philosophers (...) use the term “mechanism” interchangeably with other causal concepts, this is not something that scientists always do. This paper analyses two causal concepts in biology–the notions of “mechanism” and “pathway”–and how they figure in biological explanation. I argue that these concepts have unique features, that they are associated with distinct strategies of causal investigation, and that they figure in importantly different types of explanation. (shrink)

This chapter highlights the complexity of the relationship between enhancement of mood and cognition on the one hand and the improvement of people's well‐being on the other. To do so, two psychiatric conditions, Asperger's syndrome and bipolar disorder, are presented in the chapter. Even though there are both negative and positive aspects to Asperger's syndrome or to bipolar disorders, taking away even these negative aspects would not necessarily promote well‐being. It might also be impossible to isolate the positive aspects of (...) these disorders. An increase in specific forms of cognition might be intrinsically connected to a decrease in specific aspects of mood. A decrease in specific aspects of mood might be intrinsically connected to an increase in creativity. Neither is necessarily linked to any changes in some general form of “well‐being.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Corporate social responsibility has been hailed as a new means to address gender inequality, particularly by facilitating women’s empowerment. Women are frequently and forcefully positioned as saviours of economies or communities and proponents of sustainability. Using vignettes drawn from a CSR women’s empowerment programme in Ghana, this conceptual article explores unexpected programme outcomes enacted by women managers and farmers. It is argued that a feminist Foucauldian reading of power as relational and productive can help explain this since those involved are (...) engaged in ongoing processes of resistance and self-making. This raises questions about the assumptions made about women and what is it that such CSR programmes aim to empower them ‘from’ or ‘to.’ Empowerment, when viewed as an ethic of care for the self, is better understood as a self-directed process, rather than a corporate-led strategy. This has implications for how we can imagine the achievement of gender equality through CSR. (shrink)

In this paper, I identify a form of epistemic insensitivity that occurs when someone fails to make proper use of the epistemic tools at their disposal in order to bring their beliefs in line with epistemically relevant evidence that is available to them. I call this kind of insensitivity agential insensitivity because it stems from the epistemic behavior of an individual agent. Agential insensitivity can manifest as a failure to either attend to relevant and available evidence, or appropriately interpret evidence (...) that is attended to. The concept of agential insensitivity allows us to conceptualize the kind of not-knowing involved in forms of ignorance that are cultivated and maintained by individual agents, especially when this ignorance is enabled or encouraged by social structures. I use the skepticism about racial disparities in policing practices that is displayed by many white Americans as a lens for exploring this connection. Understanding agential insensitivity thus provides insight into both social and epistemic phenomena. (shrink)

Kaplan and Craver claim that all explanations in neuroscience appeal to mechanisms. They extend this view to the use of mathematical models in neuroscience and propose a constraint such models must meet in order to be explanatory. I analyze a mathematical model used to provide explanations in dynamical systems neuroscience and indicate how this explanation cannot be accommodated by the mechanist framework. I argue that this explanation is well characterized by Batterman’s account of minimal model explanations and that it demonstrates (...) how relationships between explanatory models in neuroscience and the systems they represent is more complex than has been appreciated. (shrink)

As clinical trials end, little is understood about how participants exiting from clinical trials approach decisions related to the removal or post-trial use of investigational brain implants, such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices. This empirical bioethics study examines how research participants experience the process of exit from research at the end of clinical trials of implanted neural devices. Using a modified grounded theory study design, we conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 16 former research participants from clinical trials of DBS (...) and responsive neurostimulation (RNS). Open-ended questions elicited motivations for joining the trial, understanding of study procedures at the time of initial informed consent, the process of exiting from research, and decisions about device removal or post-trial device use. Thematic analysis identified categories related to: limited preparedness for the end of research participation, straightforwardness of decisions to explant or keep the device, reconciling with the end of research participation, reconciling post-trial expectations, and achieving a sense of closure after exit from research. A preliminary theoretical model describes contextual factors influencing the process and experience of exit from research. Experiences of clinical trial participants should guide research practices to enhance the ethical design and conduct of clinical trials in DBS and other brain devices. (shrink)

According to mainstream philosophical views causal explanation in biology and neuroscience is mechanistic. As the term ‘mechanism’ gets regular use in these fields it is unsurprising that philosophers consider it important to scientific explanation. What is surprising is that they consider it the only causal term of importance. This paper provides an analysis of a new causal concept—it examines the cascade concept in science and the causal structure it refers to. I argue that this concept is importantly different from the (...) notion of mechanism and that this difference matters for our understanding of causation and explanation in science. (shrink)

Causal selection has to do with the distinction we make between background conditions and “the” true cause or causes of some outcome of interest. A longstanding consensus in philosophy views causal selection as lacking any objective rationale and as guided, instead, by arbitrary, pragmatic, and non-scientific considerations. I argue against this position in the context of causal selection for disease traits. In this domain, causes are selected on the basis of the type of causal control they exhibit over a disease (...) of interest. My analysis clarifies the principled rationale that guides this selection and how it involves both pragmatic and objective considerations, which have been overlooked in the extant literature. (shrink)

This article discusses the new reproductive technology of egg freezing in the context of existing literature on gender, medicalization, and infertility. What is unique about this technology is its use by women who are not currently infertile but who may anticipate a future diagnosis. This circumstance gives rise to a new ontological category of “anticipated infertility.” The author draws on participant observation and a qualitative analysis of scientific, mainstream, and marketing literature to identify and compare the representation of two different (...) candidates for egg freezing: women with cancer and healthy young women. Although both populations experience anticipated infertility, their dichotomous portrayals as appropriate candidates are demonstrative of gender norms linking women to motherhood. Egg freezing is a concise illustration of how the medicalization of women’s bodies and bodily processes masks a host of cultural anxieties about aging, illness, reproduction, and risk. (shrink)

This paper explores a distinction among causal relationships that has yet to receive attention in the philosophical literature, namely, whether causal relationships are reversible or irreversible. We provide an analysis of this distinction and show how it has important implications for causal inference and modeling. This work also clarifies how various familiar puzzles involving preemption and over-determination play out differently depending on whether the causation involved is reversible.