What happens when collectivity and law intersect? Lisa Hahn and Markus Hasl outline the state of research on this question and add new answers offered by this special issue. On the one hand, the search for interdisciplinary encounters shows that law is both means and object of collective legal struggles. In doing so, collectives shape law. On the other hand, law (re)produces collectives through categorization and personalization; it juridifies. In doing so, it oscillates between productivity and destructiveness. The authors (...) conclude that to advance the productive potential of collectivity and better regulate its risks, theoretical and doctrinal innovations are needed. (shrink)

Rural, remote, and northern Indigenous communities in Canada frequently face limited access to healthcare services with ongoing physician and staff shortages, inadequate infrastructure, and resource challenges. These healthcare gaps have produced significantly poorer health outcomes for people living in remote communities than those living in southern and urban regions who have timely access to care. Telehealth has played a critical role in bridging long-standing gaps in accessing healthcare services by connecting patients and providers across distance. While the adoption of telehealth (...) in Northern Saskatchewan is growing, its initial implementation faced several barriers related to limited and stretched human and financial resources, infrastructure challenges such as unreliable broadband, and a lack of community involvement and engaged decision-making. Emerging ethical issues during the initial implementation of telehealth in community contexts have been wide ranging including concerns around privacy that have also shaped patients’ experiences and particularly the need to consider place and space within rural contexts. Drawing from a qualitative study with four Northern Saskatchewan communities, this paper offers critical perspectives on the resource challenges and place-based considerations that are shaping telehealth in the Saskatchewan context and provides recommendations and lessons learned that could inform other Canadian regions and countries. This work responds to the ethics of tele-healthcare in rural communities in Canada and contributes perspectives of community-based service providers, advisors, and researchers. (shrink)

Eric Katz in Zombie Arguments defends the thesis authenticity is indispensable to conservation. I agree. However, I argue authenticity appears in degrees and can be reclaimed by populations through their continuing evolutionary responses to the world. This means that interventions that diminish the value of a population through reducing their authenticity can be permitted in limited cases. When our actions retain the remaining authentic features in a threatened population we should allow such a diminishment as authenticity can be reclaimed in (...) time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deception in Psychological ResearchJohn P. Gluck and Stephen Hahn-SmithMadam: In the March 1995 issue of the KIEJ, Sissela Bok adds meaningfully to her consistent and important analysis of the harms associated with deception in biomedical and behavioral research. She reminds us that investigator and review committee domination of the analysis of costs and benefits deprives the prospective research subjects of the opportunity to apply their unique sense of (...) values and preferences, an obligation that flows from an authentic respect for persons and a recognition of the importance of autonomy.She also correctly points out that the American Psychological Association (APA) is unique in that it acknowledges the harms of deception by requiring scientific [End Page 386] justification, limiting the scope of what factors can be part of the deception, and supporting minimal duration of deception, at the same time as it maintains a very permissive stance toward its use. For example, the APA code of conduct requires that alternatives to deception be implemented only when they are deemed to be "equally effective."What Bok omits in her critique is that a common justification for the use of deception by psychologists is the belief that many research subjects actually benefit from being deceived. This impression is based on studies that interview subjects at some point in time after their experimental experience. For example, Smith and Richardson (1983, p. 1080) concluded that: "In general, respondents who have been deceived while participating in psychological research did not report negative effects of their experience. In fact, they perceived their experiences more positively that did respondents who had not participated in studies employing deception." Christensen (1988, p. 668), after reviewing the literature on subject reaction to deception, states that the evidence supports the notion that deception experiments are perceived as "more enjoyable and beneficial than nondeception experiments." He goes on to say that in the face of these data it may be that deception has gotten its bad name from philosophers!Basing the acceptability of deception on direct sampling of subjects' highly personal reactions assumes that the procedure yields responses that are valid on their face. If this is true, it would seem to undermine the typical justification for deception in the first place, which is that subjects when asked for personal information are likely to respond in misleading ways. It is important to note that evidence suggests that if subjects are queried about the acceptability of deception prior to actual participation, substantial proportions of subjects judge deception to be unacceptable (Korn 1987). These results are consistent with our own recently completed research, which shows that subjects asked about their reactions following participation in a deception experiment did indeed tend to indicate its acceptability. However, when asked to make a judgment about what reactions other students had to the same experiment, they expressed concern that others may have been harmed by the deception.For psychologists to selectively disregard the distinct possibility of dynamically motivated minimization of harm in order to justify deceptive research practices further supports Bok's characterization of today's competitive research environment and the standards of personal integrity that it challenges.Stephen Hahn-SmithDepartment of Psychology The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NMReferencesChristensen, Larry. 1988. Deception in Psychological Research: When is it Justified? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 14: 664-75. Google ScholarKorn, James H. 1987. Judgements of Acceptability of Deception in Psychological Research. Journal of General Psychology 114: 205-6. [End Page 387]Google ScholarSmith, Steven S., and Richardson, Deborah. 1983 Amelioration of Deception and Harm in Psychological Research: The Important Role of Debriefing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44: 1075-82. [End Page 388]Google ScholarCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

If ecological systems are functionally organised, they can possess functions or malfunctions. Natural function would provide justification for conservationists to act for the protection of current ecological arrangements and control the presence of populations that create ecosystem malfunctions. Invasive species are often thought to be malfunctional for ecosystems, so functional arrangement would provide an objective reason for their control. Unfortunately for this prospect, I argue no theory of function, which can support such normative conclusions, can be applied to large scale (...) ecosystems. Instead ecological systems have causal structure, with small clusters of populations achieving functional arrangement. This, however, does not leave us without reason to control invasive species. We can look at the causal arrangement of ecological systems for populations that support ecological features that we should preserve. Populations that play a causal role in reducing biodiversity should be controlled, because biodiversity is a good all prudent agents should want to preserve. (shrink)

In the context of multidimensional measures of well-being, a key question for policy is whether particular groups have differing priorities and are therefore likely to react differently to given economic or social shocks. We explore this issue by presenting the results of two related analyses that suggest positive answers on both counts. First, we apply reference class weights to unique data on adult capabilities in the UK and show that relative weights vary across some groupings. Furthermore, in some cases, deprivation (...) rankings of groups vary depending on which weights are used. Second, we explore possible behavioural consequences of different weights by examining the extent to which groups respond differently to three economic and social shocks (unemployment, widowhood and ill health). In this case, we find that weights and responses vary noticeably with age and region and sometimes with gender. We conclude that whilst equal weighting may be practically unavoidable when constructing indices of welfare in the absence of information on weights, their estimation from survey or experimental data is likely to be justified and may change views about policy needs or efficacy. (shrink)

The introduction of new genetic material into wild populations, using novel biotechnology, has the potential to fortify populations against existential threats, and, controversially, create wild genetically modified populations. The introduction of new genetic variation into populations, which will have an ongoing future in areas of conservation interest, complicates long-held values in conservation science and park management. I discuss and problematize, in light of genetic intervention, what I consider the three core goals of conservation science: biodiversity, ecosystem services, and wilderness. This (...) uneasy relationship, however, does not forgo the use of such interventions. I argue there is a case for the application of this technology within some interpretations of the moral frameworks of wilderness and biodiversity, despite apparent conflict between these values and the technology, and the possibility that this technology's use displays some limitations of the ecosystem services framework. Ultimately, the advent of biotechnology assisted restoration highlights the need for us to reevaluate our ethical concepts of conservation at times of global environmental and technological change. (shrink)

In 1989 Smart problematised law as a masculinist knowledge which disqualified other forms of knowledge, particularly feminism. Twenty-one years later Smart characterises the relationship between law and feminism quite differently. In this account law responds to feminism and outcomes are progressive. Smart suggests that rather than continuing to focus on law’s disciplinary and normalising role, it is more productive to conceptualise contemporary family law as a creative kinning practice. We argue, however, that we must also bring into this account the (...) changes to the state brought about by neo-liberalism. The paper tests these observations about the trajectories of feminism, law and neo-liberalism by reflecting upon our study of the Albert Kennedy Trust (AKT). AKT was established in 1989, in the wake of gay and lesbian resistance to Clause 28, to provide homes with gay and lesbian adults for homeless gay and lesbian teenagers. We are interested in AKT’s shift in its description of the adults’ relationship with the teenagers in their care from ‘brothers and sisters’ to ‘carers’ as it moved from a marginal force to mainstream partner/provider. In this context we explore the complexity of law’s responsiveness to feminism’s dynamism, its contingent recognition of kinning practices and, in the light of neo-liberalism, its continuing disciplinary role. (shrink)

Researchers have explored important questions about employees’ prosocial motivation to impact others through their work and about employees’ engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Studies show that job seekers are attracted to CSR-engaged employers, but little is known about whether and why prospective employees are attracted by job roles that allow them to have positive social impact. We used prosocial motivation theory to develop hypotheses about processes through which a greater desire for social impact in work is associated with (...) being predisposed to it (due to trait-like prosocial motivation), being exposed to the possibility of it (through CSR-related educational choices), and both in partially mediated sequence. Analyses of data from 187 prospective employees provided support for most hypotheses. Our findings inform new directions for research on CSR and recruitment, the CSR education literature, and recruitment practices that leverage prospective employees’ desire for social impact through performing their regular work. (shrink)

_Transcendent Teacher Learner Relationships: The Way of the Shamanic Teacher (Second Edition)_ explores the nature of the transcendent teacher learner relationship and precisely how such relationships of warmth, safety, mutual care, mutual respect and mutual trust are developed and maintained.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has focused its obesity prevention and control efforts on improving population-level health. A recent Institute of Medicine report identified systems that affect population health, to include health care delivery systems, schools, businesses and employers, communities, and governmental public health infrastructure. CDC uses the public health model to engage these systems, and this process coordinates multiple settings, sectors, and jurisdictions to develop an integrated approach to identify, prevent, and control obesity. The public health approach (...) goes beyond medical care to prioritize policy and environmental strategies that can be implemented across jurisdictional levels, in collaboration with traditional and nontraditional partners. The process ultimately produces tools, guidelines, and interventions that can be used to prevent and control obesity. In this manuscript, we provide an overview of the public health perspective on obesity, outline the public health framework for addressing obesity, and discuss the rationale for leveraging law-based efforts as a tool to accomplish the public health mission. (shrink)

: A popular belief is that the process whereby search engines tailor their search results to individual users, so-called personalization, leads to filter bubbles in the sense of ideologically segregated search results that would tend to reinforce the user’s prior view. Since filter bubbles are thought to be detrimental to society, there have been calls for further legal regulation of search engines beyond the so-called Right to be Forgotten Act. However, the scientific evidence for the filter bubble hypothesis is surprisingly (...) limited. Previous studies of personalization have focused on the extent to which different users get different results lists without taking the content on the webpages into account. Such methods are unsuitable for detecting filter bubbles as such. In this paper, we propose a methodology that takes content differences between webpages into account. In particular, the method involves studying the extent to which users with strong opposing views on an issue receive search results that are correlated content-wise with their personal view. Will users of with strong prior opinion that X is true on average have a larger share of search results that are in favor of X than users with a strong prior opinion that X is false? We illustrate our methodology at work, but also the non-trivial challenges it faces, by a small-scale study of the extent to which Google Search leads to ideological segregation on the issue of man-made climate change. (shrink)

A traditional task of epistemology is to establish and defend systematic standards that must be met in order for us to have knowledge or justified beliefs. A "naturalized epistemology" tries to arrive at such standards through an empirical investigation into how we interact with our fellows and the world around us, what we seek in these activities, and the particular ways in which we can and cannot succeed. This approach is a radical departure from tradition because its means of investigation (...) is empirical. Nevertheless, since its inception three decades ago, this style of epistemology has become a powerful trend in contemporary theory of knowledge. This collection breaks new ground in extending the insights and methodology of naturalized epistemology to the subject of moral knowledge and moral theory. The essays are divided between two overarching themes. One is the so-called fact-value distinction. How can an empirical study of knowledge hope to address the normative questions about how we should reason about moral matters, how we should live morally? The other is the relation of practical moral know-how to moral discourse. Can the biological underpinning of morality explain most of its central features or is moral discourse essential to our understanding of the cognitive dimensions of moral experience? (shrink)

This volume contains ten new essays on a priori knowledge by authors from Canada, the United States, Australia, & Europe Topics addressed include the nature, explanation, & indispensability of a priori knowledge, its connection with analytic truth, its place in mathematics, in logic, & in empirical theory, & the contribution of Kant & Quine to these topics. The focus is on twentieth-century contributions to these issues, but most essays also address earlier discussions at some length, & the essays that focus (...) on Kant also relate his views to more recent discussions. Contents: Introduction. A Rationalist Manifesto. Analyticity, Undeniability, & Truth. Analyticity & the A Priori. The Doubtful A Priori. Some Remarks on Indiscernibility. The Constitutive A Priori. Kant's A Priori Methods for Recognising Necessary Truths. EPR as A Priori Science. Gaps, Gluts, & Paradox. An Essay on Material Necessity. (shrink)

Aravind Joshi famously hypothesized that natural language syntax was characterized (in part) by mildly context-sensitive generative power. Subsequent work in mathematical linguistics over the past three decades has revealed surprising convergences among a wide variety of grammatical formalisms, all of which can be said to be mildly context-sensitive. But this convergence is not absolute. Not all mildly context-sensitive formalisms can generate exactly the same stringsets (i.e. they are not all weakly equivalent), and even when two formalisms can both generate a (...) certain stringset, there might be differences in the structural descriptions they use to do so. It has generally been difficult to find cases where such differences in structural descriptions can be pinpointed in a way that allows linguistic considerations to be brought to bear on choices between formalisms, but in this paper we present one such case. The empirical pattern of interest involves wh-movement dependencies in languages that do not enforce the wh-island constraint. This pattern draws attention to two related dimensions of variation among formalisms: whether structures grow monotonically from one end to another, and whether structure-building operations are conditioned by only a finite amount of derivational state. From this perspective, we show that one class of formalisms generates the crucial empirical pattern using structures that align with mainstream syntactic analysis, and another class can only generate that same string pattern in a linguistically unnatural way. This is particularly interesting given that (i) the structurally-inadequate formalisms are strictly more powerful than the structurally-adequate ones from the perspective of weak generative capacity, and (ii) the formalism based on derivational operations that appear on the surface to align most closely with the mechanisms adopted in contemporary work in syntactic theory (merge and move) are the formalisms that fail to align with the analyses proposed in that work when the phenomenon is considered in full generality. (shrink)

A prolonged confrontation between Yahoo! Inc. and French activists who demand the removal of Nazi items from auction sites as well as restricted access to neo-Nazis sites is described and analyzed. We present the case up to the decision of Yahoo! Inc. to remove the items from yahoo.com following a French court's verdict against the firm. Using a business ethics approach, we distinguish legal, technical, philosophical and managerial issues involved in the case and their management by Yahoo! We conclude on (...) the difficulty of governing relations with society from corporate and legal affairs departments at the headquarters level, and on the clash of two visions over the regulation of social freedom. (shrink)

Autour du Manifeste de Vienne se trouvent reunis des textes fondateurs ecrits autour de 1929. Leurs auteurs: Carnap, Hahn, Neurath, Schlick l'ame du Cercle de Vienne, et Waismann plus proche de Wittgenstein, temoignent d'un courant philosophique constituant aujourd'hui la tradition analytique de source continentale a la fois empiriste et logique. Forme de maniere informelle a Vienne, au coeur de l'Europe, le Cercle reunissait des savants de differentes branches qui voulaient se donner une philosophie susceptible d' unifier leurs vues. Echo (...) aux reves d'unite de la science, cette philosophie en exprime aussi le renversement complet. Veritable Discours de la methode, mais d'esprit anti-cartesien, elle entend reconstruire la science de maniere a evincer la speculation metaphysique, le but etant qu'aucun enonce ne soit laisse a l'exterieur de cette grande architecture de symboles s'il etait pourvu de sens. La declaration de guerre contre la metaphysique est un geste de militance a une epoque riche en differents manifestes. Incomprehensible en dehors du contexte socio-politique viennois de ces annees, elle porte aussi un programme de reconstruction rationnelle qui, au dela du langage de la science, devait toucher tous les secteurs de la vie. Plus complexe qu'il n'y parait, ce programme contient, en reference a Wittgenstein, son prestigieux representant a cote d'Einstein et Russell, une mise en garde contre differentes formes d'irrationalismes, qui est d'actualite. (shrink)

In recent years, the receipt and the perception of information has changed in ways which have fueled fears about the fates of our democracies. However, real information on these possibilities or the direction of these changes does not exist. Into this gap, Hahn and colleagues bring the power of Condorcet's (1785) Jury Theorem to show that changes in our information networks have affected voter inter‐dependence so that it is likely that voters are now collectively more ignorant even if individual (...) voter competence remains unchanged. (shrink)

Ineffability—that which cannot be explained in words—lies at the heart of the Christian mystical tradition. It has also been part of every discussion of religious experience since the early twentieth century. Despite this centrality, ineffability is a concept that has largely been ignored by philosophers of religion. In this book, Bennett-Hunter builds on the recent work of David E. Cooper, who argues that the meaning of life can only be understood in terms of an ineffable source on which life (...) depends, and engages with the work of continental philosophers, such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Karl Jaspers. This is the first book to explore the concept of ineffability within contemporary philosophy of religion and provides a starting point for further scholarly debate. It will be of interest to scholars of philosophy of religion, theology, existentialism and phenomenology. -/- 'Bennett Hunter’s book is a timely contribution to the growing theological and philosophical literature on mystery and ineffability. Written in a lucid and elegant style, the book makes a convincing case for the ineffability of religious experience and explores its relationship to a sense that our lives are answerable to such experience.' — David E. Cooper. -/- 'Philosophers have long concentrated on linguistic forms in a way that has isolated language from the rest of life, and this isolation has increasingly obscured for them the vast range of things that cannot be spoken. Bennett-Hunter is not the first philosopher to try and map this distracted field, but he is remarkable in the width and sympathy of his approach to the highly various thinkers whom he invokes to illuminate it.' — Mary Midgley. (shrink)

Essays by various philosphers on the work of Tyler Burge and Burge's extensive responses.

In this analysis of one of the most difficult and neglected topics in Hegelian studies, Songsuk Susan Hahn tackles the status of contradiction in Hegel's ...

I offer a novel conception of the nature of wanting. According to it, wanting is lacking something one needs. Lacking is not a normative notion but needing is, and that is how goodness figures in to wanting. What a thing needs derives from what it is to be a good thing of its kind. In people, wanting is connected to both knowledge and the will. A person can know that she wants something and can act on that knowledge. When she (...) does, she is acting in light of that want and her want is a reason why she acted. There is a close connection between wanting and our wills, not just because we can sometimes choose how to get what we need, but because our choices can determine what we want. We can't simply choose to want something, but in deciding how to live our lives, who to be, and what to pursue, we are free to settle what we want, at least within limits. These connections to knowledge and the will make human wanting rich and morally relevant, but they don't transform human wanting into something special. Wanting is everywhere just a matter of lacking something one needs. (shrink)

Metaphysics, geometry, and the problems with diagrams -- The Pythagorean theorem: Euclid I.47 and VI.31 -- Thales and geometry: Egypt, Miletus, and beyond -- Pythagoras and the famous theorems -- From the Pythagorean theorem to the construction of the cosmos out of right triangles.