The classification of medical interventions as either invasive or non-invasive is commonly regarded to be morally important. On the most commonly endorsed account of invasiveness, a medical intervention is invasive if and only if it involves either breaking the skin (‘incision’) or inserting an object into the body (‘insertion’). Building on recent discussions of the concept of invasiveness, we show that this standard account fails to capture three aspects of existing usage of the concept of invasiveness in relation to medical (...) interventions—namely, (1) usage implying that invasiveness comes in degrees, (2) that the invasiveness of an intervention can depend on the characteristics of the salient alternative interventions, and (3) that medical interventions can be invasive in non-physical ways. We then offer the beginnings of a revised account that, we argue, is able to capture a wider range of existing usage. Central to our account is a distinction between two properties: basic invasiveness and threshold invasiveness. We end by assessing what the standard account gets right, and what more needs to be done to complete our schematic account. (shrink)

We are grateful to the commentators for their close reading of our article 1 and for their challenging and interesting responses to it. We do not have space to respond to all of the objections that they raise, so in this reply, we address only a selection of them. Some commentaries question the usefulness of developing an account of the sort we provide, 2 or of revising the Standard Account (SA) in doing so. 3–5 Our schema is intended to provide (...) a framework for developing a full account of invasiveness that captures existing uses of the term. On the assumption that the term is used somewhat reliably and consistently–and we are inclined to agree with some of our commentators 3 4 that people are not terribly confused or mistaken in how they employ the term–an account that captures these... (shrink)

Lars von Trier's movies can be seen as a series of iterations in an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma. After testing the logic of this game, at the core of which is the dilemma of cooperation or conflict, at the middle level at which an individual confronts a community up till Dogville, he has transposed the game to the level of social systems in Manderlay and the level of the minimal social unit, the couple in Anti-Christ. The story is the Oedipus (...) myth reversed and fit into the logic of the prisoner's dilemma which is, one could argue, the mathematical model of a Hobbesian world view. In that sense it could be called Von Trier's Anti-Oedipus. Moreover, this is the first film in which Von Trier fully embraces digital technologies. It is as if he as a filmmaker acts like the male protagonist in Anti-Christ, and assumes the role of the Anti-Christ in order to become a Savior, since digital technologies and special effects are aligned with 'evil' in this movie. (shrink)

Gregory Currie _Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science_ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 ISBN 0-521-45356-9 (hbk) xxiv + 301 pp.