It seems obvious that phenomenally conscious experience is something of great value, and that this value maps onto a range of important ethical issues. For example, claims about the value of life for those in a permanent vegetative state, debates about treatment and study of disorders of consciousness, controversies about end-of-life care for those with advanced dementia, and arguments about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, and non-human animals arguably turn on the moral significance of various facts about consciousness. However, (...) though work has been done on the moral significance of elements of consciousness, such as pain and pleasure, little explicit attention has been devoted to the ethical significance of consciousness. In this book Joshua Shepherd presents a systematic account of the value present within conscious experience. This account emphasizes not only the nature of consciousness, but the importance of items within experience such as affect, valence, and the complex overall shape of particular valuable experiences. Shepherd also relates this account to difficult cases involving non-humans and those with disorders of consciousness, arguing that the value of consciousness influences and partially explains the degree of moral status a being possesses, without fully determining it. The upshot is a deeper understanding of both the moral importance of phenomenal consciousness and its relations to moral status. This book will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, bioethics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)

This book presents an account of normative practical reasons and the way in which they contribute to the rationality of action. Rather than simply 'counting in favour of' actions, normative reasons play two logically distinct roles: requiring action and justifying action. The distinction between these two roles explains why some reasons do not seem relevant to the rational status of an action unless the agent cares about them, while other reasons retain all their force regardless of the agent's attitude. It (...) also explains why the class of rationally permissible action is wide enough to contain not only all morally required action, but also much selfish and immoral action. The book will appeal to a range of readers interested in practical reason in particular, and moral theory more generally. (shrink)

The National Health Service (NHS) was the first healthcare system globally to declare ambitions to become net carbon zero. To achieve this, a shift away from metered-dose inhalers which contain powerful greenhouse gases is necessary. Many patients can use dry powder inhalers which do not contain greenhouse gases and are equally effective at managing respiratory disease. This paper discusses the ethical issues that arise as the NHS attempts to mitigate climate change. Two ethical issues that pose a barrier to moving (...) away from metered-dose inhalers are considered: patients who decline an inhaler with a smaller carbon footprint and increased cost. I argue that while a patient is not morally justified in refusing a more environmentally sustainable inhaler due to the expected harms, a doctor may still prescribe a metered-dose inhaler if they believe that switching without consent might undermine trust or substantially worsen the patient’s health. Turning to cost, I argue that the imperative to combat climate change means the NHS should accept small increased financial costs for lower carbon inhalers, even though this provides no additional direct benefit for the patient. I then go on to consider the implications of the preceding analysis for policy and practice. I argue for a policy that minimises the impact of inhalers on the climate by advocating for a principle of environmental prescribing and explore decision-making in practice. While the arguments here pertain primarily to inhalers, the discussion has broader implications for debates around healthcare’s responsibility to be environmentally sustainable. (shrink)

In our paper ‘The ethical case for non-directed postmortem sperm donation’ we argued that it would be ethical for men to donate sperm after death for use by strangers. In their thoughtful response Fredrick and Ben Kroon lay out practical concerns regarding our proposal. They raise issues regarding the quality of sperm collected postmortem based on empirical studies. Second, they claim that concerns about quality would make women unlikely to use sperm collected after death. In this response we explore issues (...) of sperm quality in both living and dead donors. We consider whether there might be ways to ensure quality in both. Finally, we question whether quality should be a barrier to women choosing to use sperm donated after death. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that junior doctors are morally exploited. Moral exploitation occurs where an individual’s vulnerability is used to compel them to take on additional moral burdens. These might include additional moral responsibility, making weighty moral decisions and shouldering the consequent emotions. Key to the concept of exploitation is vulnerability and here I build on Rosalind McDougall’s work on the key roles of junior doctors to show how these leave them open to moral exploitation by restricting their reasonable (...) options. I argue that there are a number of ways junior doctors are morally exploited. First, their seniors can leverage their position to force a junior to take on some discreet decision. More common is the second type of moral exploitation where rota gaps and staffing issues means junior doctors take on more than their fair share of the moral burdens of practice. Third, I discuss structural moral exploitation where the system offloads moral burdens onto healthcare professionals. Not every instance of exploitation is wrongful and so I conclude by exploring the ways that moral exploitation wrongs junior doctors. (shrink)

Adverbialism is the view that to have a conscious perceptual experience is to be consciously experiencing in a certain way, and that this way is not to be understood in relational or representational terms. We might compare what it is for a conscious being to be experiencing in a certain way with what it is for a string to be vibrating in a certain way. This paper makes a new case for adverbialism by appealing to the fact that we can (...) pick out ways of experiencing by treating them as information-bearing signals. In both presenting and defending the view, it will be crucial that information is not the same as representational content, but can still concern objects and the properties of those objects. The resulting information-theoretic adverbialism can answer or deflect the most influential objections to adverbialism. (shrink)

In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard presents and defends a neo-Kantian theory of normativity. Her initial account of reasons seems to make them dependent upon the practical identity of the agent, and upon the value the agent must place on her own humanity. This seems to make all reasons agent-relative. But Korsgaard claims that arguments similar to Wittgenstein’s private-language argument can show that reasons are in fact essentially agent-neutral. This paper explains both of Korsgaard’s Wittgensteinian arguments, and shows why (...) neither of them work. The paper also provides a brief sketch of a different Wittgensteinian account of reasons that distinguishes the normative role of justification from that of requirement. On this account, the real agent-neutrality of reasons applies to their justificatory role, but not to their requiring role. (shrink)

In a number of recent publications, Douglas Portmore has defended consequentialism, largely on the basis of a maximizing view of practical rationality. I have criticized such maximizing views, arguing that we need to distinguish two independent dimensions of normative strength: justifying strength and requiring strength. I have also argued that this distinction helps to explain why we typically have so many rational options. Engaging with these arguments, Portmore has (a) developed his own novel maximization-friendly method of explaining the ubiquity of (...) rational options, and (b) criticized one argument in favour of a substantive justifying/requiring distinction in the domain of practical rationality. The present article defends the justifying/requiring distinction, and criticizes Portmore's maximization-friendly strategy for explaining the ubiquity of rational options. (shrink)

This article uses a particular view of the basic emotions in order to develop and defend an account of paradigmatic emotion-linked evaluative properties. The view is that felt emotions are constituted by an awareness that one is about to behave in a certain way. This view provides support for a fitting-attitude account of certain evaluative properties. But the relevant sense of fittingness is not to be understood in terms of reasons. The account therefore sidesteps the well-known Wrong Kind of Reasons (...) problem. Throughout the article, a contrast is made with the rational sentimentalism of Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson. (shrink)

One of us -- Alfred Mele (1996; 2003, ch. 5) -- has argued that possible instances of listlessness falsify the combination of cognitivism and various kinds of internalism about positive first-person moral ought-beliefs. If an argument recently advanced by James Lenman (1999) is successful, listlessnessis impossible and Mele's argument from listlessness therefore fails.However, we will argue that Lenman's argument is unpersuasive.

On the heels of the advance since the twentieth-century of wholly physicalist accounts of human persons, the influence of materialist ontology is increasingly evident in Christian theologizing. To date, the contemporary literature has tended to focus on anthropological issues (e.g., whether the traditional soul / body distinction is viable), with occasional articles treating physicalist accounts of such doctrines as the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus cropping up, as well. Interestingly, the literature to date, both for and against this influence, is (...) dominated by philosophers. The present volume is a collection of philosophers and theologians who advance several novel criticisms of this growing trend toward physicalism in Christian theology. The present collection definitively shows that Christian physicalism has some significant philosophical and theological problems. No doubt all philosophical anthropologies have their challenges, but the present volume shows that Christian physicalism is most likely not an adequate accounting for essential theological topics within Christian theism. Christians, then, should consider alternative anthropologies. (shrink)

Julia Markovits has recently argued for what she calls the ‘Coincident Reasons Thesis’: the thesis that one’s action is morally worthy if and only if one’s motivating reasons for acting mirror, in content and strength, the reasons that explain why the action ought, morally, to be performed. This thesis assumes that the structure of motivating reasons is sufficiently similar to the structure of normative reasons that the required coincidence in content and strength is a genuine possibility. But because motivating reasons (...) have only one dimension of strength, while normative reasons have both justifying and requiring strength, one’s motivating reasons can no more coincide with the normative reasons of relevance to one’s action than a line can coincide with a square, or a square with a cube. It is possible to amend the Coincident Reasons Thesis so that it concerns only one dimension of normative strength: for example, requiring strength. But such an amended thesis yields implausible verdicts. In particular it requires us either to deny the existence of supererogatory action, or—still less plausibly—to hold that such action has less moral worth than does doing the morally required minimum. (shrink)

This article attempts to do two things. The first is to make it plausible that any adequate dispositional view of color will have to associate colors with complex functions from a wide range of normal circumstances to a wide range of (simultaneously) incompatible color appearances, so that there will be no uniquely veridical appearance of any given color. The second is to show that once this move is made, dispositionalism is in a position to provide interesting answers to some of (...) the most challenging objections that have been pressed against it. It explains why colors do not seem to come on when the lights come on, and why the right thing to say seems to be that the light causes the objects to reveal their colors. It explains why the content of visual experience need not be problematically circular. It eliminates the problem of intrapersonal variation in color appearance. And it even provides resources for dealing with the problem of interpersonal variation. It is true that in moving to the more complex view, the dispositionalist becomes subject to a new objection, which has been called the problem of unity. The paper offers a solution to this problem as well. (shrink)

A popular-level discussion of the mutual significance of physics and philosophy over the ages.

In this response article, we challenge a core assumption that lies at the centre of a round table discussion regarding the Pharmacogenetics to Avoid Loss of Hearing trial. The round table regards a genetic test for a variant (mt.1555A>G) that increases the risk of deafness if a carrier is given the antibiotic gentamicin. The idea is that rapid testing can identify neonates at risk, providing an opportunity to prevent giving an antibiotic that might cause deafness. We challenge the assumption that (...) a positive test unequivocally guides antibiotic choice because, aside from the risk of deafness, all antibiotics for neonatal sepsis are equivalent. We argue that this assumption is faulty and has particularly troubling moral consequences. We claim that giving an alternative to gentamicin is potentially providing inferior treatment and thereby may increase the risk of death. Parents and doctors are faced with a terrible choice as a result of positive point-of-care testing (POCT): give gold-standard treatment and risk deafness or give second line care and risk death. While we do not indicate an answer to this choice, what we do argue is that such a deep and difficult choice is one that may make parents wish genetic testing was never undertaken, and therefore, contra some authors in the round table, provides a reason to gain specific consent for POCT. (shrink)

1 The Roots of the Laws Perhaps the most ready assumption of any reader of the Laws-it only because of its title-is that its primary purpose is to provide a ...

This article examines two disputes within sex and gender movements, using them to think through inclusion/exclusion processes, the place of such explosions in the construction of collective identity, and the gendered nature of social movements. Literatures on collective identity emphasize the ways boundary negotiation reinforces the solidarity necessary for collective action and note benefits of solid boundaries, yet downplay the role of internal conflict in the making of collective identities. The cases examined here both involved the explicit expulsion of some (...) “members”: the North American Man/boy Love Association from the International Lesbian and Gay Association, and transsexuals from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. An incongruence between practical participation and symbolic exclusion suggests that internal movement debates are best understood as public communications, depending heavily on the communicative environment. Finally, these stories raise questions about the gendered nature of collective identity construction in social movements more generally. (shrink)

-- William Nester, Asian Thought & Society.

One strategy for providing an analysis of practical rationality is to start with the notion of a practical reason as primitive. Then it will be quite tempting to think that the rationality of an action can be defined rather simply in terms of ‘the balance of reasons’. But just as, for many philosophical purposes, it is extremely useful to identify the meaning of a word in terms of the systematic contribution the word makes to the meanings of whole sentences, this (...) paper argues that it is extremely useful to explain the nature of practical reasons in terms of the systematic contributions that such reasons make to the wholesale rational statuses of actions. This strategy gives us a clear view of two logically distinct normative roles for practical reasons – justifying and requiring – that are often conflated, and it allows us to give clear definitions of what ‘the strength of a reason’ means within each of these roles. The final section of the paper explores some implications of the resulting view for the internalism/externalism debate about practical reasons, and for the practical significance of moral theory. (shrink)

This paper seeks to examine the nature of matter from an Orthodox Christian patristic perspective, specifically that of St. Gregory of Nyssa, and compare this with David Bohm's concept of wholeness and the implicate order. By examining the ramifications of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, the basic nature of matter as being rooted in the mind of God reveals itself, and furthermore shows that certain conceptions of quantum physics can provide language with which to give voice to this ancient (...) view. (shrink)

Many people think that truth somehow depends upon the way things are. Yet, it has proven difficult to precisely explain the nature of this dependence. The most common view is that truth depends upon the way things are by corresponding to things. But this account relocates the difficulty: one now wonders what correspondence is. It is worth emphasizing that the question of how truth relates to reality is not only a question for correspondence theorists; theorists of all stripes may wonder (...) how truth and reality connect. There are many reasons one might care to have an analysis of how truth relates to reality. Here are two. First, an analysis would help philosophers better understand how truth could depend upon the way things are. Why is it that when Joe shoves his cat off his pillow, the proposition that Joe's cat is on his pillow switches from true to false? It may seem puzzling that an abstract thing, such as a proposition, should be affected by physical changes to concrete particulars. How does that happen? The difficulty of seeing just how true propositions are able to systematically relate to reality will be called "the Problem of Matching." A thorough analysis of the relationship between truth and reality would effectively solve the Problem of Matching. (shrink)

Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons have recently presented a series of papers in which they argue against what has come to be called the ‘new wave’ moral realism and moral semantics of David Brink, Richard Boyd, Peter Railton, and a number of other philosophers. The central idea behind Horgan and Timmons’s criticism of these ‘new wave’ theories has been extended by Sean Holland to include the sort of realism that drops out of response-dependent accounts that make use of an analogy (...) between moral properties and secondary qualities. This paper argues that Holland’s extension depends crucially on the fact that his target is a direct response-dependent account of moral value. His argument does not work against such accounts of more basic normative notions such as ‘harm’ or ‘benefit’. And these more basic notions may then serve as the basic normative building blocks for an indirectly response-dependent moral theory. (shrink)

Jamie Dreier has argued that the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral requires explanation, and that attempts by the non-naturalist to provide it, or to sidestep the issue, have so far failed. These comments on Dreier first examine the notion of distinctness at work in the idea that non-natural properties are distinct from natural ones, pointing out that distinctness cannot be understood in modal terms if supervenience is to be respected. It then suggests that Dreier’s implicit commitment to the (...) existence of infinite Boolean combinations of properties plays a significant role in the challenge to non-naturalism, and that the non-naturalist has some principled reasons for rejecting it. It also suggests that the real problem for non-naturalists isn’t explaining supervenience, but is rather the well-known problem of explaining our capacity to know anything about non-natural properties. That is, if the latter epistemological problem can be solved, the former metaphysical one might well disappear, at least as a distinctive problem for non-naturalist realists about morality. (shrink)

Over-simple internalist accounts of practical reasons imply that we cannot have reasons to become more rational, because they claim that we have a reason to φ only if we would have some desire to φ if we were fully rational. But if we were fully rational, we would have no desire to become more rational. Robert Johnson has recently argued that in their attempts to avoid this problem, existing versions of internalism yield reasons which do not have an appropriate connection (...) with potential explanations of action. I suggest that the problem is partly a result of failure to see that action-tokens are usually tokens of a wide variety of action-types, and that the internalist conditional need only be true of one of these types in order to justify a reason claim about the token. (shrink)

The problem of creeping minimalism is the problem of drawing a principled distinction between expressivists and non-expressivists. Explanationism is a popular strategy for solving the problem, but two of its forms—ontological explanationism and representational explanationism—have fatal problems. Christine Tiefensee and Matthew Simpson have recently, and independently, endorsed a third form: subject matter explanationism. But this form also fails. At bottom, the problem is that it does not note the existence of non-reductive expressivist views, just as earlier forms of explanationism did (...) not note the existence of error theories, or non-naturalist realists, or realists who wanted to endorse deflationary views of truth and representation. The failure of this latest version of explanationism—one that does indeed avoid problems with earlier versions—strengthens the case that we may not actually want a solution to the problem of creeping minimalism after all. Rather, a form of global expressivism—neopragmatism—might be regarded as yielding a version of non-naturalist normative realism. (shrink)

Response-dispositional accounts of value defend a biconditional in which the possession of an evaluative property is said to covary with the disposition to cause a certain response. In contrast, a fitting-attitude account of the same property would claim that it is such as to merit or make fitting that same response. This paper argues that even for secondary qualities, response-dispositional accounts are inadequate; we need to import a normative notion such as appropriateness even into accounts of such descriptive properties as (...) redness. A preliminary conclusion is that the normativity that appears in fitting-attitude accounts of evaluative properties need not have anything to do with the evaluative nature of those properties. It may appear there because evaluative properties—or at least thosefor which fitting-attitude accounts are plausible—really are so much like secondary qualities that it might well be appropriate to think of them as a subclass of secondary qualities. In the second half of the paper I discuss the views of three of the philosophers who have been most influential in discussions of response-featuring accounts of evaluative notions and who explicitly distinguish response-dispositional accounts of value from fittingattitude accounts: John McDowell, Simon Blackburn, and Crispin Wright. I highlight some of the theoretical temptations that can be associated with the assumption that the response-dispositional/fitting-attitude distinction parallels the secondary quality/evaluative property distinction. (shrink)

According to socio-relational theory, men and women encountered different ecologies in their evolutionary past, and, as a result of different ancestral selection pressures, they developed different patterns of emotional expressivity that have persisted across cultures and large human evolutionary time scales. We question these assumptions, and propose that social-cognitive models of individual differences more parsimoniously account for sex differences in emotional expressivity.

This note on Propertius 4.7 argues that Cynthia, repeatedly cast in the role of the poet's Muse, rejects the burden of inspiration through a learned choice of words (non tamen insector, 4.7.49). The verb insector constitutes a clear reference to the invocation of the Camena in Livius Andronicus and of the Muse in Ennius. Cynthia recalibrates the parlance of poetic inspiration to end her relationship with Propertius, both as his puella and as his Muse.

I am grateful for these four wide-ranging and incisive commentaries on my paper discussing the ethical issues that arise when we consider the carbon footprint of inhalers.1 As I am unable to address every point raised, instead I focus on what I take to be the common thread running through these papers. Each response has something to say regarding the scope of healthcare’s responsibility to mitigate climate change. This can be explored at the intuitional or structural level, or at the (...) individual patient and practitioner level leading to a further issue of the relationship between these perspectives. Coverdale argues for broadening the scope of individual responsibilities regarding the climate.2 Discussing inhalers does not go far enough and doctors, argues Coverdale, are well placed to draw attention to the various behaviour changes patients can undertake both through role modelling and in the clinic. While Coverdale makes some excellent points, I have three worries about his proposal. One is relevance. Climate concerns may not always be pertinent in the clinical encounter; think of counselling a bereaved patient or somebody needing a fit note. Related to this is opportunity. General practitioners capacity to cover an inordinate amount in a 10 min consultation …. (shrink)

Many global and national systems of regulation of blood donors and donor compensation rely for intellectual support on Richard Titmuss’s views, represented in The Gift Relationship. Based on selective interpretation of data from the 1960s, Titmuss engineered an ethical view pertaining to donors and, in so doing, created not only ongoing stereotypes, but created a cause for followers to perpetuate misunderstandings about the nature of such donations. In many cases, donors are, in fact compensated, but regulatory systems persevere in using (...) definitional fig leaves in order to perpetuate an ongoing political goal of diminishing private sector participation in health care. However, in more recent works, including new views of critical sociology and evolutionary psychology, the Titmuss worldview has been turned upside-down. Evidence readily available today proves the safety of compensated donation and the lives saved by encouraging policies for both compensated and non-compensated donation. (shrink)

This is an appendix containing the stimulus materials for the experiments reported in the paper ‘Salient Alternatives in Perspective.’.

There is a need for all industries, including healthcare, to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. In anaesthetic practice, this not only requires a reduction in resource use and waste, but also a shift away from inhaled anaesthetic gases and towards alternatives with a lower carbon footprint. As inhalational anaesthesia produces greenhouse gas emissions at the point of use, achieving sustainable anaesthetic practice involves individual practitioner behaviour change. However, changing the practice of healthcare professionals raises potential ethical issues. The purpose of (...) this paper is twofold. First, we discuss what moral duties anaesthetic practitioners have when it comes to practices that impact the environment. We argue that behaviour change among practitioners to align with certain moral responsibilities must be supplemented with an account of institutional duties to support this. In other words, we argue that institutions and those in power have second-order responsibilities to ensure that practitioners can fulfil their first-order responsibilities to practice more sustainably. The second goal of the paper is to consider not just the nature of second-order responsibilities but the content. We assess four different ways that second-order responsibilities might be fulfilled within healthcare systems: removing certain anaesthetic agents, seeking consensus, education and methods from behavioural economics. We argue that, while each of these are a necessary part of the picture, some interventions like nudges have considerable advantages. (shrink)

In a recent issue of this journal, Benjamin Schnieder has presented an objection to the account of individual substance that we have developed and put to various uses in our works on metaphysics. According to Schnieder's objection, our proposal to analyse this notion of substantiality suffers from a special kind of circularity. In this paper, we give two replies to Schnieder's objection. The first is that a successful analysis is not, in fact, required to avoid the sort of circularity about (...) which Schnieder complains. The second is that our analysis does not involve the alleged circularity. (shrink)

Although he is not always recognised as such, Søren Kierkegaard has been an important ally for Catholic theologians since the early twentieth century. I introduce for the first time in English the constructive theological features in the underexplored writings of the Italian Thomist, Cornelio Fabro. In the first section, I set the stage with Fabro’s historical context to show Fabro’s desire to negotiate his loyalty to the Thomist revival after Aeterni Patris and the claims of the modern world. In the (...) second, I focus on Fabro’s recovery of Kierkegaard’s writings as a way into understanding Fabro’s wider project of renewal in Catholic theology. Specifically, I draw upon Fabro’s treatment of Kierkegaard’s Mariology and Ecclesiology as two counter-intuitive examples of Catholic theological renewal. I conclude with some observations regarding how Fabro’s constructive theological contribution deepens and expands current understanding of ressourcement theology in the twentieth century. My aim is not just to narrate a vital moment in the history of Catholic engagement with Kierkegaard, but also to provide a representative entry point for Kierkegaard’s writings to continue to stimulate reform and renewal in contemporary Catholic theology in the wake of the ressourcement movement. (shrink)

This discussion examines two of the central notions at work in Sterba’s From Rationality to Equality: question-beggingness, and the notion of a rational requirement. I point out that, against certain unreasonable positions, begging the question is a perfectly reasonable option. I also argue that if we use the sense of “rational requirement” that philosophers ought to have in mind when defending the idea that morality is rationally required, then Sterba has not succeed in defending this idea. Rather, he has at (...) most demonstrated the rational preferability of morality over two other positions: an extreme egoism, and a very particular form of altruism. But another position exists: one that holds altruistic reasons to exist, and to be capable of justifying sacrifices, but that also holds that they do not require us to sacrifice our interests in the way that morality sometimes does require. (shrink)

This article reaches out to the audience for controversial religious writing after the English Reformation, by examining the shared language of attainable truth, of clarity and certainty, to be found in Protestant and Catholic examples of the same. It argues that we must consider those aspects of religious controversy that lie simultaneously above and beneath its doctrinal content: the logical forms in which it was framed, and the assumptions writers made about their audiences’ needs and responses. Building on the work (...) of Susan Schreiner and others on the notion of certainty through the early Reformation, the article asks how English polemicists exalted and opened up that notion for their readers’ benefit, through proclamations of visibility, accessibility and honest dealing. Two case studies are chosen, in order to make a comparison across confessional lines: first, Protestant reactions against the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which emphasized honesty and encouraged fear of hidden meaning; and second, Catholic opposition to the notion of an invisible-or relatively invisible-church. It is argued that the language deployed in opposition to these ideas displays a shared emphasis on the clear, certain, and reliable, and that which might be attained by human means. Projecting the emphases and assertions of these writers onto their audience, and locating it within a contemporary climate, the article thus questions the emphasis historians of religion place on the intangible-on faith-in considering the production and the reception of Reformation controversy. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to develop from Kristeva’s account of time and semiotics the conditions of possibility for a new approach to interpreting the Bible. This will be set against the background of feminist biblical criticism, beginning from Esther Fuchs’s assessment of deception. She bases her comparison on the concept of deceptiveness but I will argue, using Lacan, that the aporia of desire undermines this comparison. Through Kristeva’s framework of the phases of feminism it will be shown that (...) Fuchs’s argument weakness lies in her presupposition of the determinate identities of men and women. By examining passages in Genesis it will be shown that such determined identities are also not easily found in the Hebrew Bible. Then by considering another feminist scholar, Alice Bach, it will be shown that overcoming identity requires a more nuanced approach. In the first version of “Women’s Time” Kristeva suggests that identities could be overcome through moving towards the individual but this also operates in the same structure of identity. In fact Kristeva appears to recognize this problem as when she republishes the essay she considers a different way forward. It will be instead suggested that a type of feminism that recognizes its own weakness is needed. This will be used to interpret Proverbs 31 but in doing so it will become evident that this alone lacks the potency to overcome the diffuse nature of the symbolic. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay brings Martha Nussbaum's politically liberal version of the Capabilities Approach to human development into critical dialogue with the Catholic Social Tradition. Like CST, Nussbaum's focus on embodiment, dependence and dignity entails a social use of property which privileges marginalized people, and both theories explain the underdevelopment of central human capabilities in social rather than exclusively material terms. Whereas CST is metaphysically and theologically ‘thick', however, CA is ‘thin’: its proponents positively eschew metaphysical commitments, believing a commitment to quasi-Rawlsian (...) ‘overlapping consensus' is more consistent with political liberalism. This creates two tensions between CA and CST. The first is that CST understands the internal virtues of essentially social practices to be inseparable from their concrete instantiation in actual communities, while CA sometimes describes these virtues as political entitlements which can be supported independently o... (shrink)