Although Daniel Engster's “caring” human rights are, on the surface, a compelling way to bring the concept of care into the international political realm, I argue they actually serve to perpetuate some of the same problems of mainstream human-rights discourses. The problem is twofold. First, Engster's particular care theory relies on an uncritical acceptance of our dependence relations. It can, therefore, not only overlook how local and global institutions, norms, and the marketplace shape our relations of dependence, but also serve (...) to further naturalize our current dependence relations. Second, Engster's caring human rights are only minimally feminist, which means that they do not pay attention to the way in which women's full and equal political participation is a necessary component to challenging and overcoming the oppression, marginalization, and exploitation of women and their caring labor worldwide. Although I am sympathetic to Engster's goals and some of his proposed policy solutions, I argue that we should not abandon the critical, feminist lens of care ethics in favor of “caring” human rights that cannot overcome the care critique of mainstream human-rights discourses. (shrink)

We introduce a new model of reduction inspired by Kemeny and Oppenheim’s model [Kemeny & Oppenheim 1956] and argue that this model is operative in a “ruthlessly reductive” part of current neuroscience. Kemeny and Oppenheim’s model was quickly rejected in mid-20th-century philosophy of science and replaced by models developed by Ernest Nagel and Kenneth Schaffner [Nagel 1961], [Schaffner 1967]. We think that Kemeny and Oppenheim’s model was correctly rejected, given what a “theory of reduction” was supposed to account for at (...) that time. But their guiding insights about what constitutes scientific reduction—increases in explanatory scope and systematization—reflect actual practices of current reductionistic neuroscience. The key rehabilitative step to make their insights fit current scientific details is to restate them using resources from recent work on causal-mechanistic explanation. We begin with a scientific case study, drawn from the relatively new field of “molecular and cellular cognition”. It provides an explanation of the well-known Ebbinghaus spacing effect on learning and memory in terms of interactions between a transcriptional enhancer protein and its inhibiting phosphatase in neurons recruited into the memory trace. Next we briefly describe some popular models of reduction from mid-20th-century philosophy of science. We point out how these models fail to illuminate key features of our scientific case study. Finally we present our causal-mechanistically updated Kemeny and Oppenheim-inspired model and argue that it nicely accounts for the details of our scientific case study. We close with a remark that will hopefully undercut the surprise many may feel to learn that a long-rejected philosophical account of reduction actually is at work in one of the most prominent reductionistic endeavors in current science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Samuel Pufendorf’s major work on natural law, De jure nature et gentium, included a long chapter on the power of the civil sovereign to determine the value of citizens. There, Pufendorf identified several forms of esteem (existimatio), according to which human beings are ranked in social life. The article argues that behind Pufendorf’s discussion of this topic was the idea that the way people esteem others and want others to esteem them has profound consequences for maintaining peaceful social life (...) and is therefore morally regulated by the fundamental natural-law duty to maintain sociality. The article explores the key elements of Pufendorf’s multifaceted analyses of esteem, making apparent how they were connected to sociality. The article also analyses Pufendorf’s argument for the duty to esteem other humans as one’s equals by nature, questioning the view that this relied on the idea of human dignity understood as an intrinsic value of human beings. Pufendorf’s argument for this duty was a part of same project as his analyses of existimatio, namely, to define how natural law regulates the way human beings esteem each other, and it relied on his observations concerning the character of human self-esteem. (shrink)

The current antireductionist consensus rests in part on the indefensibility of the deductive-nomological model of explanation, on which classical reductionism depends. I argue that the DN model is inessential to the reductionist program and that mechanism provides a better framework for thinking about reductionism. This runs counter to the contemporary mechanists’ claim that mechanism is an alternative to reductionism. I demonstrate that mechanists are committed to reductionism, as evidenced by the historical roots of the contemporary mechanist program. This view shares (...) certain core commitments with reductionism. It is these shared commitments that constitute the essential elements of the reductionist program. (shrink)

Next SectionThe principle of respect for autonomy has shaped much of the bioethics' discourse over the last 50 years, and is now most commonly used in the meaning of respecting autonomous choice. This is probably related to the influential concept of informed consent, which originated in research ethics and was soon also applied to the field of clinical medicine. But while available choices in medical research are well defined, this is rarely the case in healthcare. Consideration of ordinary medical practice (...) reveals that the focus on patient choice does not properly grasp the moral aspects involved in healthcare. Medical decisions are often portrayed as if doctors and patients in confidence confront specific decisions about examinations or treatment, yet the reality often involves many different participants, with decisions being made over time and space. Indeed, most of the decisions are never even presented to patients, as it would be unethical to suggest something that is not medically justifiable. The options patients do confront are somewhat arbitrarily constructed within the narrow framework of both what is deemed to be medically appropriate and how the healthcare system is organised practically. While the autonomy discourse has proven valuable, a failure to distinguish between the fields of medical research and clinical medicine has generated a focus on patient choice that does not reflect what is really at stake in healthcare settings. This is alarming, because the current discourse misrepresents medical practice in a way that actually contributes to bioethical self-delusion. (shrink)

This article examines narratives, images, and stories that give insight to everyday experimentation and ethical self‐formation. I use the case of World Vision and its early leaders to unpack genealogies of American evangelical humanitarianism. Rather than seeking to identify American evangelicalism’s normative ethical stance, I aim to expand the discussion in anthropology of ethics on ethical self‐formation through examining the tensions, reflections, and processes of becoming among evangelical humanitarians. In doing so, I examine two focal areas of ethical self‐formation among (...) early World Vision leaders. The first is oscillation between and mixing of passion and compassion frameworks in the American evangelical imagination. Second, I identify a range of temporal frames that evangelicals draw on to make sense of and formulate ethical responses to human needs encountered abroad. (shrink)

This article considers how the metaphor of the vaccine line and the subjectivity of the line jumper came to frame COVID vaccination experiences. Drawing on analysis of interviews (n = 24) with self-identified vaccine line jumpers, this article reports on three narratives that arose across interviews: (1) vaccine line jumping is a necessary strategy of health-advocacy, (2) vaccines are personal healthcare tools earned through individual merit, and (3) vaccine refusal is a problem of belief rather than access. Findings advance research (...) about the personalization of vaccination and public health while contributing insights about the constrained subjectivities that people adopt in individualistic health landscapes. (shrink)

Suhrawardī, Yaḥyá ibn Ḥabash, 1152 or 1153-1191 -- Criticism and interpretation ; Ishrāqīyah ; Islamic philosophy -- Iran -- History.

Recently, some mechanists have embraced reductionism and some reductionists have endorsed mechanism. However, the two camps disagree sharply about the extent to which mechanistic explanation is a reductionistic enterprise. Reductionists maintain that cellular and molecular mechanisms can explain mental phenomena without necessary appeal to higher-level mechanisms. Mechanists deny this claim. I argue that this dispute turns on whether reduction is a transitive relation. I show that it is. Therefore, mechanistic explanations at the cellular and molecular level explain mental phenomena. I (...) make my case in part by noting that mechanisms at higher levels are composed of mechanisms at lower levels. Compositional relations are transitive. In addition, they are explanatory. I conclude that there are explanatory linkages from cellular and molecular mechanisms to mental phenomena within a hierarchy of nested mechanisms. (shrink)

An introduction to the seven principles for practicing critical hope.

In this essay, I argue that the deflationary view of truth is inconsistent with Davidson's theory of meaning. I take deflationism to consist of two basic theses: the linguistic thesis that truth talk is always expressive and never explanatory, and the metaphysical thesis that truth is not a property. Since Davidson construes meaning in terms of truth-conditions, it appears that Davidson regards truth talk as explanatory, and truth as a property. Michael Williams argues otherwise, suggesting that Davidson's theory of meaning (...) can be understood in terms of his theory of radical interpretation, and that radical interpretation does not require a notion of truth richer than the deflationist allows. I argue that at the level of the T-sentences Davidson's theory of meaning entails (T-sentences yielded through the practice of radical interpretation), a non-deflationary notion of truth is indeed required. This is because, first, for Davidson, to grasp the meaning of a sentence is to grasp the T-sentence associated with it, and the T-sentence predicates the property truth of that sentencesecond, because it does so, in T-sentences "true" is explanatory, not merely expressive. I then consider the objection that T-sentences can be understood in terms of a norm of assertion, rather in terms of "true" as predicating a property of sentences, and I respond that the objection confuses pragmatic issues with semantic issues. (shrink)

In recent years, many philosophers of science have attempted to articulate a theory of non-epistemic emergence that is compatible with mechanistic explanation and incompatible with reductionism. The 2005 account of Fred C. Boogerd et al. has been particularly influential. They argued that a systemic property was emergent if it could not be predicted from the behaviour of less complex systems. Here, I argue that Boogerd et al.'s attempt to ground emergence in complexity guarantees that we will see emergence, but at (...) the cost of rendering it either trivial or epistemic. There are three basic problems. First, neither the measures of complexity explicitly mentioned by Boogerd et al. nor the most popular measures in the literature can do the practical and theoretical work that they assign to complexity. Second, I argue that while the success of their view depends on restricting the base of information available to the reductionist, this cannot be done in a way that is metaphysically neutral with respect to emer.. (shrink)

Mechanistic explanation is at present the received view of scientific explanation. One of its central features is the idea that mechanistic explanations are both “downward looking” and “upward looking”: they explain by offering information about the internal constitution of the mechanism as well as the larger environment in which the mechanism is situated. That is, they offer both constitutive and contextual explanatory information. Adequate mechanistic explanations, on this view, accommodate the full range of explanatory factors both “above” and “below” the (...) target phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that mechanistic explanation cannot furnish both constitutive and contextual information simultaneously, because these are different types of explanation with distinctly different aims. Claims that they can, I argue, depend on several intertwined confusions concerning the nature of explanation. Particularly, such claims tend to conflate mechanistic and functional explanation, which I argue ought to be understood as distinct. Conflating them threatens to oversell the explanatory power of mechanisms and obscures the means by which they explain. I offer two broad reasons in favor of distinguishing mechanistic and functional explanation: the first concerns the direction of explanation of each, and the second concerns the type of questions to which these explanations offer answers. I suggest an alternative picture on which mechanistic explanation is understood as fundamentally constitutive, and according to which an adequate understanding of a phenomenon typically requires supplementing the mechanistic explanation with a functional explanation. (shrink)

Traditional approaches to computer ethics regard computers as tools, andfocus, therefore, on the ethics of their use. Alternatively, computer ethicsmight instead be understood as a study of the ethics of computationalagents, exploring, for example, the different characteristics and behaviorsthat might benefit such an agent in accomplishing its goals. In this paper,I identify a list of characteristics of computational agents that facilitatetheir pursuit of their end, and claim that these characteristics can beunderstood as virtues within a framework of virtue ethics. This (...) frameworkincludes four broad categories – agentive, social, environmental, and moral– each of which can be understood as a spectrum of virtues rangingbetween two extreme subcategories. Although the use of a virtue frameworkis metaphorical rather than literal, I argue that by providing a frameworkfor identifying and critiquing assumptions about what a `good' computer is,a study of android arete provides focus and direction to the developmentof future computational agents. (shrink)

Many have argued that sexualized banter is indicative of “masculine” culture, serving as a mechanism by which men construct masculine identity and dominance and create a climate of sexual harassment. While this claim has much empirical support, sexualized banter among women remains undertheorized. Furthermore, many contemporary scholars agree that the meaning of a sexual exchange may vary widely between cultural and material contexts, but this insight has only recently been applied to studies of workplace sexuality. This article considers the issues (...) of gender, sexuality, power, and context in light of ethnographic data collected in two service work establishments. Within these organizations, many workplace sexualized interactions emerge as facilitating camaraderie and empowerment between workers. The article concludes that the sexual particularities of a workplace should be interpreted as one of its many cultural features, reflective more of its organizational conditions than of a static sexual symbolism. (shrink)

This book brings together essays dealing with the question of zoopoetics both as an object of study—i.e. texts from various traditions and periods that reflect, explicitly or implicitly, on the relationship between animality, language and representation—and as a methodological problem for animal studies, and, indeed, for literary studies more generally. What can literary animal studies tell us about literature that conventional literary studies might be blind to? How can literary studies resist the tendency to press animals into symbolic service as (...) metaphors and allegories for the human whilst also avoiding a naïve literalism with respect to the literary animal? The volume is divided into three sections: “Texts,” which focuses on the linguistic and metaphorical dimensions of zoopoetics; “Bodies,” which is primarily concerned with mimesis and questions of embodiment, performance, and lived experience; and “Entanglement,” which focuses on interspecies encounters and the complex interplay between word and world that emerges from them. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of animal studies, area studies and comparative literature, gender studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and the broader field of posthumanism. (shrink)

The Gospel of John reflects several layers of social memory and theological creativity concerning Jesus’s death. In the early material, there seems to be a suppressed awareness of Jesus’s fate and an unwillingness to unfold it in narrative form – something that recalls the hypothetical sayings gospel Q and the Gospel of Thomas. There is also a search for alternative, figurative ways to visualize the endpoint of Jesus’s earthly life. Eventually, the narrative memory of Jesus’s passion, as told in Mark (...) and Matthew, was adopted with some modifications. Among the modifications of the passion storyline is the narrativization of the image of Jesus as a Paschal Lamb, an image already known to Paul. The most remarkable innovation, however, was the figure of the “Beloved Disciple” as an eyewitness to Jesus’s passion and death. (shrink)

The rapid change of values in the latter half of the 2Qth century required new ethical answers and considerations in all areas of society (family, corporate world, medicine, biotechnology, etc.). The need for a new »Christian Ethics« in Germany permeated all of society after the collapse of Nazi-ideology and valuesystems. The article shows how Protestant ethics in and around Germany have failed to adress this need. There are two main reasons for the inadequate response. First, the mainstream of Protestant ethics (...) widely refused to offer specifically »Christian« contributions to the moral reconstruction of society, based on a fear that core of Christianity would yet again be utilized as a lable of legitimacy. Secondly, theological ethics were focused on the discourse of principle to an extent that the laboraus work of application was left more or less undone. Protestant ethics did not succeed in making ethical commitments and considerations relevant for specific questions and needs for example in the area of medicine and biotechnological research or in the realm of corporate action and interaction. The lack of applicability and immediate relevance calls for a discourse and collaboration that integrates the ethical disciplines with those members and institutions in society that are confronted with and confronting the ethical challenge. (shrink)

Karl-Wilhelm Dahm examines in his study a certain pattern of the theological criticism of marktet economy. In this pattern the market economy appears as in principal unethical. Dahm asks specifically about the theological arguments, which the criticism of market ecomomy underlie. The questions are put in a second part in an effort, to come to a constructive appreciation of the basic principles of »Soziale Marktwirtschaft«.

In the year ending March 2020, an estimated 773,000 people in England and Wales were sexually assaulted. These types of crimes have lasting effects on victims’ mental health, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. There is a large body of literature which identifies several factors associated with the likelihood of the victim reporting a sexual assault to the police, and these differences may be due to rape myth stereotypes which perpetuate the belief that rape is only “real” under certain (...) conditions. Less is known, however, about the effect these rape myths and stereotypes have on the investigation process itself and the subsequent police outcomes assigned to sex offences. This study aimed to address this gap, providing a profile of all RASSO committed over a 3-year period in one English police force, the police outcomes of these offences, and whether any offences, suspect, or victim variables were associated with different outcomes, in particular the decision to charge or cases where victims decline to prosecute. In line with previous research, the majority of victims were female while the majority of suspects were male, and the most frequent victim–suspect relationship was acquaintance, followed by partner/ex-partner. Charge outcomes were more likely in SSOs and less in rape offences, more likely with stranger offences and less likely than offences committed by partners/ex-partners and relatives, and some non-white suspects were more likely to be charged than suspects of other ethnicities, including white suspects. Victim attrition was more likely in cases where the suspect was a partner or ex-partner and least likely where the suspect was a stranger, more likely in SSOs than in rape cases, and more likely when the victim ethnicity was “other”. Law enforcement should be aware of the potential biases, both relating to rape myths and stereotypes and to the biased treatment of victims and suspects based on demographic characteristics, and work to eliminate these to ensure a fairer and more effective RASSO investigative process. (shrink)