The use of black box algorithms in medicine has raised scholarly concerns due to their opaqueness and lack of trustworthiness. Concerns about potential bias, accountability and responsibility, patient autonomy and compromised trust transpire with black box algorithms. These worries connect epistemic concerns with normative issues. In this paper, we outline that black box algorithms are less problematic for epistemic reasons than many scholars seem to believe. By outlining that more transparency in algorithms is not always necessary, and by explaining that (...) computational processes are indeed methodologically opaque to humans, we argue that the reliability of algorithms provides reasons for trusting the outcomes of medical artificial intelligence. To this end, we explain how computational reliabilism, which does not require transparency and supports the reliability of algorithms, justifies the belief that results of medical AI are to be trusted. We also argue that several ethical concerns remain with black box algorithms, even when the results are trustworthy. Having justified knowledge from reliable indicators is, therefore, necessary but not sufficient for normatively justifying physicians to act. This means that deliberation about the results of reliable algorithms is required to find out what is a desirable action. Thus understood, we argue that such challenges should not dismiss the use of black box algorithms altogether but should inform the way in which these algorithms are designed and implemented. When physicians are trained to acquire the necessary skills and expertise, and collaborate with medical informatics and data scientists, black box algorithms can contribute to improving medical care. (shrink)

Adherents to reconciliation, restorative justice, and related approaches to dealing with social conflict are well known for seeking to minimize punishment, in favor of offenders hearing out victims, making an apology, and effecting compensation for wrongful harm as well as victims forgiving offenders and accepting their reintegration into society. In contrast, I maintain that social reconciliation and similar concepts in fact characteristically require punishment but do not require forgiveness. I argue that a reconciliatory response to crime that includes punitive disavowal (...) but not necessarily forgiveness is supported by an analogy with resolving two-person conflict and by relational facets of human dignity. I also specify a novel account of the type of penalty that is justified by reconciliation, namely, burdensome labor that is likely to foster moral reform on the part of wrongdoers and to compensate their victims, which would serve neither retributive nor deterrent functions. I illustrate this conception of punishment in contexts that include having cheated on an exam at a university, engaged in criminal behavior such as robbery, and committed atrocities during large-scale social conflict. (shrink)

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Contemporary picturebooks open up spaces for philosophical dialogues between people of all ages. As works of art, picturebooks offer unique opportunities to explore ideas and to create meaning collaboratively. This book considers censorship of certain well-known picturebooks, challenging the assumptions on which this censorship is based. Through a lively exploration of children's responses to these same picturebooks the authors paint a way of working philosophically based on respectful listening and creative and authentic interactions, rather (...) than scripted lessons. This dialogical process challenges much current practice in education. The authors propose that a courageous and critical practice of listening is central to the facilitation of mutually educative dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of education studies, philosophy of education, literacy teaching and learning, children's literature, childhood and pedagogy. (shrink)

This article draws on the indigenous African intellectual tradition to ground a moral-philosophical theory of leadership that is intended to rival accounts prominent in the East Asian and Western traditions. After providing an interpretation of the characteristically sub-Saharan value of communion, the article advances a philosophical account of a good leader as one who creates, sustains and enriches communal relationships and enables others to do so. The article then applies this account to a variety of topics, including what the final (...) end of an organisation should be, how decisions ought to be made within it, who counts as a stakeholder and how to deal with non-performing or misbehaving employees. For each topic, the article notes respects in which Afro-communal leadership supports approaches that differ from those prescribed by other, more internationally familiar philosophies such as Confucianism and Kantian contract theory, and it suggests that its implications are prima facie attractive relative to them. (shrink)

In this article, we present results from an interdisciplinary research project aimed at assessing consciousness in dreams. For this purpose, we compared lucid dreams with normal non-lucid dreams from REM sleep. Both lucid and non-lucid dreams are an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness, giving valuable insights into the structure of conscious experience and its neural correlates during sleep. However, the precise differences between lucid and non-lucid dreams remain poorly understood. The construction of the Lucidity and Consciousness in (...) Dreams scale was based on theoretical considerations and empirical observations. Exploratory factor analysis of the data from the first survey identified eight factors that were validated in a second survey using confirmatory factor analysis: INSIGHT, CONTROL, THOUGHT, REALISM, MEMORY, DISSOCIATION, NEGATIVE EMOTION, and POSITIVE EMOTION. While all factors are involved in dream consciousness, realism and negative emotion do not differentiate between lucid and non-lucid dreams, suggesting that lucid insight is separable from both bizarreness in dreams and a change in the subjectively experienced realism of the dream. (shrink)

From their interpretation of the Australian Citizens’ Jury on genome editing, Scheinerman (2023) concludes that inclusive and diverse deliberative processes of public engagement have salient benefi...

We would like to thank the authors of the commentaries for their critical appraisal of our feature article, Who is afraid of black box algorithms?1 Their comments, suggestions and concerns are various, and we are glad that our article contributes to the academic debate about the ethical and epistemic conditions for medical Explanatory AI. We would like to bring to attention a few issues that are common worries across reviewers. Most prominently are the merits of computational reliabilism —in particular, when (...) promoted as an alternative to transparency—and CR as necessary but not sufficient for delivering trust. We finalise our response by addressing concerns about the place and role of artificial intelligence in medical decision-making and the physician’s responsibilities. We understand the concerns and reservations that some of the reviewers express regarding the epistemic merits of CR. We believe that, in part, this is due to a practice too deeply rooted in transparency. But on …. (shrink)

This study illuminates how a cross-sector social partnership legitimizes itself toward multiple internal and external stakeholders. Within a single-case study design, we collected retrospective and real time data on the partnership between Deutsche Post DHL and The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Within this partnership, Deutsche Post DHL provides corporate volunteers that support disaster response after natural disasters on a pro bono basis. The main objects that needed legitimacy as well as the audiences from which legitimacy (...) was mainly sought changed over time. In addition, we identified legitimation work as occurring across objects, audiences, and time. Thus, we introduce legitimation work as the purposeful effort of the legitimacy seeker to avoid certain issues while ensuring other issues that are of importance to the conferrer of legitimacy. These findings contribute to micro-level considerations within institutional theory which view legitimacy as socially constructed between legitimacy seeker and conferrer. Hence, we add another perspective on legitimation to the previously existing conceptualizations of legitimacy as a deterministic consequence of institutionalization. (shrink)

Translation of 'The Meaning of Life' (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) into Persian by Abdulfazl Tavakoli Shandiz. Printed as a booklet.

This paper explores how consumers’ ethical food consumption practices, mediated by mobile phone applications (apps), are transformed into digital data. Based on a review of studies on the digitalization of ethical consumption practices and food apps, we find that previous research, while valuable, fails to acknowledge and critically examine the digital labor required to perform digitalized ethical food consumption. In this paper, we call for research on how digital labor underlies the digitalization of ethical food consumption and develop a conceptual (...) framework that supports this research agenda. Our proposed conceptual framework builds on three interconnected analytical concepts—datafication, affordances and digital labor—that enable the study of digital labor as an infrastructural element of digitalized food consumption. We illustrate our conceptual framework through our previous research concerning Buycott, a US-based mobile app whose stated aim is to facilitate consumers’ ethical purchasing decisions. Using the walkthrough method, we consider how the Buycott app engages user-generated data and what implications this holds for consumers. The app’s infrastructure, we suggest, connects ethical consumption and digital labor. A richer understanding of the digital food economy, we propose, enables social scientists not only to elucidate how consumers engage in digital labor, but also to contribute to the development of new data governance structures in the digital food economy. We therefore call for social scientists interested in food, consumption and the digital economy to contribute to a new research agenda for studying everyday food digitalization by empirically examining how ethical consumption apps implicate ethical consumers’ work. (shrink)

I contend that there are important moral reasons for individuals, organisations and states to aid others that have gone largely unrecognised in the literature. Most of the acknowledged reasons for acting beneficently in the absence of a promise to do so are either impartial and intrinsic, on the one hand, being grounded in properties internal to and universal among individuals, such as their pleasure or autonomy, or partial and extrinsic, on the other, being grounded in non-universal properties regarding an actual (...) relation to the agent, such as common membership in a family or culture. In contrast, I articulate and defend the existence of two unrecognised reasons for beneficence that can take the form of being impartial and extrinsic. One is that a being’s capacity to be part of a sharing relationship with us can provide some reason to help it, and another is that a sharing relationship qua relationship is an end-in-itself that can provide some reason to help another. I differentiate these considerations from one another and from the more standard reasons for beneficence, provide arguments for thinking that they are central to beneficence, and rebut objections that are likely to be offered by friends of the more standard reasons. (shrink)

This article reports a follow-up study of Norwegian nursing students entitled ‘The helping motive -an important goal for choosing nursing education’. It presents and discusses a significant ambiguity within the altruistic helping motive of 301 nursing students in the light of classical and modern virtue ethics. A quantitative longitudinal survey design was used to study socialization and building professional identity. The follow-up study began after respondents had completed more than two-and-a-half years of the three-year educational programme. Data were collected using (...) a questionnaire with closed questions, supplemented by 18 semi-structured, in-depth, audiotaped interviews. A motive such as ‘desire for human contact/to help others’ appeared to be highly significant. The research questions employed were: What motivates nursing students at the end of their studies to help other people? What does helping others mean for nursing students? Factor analysis revealed two factors. Factor 1 can be expressed as an altruism factor and factor 2 can be interpreted as an ‘acknowledgement-from-the-patient factor’ that in fact indicates an ambiguity within the helping motive itself. Findings from the interviews also reveal ambiguous helping motives. On one hand the students want to be altruistic and on the other they wish to receive positive feedback from patients when giving help. The findings indicate that this positive feedback is essential to the students in order for them to provide altruistic care. (shrink)

Responding to the invitation of this special issue of Childhood and Philosophy this paper considers the ethos of facilitation in philosophical enquiry with children, and the spatial-temporal order of the community of enquiry. Within the Philosophy with Children movement, there are differences of thinking and practice on ‘facilitation’ in communities of philosophical enquiry, and we suggest that these have profound implications for the political agency of children. Facilitation can be enacted as a chronological practice of progress and development that works (...) against child, in terms of political agency. This paper theorises practices of facilitation grounded in philosophies of childhood that assume listening to child/ren as equals, as already able to philosophise, and against sameness. We explore the political and ethical implications of the radical posthumanist reconfiguration of the ‘zipped’ body in the light of including the disciplinary, imaginative and enabling energies of chronological time through the concept now/ness. We shift from ethics to ethos, and from ‘zipped’ to ‘unzipped’ bodies, through the notion of affect to explore the temporal and spatial dimensions of facilitation in Philosophy with Children and children’s political agency. We re-turn to David McKee’s Not Now Bernard, getting ‘inside the text’, and attending to the postponement of equality in Philosophy with Children. (shrink)

In recent decades, an increasing interest in the dynamics of collections has brought to view how objects circulate as parts of networks of knowledge and how collections can acquire new meanings. Introducing this special issue on Collections, Knowledge, and Time, we want to shift focus from geographical circulation towards the temporal dynamics of collections: the layering and interweaving of asynchronous temporalities as collections are preserved, frozen, reinterpreted, sampled, and destroyed over time, and how these temporalities constitute knowledge potentials. We treat (...) collections broadly across museums of history of medicine, history of science, and ethnography, and scientific institutions including biobanks, seed banks, and fly centres, to investigate the considerable overlap in collection practices, as well as how objects can move between cultural historical and scientific uses. We limit ourselves, however, to epistemic collections, mainly scientific ones, assembled with research as a main purpose. This introduction first explores apparently mundane collection practices such as preservation and care, as well as technologies such as freezers and boxes, to unravel them as temporal practices that make stored items transcend time. We then discuss historical practices across cultural and scientific collections to show how historical thinking plays a central part in scientific collection work and how new scientific methods shape investigations of the past. Finally, we outline the potentialities for future knowledge in collections. In conclusion, we sketch out a pluralist epistemology of collections focusing specifically on how the dynamics of time create multiple epistemic potentials for historical scholarship and scientific research in the present and future. (shrink)

This contribution sets out to criticize the prominent metaphor of “death while alive” in the context of dementia. We first explain the historical origin and development as well as the philosophical premises of the image. We then take a closer look at its implications for understanding dementia and societal attitudes and behaviours towards those affected. In doing so, we adopt a life course perspective that seeks to account for the ethical significance of the temporal extension and structure of human life. (...) According to this perspective, individual existence in time is characterized by normative standards of age-appropriate behavior, evaluative standards of a good life, and teleological notions of successful development which require theoretical analysis and ethical discussion. Such a perspective can contribute significantly to spelling out the implications of the metaphor of death while alive and to criticizing their problematic aspects. Indeed, it makes clear that this metaphor aligns dementia with a different point in the human life course, thus ultimately framing it as a kind of deviation from the biographical norm, a disruption in an assumed temporal order of existence. At the same time, the life course perspective can help to understand why this conception involves ethically problematic distortions and blind spots. The resulting considerations allow conclusions with regard to medical and care ethical debates about self-determination, surrogate decision making, and advance directives in the context of dementia. Furthermore, on a theoretical-conceptual level, they also illustrate the importance of a biography- and culture-sensitive approach to philosophical and ethical reasoning in biomedicine and the life sciences. (shrink)

This paper provides a stagewise overview of the important issues that play a role in technology adoption and use in organizations. In the current literature, there is a lack of consistency and clarity about the different stages of the technology adoption process, the important issues at each stage, and the differentiation between antecedents, after-effects, enablers, and barriers to technology adoption. This paper collected the relevant issues in technology adoption and use, mentioned dispersedly and under various terminologies, in the recent literature. (...) The qualitative literature review was followed by thematic analysis of the data. The resulting themes were organized into a thematic map depicting three stages of the technology adoption process: pre-change, change, and post-change. The relevant themes and subthemes at each stage were identified and their significance discussed. The themes at each stage are antecedents to the next stage. All the themes of the pre-change and change stages are neutral, but the way they are managed and executed makes them enablers or barriers in effect. The thematic map is a continuous cycle where every round of technology adoption provides input for the subsequent rounds. Based on how themes have been addressed and executed in practice, they can either enhance or impair the subsequent technology adoption. This thematic map can be used as a qualitative framework by academics and practitioners in the field to evaluate technological changes. (shrink)

Submission by 31st July 2021The relationship between pragmatism and critical realism is open to many interpretations. On the one hand, compared to more traditional approaches, the two approaches sh...

This study focuses on the meaningful encounters of patients and next of kin, as seen from their perspective. Identifying the attributes within meaningful encounters is important for increased understanding of caring and to expand and develop earlier formulated knowledge about caring relationships. Caring theory about the caring relationship provided a point of departure to illuminate the meaningful encounter in healthcare contexts. A qualitative explorative design with a hermeneutic narrative approach was used to analyze and interpret written narratives. The phases of (...) the analysis were naïve interpretation, structure analysis on two different levels (narrative structure, and deep structure through metaphors) and finally a dialectic interpretation. The narratives revealed the meaning of the meaningful encounter as sharing, a nourishing fellowship, common responsibility and coming together, experienced as safety and warmth, that gives, by extension, life‐changing moments, a healing force and dissipated insight. The meaningful encounter can be seen as a complex phenomenon with various attributes. Understanding the meaningful encounter will enable nurses to plan and provide professional care, based on caring science, focusing on patient and next‐of‐kin experiences. (shrink)

Since the transition to a constitutional order, in what respects have cultures in higher education institutions in South Africa become Africanised, and, going forward, how should they be? In this chapter I provide an overview of the major different forms that Africanisation of institutional culture could take, and I then indicate the respects in which South African universities have or have not taken them on board over the past 20 years. In addition, I provide the first comprehensive critical discussion of (...) the major reasons that have been given for Africanising. Specifically, I distinguish between five rationales for Africanising institutional culture, namely, those appealing to relativism, democracy, redress, civilisation and identity, bring out their different implications for the forms that Africanisation should take, and argue that some of these rationales are philosophically much more promising than others. I conclude that the rationales of redress, civilisation and identity together make a compelling case for a moderate form of Africanising the institutional culture of public universities, one that would be much more robust than what has appeared so far on the democratic landscape in South Africa. (shrink)

We investigate the context of discovery of two significant achievements of twentieth century biochemistry: the chemiosmotic mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation and the dark reaction of photosynthesis. The pursuit of these problems involved discovery strategies such as the transfer, recombination and reversal of previous causal and mechanistic knowledge in biochemistry. We study the operation and scope of these strategies by careful historical analysis, reaching a number of systematic conclusions: even basic strategies can illuminate “hard cases” of scientific discovery that go far (...) beyond simple extrapolation or analogy; the causal–mechanistic approach to discovery permits a middle course between the extremes of a completely substrate-neutral and a completely domain-specific view of scientific discovery; the existing literature on mechanism discovery underemphasizes the role of combinatorial approaches in defining and exploring search spaces of possible problem solutions; there is a subtle interplay between a fine-grained mechanistic and a more coarse-grained causal level of analysis, and both are needed to make discovery processes intelligible. (shrink)

Research indicates the essentiality of dignity as a vital component for quality of life, reconfirming the emphasis on dignity preservation in the international code of nursing ethics. Applying Noblit and Hare’s meta-ethnography, the aim of the study was to develop a theory model by synthesizing 10 qualitative articles from various cultural contexts, exploring nurse and allied healthcare professional perception/practice concerning dignity-preserving dementia care. “Advocating the person’s autonomy and integrity,” which involves “having compassion for the person,” “confirming the person’s worthiness and (...) sense of self,” and “creating a humane and purposeful environment,” was identified as a primary foundation for dignity-preserving dementia care. “Balancing individual choices among persons no longer able to make sound decisions, against the duty of making choices on behalf of the person,” which involves “persuasion” and/or “mild restraint,” was considered a crucial aspect in certain situations. “Sheltering human worth—remembering those who forget” was identified as a comprehensive motive and core value within dignity-preserving dementia care. (shrink)

Reprint of a chapter that initially appeared in _Being at Home_ (2015).

Since the transition to a constitutional order, in what respects have cultures in higher education institutions in South Africa become Africanised, and, going forward, how should they be? In this chapter I provide an overview of the major different forms that Africanisation of institutional culture could take, and I then indicate the respects in which South African universities have or have not taken them on board over the past 20 years. In addition, I provide the first comprehensive critical discussion of (...) the major reasons that have been given for Africanising. Specifically, I distinguish between five rationales for Africanising institutional culture, namely, those appealing to relativism, democracy, redress, civilisation and identity, bring out their different implications for the forms that Africanisation should take, and argue that some of these rationales are philosophically much more promising than others. I conclude that the rationales of redress, civilisation and identity together make a compelling case for a moderate form of Africanising the institutional culture of public universities, one that would be much more robust than what has appeared so far on the democratic landscape in South Africa. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In recent years, exposome research has been put forward as the next frontier for the study of human health and disease. Exposome research entails the analysis of the totality of environmental exposures and their corresponding biological responses within the human body. Increasingly, this is operationalized by big-data approaches to map the effects of internal as well as external exposures using smart sensors and multiomics technologies. However, the ethical implications of exposome research are still only rarely discussed in the literature. Therefore, (...) we conducted a systematic review of the academic literature regarding both the exposome and underlying research fields and approaches, to map the ethical aspects that are relevant to exposome research. We identify five ethical themes that are prominent in ethics discussions: the goals of exposome research, its standards, its tools, how it relates to study participants, and the consequences of its products. Furthermore, we provide a number of general principles for how future ethics research can best make use of our comprehensive overview of the ethical aspects of exposome research. Lastly, we highlight three aspects of exposome research that are most in need of ethical reflection: the actionability of its findings, the epidemiological or clinical norms applicable to exposome research, and the meaning and action–implications of bias. (shrink)

Background Person-centred care is based on ethical principles, and it is regarded as high-quality care. Care of older persons should embrace person-centredness. During the pandemic, older persons were highlighted as a vulnerable group at risk of developing serious illness and/or suffering death from COVID-19. Several pandemic-related measures were introduced in residential care facilities (RCFs) to reduce this risk, which influenced the possibilities to lead and provide a person-centred care. Aim This study’s aim was to explore ethical challenges in relation to (...) person-centredness during the COVID-19 pandemic, from the perspective of leaders in RCFs. Research design The study had a qualitative descriptive design. Participants and research context Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 leaders working in RCFs in Sweden. Data were analysed using conventional content analysis. Ethical considerations The study was approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority. The participants received oral and written information about the study and gave written consent. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Findings The overarching ethical challenge was Having to disregard the individual needs of the person in order to protect the group and society. This included (a) Protecting the group versus promoting the older person’s autonomy; (b) Being forced to lead care based on uncertainty instead of evidence; (c) Striving to provide dignified care but lacking opportunities; and (d) Going far beyond ordinary duty and endangering one’s own and the staff’s health. Discussion The ethical challenges meant being torn between the person’s individual needs and protecting the group and society, with clashing ethical principles as a consequence. Conclusions The leaders faced ethical situations resulting in undignified and compromised person-centred care, which has implications for stakeholders and management who need to address the work conditions in RCFs. (shrink)

This is an introduction to the special issue of Quest devoted to D. A. Masolo’s latest book, Self and Community in a Changing World. It situates this book in relation to not only Masolo’s earlier research on African philosophy but also the field more generally, sketches the central positions of the contributions to the journal issue, and in light of them makes some critical recommendations for future reflection.

Scientific discoveries are often to some degree influenced by luck. Whether luck’s influence is at odds with common-sense intuitions about responsibility, is the central concern of the philosophical debate about moral luck. Do scientists acknowledge that luck plays a role in their work and – if so – do they consider it morally problematic? The present article discusses the results of four focus groups with scientists, who were asked about their views on luck in their fields and its moral implications. (...) The participants underscored circumstantial luck as a key dimension of luck in science. Nevertheless, most participants insisted that there are ways of executing ‘control’ in science: They believe that virtues and skills can increase one’s chances for success. The cultivation of these skills and virtues was considered a reasonable ground for pride. Prizes and rewards were rarely tied to personal desert, but instead to their societal function. (shrink)

There are two main ways of understanding the function of surrogate decision making in a legal context: the Best Interests Standard and the Substituted Judgment Standard. First, we will argue that the Best Interests Standard is difficult to apply to unconscious patients. Application is difficult regardless of whether they have ever been conscious. Second, we will argue that if we accept the least problematic explanation of how unconscious patients can have interests, we are also obliged to accept that the Substituted (...) Judgment Standard can be coherently applied to patients who have never been conscious at the same extent as the Best Interests Standard. We then argue that acknowledging this result is important in order to show patients respect. (shrink)

While there is a budding literature on media ethics in the light of characteristic sub-Saharan moral values, there is virtually nothing on wartime reporting more specifically. Furthermore, the literature insofar as it has a bearing on wartime reporting suggests that embedded journalism and patriotic journalism are ethically justified during war. In this essay, I sketch a prima facie attractive African moral theory, grounded on a certain interpretation of the value of communal relationship, and bring out what it entails for the (...) ways journalists should report on war. My aims are the normative ones of showing how this Afro-communal ethic can provide a unitary foundation for a wide array of plausible conclusions about reporting on war, and, in particular, can avoid objectionable implications such as support for embedded and patriotic journalism. (shrink)

We believe that intellectual humility is an essential intellectual virtue for university students to foster. It enables them to excel as students of philosophy and other disciplines, to navigate the fast-changing world inside and outside academia, and to flourish in interaction with others. In this paper, we analyze this virtue by singling out two distinct but related aspects: the openness-aspect and the care-aspect. The former makes one value a dialogue with those who have different views from one’s own. The latter (...) aspect involves searching for implicit assumptions one brings to encounters with one’s object of inquiry and trying to study this object as unique and irreducible. We discuss four learning activities we developed for the philosophy bachelor course “Who are we? Philosophical views on humans and the gods” at University College Utrecht (the Netherlands). Throughout this paper, we show extracts from the students’ assignments, reflections, and evaluations. These extracts indicate that students developed both aspects of intellectual humility —openness to different views and care for the uniqueness of each object of inquiry— and acknowledged their importance. (shrink)

Scientific and medical practice both relate to and differ from each other, as do discussions of how to handle decisions under uncertainty in the laboratory and clinic respectively. While studies of science have pointed out that scientific practice is more complex and messier than dominant conceptions suggest, medical practice has looked to the rigour of scientific and statistical methods to address clinical uncertainty. In this article, we turn to epistemological studies of the laboratory to highlight how clinical practice already has (...) strategies for dealing with messiness. We draw on Hans-Jo ̈rg Rheinberger’s Toward a History of Epistemic Things, in which he invokes the metaphor of a spider’s web to explain the role of tacit practices in experimental biochemistry for helping practitioners manage messiness. We argue that diagnostic practices in clinical medicine employ similar, albeit codified, procedures to evaluate epistemic significance, ensure sensitivity to the unforeseen, and allow focused grounds for action. We consider three practices: (a) the pre-set structure of medical records, ensuring broad coverage in initial anamnesis, (b) the use of lists of differential diagnoses and ongoing ‘anchoring and adjusting’ as inquiry progresses, and (c) shared decision-making as an occasion to synthesize empirical evidence and reopen inquiry for potential missed information. We end by suggesting that while philosophy of medicine may learn from laboratory epistemology, the sciences may learn something from medical practice. (shrink)

I seek to advance enquiry into the point of a public higher education institution by drawing on ideals salient in the sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. There are relational, and specifically communal, values prominently held by African thinkers that I use to ground a promising rival to the dominant contemporary Western, and especially Anglo-American, accounts of what a university ultimately ought to strive to achieve, which focus mainly on autonomy, truth, and citizenship. My aims are not merely comparative, contrasting an Afro-communal (...) approach with other ones that have been more globally influential, but also substantive. Although the theory of a university’s point that I articulate and defend has an African pedigree, I work to show that it should be taken seriously by a global audience, for plausibly capturing a variety of intuitions and claims that are widely shared. (shrink)

In this article I address the question of what makes addiction morally problematic, and seek to answer it by drawing on values salient in the sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. Specifically, I appeal to life-force and communal relationship, each of which African philosophers have at times advanced as a foundational value, and spell out how addiction, or at least salient instances of it, could be viewed as unethical for flouting them. I do not seek to defend either vitality or community as (...) the best explanation of when and why addiction is immoral, instead arguing that each of these characteristically African values grounds an independent and plausible account of that. I conclude that both vitalism and communalism merit consideration as rivals to accounts that Western ethicists would typically make, according to which addiction is immoral insofar as it degrades rationality or autonomy, as per Kantianism, or causes pain or dissatisfaction, à la utilitarianism. (shrink)

In this chapter, I add to the new body of philosophical literature that addresses African approaches to just war by reflecting on some topics that have yet to be considered and by advancing different perspectives. My approach is two-fold. First, I spell out a foundational African ethic, according to which one must treat people’s capacity to relate communally with respect. Second, I derive principles from it to govern the use of force and violence, and compare and contrast their implications for (...) war with other recent African views and especially with some prominent accounts in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. I argue that the approaches to military conflict prescribed by the Afro-communal ethic and its derivative principles differ, and in some prima facie plausible ways, from the views of thinkers that include Thomas Hurka, David Luban, Larry May, Jeff McMahan, and Michael Walzer. In particular, I conclude that the African perspectives ground some interesting and under-explored approaches to just causes for war that merit consideration, including the ideas that military conflict could in principle be justified in order to protect a people’s culture or to correct an aggressor’s vice. (shrink)

The normative criterion of attainability, or non-utopianism, is often referred to in discussions of goal-setting rationality. Goals should be realistic, it is argued, since it is unreasonable to adopt goals that cannot be achieved and that are of no use in the selection of means toward their realization. However, despite the proposed requirement of attainability, utopian or semi-utopian goals are often adopted in political contexts, the Swedish Vision Zero for trafflc safety being one example. This paper develops and analyzes four (...) objections that can be raised against the use of utopian goals and to support the normative criterion of attainability: that utopian goals are (1) too imprecise and (2) too far-reaching to guide action effectively, (3) counterproductive, and (4) morally objectionable. A tentative defense of utopian goal-setting is built on the counter-arguments that can be put forward to weaken each of the four objections. (shrink)

When it comes to the question of how much the state ought to punish a given offender, the standard understanding of the desert theory for centuries has been that it should give him a penalty proportionate to his offense, that is, an amount of punishment that fits the severity of his crime. In this article, part of a special issue on the geometry of desert, we maintain that a desert theorist is not conceptually or otherwise required to hold a proportionality (...) requirement. We show that there is logical space for at least two other, non-proportionate ways of meting out deserved penalties, and we also argue that they have important advantages relative to the dominant, proportionality approach. (shrink)

I seek to advance enquiry into the point of a public higher education institution by drawing on ideals salient in the sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. There are relational, and specifically communal, values prominently held by African thinkers that I use to ground a promising rival to the dominant contemporary Western, and especially Anglo-American, accounts of what a university ultimately ought to strive to achieve, which focus mainly on autonomy, truth, and citizenship. My aims are not merely comparative, contrasting an Afro-communal (...) approach with other ones that have been more globally influential, but also substantive. Although the theory of a university’s point that I articulate and defend has an African pedigree, I work to show that it should be taken seriously by a global audience, for plausibly capturing a variety of intuitions and claims that are widely shared. (shrink)

[A Hand on the Shoulder: Touch as a Posthuman Feminist Phenomenon] With a posthuman feminist perspective, we explore touch as a phenomenon in the philosophy of education. Our argument is that touch is one of the prominent phenomena in educational contexts and therefore it requires closer theoretical investigation. In this article, we seek to challenge a ‘subject centric’ and ‘anthropocentric’ perspective, proposing a posthuman approach where touch is relationally intra-active and constantly present with multiple directions. Inspired by the methodological approach (...) ‘concept as method’, we explore the phenomenon of touch through tracing-and-cartographing how it is used in educational texts. Two central aspects – body and ‘natureculture’– appeared in the intersection of touch, education and posthuman feminism. Touch as an educational phenomenon is seen as active in highlighting everyday activities in educational practices, and pushing them to be questioned and disrupted. To conclude, we raise a few questions and discuss some challenges that emerged while working with touch as a posthuman feminist phenomenon. (shrink)

Reprint of an article from the African Journal of Business Ethics (2018).

An updated version of this 4000 word overview of the meta-, normative and applied ethical dimensions of contemporary sub-Saharan moral philosophy.

The Will Theory of Rights has commonly been criticized for excluding from the class of rights bearers all subjects who are incapable of agency. The Interest Theory of Rights faces the challenge of avoiding undue proliferation of the class of rights bearers. I advance a novel argument for a specific demarcation of the class of rights bearers. I then argue that this demarcation implies that the function of the moral rights of subjects incapable of exercising agency is to protect them (...) from being treated with illegitimate disregard in a certain sense. I advance reasons for holding that this theory is neither a Will Theory nor an Interest Theory, or a combination of these theories. The proposed account is significant also if it is interpreted as a version of the Interest Theory. It brings significant benefits in the form of cohesiveness, simplicity, and intuitive appeal. (shrink)