For thousands of years, people have used nature to justify their political, moral, and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today, as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify. The Moral Authority of Nature offers a wide-ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good, beautiful, just, or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics, including the connection of (...) cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece, medieval notions of sexual disorder, early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as "against nature," race and the origin of humans, ecological economics, and radical feminism. The essays also range widely in time and place, from archaic Greece to early twentieth-century China, medieval Europe to contemporary America. Scholars from a wide variety of fields will welcome The Moral Authority of Nature, which provides the first sustained historical survey of its topic. Contributors: Danielle Allen, Joan Cadden, Lorraine Daston, Fa-ti Fan, Eckhardt Fuchs, Valentin Groebner, Abigail J. Lustig, Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, Katharine Park, Matt Price, Robert N. Proctor, Helmut Puff, Robert J. Richards, Londa Schiebinger, Laura Slatkin, Julia Adeney Thomas, Fernando Vidal. (shrink)

For thousands of years, people have used nature to justify their political, moral, and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today, as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify. _The Moral Authority of Nature_ offers a wide-ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good, beautiful, just, or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics, including the connection of (...) cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece, medieval notions of sexual disorder, early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as "against nature," race and the origin of humans, ecological economics, and radical feminism. The essays also range widely in time and place, from archaic Greece to early twentieth-century China, medieval Europe to contemporary America. Scholars from a wide variety of fields will welcome _The Moral Authority of Nature_, which provides the first sustained historical survey of its topic. Contributors: Danielle Allen, Joan Cadden, Lorraine Daston, Fa-ti Fan, Eckhardt Fuchs, Valentin Groebner, Abigail J. Lustig, Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, Katharine Park, Matt Price, Robert N. Proctor, Helmut Puff, Robert J. Richards, Londa Schiebinger, Laura Slatkin, Julia Adeney Thomas, Fernando Vidal. (shrink)

This essay demonstrates how the early Enlightenment salonnière madame de Lambert advanced a novel feminist intellectual synthesis favoring women's taste and cognition, which hybridized Cartesian and honnête thought. Disputing recent interpretations of Enlightenment salonnières that emphasize the constraints of honnêteté on their thought, and those that see Lambert's feminism as misguided in emphasizing gendered sensibility, I analyze Lambert's approach as best serving her needs as an aristocratic woman within elite salon society, and show through contextualized analysis how she deployed honnêteté (...) towards feminist ends. Additionally, the analysis of Malebranche's, Poulain de la Barre's, and Lambert's arguments about the female mind's gendered embodiment illustrates that misrepresenting Cartesianism as necessarily liberatory for women, by reducing it to a rigid substance dualism, erases from view its more complex implications for gender politics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially in the honnête environment of the salons. (shrink)

Feminist analyses of gender concepts must avoid the inclusion problem, the fault of marginalizing or excluding some prima facie women. Sally Haslanger’s ‘ameliorative’ analysis of gender concepts seeks to do so by defining woman by reference to subordination. I argue that Haslanger’s analysis problematically marginalizes trans women, thereby failing to avoid the inclusion problem. I propose an improved ameliorative analysis that ensures the inclusion of trans women. This analysis yields ‘twin’ target concepts of woman, one concerning gender as class and (...) the other concerning gender as identity, both of which I hold to be equally necessary for feminist aims. (shrink)

In this article, I identify a distinctive form of injustice—ontic injustice—in which an individual is wronged by the very fact of being socially constructed as a member of a certain social kind. To be a member of a certain social kind is, at least in part, to be subject to certain social constraints and enablements, and these constraints and enablements can be wrongful to the individual who is subjected to them, in the sense that they inflict a moral injury. The (...) concept of ontic injustice is valuable in three main ways: it draws our attention to the role played by social kinds in enacting wrongful constraints and enablements; it clarifies our options for developing accounts of the ontology of particular social kinds, such as gender kinds; and, along with the related concept of ‘ontic oppression’, it helps us to understand and respond to oppression. (shrink)

Although the concept of gender identity plays a prominent role in campaigns for trans rights, it is not well understood, and common definitions suffer from a problematic circularity. This paper undertakes an ameliorative inquiry into the concept of gender identity, taking as a starting point the ways in which trans rights movements seek to use the concept. First, I set out six desiderata that a target concept of gender identity should meet. I then consider three analytic accounts of gender identity: (...) the dispositional account, the self-identification account, and the norm-relevancy account. I argue that only the norm-relevancy account can meet all six desiderata. Finally, I defend the norm-relevancy account from three objections: that it is cis-normative, that it has problematic implications regarding trans women, and that it entails that some people do not have the gender identity they take themselves to have. (shrink)

This article argues that rape myths and domestic abuse myths constitute hermeneutical injustices. Drawing on empirical research, I show that the prevalence of these myths makes victims of rape and of domestic abuse less likely to apply those terms to their experiences. Using Sally Haslanger's distinction between manifest and operative concepts, I argue that in these cases, myths mean that victims hold a problematic operative concept, or working understanding, which prevents them from identifying their experience as one of rape or (...) of domestic abuse. Since victims in this situation lack the conceptual resources needed to render their experience sufficiently intelligible, they are suffering a form of hermeneutical injustice. Attending to this distinctive case sheds new light not only on the functioning of social myths of this kind but on the nature of hermeneutical injustice itself, since the case of the victim who accepts myths is importantly different from other cases of hermeneutical injustice discussed in the literature to date. In practical terms, this analysis supports calls for juries in rape trials to be warned about rape myths at the start of the trial, and may have implications for calls for statutory Sex and Relationships Education in schools. (shrink)

To investigate the metaphysics of gender categories—categories like “woman,” “genderqueer,” and “man”—is to ask questions about what gender categories are and how they exist. This chapter offers a pluralist account of the metaphysics of gender categories, according to which there are several different varieties of gender categories. I begin by giving a brief overview of some feminist accounts of the metaphysics of gender categories and illustrating how certain moral and political considerations have been in play in these discussions as constraints (...) on acceptable accounts of gender categories. I then present my pluralist account of gender categories and highlight some of its virtues. Finally, I assess how my pluralist account fares relative to the moral and political considerations identified earlier in the chapter. I argue that although the account does not fare well, we should in fact revise our understanding of what those considerations are and how they should constrain our accounts of gender categories. I then show that, on this revised understanding, my pluralist account emerges as a viable position. (shrink)

One challenge in providing an adequate definition of physical disability is unifying the heterogeneous bodily conditions that count as disabilities. We examine recent proposals by Elizabeth Barnes (2016), and Dana Howard and Sean Aas (2018), and show how this debate has reached an impasse. Barnes’ account struggles to deliver principled unification of the category of disability, whilst Howard and Aas’ account risks inappropriately sidelining the body. We argue that this impasse can be broken using a novel concept: marginalised functioning. Marginalised (...) functioning concerns the relationship between a person’s bodily capacities and their social world: specifically, their ability to function in line with the default norms about how people can typically physically function that influence the structuring of social space. We argue that attending to marginalised functioning allows us to develop, not one, but three different models of disability, all of which—whilst having different strengths and weaknesses—unify the category of disability without sidelining the body. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a systemic discrimination approach to defining a narrowly construed category of ‘hate speech’, as speech that harms to a sufficient degree to warrant government regulation. This is important due to the lack of definitional clarity, and the extraordinarily wide usage, of the term. This article extends current literature on how hate speech can harm by identifying under what circumstances speakers have the capacity to harm, and under what circumstances targets are vulnerable to harm. It also (...) shows how the capacity to harm can be mobile and involve the construction of new targets. Finally, it bridges the gap between conceptual understandings of hate speech and policy designed to regulate it. (shrink)

Despite an abundance of theoretical literature on virtue ethics in nursing and health care, very little research has been carried out to support or refute the claims made. One such claim is that ethical nursing is what happens when a good nurse does the right thing. The purpose of this descriptive, qualitative study was therefore to examine nurses’ perceptions of what it means to be a good nurse and to do the right thing. Fifty-three nurses responded to two open-ended questions: (...) (1) a good nurse is one who...; and (2) how does a nurse go about doing the right thing? Three hundred and thirty-one data units were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Seven categories emerged: personal characteristics, professional characteristics, patient centredness, advocacy, competence, critical thinking and patient care. Participants viewed ethical nursing as a complex endeavour in which a variety of decision-making frameworks are used. Consistent with virtue ethics, high value was placed on both intuitive and analytical personal attributes that nurses bring into nursing by virtue of the persons they are. Further investigation is needed to determine just who the ‘good nurse’ is, and the nursing practice and education implications associated with this concept. (shrink)

The idea that there exists a natural relationship between intellectual freedom, legitimate political authority and enjoyment of a dignified life was central to the European Enlightenment and to the...

This article discusses the relationship between the origins of the concept of post-normal science, its potential as a heuristic and the phenomenon of complex science entailed policy problems in late industrial societies. Drawing on arguments presented in the early works of Funtowicz and Ravetz, it is proposed that there is a fundamentally empirical character to the post-normal science call for democratizing expertise, which serves as an antidote to late industrial poisoning of the fairy tale ideal of a clean divide between (...) science and politics. Post-normal science extended-peer-review methodology is interpreted as a response to a crisis in the governance of science. Rather than viewing extended-peer-review processes as products of the post-normal science discourse, here the post-normal science discourse is understood to provide a heuristic lens through which existing complex science/society collaborations and conflicts can be better understood. Two different post-normal science situations—management of mega-contamination in Bitterfeld, Germany, and eviction of the Parakuiyo Maasai from the eastern wetlands of the Usangu plains of Tanzania—are presented and the implications of their de facto extended-peer-review structures are discussed, to illustrate this heuristic potential. (shrink)

This article presents two studies that examine cause-related marketing promotions that require consumers’ active participation. Requiring a follow-up behavior has very valuable implications for maximizing marketing expenditures and customer relationship management. Theories related to ethical behavior, like motivated reasoning and defensive denial, are used to explain when and why consumers respond negatively to these effort demands. The first study finds that consumers rationalize not participating in CRM by devaluing the sponsored cause. The second study identifies a tactic marketers can utilize (...) to neutralize consumers’ use of defensive denial. Allowing the consumer to choose the sponsored cause seems to effectively refocus their attention and increases consumers’ threshold for campaign requirements. Implications for nonprofits and marketing managers include a tendency for consumers to be more likely to perceive a firm as ethical and socially responsible when they are allowed to choose the specific cause that is supported. (shrink)

This paper is a cross-cultural examination of the development of hunting skills and the implications for the debate on the role of learning in the evolution of human life history patterns. While life history theory has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding the evolution of the human life course, other schools, such as cultural transmission and social learning theory, also provide theoretical insights. These disparate theories are reviewed, and alternative and exclusive predictions are identified. This study of cross-cultural (...) regularities in how children learn hunting skills, based on the ethnographic literature on traditional hunters, complements existing empirical work and highlights future areas for investigation. (shrink)

Wonders and the Order of Nature is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions---these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and (...) explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature’s best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds. Frontmatter Preface, page 9 Introduction: At the Limit, page 13 I THE TOPOGRAPHY OF WONDER, page 21 II THE PROPERTIES OF THINGS, page 67 III WONDER AMONG THE PHILOSOPHERS, page 109 IV MARVELOUS PARTICULARS, page 135 V MONSTERS: A CASE STUDY, page 173 VI STRANGE FACTS, page 215 VII WONDERS OF ART, WONDERS OF NATURE, page 255 VIII THE PASSIONS OF INQUIRY, page 303 IX THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE ANTI-MARVELOUS, page 329 Epilogue, page 365 Photo Credits, page 369 Notes, page 373 Bibliography, page 451 Index, page 499. (shrink)

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or adding brand new (...) word-meaning pairs (as with 'sexual harassment'). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that's a feature, not a bug of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can be further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 4-6.

Much of the most influential free speech scholarship emphasises that ‘political speech’ warrants the very highest standards of protection because of its centrality to self-governance. This central idea mitigates against efforts to justify the regulation of political speech and renders some egregiously offensive or harmful speech worthy of protection from a theoretical perspective. Yet paradoxically, in practice, in many liberal democracies such speech is routinely restricted. In this paper, I develop an argument that is compatible with both the argument from (...) democracy and the notion of political speech, and that can justify the regulation of hate speech, by joining an understanding of the constitutive role of speech in individuals’ lives derived from Nussbaum's capabilities theory with ideas of democratic deliberation and legitimation drawn from a Habermasian framework. This approach attends to the conditions required at an individual level for democratic legitimation to occur at a social level. It permits the development of a robust theoretical justification for the protection of a broad range of speech. It simultaneously provides a guiding framework for regulatory policy designed to ameliorate the effects of, and inhibit the expression of, that speech, which could imperil the conditions required for individuals to develop their own capabilities and which instantiates anti-democratic practice, and thus discourse, preventing the very communications required to perform democracy from being uttered. Thus, my argument also strengthens and transforms the argument from democracy as a justification for free speech protection more generally. (shrink)

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the semantics of generics. And a relatively mainstream view in this work is that the semantics of generics must appeal to kinds. But what are kinds? Can we learn anything about their nature by looking at how semantic theories of generics appeal to them? In this article, we overview recent work on the semantics of generics and consider their consequences for our understanding of the metaphysics of kinds.

The conferralist account of social properties that Ásta develops and defends in Categories We Live By is persuasive in many ways. Conferralism could however do better, by its own lights, at handling the phenomenon of intersectionality. This paper first suggests a friendly amendment to the schema for conferrals that Asta offers. This helps to explain the difficulty concerning intersectionality. Finally, the paper suggests a way of developing the conferralist account that would resolve this difficulty.

Domination as opposed to what? Michel Foucault’s works on power and subject formation uncover the subtle ways in which disciplinary power structures create opportunities for domination. Yet Foucaul...

The terms ‘hate’ and ‘hatred’ are increasingly used to describe the rationale of a kind of anti-Western terrorist-extremist speech. This discursively links this kind of terrorist-extremist speech with the well-known concept of ‘hate speech’, a link that suggests the two phenomena are more alike than they are unlike. In this article I interrogate the similarities and differences between anti-Western terrorist-extremist speech and hate speech as they manifest in Western liberal democratic states along two axes: to whom the speech is addressed, (...) and how harm is occasioned. Relying on a combination of philosophical conceptions and public policy empirics, I demonstrate that there are significant differences between the two types of speech, especially in their mechanisms of harm. The implications of this analysis are that these differences should be better understood in order to respond appropriately to these two distinct types of harmful speech. (shrink)

This essay argues that Malebranche originated the model of sensitive taste in French thought, several decades before Du Bos. It examines the highly gendered, negative physiological model of taste and of the female mind which Malebranche developed within the Cartesian framework and as a witness to Parisian salon society in which women’s taste had great cultural influence, and strongly questions the common assumption that Cartesian substance dualism necessarily contained feminist potential. The essay argues for Malebranche’s great influence in this regard, (...) connecting him to later Enlightenment critics of women’s taste such as Rousseau, and to Vitalist physicians like Le Camus. -/- All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112. (shrink)

Experience and expression are orthogonal emotion dimensions: we do not always show what we feel, nor do we always feel what we show. However, the experience and expression dimensions of emotion are rarely considered simultaneously. We propose a model outlining the intersection of goals for emotion experience and expression. We suggest that these goals may be aligned or misaligned. Our model posits these states can be separated into goals to experience and express, experience but not express, express but not experience, (...) or neither experience nor express positive and negative emotion. We contend that considering intersections between experience and expression goals will advance understanding of emotion regulation choice and success. (shrink)

Ethical decision-making is inherent in nursing practice. Although a definite portion of the nursing literature is devoted to ethics and ethical decision-making, the profession is just beginning to ground its ethics research in the actual experience of nurses. Therefore, the purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine the experience of staff nurses as they engage in ethical decision-making. Interview data were collected from 19 staff nurses in a large, midwestern American metropolitan hospital. Interviews were subse quently transcribed and Giorgi's (...) method of data analysis applied. The emerging descrip tion revealed four common aspects of ethical decision-making among staff nurses: context, trigger, ethical decision-making process (i.e. deliberation and integration), and outcomes. This description provides a foundation for future research regarding a descrip tive theory of ethical decision-making in nursing. (shrink)

This paper offers three objections to Leslie’s recent and already influential theory of generics :375–403, 2007a, Philos Rev 117:1–47, 2008): her proposed metaphysical truth-conditions are subject to systematic counter-examples, the proposed disquotational semantics fails, and there is evidence that generics do not express cognitively primitive generalisations.

This article discusses recent theories of the meaning of generics. The discussion is centred on how the theories differ in their approach to addressing the primary difficulty in providing a theory of generic meaning: The notoriously complex ways in which the truth conditions of generics seem to vary. In addition, the article summarizes considerations for and against each theory.

In this paper, I aim to shed some light on what rape myths are and what we can do about them. I start by giving a brief overview of some common rape myths. I then use two philosophical tools to offer a perspective on rape myths. First, I show that we can usefully see rape myths as an example of what Miranda Fricker has termed ‘epistemic injustice’, which is a type of wrong that concerns our role as knowers. Then, I (...) show that it is important to recognise that rape myths are instances of misogyny. This word is of course a more familiar one, but I'll be drawing on a specific philosophical account of what misogyny is, developed by Kate Manne, that I think is useful here. Finally, I briefly consider some upshots of these claims. (shrink)

The term sustainability can be used so liberally within production industries that it becomes meaningless. There is also recognition that for sustainability to be a useful concept, it must be crafted for the context in which it is deployed. A paradox of sustainability, it seems, lies in the conflict between the practical adoptability and context specificity of programs paired with the need for significant change. One response for those grappling with this sustainability challenge has been to adopt flexible approaches to (...) sustainability through the development of technologies and governance processes that focus on benchmarking, monitoring and ongoing change, rather than hard limits and targets. In this paper we elaborate on this point by evaluating how sustainability programs in a transition context can be seen as deliberative platforms and thus actors in governance processes. Through an analysis of the development of a sustainability program deployed in the wine industry in New Zealand, we argue that a widely adopted and clearly defined program can be an asset to democratic environmental governance, if viewed as a shared project. Drawing on interviews with key personnel in the wine industry and reviews of industry literature and media, we suggest that substantiating sustainability can have benefits for environmental governance through the precipitation of distinction and dialogue. We conclude with some suggestions about how to encourage visionary forms of practice and engagement with sustainability programs in ways that can aid their democratic development and expand the reach of their goals. (shrink)

What is the future of genetic testing during pregnancy likely to look like? Given that the patterns of use of genetic testing in neonatology tend to precede, and thus predict, patterns of prenatal...

This book is a unique study of the work of Gabriel Marcel, a twentieth-century philosopher of international renown. This book brings a fresh perspective to the examination of Marcel's thought, highlighting facets of interest to many different audiences and presenting a clear exposition of the nature of creative fidelity.

Levinas rarely speaks about non-human animals directly, but his texts and his interviews are saturated with animal rhetoric. Levinas’s most ubiquitous gesture is to cast non-human animals as beings whose striving to live is a form of violence. These images constitute violence as endemic to nature, and provide the essential contrast to what Levinas regards as the strictly human event of ethics. In order to sufficiently interrogate the fate of non-human animals in Levinas’s philosophy, we must address the manner in (...) which this animal imagery functions in Levinas’s rhetoric. What conceptions of the human are sustained, and what possibilities for an ethical comportment toward non-human animals are foreclosed, as a result of this oppositional imagery? How do essential vulnerabilities appear only as violence, and what forms of violence remain unacknowledged through their veiling by related vulnerabilities? What philosophical consequences result from Levinas’s relegation of violence, including human violence, to the figure of the animal or to animality? How might Levinas’s philosophy be transformed if we were to address ourselves to his imaginative acts of segregation and complementarity vis-à-vis human beings and non-human animals? (shrink)

Utría National Park is a remote biodiversity hotspot in Colombia. It encompasses ancestral territories of the Embera indigenous peoples and borders territories of Afro-descendant communities in El Valle. We explore environmental value conflicts regarding the use of the park, describing them as a Wicked Problem that has no clear solution. Juxtaposing how the territory is perceived by different communities, we employ Faber et al.'s heuristic of the three tele of living nature to search for deficiency in the third telos, service, (...) which we take to be symptomatic of Wicked Problems. Based on field data encoded using the three-tele heuristic, concerning how the respective communities would like to use the park area, we identify deficiencies in the third telos and develop recommendations regarding how these might be addressed. (shrink)

:This article takes up a game-theoretic perspective on California’s recently passed bill that closes all nonmedical exemptions for school-mandated vaccination. Such a perspective characterizes parental decisions to vaccinate their children as a collective action problem and reveals the presence of an incentive to free ride—to enjoy the benefits of others’ efforts to vaccinate their children without vaccinating one’s own. This article defends California’s legislation as a reasonable means of overcoming the free rider problem and of ensuring that the burdens of (...) vaccination are shared equally. (shrink)