Over the years, Katie Cannon's students referred to her work in progress as "Katie's canon." Not only does this book represent the canon of Cannon's best work; the book itself directly addresses the issues of canon formation and canon reformation. Cannon canonizes a literary tradition and directly addresses both oppression and liberation of African American women. Now in an expanded 25th-anniversary edition, Katie's Canon still packs firepower.

In Virtual Worlds, Benjamin Woolley examines the reality of virtual reality.

Koonin argues that CRISPR-Cas systems present the best-known case in point for Lamarckian evolution because they satisfy his proposed criteria for the specific inheritance of acquired adaptive characteristics. We see two interrelated issues with Koonin’s characterization of CRISPR-Cas systems as Lamarckian. First, at times he appears to confuse an account of the CRISPR-Cas system with an account of the mechanism it employs. We argue there is no evidence for the CRISPR-Cas system being “Lamarckian” in any sense. Second, it is unclear (...) whether the mechanism is more “Lamarckian” than many other forms of genetic change already well-characterized in Darwinian terms. We present three conceptually distinct senses in which the mechanism of IAC may be considered Lamarckian and argue that only the strongest sense of goal-directed IAC would be difficult to accommodate in a Darwinian account. As the CRISPR-Cas mechanism does not qualify as “Lamarckian” in this strong sense, we argue there is no conceptual value in calling it “Lamarckian”. Finally, we suggest that CRISPR-Cas systems do hold the potential for genuinely non-Darwinian, directed evolution in a way that Koonin did not discuss, involving their potential use as a human gene-editing tool. (shrink)

The article provides an overview of different approaches to the semiotic study of landscapes both in the field of semiotics proper and in landscape studiesin general. The article describes different approaches to the semiotic processes in landscapes from the semiological tradition where landscape has been seen as analogous to a text with its language, to more naturalized and phenomenological approaches, as well as ecosemiotic view of landscapes that goes beyond anthropocentric definitions. Special attention is paid to the potential of cultural (...) semiotics of Tartu–Moscow school for the analysis of landscapes and the possibilities held by a dynamic, dialogic and holistic landscape definition for the development of ecosemiotics. (shrink)

The Bayesian maxim for rational learning could be described as conservative change from one probabilistic belief or credence function to another in response to newinformation. Roughly: ‘Hold fixed any credences that are not directly affected by the learning experience.’ This is precisely articulated for the case when we learn that some proposition that we had previously entertained is indeed true (the rule of conditionalisation). But can this conservative-change maxim be extended to revising one’s credences in response to entertaining propositions or (...) concepts of which one was previously unaware? The economists Karni and Vierø (2013, 2015) make a proposal in this spirit. Philosophers have adopted effectively the same rule: revision in response to growing awareness should not affect the relative probabilities of propositions in one’s ‘old’ epistemic state. The rule is compelling, but only under the assumptions that its advocates introduce. It is not a general requirement of rationality, or so we argue. We provide informal counterexamples. And we show that, when awareness grows, the boundary between one’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ epistemic commitments is blurred. Accordingly, there is no general notion of conservative change in this setting. (shrink)

The majority of U.S. abortion patients are poor women, and Black and Hispanic women. Therefore, this article encourages bioethicists and equity advocates to consider whether the need for abortion c...

A few years ago, it was common for philosophers to begin inquiry into hope by noting that the subject has received little attention in the philosophical literature. But our ability to make this claim is quickly coming to an end; hope has been earning increasing recognition in the discipline, with philosophers exploring important questions related to the nature of hope, what makes hope rational, and how hope is connected to human wellbeing and agency. Despite this recent interest, however, there remains (...) very little discussion of the social and political dimensions of hope. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the importance of a feminist perspective in bringing these dimensions into fuller view. I argue that feminist insights into the relational nature of the self, which call attention to where selves are socially situated in relation to others, enable a richer understanding of the nature and value of hope. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the processes by which entrepreneurial opportunities are cocreated between entrepreneurs and their stakeholders. The longitudinal case study of de novo firm Wakefield Seafoods seeks to understand the underlying dynamics of phenomena that play out over time as stakeholders emerge and their contributions become essential to the opportunity formation process. The king crab data show that under conditions of uncertainty, characterized by incomplete or missing knowledge, entrepreneurial processes of experimentation, failure, and learning were effective in forming (...) and exploiting an opportunity. Moreover, contrary to existing literature that either emphasizes heroic entrepreneurs or downplays their value, this article shows that both the vision of the entrepreneur and the stakeholder contributions are critical. This detailed examination of process data shows that the cumulative actions made by entrepreneurs in concert with their stakeholders formed an opportunity that coalesced into a new market. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is not to offer yet another theory of hope, but to re-orient the discussion about the nature of hope to focus on hope’s place in our hearts: on how, exactly, hope makes us feel. Although philosophers writing on hope have certainly paid attention to hope’s affective dimensions, when affect is discussed, it is often assumed that hope is positively valenced. I argue that descriptions of the phenomenology of hope as positively valenced paint hope as brighter (...) and cheerier than many hopes tend to be, and that hope is not always pleasant to experience (even in part). In making this argument, I focus specifically on hopes we form in response to non-ideal conditions, hopes that are tainted by the negatively valenced emotion of fear. I then consider the complex relationship between hope, fear, and basal emotions: those emotions which are "experiential backdrops" on which particular emotions arise. I close by reflecting on implications for the relationship between hope and motivation, and raise the question of whether hope itself is an emotion. (shrink)

Group decisions raise a number of substantial philosophical and methodological issues. We focus on the goal of the group decision exercise itself. We ask: What should be counted as a good group decision-making result? The right decision might not be accessible to, or please, any of the group members. Conversely, a popular decision can fail to be the correct decision. In this paper we discuss what it means for a decision to be "right" and what components are required in a (...) decision process to produce happy decision-makers. Importantly, we discuss how "right" decisions can produce happy decision-makers, or rather, the conditions under which happy decision-makers and right decisions coincide. In a large range of contexts, we argue for the adoption of formal consensus models to assist in the group decision-making process. In particular, we advocate the formal consensus convergence model of Lehrer and Wagner (1981), because a strong case can be made as to why the underlying algorithm produces a result that should make each of the experts in a group happy. Arguably, this model facilitates true consensus, where the group choice is effectively each person's individual choice. We analyse Lehrer and Wagner's algorithm for reaching consensus on group probabilities/utilities in the context of complex decision-making for conservation biology. While many conservation decisions are driven by a search for objective utility/probability distributions (regarding extinction risks of species and the like), other components of conservation management primarily concern the interests of stakeholders. We conclude with cautionary notes on mandating consensus in decision scenarios for which no fact of the matter exists. For such decision settings alternative types of social choice methods are more appropriate. (shrink)

While holist views such as ecocentrism have considerable intuitive appeal, arguing for the moral considerability of ecological wholes such as ecosystems has turned out to be a very difficult task. In the environmental ethics literature, individualist biocentrists have persuasively argued that individual organisms—but not ecological wholes—are properly regarded as having a good of their own . In this paper, I revisit those arguments and contend that they are fatally flawed. The paper proceeds in five parts. First, I consider some problems (...) brought about by climate change for environmental conservation strategies and argue that these problems give us good pragmatic reasons to want a better account of the welfare of ecological wholes. Second, I describe the theoretical assumptions from normative ethics that form the background of the arguments against holism. Third, I review the arguments given by individualist biocentrists in favour of individualism over holism. Fourth, I review recent work in the philosophy of biology on the units of selection problem, work in medicine on the human biome, and work in evolutionary biology on epigenetics and endogenous viral elements. I show how these developments undermine both the individualist arguments described above as well as the distinction between individuals and wholes as it has been understood by individualists. Finally, I consider five possible theoretical responses to these problems. (shrink)

Richard Rudner famously argues that the communication of scientific advice to policy makers involves ethical value judgments. His argument has, however, been rightly criticized. This article revives Rudner’s conclusion, by strengthening both his lines of argument: we generalize his initial assumption regarding the form in which scientists must communicate their results and complete his ‘backup’ argument by appealing to the difference between private and public decisions. Our conclusion that science advisors must, for deep-seated pragmatic reasons, make value judgments is further (...) bolstered by reflections on how the scientific contribution to policy is far less straightforward than the Rudner-style model suggests. (shrink)

A comment on “Editorial 37” Content Type Journal Article Pages 93-95 DOI 10.1007/s10698-011-9110-4 Authors Brian T. Sutcliffe, Laboratoire de Chimie quantique et Photophysique, Université Libre de Bruxelles, B-1050 Bruxelles, Belgium R. Guy Woolley, School of Biomedical and Natural Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, NG11 8NS UK Journal Foundations of Chemistry Online ISSN 1572-8463 Print ISSN 1386-4238 Journal Volume Volume 13 Journal Issue Volume 13, Number 2.

While the fundamental laws of physics are time-reversal invariant, most macroscopic processes are irreversible. Given that the fundamental laws are taken to underpin all other processes, how can the fundamental time-symmetry be reconciled with the asymmetry manifest elsewhere? In statistical mechanics, progress can be made with this question. What I dub the ‘Zwanzig–Zeh–Wallace framework’ can be used to construct the irreversible equations of SM from the underlying microdynamics. Yet this framework uses coarse-graining, a procedure that has faced much criticism. I (...) focus on two objections in the literature: claims that coarse-graining makes time-asymmetry ‘illusory’ and ‘anthropocentric’. I argue that these objections arise from an unsatisfactory justification of coarse-graining prevalent in the literature, rather than from coarse-graining itself. This justification relies on the idea of measurement imprecision. By considering the role that abstraction and autonomy play, I provide an alternative justification and offer replies to the illusory and anthropocentric objections. Finally, I consider the broader consequences of this alternative justification: the connection to debates about inter-theoretic reduction and the implication that the time-asymmetry in SM is weakly emergent. 1Introduction 1.1Prospectus2The Zwanzig–Zeh–Wallace Framework3Why Does This Method Work? 3.1The special conditions account3.2When is a density forwards-compatible?4Anthropocentrism and Illusion: Two Objections 4.1The two objections in more detail4.2Against the justification by measurement imprecision5An Alternative Justification 5.1Abstraction and autonomy5.2An illustration: the Game of Life6Reply to Illusory7Reply to Anthropocentric8The Wider Landscape: Concluding Remarks 8.1Inter-theoretic relations8.2The nature of irreversibility. (shrink)

We argue that concerns about double-counting—using the same evidence both to calibrate or tune climate models and also to confirm or verify that the models are adequate—deserve more careful scrutiny in climate modelling circles. It is widely held that double-counting is bad and that separate data must be used for calibration and confirmation. We show that this is far from obviously true, and that climate scientists may be confusing their targets. Our analysis turns on a Bayesian/relative-likelihood approach to incremental confirmation. (...) According to this approach, double-counting is entirely proper. We go on to discuss plausible difficulties with calibrating climate models, and we distinguish more and less ambitious notions of confirmation. Strong claims of confirmation may not, in many cases, be warranted, but it would be a mistake to regard double-counting as the culprit. 1 Introduction2 Remarks about Models and Adequacy-for-Purpose3 Evidence for Calibration Can Also Yield Comparative Confirmation3.1 Double-counting I3.2 Double-counting II4 Climate Science Examples: Comparative Confirmation in Practice4.1 Confirmation due to better and worse best fits4.2 Confirmation due to more and less plausible forcings values5 Old Evidence6 Doubts about the Relevance of Past Data7 Non-comparative Confirmation and Catch-Alls8 Climate Science Example: Non-comparative Confirmation and Catch-Alls in Practice9 Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

The language of “participant-driven research,” “crowdsourcing” and “citizen science” is increasingly being used to encourage the public to become involved in research ventures as both subjects and scientists. Originally, these labels were invoked by volunteer research efforts propelled by amateurs outside of traditional research institutions and aimed at appealing to those looking for more “democratic,” “patient-centric,” or “lay” alternatives to the professional science establishment. As mainstream translational biomedical research requires increasingly larger participant pools, however, corporate, academic and governmental research programs (...) are embracing this populist rhetoric to encourage wider public participation. We examine the ethical and social implications of this recruitment strategy. We begin by surveying examples of “citizen science” outside of biomedicine, as paradigmatic of the aspirations this democratizing rhetoric was originally meant to embody. Next, we discuss the ways these aspirations become articulated in the biomedical context, with a view to drawing out the multiple and potentially conflicting meanings of “public engagement” when citizens are also the subjects of the science. We then illustrate two uses of public engagement rhetoric to gain public support for national biomedical research efforts: its post-hoc use in the “care.data” project of the National Health Service in England, and its proactive uses in the “Precision Medicine Initiative” of the United States White House. These examples will serve as the basis for a normative analysis, discussing the potential ethical and social ramifications of this rhetoric. We pay particular attention to the implications of government strategies that cultivate the idea that members of the public have a civic duty to participate in government-sponsored research initiatives. We argue that such initiatives should draw from policy frameworks that support normative analysis of the role of citizenry. And, we conclude it is imperative to make visible and clear the full spectrum of meanings of “citizen science,” the contexts in which it is used, and its demands with respect to participation, engagement, and governance. (shrink)

How do we know what nations intend when they wage war? Scholars of the just war tradition have tended to assume that belligerent nations intend whatever their heads of state say they intend. But this confuses descriptions of intentions—only some of them sincere—with intentions themselves. In truth, intentions are much more action‐oriented and embodied than scholars have so far realized. Nor have scholars of the just war tradition adequately reckoned with the corporate character of national intentions. In order to remedy (...) this, I draw upon the insights of both neuroscience and the scholarly subfield known as “cognitive sports psychology” in order to craft a robustly embodied and adequately corporate account of a nation’s wartime intentions. But we cannot simply plug this new understanding of intention into existing formulations of what qualifies as a just war. Assessments of national intentions will remain overly verbal and insufficiently corporate as long as scholars split war into the three phases of jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum. Because intention is action‐oriented, we cannot know what a nation intends until it has acted; intention unfolds across all phases of war and therefore cannot be fully known until a war is finished. (shrink)

The etiological account of function defines a part’s/trait’s function as whatever that part/trait does and was selected for doing. Some philosophers have tried to employ this as an account of biological interests, claiming that to benefit an organism is to promote its etiological functioning and to harm it is to inhibit such functioning. I argue that etiological functioning is not a good account of biological interests. I first describe the history of theories of biological interests, explaining the special role that (...) etiological accounts of function have played within such theories. Second, I explain the problems with allowing etiological accounts of function to play this role and consider objections to my line of argument. Finally, I consider the theoretical alternatives to etiological function accounts of interests and assess their advantages and disadvantages. (shrink)

The main aim of this book is to introduce the topic of limited awareness, and changes in awareness, to those interested in the philosophy of decision-making and uncertain reasoning.

The search for the statistical mechanical underpinning of thermodynamic irreversibility has so far focussed on the spontaneous approach to equilibrium. But this is the search for the underpinning of what Brown and Uffink have dubbed the ‘minus first law’ of thermodynamics. In contrast, the second law tells us that certain interventions on equilibrium states render the initial state ‘irrecoverable’. In this article, I discuss the unusual nature of processes in thermodynamics, and the type of irreversibility that the second law embodies. (...) I then search for the microscopic underpinning or statistical mechanical ‘reductive basis’ of the second law of thermodynamics by taking a functionalist strategy. First, I outline the functional role of the thermodynamic entropy: for a thermally isolated system, the thermodynamic entropy is constant in quasi-static processes, but increasing in non-quasi-static processes. I then search for the statistical mechanical quantity that plays this role—rather than the role of the traditional ‘holy grail’ as described by Callender. I argue that in statistical mechanics, the Gibbs entropy plays this role. (shrink)

Although statistically common, and legal since 1973, abortion still bears significant stigma--a proverbial scarlet A. Fear of this stigma leads most of the women and men who are part of the 21% of American pregnancies that end in abortion to remain silent. This book brings the story of ordinary abortion out of the shadows and invites a new conversation about its actual practice, ethics, politics, and law. Katie Watson lends her incisive legal and medical ethics expertise to navigate wisely (...) and respectfully one of the most divisive topics of contemporary life. (shrink)

This book explores the nature, value, and role of hope in human life under conditions of oppression. Oppression is often a threat and damage to hope, yet many members of oppressed groups, including prominent activists pursuing a more just world, find hope valuable and even essential to their personal and political lives. This book offers a unique evaluative framework for hope that captures the intrinsic value of hope for many of us, the rationality and morality of hope, and ultimately how (...) we can hope well in the non-ideal world we share. It develops an account of the relationship between hope and anger about oppression and argues that anger tends to be accompanied by hopes for repair. When people’s hopes for repair are not realized, as is often the case for those who are oppressed, anger can evolve into bitterness: a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that injustice will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. But even when all hope might seem lost or out of reach, faith can enable resilience in the face of oppression. Spiritual faith, faith in humanity, and moral faith are part of what motivates people to join in solidarity against injustice, through which hope can be recovered collectively. Joining with others who share one’s experiences or commitments for a better world, and uniting with them in collective action, can restore and strengthen hope for the future when hope might otherwise be lost. (shrink)

I develop an account of ecological role functions—the functions of species within ecosystems—which is informed by alternative regime phenomena in ecology. My account is a causal-role theory which includes a counterfactual sensitivity condition. The account tracks and explains a distinction ecologists make between functions and various activities which are not functions. My counterfactual sensitivity condition resolves the liberality problem often attributed to causal-role theories of function, while also illuminating the explanatory centrality of role functions within ecology.

Internet protocol development is a social process, and resulting protocols are shaped by their developers’ politics and values. This article argues that the work of protocol development poses barriers to developers’ reflection upon values and politics in protocol design. A participant observation of a team developing internet protocols revealed that difficulties defining the stakeholders in an infrastructure and tensions between local and global viewpoints both complicated values reflection. Further, Internet architects tended to equate a core value of interoperability with values (...) neutrality. The article describes how particular work practices within infrastructure development overcame these challenges by engaging developers in praxis: situated, lived experience of the social nature of technology. (shrink)

Children's conceptions of dreams are an important component of their developing understanding of the mind. Although there is much that even adults do not understand about the nature of dreams, most adults in Western society believe that: Dream entities are not real in the sense that they are nonphysical; they are private in the sense that they are not available to public perception, and are not directly shared with other dreamers; and, dreams are typically fictional in content. Thus, children in (...) our society must confront several dualisms with respect to dreams, such as their physical versus nonphysical, perceptually-public versus perceptually-private, and shared versus individuated nature. Thirty-two children, aged 3- and 4-years-old, were told stories about children who were dreaming about an object, playing with an object, or looking at a photograph of an object, and then were asked questions about the status of these entities with regard to these three dualisms. All children judged dream entities, photographs, and physical objects to be appropriately different in terms of physical versus nonphysical properties and in terms of perceptually-public versus private status. They also understood the fictional nature of dreams. However, whereas most 4-year-olds understood that dreams are individuated, many 3-year-olds believed that dreams are directly shared by more than one person. These findings contrast with earlier research characterizing children's understanding of dreams as realistic. We reconcile these contrasting findings by discussing methodological differences, and we situate our findings regarding children's understanding of dreams within the context of contemporary research on children's theory of mind. (shrink)

Recent critics (Andrew Light, Bryan Norton, Anthony Weston, and Bruce Morito, among others) have argued that we should give up talk of intrinsic value in general and that of nature in particular. While earlier theorists might have overestimated the importance of intrinsic value, these recent critics underestimate its importance. Claims about a thing’s intrinsic value are claims about the distinctive way in which we have reason to care about that thing. If we understand intrinsic value in this manner, we can (...) capture the core claims that environmentalists want to make about nature while avoiding the worries raised by contemporary critics. Since the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value plays a critical role in our understanding of the different ways that we do and should care about things, moral psychology, ethical theory in general, and environmental ethics in particular shouldn’t give up on the concept of intrinsic value. (shrink)

On the 24th June 2015, Feminist Legal Studies and the London School of Economics Law Department hosted an afternoon event with Professor Wendy Brown, Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science, University of California. Professor Brown kindly agreed to discuss her scholarship on feminist theory, and its relationship to both the law and neoliberalism. The event included an interview by Dr Katie Cruz and a Q&A session, which are presented here in an edited version of the transcript. Sumi (...) Madhock, Professor of Gender Studies, LSE chaired the interview and discussion and introduced Professor Brown’s work. Katie Cruz asked Wendy Brown to reflect upon topics that span her scholarship and activism, including the state of critical, feminist, and Left approaches to rights, neoliberalism, despair and utopianism, and the future of feminist theory and practice in the context of neoliberalism and current debates about intersectionality. Participants in the discussion asked questions on a wide range of issues, including the limits of feminist engagement with law as a tool for social change, the dominance of neoliberalism, imperialist feminism, Islamophobia, secularism, and our attachment to the figure of homo politicus. (shrink)

In this article, I defend a conception of bitterness as a moral emotion and offer an evaluative framework for assessing when instances of bitterness are morally justified. I argue that bitterness is a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that an injustice or other moral wrong will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. Orienting the discussion around instances of bitterness in response to social and political injustices, I argue that bitterness is sometimes morally justified even if it is (...) ultimately undesirable to bear. I then suggest that focusing only on the harms and risks of bitterness can distract from its positive role as a moral reminder about a past or persistent injustice, indicating that there is still moral and often political work left to do. Finally, I address the concern that bearing bitterness may lead to despair and inaction. I respond by arguing that moral agents can and do persist in their moral and political struggles with bitterness, and without hope that their efforts will be successful. (shrink)

Theories of emotion have often maintained artificial boundaries: for instance, that cognition and emotion are separable, and that an emotion concept is separable from the emotional events that comprise its category (e.g. “fear” is distinct from instances of fear). Over the past several years, research has dissolved these artificial boundaries, suggesting instead that conceptual construction is a domain-general process—a process by which the brain makes meaning of the world. The brain constructs emotion concepts, but also cognitions and perceptions, all in (...) the service of guiding action. In this view, concepts are multimodal constructions, dynamically prepared from a set of highly variable instances. This approach obviates old questions (e.g. how does cognition regulate emotion?) but generates new ones (e.g. how does a brain learn emotion concepts?). In this paper, we review this constructionist, predictive coding account of emotion, considering its implications for health and well-being, culture and development. (shrink)

This paper tests Harry Arthur's theory that there is an “ethical economy“ of lawyer regulation in Canada, in which Canadian law societies use their regulatory powers only in high reward/low risk cases - ie, where the practitioner is less likely to resist their authority and the offence is morally unambiguous. Analysing reported cases from 2009 in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Nova Scotia the paper concludes that Arthurs' description still accurately characterises the regulation of lawyers by Canadian law societies. (...) The paper then conducts a case study of law society and court cases related to one Canadian lawyer, Anthony Merchant, to assess whether the ethical economy is inevitable, or whether a different approach to lawyer regulation can and should be undertaken. (shrink)

This article deals with the prospect of genetically enhancing intelligence. We identify and contrast social attitudes (disapproval) to the use of future genetic technology with social attitudes (approval) for environmental methods of enhancing intelligence. Using various forms of the argument that the means by which enhancement is achieved has moral significance, we look for differences that could justify the different attitudes. We find that the different attitudes cannot be ethically justified. We predict that the lack of ethical justification for distinguishing (...) between means of enhancement is likely to result in the eventual acceptance of genetic enhancement of intelligence. (shrink)

Resentment, as it is currently understood in the philosophical literature, is individual. That is, it is anger about a moral injury done to oneself. But in some cases, resentment responds to systemic harms and injustices rather than direct moral injuries. The purpose of this paper is to move beyond individualistic conceptions of resentment to develop an account of collective resentment that better captures the character and effects of the emotion in these cases. I use the example of indigenous and settler (...) Canadians’ reciprocal resentments in response to the Indian Residential Schools and continuing political disagreements as an example of a context in which understanding collective resentment is important. (shrink)

When once-successful physical theories are abandoned, common wisdom has it that their characteristic theoretical entities are abandoned with them: examples include phlogiston, light rays, Newtonian forces, Euclidean space. But sometimes a theory sees ongoing use, despite being superseded. What should scientific realists say about the characteristic entities of the theories in such cases? The standard answer is that these ‘theoretical relicts’ are merely useful fictions. In this paper we offer a different answer. We start by distinguishing horizontal reduction (in which (...) a superseded theory approximates the successor theory) from vertical reduction (in which a higher-level theory abstracts away from the lower-level theory, but nonetheless can be constructed from it); these are usually regarded as having different ontological consequences. We describe a ‘verticalization’ procedure which transforms horizontal reductions into vertical reductions. The resulting verticalized theories are abstractions rather than approximations, with restricted domains. We identify a sense in which the higher-level theory describes distinct subject matters from the lower-level theory, enabling in certain cases the higher-level theory to retain distinctive explanatory power even in the presence of reduction. We suggest that theoretical entities from superseded theories should be retained in a scientific realist worldview just when, reinterpreted as higher-level abstractions, those theories and their characteristic entities continue to perform distinctive explanatory work in providing the best explanation for less-fundamental phenomena of interest. In slogan form: a good relict is an emergent relict. (shrink)

Medical professionals regularly joke about their patients' problems. Some of these jokes are clearly wrong, but are all jokes wrong?

This article introduces a new term, “anti‐blackness supremacy,” in order to supplement existing theological discourse about the ethical life of racism. To a much greater extent than the terms “racism, ” “white privilege” or even “white supremacy,” this term also better positions scholars to address what I identify as the two most pressing problems in anti‐racist discourse: first, the inability to diagnose the relation between classism and racism without reducing one into the other; and second, the tendency to treat racism (...) as a monolithic evil that falls upon all people of color equally and in the same way. The former error has distorted political discourse for decades; the latter misconception intensifies as the United States undergoes demographic shifts in the wake of immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Both of these errors arise from a pervasive misunderstanding of the slave regime that has set our current racial system in motion. In truth, slavery primarily represents not a mechanism of profit extraction, but a relation of a unique type of power. The term “anti‐blackness supremacy,” I contend, corrects both of these misperceptions, affirming both the singularity of black oppression and its fundamental connection to enslaving power. In so doing, it enables ethicists to disarm an older racial foe while thwarting the ascension of a newer one. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore how and why younger Internet users of social networking platforms such as MySpace and Facebook maintain connections with those who have died or been killed. This article, therefore, examines the blurring or blending of interpersonal communication and mass communication via the web as what once was very private communication—messages to the deceased—becomes very public. The findings suggest that these online social networks enable or empower individuals marginalized by more traditional forms of memorialization.

There are at least two plausible generalisations of subjective expected utility (SEU) theory: cumulative prospect theory (which relaxes the independence axiom) and Levi’s decision theory (which relaxes at least ordering). These theories call for a re-assessment of the minimal requirements of rational choice. Here, I consider how an analysis of sequential decision making contributes to this assessment. I criticise Hammond’s (Economica 44(176):337–350, 1977; Econ Philos 4:292–297, 1988a; Risk, decision and rationality, 1988b; Theory Decis 25:25–78, 1988c) ‘consequentialist’ argument for the SEU (...) preference axioms, but go on to formulate a related diachronic-Dutch-book-style’ argument that better achieves Hammond’s aims. Some deny the importance of Dutch-book sure losses, however, in which case, Seidenfeld’s (Econ Philos 4:267–290, 1988a) argument that distinguishes between theories that relax independence and those that relax ordering is relevant. I unravel Seidenfeld’s argument in light of the various criticisms of it and show that the crux of the argument is somewhat different and much more persuasive than what others have taken it to be; the critical issue is the modelling of future choices between ‘indifferent’ decision-tree branches in the sequential setting. Finally, I consider how Seidenfeld’s conclusions might nonetheless be resisted. (shrink)

Most ethicists agree that at least some nonhumans have interests that are of direct moral importance. Yet with very few exceptions, both climate ethics and climate policy have operated as though only human interests should be considered in formulating and evaluating climate policy. In this paper I argue that the anthropocentrism of current climate ethics and policy cannot be justified. I first describe the ethical claims upon which my analysis rests, arguing that they are no longer controversial within contemporary ethics. (...) Next, I review work in climate ethics and policy, demonstrating the absence of consideration of nonhuman interests in both domains. Finally, I consider five possible justifications for omitting nonhuman interests in the evaluation climate policy options, arguing that none of these arguments succeeds. (shrink)

This paper defends an account of moral shock as an emotional response to intensely bewildering events that are also of moral significance. This theory stands in contrast to the common view that shock is a form of intense surprise. On the standard model of surprise, surprise is an emotional response to events that violated one's expectations. But I show that we can be morally shocked by events that confirm our expectations. What makes an event shocking is not that it violated (...) one's expectations, but that the content of the event is intensely bewildering. What causes moral shock is, I argue, our lack of emotional preparedness for the event. And I show that, despite the relative lack of attention to shock in the philosophical literature, the emotion is significant to moral, social, and political life. (shrink)

There is growing consensus that teaching computer ethics is important, but there is little consensus on how to do so. One unmet challenge is increasing the capacity of computing students to make decisions about the ethical challenges embedded in their technical work. This paper reports on the design, testing, and evaluation of an educational simulation to meet this challenge. The privacy by design simulation enables more relevant and effective computer ethics education by letting students experience and make decisions about common (...) ethical challenges encountered in real-world work environments. This paper describes the process of incorporating empirical observations of ethical questions in computing into an online simulation and an in-person board game. We employed theValues at Playframework to transform empirical observations of design into a playable educational experience. First, we conducted qualitative research to discover when and how values levers—practices that encourage values discussions during technology development—occur during the design of new mobile applications. We then translated these findings into gameplay elements, including the goals, roles, and elements of surprise incorporated into a simulation. We ran the online simulation in five undergraduate computer and information science classes. Based on this experience, we created a more accessible board game, which we tested in two undergraduate classes and two professional workshops. We evaluated the effectiveness of both the online simulation and the board game using two methods: a pre/post-test of moral sensitivity based on the Defining Issues Test, and a questionnaire evaluating student experience. We found that converting real-world ethical challenges into a playable simulation increased student’s reported interest in ethical issues in technology, and that students identified the role-playing activity as relevant to their technical coursework. This demonstrates that roleplaying can emphasize ethical decision-making as a relevant component of technical work. (shrink)