When developing computational models to analyze the tradeoffs between climate risk management strategies (i.e., mitigation, adaptation, or geoengineering), scientists make explicit and implicit decisions that are influenced by their beliefs, values and preferences. Model descriptions typically include only the explicit decisions and are silent on value judgments that may explain these decisions. Eliciting scientists’ mental models, a systematic approach to determining how they think about climate risk management, can help to gain a clearer understanding of their modeling decisions. In order (...) to identify and represent the role of values, beliefs and preferences on decisions, we used an augmented mental models research approach, namely values-informed mental models (ViMM). We conducted and qualitatively analyzed interviews with eleven climate risk management scientists. Our results suggest that these scientists use a similar decision framework to each other to think about modeling climate risk management tradeoffs, including eight specific decisions ranging from defining the model objectives to evaluating the model’s results. The influence of values on these decisions varied between our scientists and between the specific decisions. For instance, scientists invoked ethical values (e.g., concerns about human welfare) when defining objectives, but epistemic values (e.g., concerns about model consistency) were more influential when evaluating model results. ViMM can (i) enable insights that can inform the design of new computational models and (ii) make value judgments explicit and more inclusive of relevant values. This transparency can help model users to better discern the relevance of model results to their own decision framing and concerns. (shrink)

Group sex among men who have sex with men may be understood as a ‘radical’ practice insofar as it transgresses dominant social discourses around appropriate sexual relations—prioritizing heteronormative, monogamous and risk‐averse sex. These practices are generally defined as steeped in risk, most commonly due to the potential for transmitting human immunodeficiency virus and sexually transmitted infections and accompanied by the possibility of legal and social repercussions. Our ethnographic research study explored the desires, practices and contexts of group sex participants (n (...) = 10) within a popular group sex party destination located in the United States. We employ a poststructuralist perspective (utilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari) to understand group sex events with the pretext that bodies have no inherent ethics, meaning or essence: they are ‘bodies without organs’. We identify group sex as a form of boundary play, in which participants pursue new limits to what their bodies can do but within a carefully constructed environment that establishes norms of interaction meant to secure trust and safety between participants. A variety of risk reduction practices are shown to be promoted and honoured within these eventful sexual(ized) spaces. The application of poststructuralist concepts of ‘boundary play’ and ‘bodies without organs’ helped to depict the construction and navigation of pleasure, safety and risk among group sex participants. (shrink)

The practice of recontact in genomic medicine has the power to help rectify long‐standing inequities in genetic testing. However, if not delivered systematically, recontacting practices also have the potential to reinforce these same inequities. Recontact, which occurs when contact between a clinician and patient is reinitiated after a relationship has ended, is often in search of or in response to updated interpretation or results. Currently, recontact is happening in a patient‐driven and ad hoc manner, undermining its potential to benefit all (...) patients. In this paper, the authors position justice as an additional argument in favor of systematic recontact and an argument against the predominantly patient‐initiated model. They argue that patients from equity‐deserving groups should be early beneficiaries of an emerging responsibility to recontact patients. The authors share illustrative clinical vignettes and propose role‐specific and systems‐level solutions to rightfully position recontact as a tool to promote a more equitable clinical genomics future. (shrink)

Recent experimental philosophy arguments have raised trouble for philosophers' reliance on armchair intuitions. One popular line of response has been the expertise defense: philosophers are highly-trained experts, whereas the subjects in the experimental philosophy studies have generally been ordinary undergraduates, and so there's no reason to think philosophers will make the same mistakes. But this deploys a substantive empirical claim, that philosophers' training indeed inculcates sufficient protection from such mistakes. We canvass the psychological literature on expertise, which indicates that people (...) are not generally very good at reckoning who will develop expertise under what circumstances. We consider three promising hypotheses concerning what philosophical expertise might consist in: (i) better conceptual schemata; (ii) mastery of entrenched theories; and (iii) general practical know-how with the entertaining of hypotheticals. On inspection, none seem to provide us with good reason to endorse this key empirical premise of the expertise defense. (shrink)

It is becoming more common that the decision-makers in private and public institutions are predictive algorithmic systems, not humans. This article argues that relying on algorithmic systems is procedurally unjust in contexts involving background conditions of structural injustice. Under such nonideal conditions, algorithmic systems, if left to their own devices, cannot meet a necessary condition of procedural justice, because they fail to provide a sufficiently nuanced model of which cases count as relevantly similar. Resolving this problem requires deliberative capacities uniquely (...) available to human agents. After exploring the limitations of existing formal algorithmic fairness strategies, the article argues that procedural justice requires that human agents relying wholly or in part on algorithmic systems proceed with caution: by avoiding doxastic negligence about algorithmic outputs, by exercising deliberative capacities when making similarity judgments, and by suspending belief and gathering additional information in light of higher-order uncertainty. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates how perspective bears on putative salient alternative effects on knowledge ascriptions. Some theoretical accounts predict salient alternative effects in both fir...

The precautionary principle has been widely discussed in the academic, legal, and policy arenas. This paper argues, however, that there is no single precautionary principle and we should stop referring to ?the? precautionary principle. Instead, we should talk about ?precaution? and ?precautionary approaches? more generally and identify and defend distinct precautionary principles of limited scope. Drawing on the vast literature on ?the? precautionary principle, this paper further argues that the challenges of decision making under conditions of uncertainty necessitate taking a (...) precautionary approach to decision making that will enable us to understand what particular precautionary principles require of us on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

Non-Consequentialist moral theories posit the existence of moral constraints: prohibitions on performing particular kinds of wrongful acts, regardless of the good those acts could produce. Many believe that such theories cannot give satisfactory verdicts about what we morally ought to do when there is some probability that we will violate a moral constraint. In this article, I defend Non-Consequentialist theories from this critique. Using a general choice-theoretic framework, I identify various types of Non-Consequentialism that have otherwise been conflated in the (...) debate. I then prove a number of formal possibility and impossibility results establishing which types of Non-Consequentialism can -- and which cannot -- give us adequate guidance through through a risky world. (shrink)

While the phenomenon of ‘moral distress’ has been of interest to the nursing community since Jameton first described it in 1984, moral distress is now understood to effect healthcare professionals...

Business and society researchers, as well as practitioners, have been critiqued for ignoring those with less voice and power often referred to as “fringe stakeholders.” Existing methods used in B&S research often fail to address issues of meaningful participation, voice and power, especially in developing countries. In this article, we stress the utility of visual participatory research methods in B&S research to fill this gap. Through a case study on engaging Ghanaian cocoa farmers on gender inequality issues, we explore how (...) VPR methods may be used by researchers to achieve more inclusive, and thus more credible, stakeholder research that can improve decision making within businesses. Furthermore, we argue that ingrained social and environmental problems tackled by B&S research and the unique context in which they occur may open up new opportunities to develop participatory visual methods for social change. (shrink)

Solar radiation management is a form of geoengineering that involves the intentional manipulation of solar radiation with the aim of reducing global average temperature. This paper explores what precaution implies about the status of solar radiation management. It is argued that any form of solar radiation management that poses threats of catastrophe cannot constitute an appropriate precautionary measure against another threat of catastrophe, namely climate change. Research of solar radiation management is appropriate on a precautionary view only insofar as such (...) research aims to identify whether any forms of solar radiation management could be implemented without creating new or exacerbating existing threats of catastrophe. (shrink)

We investigate whether the disclosure of a firm’s decision to organize as a benefit corporation (BC) rather than a traditional C corporation (CC) influences investors. We survey 136 investors and 57 MBA students and find that they expect BCs to attain higher future corporate social responsibility (CSR) than CCs even when both have equal CSR ratings. Approximately one third of our sample prefers to invest in BCs when CCs have greater financial returns, indicating a willingness by some investors to sacrifice (...) personal financial gain for social good. Our results suggest that investors weight the information contained in BC disclosures as reliable and value-relevant in their investment decisions. We extend the CSR disclosure literature by indicating how investors weight this new type of CSR information, which may affect how BCs fare as publicly traded companies. (shrink)

As we read his work, John Rawls was developing an innovative approach to political philosophy, and Political Liberalism struggles with different ways to model these new insights. This article presents four models of political liberalism, particularly focusing on understanding the nature of overlapping consensus and its relation to public reason. Beyond clarifying Rawls’s insights, we aim to spur readers to reassemble the rich elements of Political Liberalism to produce tractable and enlightening models of political life among free and equal citizens (...) under conditions of deep diversity to advance the public reason project. (shrink)

Peter Geach’s distinction between logically predicative and logically attributive adjectives has gained a certain currency in philosophy. For all that, no satisfactory explanation of what an attributive adjective is has yet been provided. We argue that Geach’s discussion suggests two different ways of understanding the notion. According to one, an adjective is attributive just in case predications of it in combination with a noun fail to behave in inferences like a logical conjunction of two separate predications. According to the other, (...) an adjective is attributive just in case it cannot be applied in a truth-value-yielding fashion unless combined with a noun. The latter way of understanding the notion has been largely neglected by Geach’s critics, but we argue that taking account of it shows the misguided nature of some of their objections, and also yields a more satisfactory explanation of attributivity than does the other. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy grounds its legitimacy largely in the ability of speakers to participate on equal terms. Yet theorists and practitioners have struggled with how to establish deliberative equality in the face of stark differences of power in liberal democracies. Designers of innovative civic forums for deliberation often aim to neutralize inequities among participants through proportional inclusion of disempowered speakers and discourses. In contrast, others argue that democratic equality is best achieved when disempowered groups deliberate in their own enclaves before entering (...) the broader public sphere. Borrowing from each perspective, the authors argue that there are strong reasons to incorporate enclave deliberation among the disempowered within civic forums. They support this claim by presenting case study evidence showing that participants in such forums can gain some of the same benefits of deliberation found in more heterogeneous groups, can consider a diversity of viewpoints rather than falling into groupthink and polarization, and can persuade external stakeholders of the legitimacy of the group’s deliberations. (shrink)

Background: The literature and research on nursing ethics and advocacy has shown that generally very few nurses and other clinicians will speak up about an issue they have witnessed regarding a patient advocacy concern and that often advocacy in nursing is not learned until after students have graduated and begun working. Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of narrative pedagogy on the development of advocacy in student nurses, as measured by the Protective Nursing Advocacy Scale. Design: We tested the hypothesis that (...) use of a narrative pedagogy assignment related to ethics would improve student nurse’s perception of their advocacy role as measured by the Protective Nursing Advocacy Scale using a quasi-experimental nonrandomized study using a pre-test, intervention, post-test design. Data collection occurred during class time from October 2012 to December 2012. The Protective Nursing Advocacy Scale tool was administered to students in class to assess their baseline and was administered again at the completion of the educational intervention to assess whether narrative pedagogy was effective in developing the nursing student’s perception of their role as a patient advocate. Ethical considerations: Students were informed that their participation was voluntary and that the data collected would be anonymous and confidential. The survey was not a graded assignment, and students did not receive any incentive to participate. The institutional review board of the college determined the study to be exempt from review. Setting: School of Nursing at a small liberal arts college in the Northeastern United States. Participants: A consecutive, nonprobability sample of 44 senior-level nursing students enrolled in their final nursing semester was utilized. Findings: Results indicated significant differences in student nurse’s perception of their advocacy role related to environment and educational influences following an education intervention using an ethics digital story. Conclusion: Using the Protective Nursing Advocacy Scale, we were able to measure the effectiveness of narrative pedagogy on nursing student’s perception of the nurse’s advocacy role. (shrink)

As theorists, developers, and practitioners of the anticipatory governance of emerging technologies, we applaud Ankeny et al.’s...

Discussions of harm are central in the climate ethics literature. Especially in the rapidly emerging body of work addressing the question of whether or not individuals are morally responsible for their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, whether or in what way individuals’ emissions are harmful is a hotly debated question. John Nolt’s recent paper, “How harmful are the average American’s greenhouse gas emissions?” illustrates the prevalence of this framing (Nolt 2011). Here I take a step back and ask what we mean (...) by the concept “harmful” when talking about climate change. I argue, as several respondents to Nolt have suggested (e.g., Attfield 2011, Odenbaugh 2011), that we should not be so quick to apply our standard .. (shrink)

In The Price of Precaution and the Ethics of Risk, Christian Munthe attempts to identify the normative basis of the requirement of precaution and shed light on how we should determine the appropria...

In the aftermath of shocking workplace scandals, people are often baffled when individuals within the organization were aware of clear-cut wrongdoing yet did not inform authorities. The current research suggests that moral concern for the suffering that a transgressor might face if a crime were reported is an under-recognized, powerful force that shapes whistleblowing in organizations, particularly when transgressors are fellow members of a highly entitative group. Two experiments show that group entitativity heightens concern about possible consequences that the transgressor (...) would face if a crime were to be reported, and that this concern reduces the likelihood of reporting wrongdoing in organizations to authorities. Further, the studies identify a mechanism through which concern about the transgressor is heightened in highly entitative groups: potential reporters perceive that the transgressor felt remorse for their crime. Thus, when fellow members of highly entitative organizations commit crimes, people are more likely to imagine that these transgressors felt anxiety or guilt about their actions, and this prompts greater concern for transgressors in ways that encourage people to let them “off the hook.” We discuss the implications of these findings for how reporting to authorities can be encouraged within highly entitative organizations. (shrink)

Precaution is usually associated with the intuition that it is better to be safe than sorry, and/or that it is sometimes necessary to act in advance of scientific certainty to prevent harmful outcomes. At this point, we cannot entirely prevent climate change, but we can affect how harmful such change is. Adaptation may therefore be understood as a precautionary measure against the damage due to climate change. 'The' precautionary principle alone is too vague to shape adaptation policy, but a limited (...) catastrophic precautionary principle may productively guide adaptation policy makers. I argue in this paper that an explicit commitment to a precautionary approach based on the catastrophic precautionary principle could and should be made to strengthen the adaptation policies introduced at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (shrink)

Given the increasing need for solid organ and tissue transplants and the decreasing supply of suitable allographic organs and tissue to meet this need, it is understandable that the hope for successful xenotransplantation has resurfaced in recent years. The biomedical obstacles to xenotransplantation encountered in previous attempts could be mitigated or overcome by developments in immunosuppression and especially by genetic manipulation of organ source animals. In this essay we consider the history of xenotransplantation, discuss the biomedical obstacles to success, explore (...) recent developments in transgenic sourcing of organs and tissues, and analyze the problem of infectious disease resulting from xenotransplantation (xenosis). We then apply a model of risk analysis to these risks. The conclusions of this risk analysis are used in an ethical evaluation of informed consent in xenotransplantation, with an ethical foundation in Kantian autonomy and Levinasian heteronomic alterity. Our conclusion is that individual and collective informed consent to the infectious disease risks of xenotransplantation requires an open, participatory and dialogical public policy process not yet seen in the United States and Europe. Until that process is created, we propose caution in xenotransplantation in general and a postponement of solid organ xenotransplants in particular. (shrink)

This issue of Philosophical Psychology hosts two book symposia. One is on Elizabeth Barnes’s book, Health Problems: Philosophical Puzzles about the Nature of Health (Oxford University Press, 2023),...

It is assumed that bipolarity in happiness and sadness requires mutual exclusion. However, we present psychometric research to show how coendorsements of happiness and sadness do not necessarily constitute evidence against bipolarity. Because individuals have a tendency to endorse emotion terms close to their current state, individuals whose current state is close to the middle of a bipolar continuum would report both happiness and sadness, despite their current state being best represented by a single point. As such, endorsements of happiness (...) and sadness are theoretically expected when individuals’ current state is in the middle of the continuum. Bipolarity however would be violated if endorsements of extreme levels of happiness and sadness can be demonstrated, which has yet to be shown. (shrink)

_Focused on existentialism, this issue explores current writers, thinkers, and texts affiliated with the movement_ In 1948, _Yale French Studies_ devoted its inaugural issue to existentialism. This anniversary issue responds seventy years later. In recent years, new critical and theoretical approaches have reconfigured existentialism and refreshed perspectives on the philosophical, literary, and stylistic movement. This special issue restores the writers, thinkers, and texts of the movement to their subversive strength. In so doing, it illustrates existentialism’s present relevance, revealing how the (...) concerns of the past urgently bristle into our own times. (shrink)

We present several new studies focusing on “salience effects”—the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge to someone when an unrealized possibility of error has been made salient in a given conversational context. These studies suggest a complicated picture of epistemic universalism: there may be structural universals, universal epistemic parameters that influence epistemic intuitions, but that these parameters vary in such a way that epistemic intuitions, in either their strength or propositional content, can display patterns of genuine cross-cultural diversity.

The relationship between dementia and criminal behavior perplexes legal and health care systems. Dementia is a progressive clinical syndrome defined by impairment in at least two cognitive domains that interferes with one's activities of daily. Dementia symptoms have been associated with behaviors that violate social norms and constitute criminal actions. A failure to address a gap in policies that support appropriate management of individuals with dementia reflects a failure in our social obligation to care for those who are most vulnerable (...) amongst us. Categorical protections, informed by precedent models applied to juveniles and individuals with psychiatric illness, could help meet a social obligation to provide protections to individuals with dementia. We propose an approach that integrates affirmative defenses to mitigate criminal liability and sentencing restrictions to prevent cruel and unusual punishment. (shrink)

The “public charge” rule is a long-standing immigration policy that seeks to determine the likelihood that a prospective immigrant will become dependent on the government for subsistence. When the Trump administration sought to expand the criteria that would count against an applicant for permanent residency to include public benefits historically excluded from the calculation, thousands of commenters wrote to oppose or support the proposed changes. This paper explores the moral and practical reasons commenters provided for their position on the public (...) charge rule and considers the value of the public comment process for immigration, health, and social policy. (shrink)

This study investigates the extent to which there is individuality in how structural variation is conditioned over time. Earlier research already classified the diachronically unstable gerund variation as involving a high fraction of mixed-usage speakers throughout the change, whereby the proportion of the conservative variant versus the progressive variant as observable in the linguistic output of individual language users superficially resembles the mean proportion as observable at the population level. However, this study sets out to show that there can still (...) be heterogeneity within such a centralized population in terms of how each individual conditions the observed variation. A random forest and conditional inference tree analysis of over 14,000 gerunds uttered by nineteen seventeenth-century authors is presented to show that, while the most important language-internal factors conditioning the gerund variation are adopted by (and shared between) all authors, we can still attest inter-individual variation (i) at lower levels of variable importance, and (ii) in the breadth of the range of contexts individual authors employ to condition the attested variation. (shrink)

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Daniel Brudney suggests that clinicians have an overly deferential attitude toward their patients’ surrogate decision-makers that is rooted in a wrongful investment of moral authority. He maintains that surrogate decision-makers have no moral right to decide for their loved ones and that their value in the decision-making process is limited to their knowledge of their loved one's preferences. If operationalized, Brudney's framework would ease the way for clinicians to remove a surrogate who (...) cannot provide information relevant to the patient's preferences and to resort to a paternalistic model of decision-making. Brudney fails to consider that the value of the surrogate does not flow from the surrogate, but rather from the patient's moral claim to have decisions made for him or her by a loved one. This claim recognizes that surrogates have intrinsic value through their relationship to and knowledge of the patient. Bioethics consultation services can assist clinical teams in engaging with the human crowd that surrounds each patient and navigating conflicting values and goals. This relational approach embraces the “mire and blood” that is endemic to relationships and clinical encounters. (shrink)

A multi-method, multi-informant method was used to collect data from diverse stakeholders about school climate to inform school improvement efforts as part of the Positive Behaviour Intervention Supports framework. Teachers, administrators, school staff and students completed surveys and parents participated in focus groups to gather perspectives about school climate. Respondents identified safety as a strength at the school, staff and student results suggested interpersonal relationships as an area for improvement and staff identified parent involvement as an area for growth. Both (...) positive and negative perceptions of school climate emerged from the parent focus group. While there are limitations to the generalisability of the results, this case study provides a useful approach for schools to assess their school climate and establish goals for improvement. (shrink)

In the decades after the Civil War, Southerners wrote and published their own history textbooks for secondary schools. These “mint julep textbooks,” as the Southern all-white editions were called by the 1960s, reinforced a Lost Cause narrative of the war for Southern audiences while competing with Northern versions of events. In this study, we employ both historical narrative and content analysis of six textbooks’ portrayals of John Brown, John Wilkes Booth, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. The textbooks that are compared– three (...) Southern and three Northern – were written from the 1870s through the 1910s. While subtle but important differences emerge between the Northern and Southern depiction of these three figures, an even more important trend developed when analyzing change over time. In this article we conclude that, as time progressed, Southern versions of events increasingly impacted Northern textbooks. By the 1930s, the mint julep version of these three figures became the national consensus, as reflected in the work of historian David Saville Muzzey. This consensus around events like the raid at Harpers Ferry, the assassination of Lincoln, and the massacre at Fort Pillow lasted for much of the 20th century. By the early 20th century, Northerners appeased Southern interests in the writing of history textbooks. (shrink)

We agree that human culture is unique. However, we also believe that an understanding of the evolution of culture requires a comparative approach. We offer examples of collaborative behaviors from dolphin play, and argue that consideration should be given to whether various forms of culture are best viewed as falling along a continuum or as discrete categories.

This essay offers seven intersectional feminist principles for equitable and actionable COVID-19 data, drawing from the authors' prior work on data feminism. Our book, Data Feminism, offers seven principles which suggest possible points of entry for challenging and changing power imbalances in data science. In this essay, we offer seven sets of examples, one inspired by each of our principles, for both identifying existing power imbalances with respect to the impact of the novel coronavirus and its response, and for beginning (...) the work of change. (shrink)