Homelessness -- No man's lands -- The nature theater -- The property relation -- Conclusion : Adorno, neoliberalism, housing.

In this chapter, we recount some of the most pressing objections to character scepticism, pointing out their limitations and, when appropriate, incorporating their suggestions. From here, we consider what empirically informed moral improvement might look like by turning to the skill analogy. While the skill analogy provides a realistic rubric for becoming a better person, many of the questions concerning the details of how moral improvement might take place remain unanswered. When developing expertise in domains like chess and morality, a (...) wide range of factors will likely be important and it is unlikely than any one individual factor will be especially important. Given this, for any account of moral improvement, our optimism should be bounded: the effect of any particular intervention is likely to be limited, in both magnitude and domain. Lastly, we consider how character scepticism has reshaped the way we think about moral responsibility, whether this is cashed out in reasons-responsiveness or self-expression accounts. While both views face challenges, by distinguishing the possession of the responsibility-making feature from failures to manifest that property in behaviour, we gain a certain degree of wiggle room that allows us to accommodate empirical findings while holding on to notions of responsibility. This chapter highlights that the ‘person-situationism debate’ has expanded far beyond its beginnings, giving way to new accounts of moral improvement and moral responsibility. (shrink)

In both social science and medicine, research on reproduction generally focuses on women. In this article, we examine how men’s reproductive contributions are understood. We develop an analytic framework that brings together Cynthia Daniels’ conceptualization of reproductive masculinity with a staged view of reproduction, where the stages include the period before conception, conception, gestation, and birth. Drawing on data from two medical sites that are oriented to the period before pregnancy, we examine how gendered knowledge about reproduction produces different reproductive (...) equations in different stages of the reproductive process. We conclude with a new research agenda that emerges from rethinking the role of men and masculinity in reproduction. (shrink)

Kant’s philosophy treated endings as necessary but necessarily elusive for the moral and political imagination, and he employed irony, among other things, to draw attention to the risks of perverting the figure of the end. Kantian endings, this essay suggests, give rise to two possible orientations which exist in tension with each other: melancholic confrontations with impossibility alongside a more forward-looking, optimistic gaze. I examine the two features of Kantian endings and the affective orientations they inspire under the headings of (...) succession and secession. In addition to the mathematical-logical language of Kant’s writing, however, one also has to be able to appreciate the noirish qualities of Kant’s thought, which is to say, elements of culpability and aversion with respect to figures of transcendence that posit the space within which finite experience takes shape. (shrink)

In recent years, tremendous progress has been made toward recognizing the need for improved medical knowledge for pregnant people, a population group that has long been excluded from clinical trial...

Adorno wrote prolifically about modernism in culture and the arts, but little has been written about whether or in what form he might have addressed architectural concerns. The project of exploring this potentially fruitful intersection has been helped in the last couple of decades by authors from philosophy and critical theory contrasting his ideas about dwelling with Heidegger’s and by architectural theorists considering the import of his aesthetic theory.1 If these fall shy of the more immediate connections to architecture that (...) some have hoped to uncover, this is because Adorno almost never wrote about specific buildings and their designers. Neither did he publish any texts dedicated exclusively to architecture or dwelling, which is not to say that he never wrote about them or that architectural concerns are absent from his work. Adorno’s writings on dwelling and architecture live here and there, emerging and then moving on to surface later, if not often as direct commentary then as a kind of architectural gaze his thinking sometimes employs. Dwelling and architecture exist like exiles in his writings even though the question of dwelling—of what it means to inhabit social and space-time worlds as embodied beings—lies as much at the core of Adorno’s philosophy as it did in Heidegger’s. (shrink)

In “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” Adorno likens his early trips from New York City to a previously abandoned New Jersey brewery, the site of the Princeton Radio Research Project, to Kafka's story about the “Great Natural Theater of Oklahama [sic]” at the end of the novel Amerika (German title: Der Verschollene). It is easy enough to account for this association. The natural theater story tells of Karl Rossmann's hire and transportation by train to a kind of (...) circus in the American dustbowl. Rossmann is a European immigrant in search of refuge. It is, however, a highly…. (shrink)

Feminist bioethicists have long shed light on the indignities and injustice of reproductive intrusions, be they coerced gestation or forced interventions during pregnancy and birth. Writing about t...

While experience often affords important knowledge and insight that is difficult to garner through observation or testimony alone, it also has the potential to generate conflicts of interest and unrepresentative perspectives. We call this tension the paradox of experience. In this paper, we first outline appeals to experience made in debates about access to unproven medical products and disability bioethics, as examples of how experience claims arise in bioethics and some of the challenges raised by these claims. We then motivate (...) the idea that experience can be an asset by appealing to themes in feminist and moral epistemology, distinguishing between epistemic and justice-based appeals. Next, we explain the concern that experience may be a liability by appealing to empirical work on cognitive biases and theoretical work about the problem of partial representation. We conclude with preliminary recommendations for addressing the paradox and offer several questions for future discussion. (shrink)

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

Racial inequities in medicine are the consequence of intersecting, multidimensional factors. As detailed in the articles by Braddock, Mithani, Cooper, and Boyd, and Yearby, the...

Upon doing something generous for someone with whom you are close, some kind of reciprocity may be appropriate. But it often seems wrong to actually request reciprocity. This chapter explores the wrongness in making these requests, and why they can nevertheless appear appropriate. After considering several explanations for the wrongness at issue (involving, e.g. distinguishing oughts from obligation, the suberogatory, imperfect duties, and gift-giving norms), a novel proposal is advanced. The requests are disrespectful; they express that their agent insufficiently trusts (...) the hearer to recognize their own reasons to reciprocate, and the close relationship between them morally requires this kind of trust. This proposal is articulated and situated in the recent discussion of the normativity of requests. The chapter concludes by explaining how these requests may appear appropriate. Agents in these relationships often have standing to make requests, though the standing is lacking in these particular cases. (shrink)

On concept of Jīva in Hindu philosophy and Vedic literature.

Works of Tran Duc Thao, a Vietnamese philosopher.