The paper clarifies the relative merits and proper roles of standards of review in the determination of proxy consent for those unable to make decisions concerning their own medical treatment. The "substituted judgment" standard asks which treatment the incompetent person would choose if competent, while the "best interests" test asks which treatment would benefit the patient. The tests are discussed in relation to the moral principles of autonomy and beneficence which provide their justification. I distinguish six types of cases involving (...) incompetent patients and argue that which standard is appropriate depends on the type of case involved. A "rational choice" standard, which asks "What would the incompetent patient choose if his or her choice were rational?", is proposed as a way of determining best interests. Keywords: proxy consent, nontreatment of incompetent persons, substituted judgment CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The paper is a defense of the moral methodology of John Rawls against criticisms by R.M. Hare and Peter Singer. Rawls is accused of intuitionism and subjectivism by Hare and of subjectivism and relativism by Singer, I argue that Rawls does not rely on intuitions as such, but on judgments on which there is a consensus. This does not commit Rawls to subjectivism for what is required for objectivity in ethics as in science is simply a rational justification procedure for (...) principles, which Rawls provides. Moreover, an appeal to a moral consensus at some point is inescapable. Finally, concerning the charge of relativism, I point out that Rawls includes in his justification procedure only those judgments on which there is a consensus among competent judges. Though there is the possibility that conflicting sets of judgments may be equally valid for different societies in the unlikely case that there is nothing invariant in the judgments of competent judges, this is a relativism we can accept. (shrink)

Ferdinand Schoeman criticizes the liberal view of the family which holds that parental rights are based in and limited by parental duties to the child. Instead he proposes the construction of principles based on the value of familial intimacy. Schoeman claims that only by recognizing the value of intimacy can we account for the degree of autonomy we legitimately grant parents in their relations with their children. In opposition, I argue that he misinterprets the liberal view. A correct interpretation allows (...) an appropriate degree of parental autonomy and familial intimacy but without sacrificing the child’s developmental needs. (shrink)

Ferdinand Schoeman criticizes the liberal view of the family which holds that parental rights are based in and limited by parental duties to the child. Instead he proposes the construction of principles based on the value of familial intimacy. Schoeman claims that only by recognizing the value of intimacy can we account for the degree of autonomy we legitimately grant parents in their relations with their children. In opposition, I argue that he misinterprets the liberal view. A correct interpretation allows (...) an appropriate degree of parental autonomy and familial intimacy but without sacrificing the child’s developmental needs. (shrink)

Bayesian models of legal arguments generally aim to produce a single integrated model, combining each of the legal arguments under consideration. This combined approach implicitly assumes that variables and their relationships can be represented without any contradiction or misalignment, and in a way that makes sense with respect to the competing argument narratives. This paper describes a novel approach to compare and ‘average’ Bayesian models of legal arguments that have been built independently and with no attempt to make them consistent (...) in terms of variables, causal assumptions or parameterization. The approach involves assessing whether competing models of legal arguments are explained or predict facts uncovered before or during the trial process. Those models that are more heavily disconfirmed by the facts are given lower weight, as model plausibility measures, in the Bayesian model comparison and averaging framework adopted. In this way a plurality of arguments is allowed yet a single judgement based on all arguments is possible and rational. (shrink)

In this paper, we empirically explore some manifestations of norms for the conduct of science. We focus on scientific research ethics and report survey results from 606 scientists who received funding in 1993 and 1994 from the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the Biology Directorate of the National Science Foundation. We also report results for 91 administrators charged with overseeing research integrity at the scientists’ research institutions. Both groups of respondents were presented with a set of scenarios, designed (...) by fractional factorial methods, describing different kinds of scientific conduct that in the eyes of some would likely be unethical. Respondents then were asked to evaluate each of these scenarios for how unethical the behavior might be and what kinds of sanctions might be appropriate. We use the responses to consider the nature of consensus around norms related to the practice of science and in particular, similarities and differences between scientists and science administrators. Implications for policy are also discussed. (shrink)

While working with police in the U.K. and in many countries in Europe, I encountered instances of police officers in the grip of dilemmas about misplaced, misguided, divided, and conflicting loyalt...

To survive, all forms of government require popular support, whether voluntary or involuntary. Following the collapse of the Soviet system, Russia's rulers took steps toward democracy, yet under Vladimir Putin Russia has become increasingly undemocratic. This book uses a unique source of evidence, eighteen surveys of Russian public opinion from the first month of the new regime in 1992 up to 2009, to track the changing views of Russians. Clearly presented and sophisticated figures and tables show how political support has (...) increased because of a sense of resignation that is even stronger than the unstable benefits of exporting oil and gas. Whilst comparative analyses of surveys on other continents show that Russia's elite is not alone in being able to mobilize popular support for an undemocratic regime, Russia provides an outstanding caution that popular support can grow when governors reject democracy and create an undemocratic regime. (shrink)

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of 'lenses' and 'tensions' to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and (...) procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the 'mess' of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses. (shrink)

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tensions’ to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and (...) procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the ‘mess’ of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses. (shrink)

On his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was heralded by the New York Times as “one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers.” Controversial on the left and the right for his critiques of objectivity and political radicalism, Rorty experienced a renown denied to all but a handful of living philosophers. In this masterly biography, Neil Gross explores the path of Rorty’s thought over the decades in order to trace the intellectual and professional journey that led him to that (...) prominence. The child of a pair of leftist writers who worried that their precocious son “wasn’t rebellious enough,” Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of fifteen. There he came under the tutelage of polymath Richard McKeon, whose catholic approach to philosophical systems would profoundly influence Rorty’s own thought. Doctoral work at Yale led to Rorty’s landing a job at Princeton, where his colleagues were primarily analytic philosophers. With a series of publications in the 1960s, Rorty quickly established himself as a strong thinker in that tradition—but by the late 1970s Rorty had eschewed the idea of objective truth altogether, urging philosophers to take a “relaxed attitude” toward the question of logical rigor. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, he argued that philosophers should instead open themselves up to multiple methods of thought and sources of knowledge—an approach that would culminate in the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , one of the most seminal and controversial philosophical works of our time. In clear and compelling fashion, Gross sets that surprising shift in Rorty’s thought in the context of his life and social experiences, revealing the many disparate influences that contribute to the making of knowledge. As much a book about the growth of ideas as it is a biography of a philosopher, Richard Rorty will provide readers with a fresh understanding of both the man and the course of twentieth-century thought. (shrink)

To understand how Richard Rorty's “redescription” of transcendental arguments works against the realist interpretation – and in particular against the notion that philosophy can provide an answer to the quaestio juris – it is helpful to turn to a little history. In Anglophone philosophy, the development of the anti‐skeptical and antireductionist potential of transcendental arguments is usually ascribed to the work of P. F. Strawson and other philosophers influenced by the later L. Wittgenstein. According to Rorty, the following condition is (...) sufficient for designating an argument “realist”: a distinction is made between scheme and content. A transcendental argument against realism is an argument to the effect that attempts to make sense of a notion of justification that would do the work of legitimation required is parasitic on what can be gleaned from the methods of confirmation/inferential relations that we use in practice. (shrink)

Safe stair negotiation is an everyday task that children with developmental coordination disorder are commonly thought to struggle with. Yet, there is currently a paucity of research supporting these claims. We investigated the visuomotor control strategies underpinning stair negotiation in children with and without DCD by measuring kinematics, gaze behavior and state anxiety as they ascended and descended a staircase. A questionnaire was administered to determine parents' confidence in their child's ability to safely navigate stairs and their child's fall history. (...) Kinematics were measured using three-dimensional motion capture, whilst gaze was measured using mobile eye-tracking equipment. The parents of DCD children reported significantly lower confidence in their child's ability to maintain balance on the stairs and significantly more stair-related falls in the previous year compared to the parents of typically developing children. During both stair ascent and stair descent, the children with DCD took longer to ascend/descend the staircase and displayed greater handrail use, reflecting a more cautious stair negotiation strategy. No differences were observed between groups in their margin of stability, but the DCD children exhibited significantly greater variability in their foot-clearances over the step edge, which may increase the risk of a fall. For stair descent only, the DCD children reported significantly higher levels of state anxiety than the TD children and looked significantly further along the staircase during the initial entry phase, suggesting an anxiety-related response that may bias gaze toward the planning of future stepping actions over the accurate execution of an ongoing step. Taken together, our findings provide the first quantifiable evidence that safe stair negotiation is a significant challenge for children with DCD, and that this challenge is reflected by marked differences in their visuomotor control strategies and state anxiety levels. Whilst it is currently unclear whether these differences are contributing to the frequency of stair-related falls in children with DCD, our findings pave the way for future research to answer these important questions. (shrink)

When the benefits of surgery do not outweigh the harms or where they do not clearly do so, surgical interventions become morally contested. Cutting to the Core examines a number of such surgeries, including infant male circumcision and cutting the genitals of female children, the separation of conjoined twins, surgical sex assignment of intersex children and the surgical re-assignment of transsexuals, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery.

Neil Gascoigne provides the first comprehensive introduction Richard Rorty's work. He demonstrates to the general reader and to the student of philosophy alike how the radical views on truth, objectivity and rationality expressed in Rorty's widely-read essays on contemporary culture and politics derive from his earliest work in the philosophy of mind and language. He avoids the partisanship that characterizes much discussion of Rorty's work whilst providing a critical account of some of the dominant concerns of contemporary thought. Beginning (...) with Rorty's early work on concept-change in the philosophy of mind, the book traces his increasing hostility to the idea that philosophy is cognitively privileged with respect to other disciplines. After the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, this led to a new emphasis on preserving the moral and political inheritance of the enlightenment by detaching it from the traditional search for rational foundations. This emerging project led Rorty to champion 'ironic' thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, and to his attempt to update the liberalism of J. S. Mill by offering a non-universalistic account of the individual's need to balance their own private interests against their commitments to others. By returning him to his philosophical roots, Gascoigne shows why Rorty's pragmatism is of continuing relevance to anyone interested in ongoing debates about the nature and limits of philosophy, and the implications these debates have for our understanding of what role the intellectual might play in contemporary life. This book serves as both an excellent introduction to Rorty's work and an innovative critique which contributes to ongoing debates in the field. (shrink)

This book asks whether there any limits to the sorts of religious considerations that can be raised in public debates, and if there are, by whom they are to be identified. Its starting point is the work of Richard Rorty, whose pragmatic pluralism leads him to argue for a politically motivated anticlericalism rather than an epistemologically driven atheism. Rather than defend Rorty’s position directly, Gascoigne argues for an epistemological stance he calls ‘Pragmatist Fideism’. The starting point for this exercise in (...) what Rorty calls ‘Cultural Politics’ is an acknowledgement that one must appeal to both secularists and those with religious commitments. In recent years ‘reformed’ epistemologists have aimed to establish a parity of epistemic esteem between religious and perceptual beliefs by exploiting an analogy in respect of their mutual vulnerability to sceptical challenges. Through an examination of this analogy, and in light of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, this book argues that understood correctly the ‘parity’ argument in fact lends epistemological support to the argument that religious considerations should not be raised in public debate. The political price paid—paying the price of politics—is worth it: the religious thinker is provided with a good reason for maintaining that their practices and beliefs are not undermined by other forms of religious life. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

The political theory of Richard Vernon has been a guiding light for students of politics for over five decades. From the situated ethics of shared citizenship to the normative character of individuals' connections to members of other societies and generations, Vernon has cleared a distinctive course in his contributions to the many complex dimensions of political morality. Justice, Rights, and Toleration centres on the core ideas that animate Vernon's engagement with the problems of political theory. Contributors to this volume - (...) all former students and colleagues of Vernon - offer critical engagement with the fundamental themes threaded throughout the thinker's work on the perennial political challenges in liberal democratic societies, including the understanding of citizenship and political membership, justice within and between nations and generations, the rights of children and parents, and the idea of toleration. Vernon articulated a clear vision of the nature of these problems as well as a nuanced approach to addressing them, one rooted in the ideas of democratic dialogue and justice. The essays in this volume are a testament to the breadth of the pressing issues on which Vernon's work continues to advance critical insights. Justice, Rights, and Toleration provides a worthy tribute to the wide range of Richard Vernon's interests and the inspiration to be found in his deep yet subtle body of work in political theory. (shrink)

In 1934, Admiral Richard E. Byrd retreated from his crew at the remote Little America encampment in Antarctica to an even more isolated setting: a small underground shack on ‘the dark immensity of the Ross Ice Barrier, on a line between Little America and the South Pole’. Byrd remained there in solitude for a little over four months and later wrote about his ordeal in Alone. This essay considers Byrd’s account alongside his earlier Antarctic writings in order to ask what (...) they reveal about the difficulties of retreating and maintaining critical distance from ‘civilisation’. (shrink)

Recent discoveries in physics, cosmology and biochemistry have captured the public imagination and made the Design Argument - the theory that God created the world according to a specific plan - the object of renewed scientific and philosophical interest. This accessible but serious introduction to the design problem brings together new perspectives from prominent scientists and philosophers including Paul Davies, Richard Swinburne, Sir Martin Rees, Michael Behe, Elliot Sober and Peter van Inwagen.

Neil Gascoigne explains the pragmatist attitude to science, contrasting it with both the realism of scientists like Susan Greenfield and Richard Dawkins, and the anti-realism of sociologists like Harry Collins.

En utilisant le cadre théorique développé par Jaegwon Kim, soit l’opposition entre le réalisme explicatif et l’irréalisme explicatif, ainsi que quelques observations sur la métaphysique et l’épistémologie de l’explication, je réexamine le désaccord opposant Robert Kane à Richard Double au sujet du principe de l’explication rationnelle. Je défends la position de Kane sur la double rationalité et je soutiens que le principe proposé par Double possède un champ d’application plus limité qu’il le prétend. Je montre aussi que, contrairement à ce (...) que suppose Double, la façon dont Kane entend expliquer l’action ne se transforme pas en une forme d’irréalisme explicatif. (shrink)

This paper addresses Richard Vernon's approach to reconciling cosmopolitan political morality with particularized political obligations in his work, Cosmopolitan Regard. It situates his approach in his critical treatment of competing transactional theories of obligation, particularly reciprocity for benefits received, and presents his justification of particularized political obligations towards fellow members of persons' own state, based on complicity in unique systems of risk exposure. The paper also presents a critical treatment of his theory, and goes on to outline an alternate conception (...) of legitimacy without obligation as promising in addressing the identified concerns and as applicable to structures of governance beyond the state. (shrink)

A critical outline is given of Rorty’s early, “eliminativist” attempt to formulate a materialist version of the mind-body identity theory that does not fall foul of the “irreducible properties objection” (the thought that if mental states are brain states then the latter must exhibit the same properties as the former). An explanation is offered of why Rorty continued to describe himself as a materialist/physicalist despite having come to reject any version of mind-body identity.

In a series of articles, Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons have argued that Richard Boyd’s defence of moral realism, utilizing a causal theory of reference, fails. Horgan and Timmons construct a twin Earth-style thought experiment which, they claim, generates intuitions inconsistent with the realist account. In their thought experiment, the use of (allegedly) moral terms at a world is causally regulated by some property distinct from that regulating their use here on Earth; nevertheless, Horgan and Timmons claim, it is intuitive (...) that the inhabitants of this world disagree with us in their moral claims. Since any disagreement would be merely verbal were the alleged moral facts identical to or constituted by different natural facts, the identity or constitution claim must be false. I argue that their argument fails. Horgan and Timmons’ thought experiment is underdescribed; when we fill out the details, I claim, we shall see that the challenge to moral realism fades away. I sketch two possible interpretations of the (apparently) moral claims of the inhabitants of moral Twin Earth. On one interpretation, they fail to disagree with us because they actually agree with us; on the other, they fail to disagree with us because they are not moralizers at all. Which interpretation is true, I argue, will depend on the facts that explain the differences between us and the inhabitants of moral twin Earth. (shrink)

One of the first to teach the new Aristotle, Richard Rufus of Cornwall here presents exciting accounts of divisibility, growth, and Aristotelian mixture which transform our understanding of the introduction of Aristotelian natural philosophy to the West and provide insight into the early history and prehistory of chemistry.

Three puzzles about self-deception make this mental phenomenon an intriguing explanatory target. The first relates to how to define it without paradox; the second is about how to make sense of self-deception in light of the interpretive view of the mental that has become widespread in philosophy; and the third concerns why it exists at all. In this paper I address the first and third puzzles. First, I define self-deception. Second, I criticize Robert Trivers' attempt to use adaptionist evolutionary psychology (...) to solve the third puzzle (existence). Third, I sketch a theory to replace that of Trivers. Self-deception is not an adaptation, but a spandrel in the sense that Gould and Lewontin give the term: a byproduct of other features of human (cognitive) architecture. Self-deception is so undeniable a fact of human life that if anyone tried to deny its existence, the proper response would be to accuse this person of it. (Allen Wood, 1988). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 368-370 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry, by David Bromwich; xvii & 256 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; $49.00 cloth, $16.00 paper. In his preface to this gathering of his essays and reviews on twentieth-century American and British poetry, David Bromwich regrets that it is "too late to suppress the (...) evidence of a critic educating himself in public" (p. xi). But even the earliest work reprinted in Skeptical Music--"The Making of the Auden Canon," published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1976, when the author was still a graduate student at Yale--hardly qualifies as juvenilia. Indeed, in Bromwich's case, evidence of a critic educating himself in public seems to have been suppressed from the start. No single explanation will account for an author's precocity, but the consistency of Bromwich's critical voice over the last quarter century is certainly related to his early preoccupation with William Hazlitt, the subject of his first book. In choosing Hazlitt as his model, Bromwich rejected what he took to be the legacy of systematic and professional literary theory extending from Coleridge to each new school of academic criticism. Bromwich's own development as a critic has therefore been subtler and more introspective than the critical retooling of so many of his colleagues. Although never far from the evaluative art of the reviewer, Bromwich has come to favor the more speculative dimension of his work. The more recent the piece, the more overt the attempt to imagine "what was in the poet's mind, or what was in the poem's mind, on the theory that certain thoughts and feelings are worth the trouble to characterize because of their strangeness and originality" (p. xi).Some of the most compelling chapters in Skeptical Music imagine what was in the poet's mind, or the poem's mind, by telling stories about complex relationships between poems by different poets--between the work of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, or T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. These are stories about literary influence, or deep temperamental affinity. As in Harold Bloom's work, the stories are grounded in close readings, usually of the passages the critic prizes for their aesthetic superiority.A related procedure is at work in "Stevens and the Idea of the Hero"--a long speculative piece on Wallace Stevens's transfer of allegiance, at a crucial moment in his career, from the pragmatism of Nietzsche to the pragmatism of William James. What Stevens found "most persistently attractive" in Nietzsche's pragmatism, Bromwich coolly explains, was "the suggestion that the good of existence is change" and that "our most vivid acknowledgment of that good comes from the ability to imagine a life wiped clear of ourselves" (p. 71). But the Nietzschean sublime proved insufficient for Stevens. During the Second World War, the poet was confronted by "the reality of American soldiers going off to fight... for a cause which, as Stevens saw it, they could only make true by their fighting" (p. 68). Stevens turned to James for "the less brutal idea of a [End Page 368] man or woman who is made great by an enterprise in which others have a part" (p. 78).Bromwich's argument that Stevens became a more valuable poet when he located heroism in human solidarity, not just Nietzschean contingency and self-creation, bears a family resemblance to the work of one of James's heirs, Richard Rorty. Like Rorty, Bromwich often feels the pressure to adjudicate between the claims of the individual artist and the claims of the community; and like Rorty, he makes his judgements on a case by case basis, without recourse to a set standard, rule, or theory. In the closing chapter of Skeptical Music--"Is Taste Moral?"--Bromwich directly addresses the tension between aestheticism and the social good, a subject that also surfaces at the close of his preface and at numerous moments throughout the book. But the claims of the community seem relatively muted... (shrink)

Three puzzles about self-deception make this mental phenomenon an intriguing explanatory target. The first relates to how to define it without paradox; the second is about how to make sense of self-deception in light of the interpretive view of the mental that has become widespread in philosophy; and the third concerns why it exists at all. In this paper I address the first and third puzzles. First, I define self-deception. Second, I criticize Robert Trivers’ attempt to use adaptionist evolutionary psychology (...) to solve the third puzzle (existence). Third, I sketch a theory to replace that of Trivers. Self-deception is not an adaptation, but a spandrel in the sense that Gould and Lewontin give the term: a byproduct of other features of human (cognitive) architecture.Self-deception is so undeniable a fact of human life that if anyone tried to deny its existence, the proper response would be to accuse this person of it. (Allen Wood, Citation 1988 ). (shrink)