Western liberal democracies tend to impose duties on public and private bodies that are often formulated as an obligation not to discriminate. For instance, the European Union prohibits direct and indirect discrimination on certain grounds in certain contexts. Under this model, indirect discrimination involves a measure that, although it does not directly (i.e. explicitly) discriminate on the basis of a proscribed ground, produces a disparate impact that correlates with such a proscribed ground. Indirect discrimination is generally viewed, both conceptually and (...) politically, as subordinate to direct discrimination. Professor John Gardner has argued that anti-discrimination law is justified on the basis of duties to respect other people's autonomy. On the base of this analysis, he argues that indirect discrimination is a secondary concept to the paradigm wrong of direct discrimination. I contend in this article that, if one adopts Gardner's autonomy-based analysis of anti-discrimination law, indirect discrimination is not a secondary concept to direct discrimination. Further, I argue that autonomy does not provide a convincing justification for the prohibition of either direct or indirect discrimination. I tentatively suggest, however, that the widespread impact of certain types of discrimination (alluded to by Gardner) may support an equality-based justification for the prohibition of both direct and indirect discrimination. (shrink)

A unique and controversial study of Nietzsche's philosophy in relation to Kantian methodologies.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 153-174 [Access article in PDF] LSDNA: Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence of Biotechnology Richard Doyle I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. —Albert Hofmann on his self-experiment with LSD-25 Finding a place to start is of utmost importance. Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audio tape on the floor of the car in the dark. —Kary Mullis (...) on the invention of Polymerase Chain Reaction 1. Undoing life What happened is this: Once upon a time there was a narrative of vitality. Ok, not a narrative, but an apprehension, a fear, a vision. It didn't have a beginning, middle, or end. It was. Its contours were no more determinable than those of consciousness. Indeed, our consciousness, as humans, was our sole alleged difference from it. From something called "life." We were more than life, but were also, tragically, confined to it. You know the story all too well. Some of its major authors were Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Bichat. Even Shelley.Just because this sudden transformation happened on paper doesn't mean it was easy to endure. Enormous numbers of humans went on tranquilizers just to deal with the effects. Others, elsewhere, knew nothing but rumors. Nonetheless, they became increasingly implicated in its effects, the effects of understanding and experiencing both "life" and "consciousness" as informatic events. Suddenly—and it is sudden, a real surprise—both our vitality and our thought were distributed, scattered across a network and nowhere in particular. Timothy Leary and Francis Crick were speaking the same language, the language of information where the organic and the machinic enfold each other helically and, sometimes, the capacity for replication goes through the ceiling. This new language of information would [End Page 153] introduce a novel response and abyss: the pleasures and hells of eternal replication. The distribution of both life and consciousness enabled a dream of immortality from which we have not yet awakened, as the mere specter of infinite clonal replicants provokes entropies of identity even as it preserves the self from onslaughts of decay. 1In at least one of its characteristics this shift toward an informatic understanding of life is perhaps not really so novel. The seductions of control are hardly, historians of science tell us, foreign to the practices and effects of technoscience. Evelyn Fox Keller makes this point concisely and precisely in her not-quite eponymous essay, "From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death," itself a self-professed sequel to her 1986 "Making Gender Visible." Here the scientific "impulse" is underwritten by a perennial motif that underlies much of scientific creativity, namely, the urge to fathom the secrets of nature and the collateral hope that, in fathoming the secrets of nature, we will fathom (and hence gain control of) our own mortality (Secrets, 29).Surely Keller is correct that the nascent practices of molecular biology were cryptographic in character, an espionage project unknowingly launched by Erwin Schrodinger during the Second World War. Surely it is crucial to this moment that while Schrodinger's 1943 Dublin lectures were introducing audiences to the concept of the code-script, Alan Turing again brilliantly decrypted a modified U-boat code, giving the Allies code superiority for the remainder of the war. 2 But in this segment on that strange growth called "biotechnology," I want to focus on what Keller has called the "collateral" of hope in this cryptographic impulse, namely the collateral equation between inquiry and control, specifically the control of mortality.For is "fathoming" a secret identical to the exercise of control? The very cadence and rhetorical encryption of Keller's formulation here, a general parenthetical syllogistic conclusion within and alongside a hyphenated invocation of particularity, suggest that concepts and practices of secrecy are more unstable than Keller implies with her invocation of Feynman's "disease" of lock picking: "One of my diseases, one of my things in life, is that anything that is secret, I try to undo" (40).For Keller, Feynman's confession is emblematic of a desire to control life and death... (shrink)

This essay suggests that Continental Studies of Evil need a more global approach in thinking about political evils of today. Highlighting the need for a more comparative and global perspective, I explore two proposals: first, the in-between space of the geographical binaries of East/West and Global South/Global North cultivates many political evils. Second, taking issue with the conviction in Continental philosophy that the Holocaust caused a rupture in the thinking of evil, I argue for the continuity of evils and characterize (...) the insistence on the unprecedented character of the Holocaust as an example of Eurocentrism. (shrink)

I argue that Quine’s early critique of Carnap’s conventionalism is in serious tension with the holism of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", since his critique of convention- alism makes a compelling case for a privileged status either for logic, or for some other principle by means of which to derive consequences. Based on this, I call for a modification of Quinean holism, on grounds internal to Quine’s views. The result motivates a rehabilitation of Carnap’s notion of framework principles, and a rethinking (...) of logic as a kind of relativised a priori. (shrink)

The paper examines the interrelationship between mathematics and logic, arguing that a central characteristic of each has an essential role within the other. The first part is a reconstruction of and elaboration on Paul Bernays’ argument, that mathematics and logic are based on different directions of abstraction from content, and that mathematics, at its core it is a study of formal structures. The notion of a study of structure is clarified by the examples of Hilbert’s work on the axiomatization of (...) geometry and Hilbert et al.’s formalist proof theory. It is further argued that the structural aspect of logic puts it under the purview of the mathematical, analogously to how the deductive nature of mathematics puts it under the purview of logic. This is then linked, in the second part, to certain aspects of Gödel’s critique of Carnap’s conventionalism, that ‘mere syntax’ cannot capture the full content of mathematics, which is revealed to be closely related to the characteristic of mathematics argued for by Bernays. Finally, this is connected with Gödel’s latter-day views about two kinds of formality, intensional and extensional, and the relationship between them. (shrink)

Background: Moral distress is an important and well-studied phenomenon among nurses and other healthcare providers, yet the conceptualization of parental moral distress remains unclear. Objective: The objective of this dimensional analysis was to describe the nature of family moral distress in serious pediatric illness. Design and methods: A dimensional analysis of articles retrieved from a librarian-assisted systematic review of Scopus, CINAHL, and PsychInfo was conducted, focusing on how children, parents, other family members, and healthcare providers describe parental moral distress, both (...) explicitly through writings on parental moral experience and implicitly through writings on parental involvement in distressing aspects of the child’s serious illness. Ethical considerations: To promote child and family best interest and minimize harm, a nuanced understanding of the moral, existential, emotional, and spiritual impact of serious pediatric illness is needed. The cases used in this dimensional analysis come from the first author’s IRB approved study at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and subsequent published studies; or have been adapted from the literature and the authors’ clinical experiences. Findings: Three dimensions emerged from the literature surrounding parent moral distress: an intrapersonal dimension, an interpersonal dimension, and a spiritual/existential dimension. The overarching theme is that parents experience relational solace and distress because of the impact of their child’s illness on relationships with themselves, their children, family, healthcare providers, their surrounding communities, and society. Discussion: Elucidating this concept can help nurses and other professionals understand, mitigate, or eliminate antecedents to parental moral distress. We discuss how this model can facilitate future empirical and conceptual bioethics research, as well as inform the manner in which healthcare providers engage, collaborate with, and care for families during serious pediatric illness. Conclusion: Parent moral distress is an important and complex phenomenon that requires further theoretical and empirical investigation. We provide an integrated definition and dimensional schematic model that may serve as a starting point for future research and dialogue. (shrink)

_This practical and forward-focused book presents a framework that uses social infrastructure to produce effective and inclusive professional development options in education._ Although technology has increased our capacity for social networking both in the digital space and face-to-face, Kira J. Baker-Doyle contends that most professional development opportunities for educators are still fundamentally asocial. She calls for the adoption of humanizing network practices to create meaningful continuing education experiences that leverage the collective knowledge, expertise, and social capital of educators to (...) spark educational change. Baker-Doyle shows how the critical network literacy (CNL) framework overlays critical theory, multiliteracies theory, and social network theory in a way that encourages critical reflection and collaboration among participants. She draws from sources including empirical studies of teacher educators and teacher activists, meta-analytical studies of social network research in education, and professional experience with collective organizing efforts, to detail the many benefits of cultivating CNL in educational spaces. Baker-Doyle provides evidence of how the framework’s practices and protocols can increase transparency, improve representation, and incorporate affirming and restorative discourse. Her work demonstrates how CNL helps create environments that honor teachers’ social identities, their social networks, and the broader social context in which they work. This thought-provoking book is filled with exercises that reinforce social competencies, questions that prompt dialogue and understanding, and real-world examples that underscore the framework's relevance to key educational practices. The generous guidance offered in _Critical Network Literacy_ can be used as a launching point to promote innovation and leadership in teaching. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics VII Aristotle describes akrasia as a disposition. Taking into account that it is a disposition, I argue that akrasia cannot be understood on an epistemological basis alone, i.e., it is not merely a problem of knowledge that the akratic person acts the ways he does, but rather one is akratic due to a certain kind of habituation, where the person is not able to activate the potential knowledge s/he possesses. To stress this point, I focus on the (...) gap between potential knowledge and its activation, whereby I argue that the distinction between potential and actual knowledge is at the center of the problem of akrasia. I suggest that to elaborate on this gap, we must go beyond the limits of Nicomachean Ethics to Metaphysics IX, where we find Aristotle’s discussion of the distinction between potentiality and actuality. I further analyze the gap between potential and actual knowledge by means of Aristotle’s discussion of practical syllogism, where I argue that akrasia is a result of a conflict in practical reasoning. I conclude my paper by stressing that for the akratic person the action is determined with respect to the conclusion of the practical syllogism, where the conclusion is produced by means of a ‘conflict’ between the universal opinion which is potential and the particular opinion which is appetitive. (shrink)

Since 2001, Continental philosophical studies of evil suggest that we are forced to rethink the category of evil as we face acts of terrorism on a global scale. In light of this suggestion, this article traces the idea of the “inscrutability of evil” as a common lens through which we associate the category of evil with the phenomena we identify as evil. This idea finds its first modern formulation in Kant’s theory of radical evil. I argue that Hannah Arendt and (...) Emmanuel Levinas follow Kant in identifying evil as an inscrutable phenomenon. While they all agree that evil cannot be rationalized, integrated into reason, or understood within the framework of theodicy, for Kant, evil is inscrutable because it is grounded in freedom; for Arendt, evil is inscrutable because it is “banal;” and for Levinas, evil is inscrutable because it is “excessive” and “useless.” My analysis demonstrates that inscrutability is an essential marker of the concept of evil since it is found in all three accounts as a feature of evil, even though in each account a different type of evil is at stake (moral, political, and existential). (shrink)

Annotation Scholars of medieval scholastic philosophy as well as those who study semiotics will appreciate this side-by-side translation, with introduction, by Doyle (Saint Louis U.) of a late 16th-early 17th century Jesuit text. The text (its name is taken from the U. of Coimbra, in Portugal, where the authors taught) contains commentaries on Aristotle, as part of a course in philosophy, particularly logic. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

It is a widely held view that lying is defined in the traditional tripartite model as the conjunction of a statement, the false belief, and the intended deception. Much of the criticisms have been levelled at the third condition—intended deception—with contemporary counterexamples. My main criticism of the traditional and contemporary model of lying centres on that philosophers discard the social existence of the hearer. Schutz‘s phenomenological sociology gives a sheer inspiration to redefine the third condition by taking the hearer as (...) a consciously social being into account. Lying should be an intersubjective action for the Other from the perspective of the liar; it might be, thus, reasonable to assume that there should be commonsense awareness between the speaker and the hearer. This paper, by focusing on this commonsenseness and its typifications, introduces a new approach to the third condition: S must intend that H be induced to believe that p, where p is false. In this regard, once you lie, by being subjected to the taken-for-granted commonsenseness in our daily life, you must try as hard as possible to succeed in deceiving the hearer by stating that p. You, as a typical person, tell a typical lie in typical contexts for typical Others. The focus of attention, therefore, is on the hearer and it is the key to understanding that mere intent to deceive is too broad and unpragmatic for a social human being who always intends to flee the negative consequences of the context in which she has to lie. Making the extension narrower necessitates a new term, anti-social bullshit generally being replied rhetorically as "how can you expect me to believe that?" comprises the excluded cases. (shrink)

This essay provides a subtly new reading of Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs through a re-examination of one of its key terms: noirceur, or ‘blackness’. Whi...

(2013). Nietzsche, Value and Objectivity. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 41-63. doi: 10.1080/09672559.2012.746268.

The scholarship on Frantz Fanon’s theorization of violence is crowded with interpretations that follow the Arendtian paradigm of violence. These interpretations often discuss whether violence is instrumental or non-instrumental in Fanon’s work. This reading, I believe, is the result of approaching Fanon through Hannah Arendt’s framing of violence, i.e. through a binary paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. Even some Fanon scholars who question Arendt’s reading of Fanon, do so by employing a similar binary logic, hence repeating the same either/or (...) paradigm of instrumental versus non-instrumental violence. I aim to challenge such interpretations of Fanon by demonstrating that in the context of anticolonial armed struggle in which Fanon writes, the either/or framework of the instrumental/non-instrumental binary of violence cannot fully capture his perspective. Violence can indeed be conceived as having both constructive and instrumental aspects. My argument is supported by Fanon’s corpus, including his 1960 Accra speech, “Why We Use Violence” in Alienation and Freedom. This piece, I suggest, together with Fanon’s other writings, poses a direct challenge to the Arendtian binary of violence. My analysis resists positioning the difference between Arendt and Fanon through the instrumental/non-instrumental binary. By using Judith Butler’s notion of “frame” I complicate their difference and argue Arendt’s framing of violence prevents her from apprehending Fanon and – more importantly – interpretations of Fanon based on this Arendtian frame of violence inevitably lead to misinterpretations. (shrink)

The racist killing of Georg Floyd in the Summer of 2020 created waves of protests not only in the U.S. but all over the globe. In Turkey, my home country, there were also street demonstrations that demanded justice for Floyd, but “Twitter activism” was more popular. Turkish-speaking-twitter became a hotbed for condemnations. Amidst an array of tweets condemning Floyd’s racist killing, one stood out and made it to the headlines of alternative media outlets. A former official of the authoritarian Turkish (...) government, Yusuf Yerkel, wrote the following tweet in Turkish on June 5, 2020, in response to Floyd’s racist killing; here, I provide an English translation of his infamous tweet (the Turkish original of which is still available on Yerkel’s account on Twitter): “The reason that protests grew to this extent in the U.S. seems to be based on a phenomenon, in H. Arendt’s terms, ‘banality of evil,’ which has become evident in the face of Floyd’s murder. An ordinary White cop’s atrocity as an “everyday job” was the tipping point.”. (shrink)

The racist killing of Georg Floyd in the Summer of 2020 created waves of protests not only in the U.S. but all over the globe. In Turkey, my home country, there were also street demonstrations that demanded justice for Floyd, but “Twitter activism” was more popular. Turkish-speaking-twitter became a hotbed for condemnations. Amidst an array of tweets condemning Floyd’s racist killing, one stood out and made it to the headlines of alternative media outlets. A former official of the authoritarian Turkish (...) government, Yusuf Yerkel, wrote the following tweet in Turkish on June 5, 2020, in response to Floyd’s racist killing; here, I provide an English translation of his infamous tweet (the Turkish original of which is still available on Yerkel’s account on Twitter): “The reason that protests grew to this extent in the U.S. seems to be based on a phenomenon, in H. Arendt’s terms, ‘banality of evil,’ which has become evident in the face of Floyd’s murder. An ordinary White cop’s atrocity as an “everyday job” was the tipping point.” Yerkel herein uses Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil (see esp. p. 287 of the book) to describe Derek Chauvin’s atrocious act, where the evil of racist police violence has become ordinary, banal, and “every day.”. (shrink)

That the Arctic is undergoing transformative changes driven in large part by external forces is no longer news. The high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, which are not themselves significant sources of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) or short-lived climate pollutants (such as black carbon soot), are experiencing effects attributable to climate change that are equal to or greater than those occurring in any of the planet's other large regions. Prominent among these effects are rising surface temperatures, a deepening (...) of the active layer of the permafrost, the collapse of sea ice, increases in the intensity of coastal storm surges made possible by the retreat of sea ice, the accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and the acidification of marine systems. The deposition of black carbon in the high north alone—almost 60 percent of which is thought to originate in Europe—appears to account for half or more of the increase in temperature occurring in the Arctic. Positive feedback processes, such as lowered albedo (that is, the capacity of Earth's surface to reflect incoming solar radiation back into space) following the melting of ice at sea and snow on land, have the effect of magnifying the impact of these external forces. Nowhere is the challenge of adapting to the impacts of climate change more urgent than in Arctic coastal communities confronted with the need to relocate to avoid physical destruction. And nowhere are the threats to individual species (for example, the polar bear) and whole ecosystems more severe than they are in the Arctic, where biophysical changes are outstripping the capacity of plants and animals to adapt to altered conditions. (shrink)

Recent estimates indicate that over 40,000 children die annually in the United States and a majority have life-limiting conditions. Children at end of life require extensive healthcare resources, including multiple hospital readmissions and emergency room visits. Yet, many children still suffer from symptoms at end of life—including fatigue, pain, dyspnea, and anxiety—with less than 10% of these children utilizing hospice care services. A critical barrier to pediatric hospice use was the original federal regulations associated with the hospice care that required (...) a diagnosis of 6 months to live and the discontinuation of all curative treatments. The Concurrent Care Provision of the United States’ Affordable Care Act eliminated the need to forgo curative therapies in order to enroll in hospice for children in Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program. Concurrent care for children can help mitigate the tension families experience in choosing between essential forms of care, as well as contribute to improved end-of-life outcomes for the child and possibly bereavement outcomes for the family. Understanding concurrent care for children from a social justice perspective has important advocacy and research implications for hospice and palliative care clinicians providing care for children and their families. We apply Powers and Faden’s theory of social justice “as the moral foundation of public health and health policy” to the provision of concurrent care to children near end of life and families in the United States. The goals of applying this theory are to explore additional insights and perspectives into concurrent care policy may provide and to assess the usefulness of this theory when applied to end-of-life health policy. We argue that concurrent care policy is socially just since it has potential to promote well-being in vulnerable children and families and can limit the inequity children at end-of-life experience in access to high-quality hospice care. (shrink)

T he Question of punishment and its justification has been a major preoccupation in recent philosophy of law. The reasons for this growing concern are not difficult to discover. Both philosophers and jurists have become increasingly sceptical of traditional theories of legal punishment. Each of these inherited theories was designed to establish criteria for the recognition and appraisal of punishment as a legal institution. However, alternative theories emphasised different and often conflicting criteria. Some theories emphasised moral desert and retribution, while (...) others appealed to the social utilities of punishment. Failure to reconcile these diverse philosophical viewpoints, through sustained debate over two centuries, has been a major source of intellectual dissatisfaction. (shrink)

Howard S. Cohen and Michael Feldberg, Power and Restraint: The Moral Dimension of Police Work, New York Praeger, 1991; xvii + 166 pp.

Decisions about whether or not to become a parent are significant parts of normative human development. Many studies have shown that married different-sex couples are expected to become parents, and that many social pressures enforce this norm. For same-sex couples, however, much less is known about social norms surrounding parenthood within marriage. This study examined injunctive norms and descriptive norms for the pursuit of parenthood as a function of age, gender, and sexual orientation. Participants in an internet survey included 1020 (...) cisgender people from across the United States Findings showed that norms, especially descriptive norms, for the pursuit of parenthood for heterosexual people were much stronger than those for lesbian women and gay men, and that norms for lesbian women were stronger than those for gay men. These differences were more pronounced for older, heterosexual, and male participants. However, lesbian and gay participants, especially gay men, reported that lesbian and gay people ought to become parents to the same extent as heterosexual people. Overall, the results indicated that, regardless of sexual orientation, adults report that lesbian and gay married people ought to become parents, but that they expect only a minority of these couples will pursue parenthood. This research provided a glimpse into how Americans are envisioning family formation among same-sex couples today. (shrink)

All non-nuclear-weapon states are morally and legally obliged by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons. These obligations cannot be overridden for reasons of mere prudence. Only (i) material breaches of the treaty and/or a corresponding; (ii) ‘fundamental change in circumstances’ (rebus sic stantibus) that undermines the integrity of the NPT may override states parties’ legal nonproliferation duties. More than the violations of the NPT by ‘rogue’ states like North Korea or Iran, I argue that the (...) failure of the de jure nuclear-weapon powers since 2001 to uphold their informal and some formal NPT commitments suggests the possibility of material breach and/or institutional subversion. If NPT subversion were to occur, the non-nuclear-weapon states’ collective responsibility to avoid complicity in that subversion leads them to choose between (a) individually seeking nuclear weapons capability for state security; or, more preferably, (b) a publicly announced and collective withdrawal from the NPT that simultaneously refuses to pursue the nuclear weapons option. (shrink)

This manuscript presents a demonstration study of Quiet Time, a classroom-based Transcendental Meditation intervention. The aim of the study is to assess the feasibility of implementing and evaluating QT in two pilot settings in the United Kingdom and Ireland. This study contributes to the field by targeting middle childhood, testing efficiency in two settings operating under different educational systems, and including a large array of measures. First, teacher and pupil engagement with QT was assessed. Second, the feasibility of using a (...) quasi-experimental design and a wide range of instruments to measure changes in pupil outcomes before and after the intervention was assessed. This allows us to obtain information about which instruments might be feasible to administer and most sensitive to change. The first setting included 89 students from a primary school in the United Kingdom: those in sixth grade received the QT intervention, while those in fifth grade practiced meditation using the Headspace application. The second setting included 100 fifth- and sixth-grade students from two schools in Ireland: one received the QT intervention, the other served as a control. Recruitment and retention rates were high in both settings, and the intervention was feasible and accepted by students, parents and teachers. Implementation fidelity was lower in the United Kingdom setting where delivery started later in the school year and the practice was affected by preparation for the Standard Assessment Tests. These results show that QT may be feasibly delivered in school settings, and suggest the use of a compact battery of tests to measure impact. We find suggestive evidence that the intervention affected executive function as children who practiced QT showed improved working memory in both settings. In the Irish setting, pupils in the QT group had improved ability to control responses. These results have implications for future studies by a) demonstrating that implementation fidelity is highly context dependent and b) providing suggestive evidence of the malleability of children’s skills in middle childhood. The results of this demonstration study will be used to inform a larger RCT of the QT intervention. (shrink)

Dori's narrative is a heart-touching and zany blend of actual events in the life of a young Boxer. With edgy charm, she takes us on a romp through her world in such a way we can't help but reconsider our lives. Through her we get a dog's-eye view on human exploitation of animals. This unique approach is hauntingly effective.

We propose conscious awareness as a mechanism for creating “shared value”; a form of value that Porter describes as putting social and community needs before profit. We explore the mechanism empirically in an entrepreneurial context and find that spiritual practices increase conscious awareness which, in turn, shapes entrepreneurial intentions and venture characteristics focused on shared value.