SELF-INJURY IS A COMPLEX phenomenon that is encountered on a regular basis by health care professionals in mental health care. In this article, I use the concept of epistemic injustice to examine this complex phenomenon and argue that this helps us to understand developments in the way we think about and support people who self-injure. Individuals with lived experience have important knowledge about the nature of self-injury and particularly how it relates to them. If the credibility of this knowledge is (...) denied, for example through accusations of emotional instability, manipulation and attention seeking, then we may cause epistemic and non-epistemic harms. The former by denying the capacity for knowledge, by not... (shrink)

Harm minimisation has been proposed as a means of supporting people who self-injure. When adopting this approach, rather than trying to stop self-injury immediately the person is allowed to injure safely whilst developing more appropriate ways of dealing with distress. The approach is controversial as the health care professional actively allows harm to occur. This paper will consider a specific objection to harm minimisation. That is, it is a misguided collaboration between the health care professional and the person who self-injures (...) that is morally and clinically questionable. The objection has two components. The first component is moral in nature and asserts that the health care professional is complicit in any harm that occurs and as a result they can be held morally responsible and subject to moral blame. The second component is clinical in nature and suggests that harm minimisation involves the health care professional in colluding in the perpetuation of self-injury. This element of the objection i... (shrink)

This paper provides a response to Hanna Pickard and Stephen Pearce’s paper ‘Balancing costs and benefits: a clinical perspective does not support a harm minimisation approach for self-injury outside of community settings.’ This paper responded to my article ‘Should healthcare professionals sometimes allow harm? The case of self-injury.’ There is much in the paper that I would agree with, but I feel it is important to respond to a number of the criticisms of my paper in order to clarify my (...) position and to facilitate ongoing debate in relation to this important issue. (shrink)

Should all digital communication be accessible to government inspection? Is robust cryptography in the hands of the public a threat to our national security? With Dorothy Denning and Patrick Sullivan.

Should all digital communication be accessible to government inspection? Is robust cryptography in the hands of the public a threat to our national security? With Dorothy Denning and Patrick Sullivan.

Can the rights of the disabled be justified by John Locke's theory of natural rights? Does an "ethics of caring" offer a better framework for considering these rights? When can we end a human life? With Anita Silvers, Patrick Sullivan, and John Loughney.

Can the rights of the disabled be justified by John Locke's theory of natural rights? Does an "ethics of caring" offer a better framework for considering these rights? When can we end a human life? With Anita Silvers, Patrick Sullivan, and John Loughney.

Does each of us have the right to terminate our own existence if we so decide? Can we delegate this task to others? With what methods can we decide these questions? With Michele Carter, John Loughney, and Patrick Sullivan.

Does each of us have the right to terminate our own existence if we so decide? Can we delegate this task to others? With what methods can we decide these questions? With Michele Carter, John Loughney, and Patrick Sullivan.

To what extent can individuals make a claim on their community to provide for upkeep and healing of their bodies? Can the philosophy of natural rights that animates the American political tradition be applied usefully to the health care debate? With Michael Boylan, Helen John, and Patrick Sullivan.

An integration of rhetoric and method, or communication and inquiry, is important for contemporary communication research because it suggests a framework for understanding Speech Communication as an epistemological discipline. Yet, an integration of rhetoric and method is problematic. A breakdown of the understanding of invention as an epistemologically informative process of discovery has contributed to a schism of rhetoric and method. Nominalistic commitments, primarily characterized by the assumptions of British Empiricism, have led to difficulties in contemporary accounts of communication and (...) inquiry and to a view of inquiry in which rhetoric has no place. ;My aim in this study is to provide a basis for an integration of rhetoric and method with an explication of Charles Peirce's Speculative Rhetoric, or as it is also known, Methodeutic. Speculative Rhetoric is concerned with the semeiotic structure of thought--the laws governing the relations of signs with other signs--and thought is given a dialogic model by peirce. Speculative Rhetoric can thus be viewed as concerned with the semeiotic structure of communication. Speculative Rhetoric as Methodeutic also is concerned with the nature and function of inquiry, i.e., with the inferential structure of method. ;A common assumption among Peirce scholars is that little is known about Speculative Rhetoric, because Peirce did not appear to expose its concerns in any systematic way. The difficulty, however, is that Peirce had much to say about the laws governing the relations of signs with signs, and the conduct of inquiry. And, much of what Peirce said is very systematic. I explicate the interests of speculative Rhetoric by examining Peirce's account of semeiosis and his account of the method of inquiry. The account of semeiosis then provides an explication of the inferential nature of communication, while the account of inquiry provides an explication of the epistemological function of communication. The two accounts together show the integration of rhetoric and method that makes speculative Rhetoric a metatheoretical framework for communication theory, i.e., a pragmatism of communication that grounds a realist philosophy of communication. (shrink)