There's been a great deal of interest in epistemology regarding what it takes for a hearer to come to know on the basis of a speaker's say-so. That is, there's been much work on the epistemology of testimony. However, what about when hearers don't believe speakers when they should? In other words, what are we to make of when testimony goes wrong? A recent topic of interest in epistemology and feminist philosophy is how we sometimes fail to believe speakers due (...) to inappropriate prejudices – implicit or explicit. This is known as epistemic injustice. In this article, I discuss Miranda Fricker's groundbreaking work on epistemic injustice, as well as more recent developments that both offer critique and expansion on the nature and extent of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to explore various ways of thinking about the concept of manipulation in order to capture both current and potentially future instances of machine manipulation, manipulation on the part of everything from the Facebook advertising algorithm to super-intelligent AGI. Three views are considered: a conservative one, which slightly tweaks extant influence-based theories of manipulation; a dismissive view according to which it doesn't matter much if machines are literally manipulative, provided we can classify them as so (...) doing to make sense of our interactions with them; and an ameliorative analysis, according to which we should change our concept of manipulation better to make sense of machine manipulation. We tentatively favor the latter. (shrink)

Our concept of disorder is changing. This causes problems for projects of descriptive conceptual analysis. Conceptual change means that a criterion that was necessary for a condition to be a disorder at one time may cease to be necessary a relatively short time later. Nevertheless, some conceptually based claims will be fairly robust. In particular, the claim that no adequate account of disorder can appeal only to biological facts can be maintained for the foreseeable future. This is because our current (...) concept of disorder continues to be laden with ethical and political values in multiple ways. (shrink)

This book is about the norms of the speech act of assertion. This is a topic of lively contemporary debate primarily carried out in epistemology and philosophy of language. Suppose that you ask me what time an upcoming meeting starts, and I say, “4 p.m.” I’ve just asserted that the meeting starts at 4 p.m. Whenever we make claims like this, we’re asserting. The central question here is whether we need to know what we say, and, relatedly, whether what we (...) assert must be true. If the meeting is really at 3:30 p.m., you’ll be late, and probably rather upset that I told you the wrong time. In some sense, it seems like I’m on the hook for having said something false. This sense that I’ve done something wrong suggests that there are certain standards of evaluating assertions: a way of distinguishing between good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate. We call these standards norms. And so the debate about what, if any, norms govern the linguistic practice of assertion is known as the norms of assertion debate. When one’s assertion satisfies the norm, we say that the assertion is warranted. -/- Various philosophers have typically focused their views of the norms of assertion on articulating the level of epistemic support required for properly asserting. Some argue, for example, that one must know what one asserts. Others argue that one merely needs to justifiably believe what one asserts–an epistemic standing weaker than knowledge. The purpose of this book is to defend what I propose as the central norm governing our practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm. Here’s what it looks like: -/- One may assert that p only if: One has supportive reasons for p, The relevant conventional and pragmatic elements of the context are present, and One asserts that p at least in part because the assertion that p satisfies and. -/- In rough outline, the standards for warrantedly asserting shift with changes in context, although knowledge is never required for warrantedly asserting. In fact, in some special contexts, speakers may warrantedly lie. This latter feature particularly sets apart my view from others in the debate. This also means that truth, knowledge, and even belief aren’t necessary conditions for warrantedly asserting. (shrink)

The imaginative context in which artificial intelligence is embedded remains a crucial touchstone from which to understand and critique both the histories and prospective futures of an AI-driven world. A recent article from Cave and Dihal sets out a narrative schema of four hopes and four corresponding fears associated with intelligent machines and AI. This article seeks to respond to the work of Cave and Dihal by presenting a gendered reading of this schema of hopes and fears. I offer a (...) brief genealogy of narratives which feature female automata, before turning to examine how gendered technology today—particularly AI assistants like Siri and Alexa—reproduces the historical narratives associated with intelligent machines in new ways. Through a gendered reading of the hopes and fears associated with AI, two key responses arise. First, that the affective reactions to intelligent machines cannot be readily separated where such machines are gendered female. And second, that the gendering of AI technologies today can be understood as an attempt to reconcile the opposing hopes and fears AI produces, and that this reconciliation is based on the association of such technologies with traditional notions of femininity. Critically, a gendered reading enables us to problematize the narratives associated with AI and expose the power asymmetries that lie within, and the technologies which arise out of, such narratives. (shrink)

What happens when we consider transformative experiences from the perspective of gender transitions? In this paper I suggest that at least two insights emerge. First, trans* persons’ experiences of gender transitions show some limitations to L.A. Paul’s (forthcoming) decision theoretic account of transformative decisions. This will involve exploring some of the phenomenology of coming to know that one is trans, and in coming to decide to transition. Second, what epistemological effects are there to undergoing a transformative experience? By connecting some (...) experiences of gender transitions to feminist standpoint epistemology, I argue that radical changes in one’s identity and social location also radically affects one’s access to knowledge in ways not widely appreciated in contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider how the notion of metalinguistic negotiation interacts with various theories of generics. The notion of metalinguistic negotiation we discuss stems from previous work from two of us (Plunkett and Sundell). Metalinguistic negotiations are disputes in which speakers disagree about normative issues concerning language, such as issues about what a given word should mean in the relevant context, or which of a range of related concepts a word should express. In a metalinguistic negotiation, speakers argue about (...) such issues implicitly, via competing “metalinguistic” usages of terms. Here, we argue that some disputes involving generics are best thought of as metalinguistic negotiations, and that these cases can be illuminating for our more general theorizing about generics. Specifically, we argue that the “contextualist” theory of generics that one of us (Sterken) has developed in other work is best equipped to account for these metalinguistic negotiations, relative to other leading views of generics. We thus argue for a “package deal” view of generics: a view that combines Plunkett and Sundell’s account of metalinguistic negotiation with Sterken’s contextualist view of generics. (shrink)

Global production networks connect multiple producers involved in fragmented manufacturing processes. Major brands and retailers, considered as lead firms, are under increasing pressure to ensure products made through GPNs are produced sustainably. Theories of governance developed to understand dynamics in outsourced production can provide insight into this issue. However, these theories and related empirical research have often focused on relationships between lead firms and upper-tier suppliers. When manufacturing involves multiple fragmented stages, understanding the role of lead firms becomes more difficult. (...) This article considers new governance roles that lead firms, as buyers, are playing when attempting to promote sustainable practices across all stages of production for buyer-driven industries. The focus is exploring the nature of new governance approaches which lead firms have developed in order to address diverse sustainability challenges found within GPNs, particularly related to lower-tier suppliers. These approaches can involve lead firms working through vertical buyer–seller links or developing new horizontal relationships, which link lead firms with lower-tier suppliers and governance processes in these suppliers’ local productive systems. The findings draw from field research examining how top UK garment retailers provide governance to producers involved in creating cotton garments in India and a review of publicised policies and practices of these retailers related to promoting sustainable production. Five types of governance mechanisms that can involve vertical or horizontal links are identified. Considering the growth of new governance relationships expands previous conceptions of the roles of lead firm governance. (shrink)

We discuss the relationship between expertise, expert authority, and trust in the case of vaccine research and policy, with a particular focus on COVID-19 vaccines. We argue that expert authority is not merely an epistemic notion, but entails being trusted by the relevant public and is valuable if it is accompanied by expert trustworthiness. Trustworthiness requires, among other things, being transparent, acknowledging uncertainty and expert disagreement (e.g., around vaccines’ effectiveness and safety), being willing to revise views in response to new (...) evidence, and being clear about the values that underpin expert recommendations. We explore how failure to acknowledge expert disagreement and uncertainty can undermine trust in vaccination and public health experts, using expert recommendations around COVID-19 vaccines as a case study. (shrink)

Much recent philosophical work argues that power constrains speech—pornography silences women, testimonial injustice thwarts a speaker’s transmission of knowledge, bias distorts the performative force of subordinated speech. Though the constraints that power places on speech are serious, power also enables some speech. Power doesn’t just keep us from speaking—it also makes us speak. In this paper I explore how power produces, rather than constrains, speech. I discuss a kind of speech I call extracted speech: speech that is unjustly elicited from (...) an agent. I discuss examples of coerced confession, intimidated “consent,” and mandatory self-disclosure as instances of extracted speech, and theorize a bit about what significance this speech has more generally for philosophy of language and political philosophy. (shrink)

According to “voluntarists,” voluntary control is a necessary precondition on being blameworthy. According to “non-voluntarists,” it isn’t. I argue here that we ought to take seriously a type of voluntary control that both camps have tended to overlook. In addition to “direct” control over our behavior, and “indirect” control over some of the consequences of our behavior, we also possess “constitutive” control: the capacity to govern some of our attitudes and character traits by making choices about what to do that (...) constitute those attitudes and traits. Taking this sort of control seriously, I argue, ultimately tips the scale towards voluntarism. First, I address a non-voluntarist case in which an agent is putatively made blameworthy by the reasons for which she acts, even though the particular reasons for which she acts aren’t up to her. I argue that this case looks compelling only if we overlook constitutive control, and thereby miss how the agent’s motivating reasons are under her voluntary control even though non-voluntarists think they are not. I then use the notion of constitutive control to diffuse some of the best putative counterexamples to voluntarism: cases in which subjects are blameworthy either for caring inadequately about others or for wishing them ill. (shrink)

This article explores how visual images of dependency and care reflect and reinforce perceptions of people who are ill, disabled, or otherwise dependent, those who sustain them, and the meaning of the work they do. Scenes of care are a valuable index for understanding cultural assumptions about who is deserving of care, how and where care should be given, and who is obligated to serve as a giver of care. It positions these images in the context of the emphasis, within (...) the disability rights movement, on independence. I argue that the insistence on independence entails a form of what Lauren Berlant calls "cruel optimism"—desire for the very things that undermine happiness and well-being—because they rely on a willful disregard of the inevitable interdependency that is a fact of all human existence, as well as the particular forms of dependency that pertain to many disabled bodies. The end of the article considers works of visual art that challenge dominant modes for representing how care is given and received. If the invisibility of caregiving is one aspect of our willful forgetting that all bodies are dependent, I'll argue that visual images of care are an essential resource for recognizing and reimagining its status in our society. One desired outcome of such reconsideration would be to complicate the meaning of autonomy—as it relates to choosing disability—as well as how the work of caregiving is acknowledged and valued. (shrink)

Background Researchers engaged in the study of the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of genetics and genomics are often publicly funded and intend their work to be in the public interest. These features of U.S. ELSI research create an imperative for these scholars to demonstrate the public utility of their work and the expectation that they engage in research that has potential to inform policy or practice outcomes. In support of the fulfillment of this “translational mandate,” the Center for (...) ELSI Resources and Analysis (CERA), funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), aims to facilitate community-informed, ELSI research results synthesis and dissemination. However, little is known about how ELSI research scholars define the goals of translation and imagine the intended users of their research findings.Methodology We distributed a Qualtrics survey to ELSI scholars that aimed to determine: (1) researchers’ expectations for their research findings in relation to policy or practice outcomes, (2) the stakeholder groups researchers believe could benefit from their research findings, and (3) the methods researchers use to foster the uptake of their findings by those stakeholders.Results Most ELSI researchers surveyed thought there were stakeholders that could benefit from their research findings, including health care professionals, at-risk individuals, patients, and their family members, policy-makers, and researchers/scientists, and expected their research findings to inform the creation or revision of laws, policies, or practice guidelines. Most researchers planned to disseminate findings directly to relevant stakeholders, with fewer expecting dissemination support from research funders, universities, or other entities.Conclusion The broad range of research topics, disciplines, and set of potential end users represented in ELSI reseach complicate the work of a knowledge broker. Nonetheless, the CERA can play an important role in disseminating ELSI results to relevant stakeholders. Further research should explore outreach mechanisms. (shrink)

Adriana Cavarero has been, and continues to be, one of the most innovative and influential voices in Italian political and feminist thought of the last forty years. Known widely for her challenges to the male-dominated canon of political philosophy (and philosophy more broadly construed), Cavarero has offered provocative accounts of what constitutes the political, with an emphasis on embodiment, singularity, and relationality. Political Bodies gathers some of today’s most prominent and well-established theorists, along with emerging scholars, to contribute their insights, (...) questions, and concerns about Cavarero's political philosophy and to put her work in conversation with other feminist thinkers, political theorists, queer theorists, and thinkers of race and coloniality. A new essay by Adriana Cavarero herself closes out the volume. Political Bodies ventures beyond the familiar boundaries of Cavarero's own writing and is a testament to the generative encounters that her philosophy makes possible. (shrink)

A new reading of Plato's account of conventionalism about names in the Cratylus. It argues that Hermogenes' position, according to which a name is whatever anybody 'sets down' as one, does not have the counterintuitive consequences usually claimed. At the same time, Plato's treatment of conventionalism needs to be related to his treatment of formally similar positions in ethics and politics. Plato is committed to standards of objective natural correctness in all such areas, despite the problematic consequences which, as he (...) himself shows, arise in the case of language. (shrink)

This Handbook brings together philosophical work on how language shapes, and is shaped by, social and political factors. Its 24 chapters were written exclusively for this volume by an international team of leading researchers, and together they provide a broad expert introduction to the major issues currently under discussion in this area. The volume is divided into four parts: Part I: Methodological and Foundational Issues Part II: Non-ideal Semantics and Pragmatics Part III: Linguistic Harms Part IV: Applications The parts, and (...) chapters in each part, are introduced in the volume's General Introduction. A list of Works Cited concludes each chapter, pointing readers to further areas of study. The Handbook is the first major, multi-authored reference work in this growing area and essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of language and its relationship to social and political reality. (shrink)

Foundation models such as GPT-4 are fine-tuned to avoid unsafe or otherwise problematic behavior, such as helping to commit crimes or producing racist text. One approach to fine-tuning, called reinforcement learning from human feedback, learns from humans' expressed preferences over multiple outputs. Another approach is constitutional AI, in which the input from humans is a list of high-level principles. But how do we deal with potentially diverging input from humans? How can we aggregate the input into consistent data about "collective" (...) preferences or otherwise use it to make collective choices about model behavior? In this paper, we argue that the field of social choice is well positioned to address these questions, and we discuss ways forward for this agenda, drawing on discussions in a recent workshop on Social Choice for AI Ethics and Safety held in Berkeley, CA, USA in December 2023. (shrink)

What consciousness exactly is remains an unsettled issue among both philosophers and biologists. Three aspects of consciousness are generally recognized: awareness consciousness (through connection...

A major goal of this work is to specify some steps of the process by which participants maintain coherency in their conversations.The underlying element of the analysis is a construct called a “context space.” Roughly, a group of utterances that refers to a single issue or episode forms the basis for a context space. Superficially, a conversation is a sequence of utterances; at a deeper level it is a structured entity whose utterances can be parsed into hierarchically related context spaces.As (...) a conversation proceeds, each conversant builds a discourse model that includes the conversation's context space structure, a notion of the present discourse topic, and a list of items being focused upon. Conversational coherency depends upon a lack of conflict between the respective models of the participants. Conflicts are prevented by speakers following high level syntactic and semantic relational rules that enable listeners to identify their discourse models. These rules, given in the study, are highly integrated with the view of conversation presented here—a hierarchy of related context spaces. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How We Keep Caring While Walking Through Our PainOla Ziara and Rachel CoghlanAuthor Dedication. To my dear brother Omar Ziara, a bright doctor, entrepreneur, and community advocate who was killed in an Israeli bombing in November 2023.May your soul rest in peace and may your memory remain alive in our hearts. May your unborn child grow up to become the wonderful man that you were. Forever loved by (...) all.Palestinian-American poet, Suheir Hammad, writes:Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water.And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and you refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.I am a doctor from the Gaza Strip in Palestine. I live through acute war and protracted occupation. I work under missiles and through scant resources. I experience risks and dangers and face abominable choices made from nightmares. I know heartbreaking death.As doctors here, we fear, suffer, cry, and grieve alongside our patients and their families. This is my story of how we continue to care.Summer 2014 A Fifty-Two-Day War: How To Stay And How To Keep Them SafeThe huge bombardment strikes close to the hospital, scattering glass and rubble. It brings an abrupt end to my rare, quiet pause for coffee. Are the babies hit? We sprint to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, our full attention only on those infants, hastily checking every crib. My thoughts are frenzied. What if the next missile strikes us? Will I be able to rescue them? Will I have time to carry their tiny bodies outside through wreckage and fire? How will I choose who to save, and who to leave behind? Could I choose? Will I even be able to think lucidly, act logically for those babies if the fire consumes us? We stay.Somewhere, a house razed to the ground, a mother and her children dead. This time, our babies are safe.Summer 2014 A Fifty-Two-Day War: How To Cast Off Danger And How To Find ConsolationA missile shatters our neighbour’s roof. I am about to leave home for my evening shift. I check on my shaking mum; she is okay, not hurt at least. I ring the senior doctor. I am sorry. I am coming. I will be a little late. Two further missiles hit, wiping out the next-door building completely. No, do not send an ambulance for me. It is too dangerous. I will come [End Page 153] alone. Trembling through the dust and darkness, I leave on foot to reach those babies. I must compose myself. We are needed there to bring calm, to keep caring.And we gamble our lives to seek distraction and comfort for ourselves. We find solace through unbearable pain in our caring.Winter, Spring, Autumn, Summer, Any Day: How To Question Purpose And How To Feel HelplessIt is an ordinary night shift in ‘quiet’ times. Tonight, all the beds are occupied. All the ventilators are taken, forcing life into small, sick faces. At dawn, the phone call comes. A new baby struggling to breathe is on his way. I call around. No more beds to take him here or anywhere. No more ventilators—here or anywhere. Bring him here. We will care for him.He is in a very bad way. He needs immediate life-saving care. We take turns manually ventilating him, working to the hissing rhythm of the Ambu Bag1—inflating, deflating, inflating. Our arms ache. We keep pumping the bag. Do not stop. The moment when the morning shift arrives is our moment of salvage. We can go home. We have made it through the night without medicines, machines, disposables, or enough manpower, our arms throbbing. We have kept him alive.But he is so fragile, the system is fragile, we are fragile. Dare I even ask—is it worth it? Is it worth a baby surviving the... (shrink)

This article offers a series of critical theorizations on the biopolitical dimensions of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), with specific attention to what has recently been referred to in the United States as the ‘MRSA Epidemic’. In particular, we reflect on the proliferation of biomedical discourses around the ‘spread’, and the pathogenic potentialities, of community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA). We turn to the work of Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy to better make sense of how, during this immunological crisis, the individualized (...) fleshy and fluid body is articulated to dimensions of community and corporeal proximity; the body is thus conceived in popular biopolitical framings as a site of transmission, inoculation, and isolation – as a living ecological and pathological vessel. We give emphasis to the spatial relations of flesh, namely in how biomedical ‘experts’ have sought to (bio-)technologize spaces of heightened communal bodily contact (such as playgrounds or gymnasia). (shrink)

Bioethics has entered a new era: as many commentators have noted, the familiar mantra of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice has proven to be an overly simplistic framework for understanding problems that arise in modern medicine, particularly at the intersection of public policy and individual preferences. A tradition of liberal pluralism grounds respect for individual preferences and affirmation of competing conceptions of the good. But we struggle to maintain (or at times explicitly reject) this tradition in the face of individual (...) preferences that we find distasteful, suspect, or even repugnant, especially where the broader social good or respect for equality is at stake. Directed donation presents us with such a dilemma: can we uphold the right of self-determination through respect of individual preferences regarding disposition of transplantable organs while at the same time maintaining an allocation system that reflects values of equity and justice claimed to underlie the socially negotiated practice of transplantation? Or are some preferences simply to be deemed unethical and not respected, even if that leads to a reduction in the number of transplantable organs available and to an apparent disregard for the autonomous decisions of the recently deceased? (shrink)

Independence was a core value of the movement for disability rights. People with disabilities did not have to be dependent, advocates claimed; they were robbed of autonomy by poverty, social prejudice, and architectural barriers. Recently, critics have noted that the emphasis on independence equates personhood with autonomy, reason, and self-awareness, thereby excluding those who are incapable of self-determination. The stigma of dependency is communicated to caregivers whose work is devalued and undercompensated. These values are echoed in the life writing of (...) people with disabilities, which tends to present a singular narrative voice, even when the author requires assistance in the physical or intellectual work of composition. The 1979 Mexican memoir-testimonio Gaby Brimmer, collaboratively authored by the acclaimed journalist Elena Poniatowska, Brimmer, her mother, and her paid caregiver is a notable exception. Consisting of interwoven dialogue among its three informants, Gaby Brimmer enacts dependency at the level of form, while exploring the challenges and opportunities of interdependence in societies that devalue the giving and receiving of care. (shrink)

Comparison between different animal species is omnipresent in the history of science and medicine but rarely subject to focussed historical analysis. The articles in the “Working Across Species” topical collection address this deficit by looking directly at the practical and epistemic work of cross-species comparison. Drawn from papers presented at a Wellcome-Trust-funded workshop in 2016, these papers investigate various ways that comparison has been made persuasive and successful, in multiple locations, by diverse disciplines, over the course of two centuries. They (...) explore the many different animal features that have been considered to be comparable, and the ways that animals have shaped science and medicine through the use of comparison. Authors demonstrate that comparison between species often transcended the range of practices typically employed with experimental animal models, where standardised practises and apparatus were applied to standardised bodies to produce generalizable, objective data; instead, comparison across species has often engaged diverse groups of non-standard species, made use of subjective inferences about phenomena that cannot be directly observed, and inspired analogies that linked physiological and behavioural characteristics with the apparent affective state of non-human animals. Moreover, such comparative practices have also provided unusually fruitful opportunities for collaborative connections between different research traditions and disciplines. (shrink)

I respond to Sarah Buss first by considering Socrates as an exemplar of courageous resistance to injustice, then by adding two caveats: exemplary resistance seems to flow from very diverse psychological profiles, and cowardice may not always be best understood as expressing fearful self‐attachment.

This essay considers how an “intimacy contract,” as a conceptual tool and a political reality, extends existing critiques of the social contract tradition by accounting for the privatized nature of the post-9/11 US empire. Examining critiques by Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, I argue that an intimacy contract uncovers the coercive power relations underlying neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurial freedom. Focusing on migrant labor on US military bases, I provide an overview of the racial, sexual, and settler contracts and the need (...) to extend Mills’s and Pateman’s critiques of embodiment and spatiality. Next, I suggest how the intimacy contract generates a transnational, embodied account of the labors upholding US empire; a lens into the shifting significance of these labors under neoliberal imperialism; and a chronicling of desire and workers’ interests. In conclusion, I suggest how the intimacy contract exposes multiple resistances to US empire and neoliberal capitalism. (shrink)

CRISPR, a recently developed gene-editing tool, has become synonymous with rapid biological advancement. While gene editing had been performed in life sciences research for decades, genetic engineering with CRISPR is much more straightforward, faster, and less expensive—and thus, the technology has been rapidly democratized. CRISPR was built on a natural mechanism, the method by which bacteria resist infections from viruses called bacteriophage. Once infected, bacteria may recognize specific genetic sequences of the invading bacteriophage virus and chop its genetic material into (...) pieces. This bacterial immune response, discovered through basic research, has been exploited by scientists to develop a gene-editing tool... (shrink)

De Neys offers a welcome departure from the dual-process accounts that have dominated theorizing about reasoning. However, we see little justification for retaining the distinction between intuition and deliberation. Instead, reasoning can be treated as a case of multiple-cue decision making. Reasoning phenomena can then be explained by decision-making models that supply the processing details missing from De Neys's framework.

The concept of solidarity is of central importance to the political sense of collective action. But it is a curious fact that solidarity is virtually unmentioned across the large and growing literature in philosophical collective action theory. Instead, we see discussions of collective action overwhelmingly focus on epistemic conditions and group-level correlates of individual action explanations such as collective intentions, collective beliefs, and so on. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the relationship between solidarity and collective action theory. (...) I will try to answer two questions: (1) What is it about the structure of accounts of collective action that seems to preclude discussions of solidarity and related concepts; and (2) How can solidarity be made to play a useful role in those accounts? (shrink)