This case describes an adolescent in a crisis of a chronic medical condition whose situation is complicated by substance abuse and mental illness. D. Micah Hester provides an analytic approach, teasing apart the multiple layers of medical, developmental, and moral issues at hand and describing possible responses and outcomes. Amy T. Campbell examines existing legal guidelines for adolescent decision making, arguing that greater space exists for clinical discretion in these matters than commonly thought. Cheryl D. Lew discusses the development (...) of agency in adolescent patients, the ideal of autonomous decision making in the context of impairment and chronic illness, and the obligation of healthcare teams to examine an adolescent patient’s decisions in relation to her identity. (shrink)

We extend attribution and stakeholder theory in the context of crisis reputation management by examining differences in stakeholder perceptions in the form of organization-related blame. We presented eight stakeholder groups with factual information surrounding the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and asked them to indicate the extent to which they blamed the leaders and organizations associated with the event. Stakeholders also completed a survey assessing their attribution styles. Results indicated that perceptions of blame were affected by the interaction of stakeholder role (...) (i.e., active vs. passive) with attribution style (i.e., optimistic vs. pessimistic). Our results suggest that organizational leaders’ understanding of their stakeholders may be an important aspect in managing stakeholders’ sensemaking during crises. (shrink)

In 1933, Ethel Thompson Overby became the first African American female principal in Richmond, Virginia. Her motto was ?It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness? (Overby 1975, 1). Before becoming principal, Overby had been a teacher in the southern urban de jure segregated schools of the city. How did the racially segregated context impact her understanding of democracy as an African American woman? As a teacher, what educational practices did she subscribe to? What educational theorizing (...) underpinned her educational practices as a teacher and as a principal? Who was she? These were the questions that guided this research into the educational theorizing of Ethel T. Overby. This research seeks to further the understanding of the theorizing that underpinned the educational practices of African American female teachers and principals who taught and led in public urban de jure segregated southern schools (Charron 2009; Johnson 2000; May 2007; Walker 2009). This historical qualitative research provides knowledge about the educational theorizing of African American educators and how past practices can support the educational fortitude of African American students today. ?To be a teacher, you had to be a good citizen.??Ethel Thompson Overby (1975, 10). (shrink)

Sometimes someone does something morally wrong in clear-eyed awareness that what she is doing is wrong. More commonly, a wrongdoer fails to see that her conduct is wrong. Call the latter behavior unwitting wrongful conduct. It is generally agreed that an agent can be blameworthy for such conduct, but there is considerable disagreement about how one’s blameworthiness in such cases is to be explained, or what conditions must be satisfied for the agent to be blameworthy for her conduct. Many theorists (...) hold that an agent’s blameworthiness for unwitting wrongful conduct must stem from—or trace back to—her blameworthiness for something else. And appeals to tracing in these cases lead some writers to a highly revisionist view, on which people are blameworthy for wrongdoing much less often than we ordinarily think (and our mistake, unfortunately, isn’t about how much wrongdoing there is). In this chapter, I set out the main claims of an argument for such a view and respond to it. I offer grounds for retaining a good many of the judgments that the revisionist would have us reject. The defense rests to a significant extent on commonsense views about the psychological capacities and abilities to act that people ordinarily possess, views that, as far as I can tell, revisionists have not shown to be mistaken. (shrink)

This paper defends a minimal desert thesis, according to which someone who is blameworthy for something deserves to feel guilty, to the right extent, at the right time, because of her culpability. The sentiment or emotion of guilt includes a thought that one is blameworthy for something as well as an unpleasant affect. Feeling guilty is not a matter of inflicting suffering on oneself, and it need not involve any thought that one deserves to suffer. The desert of a feeling (...) of guilt is a kind of moral propriety of that response, and it is a matter of justice. If the minimal desert thesis is correct, then it is in some respect good that one who is blameworthy feel guilty—there is some justice in that state of affairs. But if retributivism concerns the justification of punishment, the minimal desert thesis is not retributivist. Its plausibility nevertheless raises doubt about whether, as some have argued, there are senses of moral responsibility that are not desert-entailing. (shrink)

Consider cases in which an agent simply doesn.t think to do a certain thing, or doesn't think of a crucial consideration favoring doing a certain thing, or intends to do a certain thing but forgets to do it. In such a case, is the agent able to do the thing that she fails to do? Assume that commonly we all‐in can do things that we do not do. Here I argue that, given this assumption, in the cases under consideration, too, (...) commonly agents all‐in can do the things they fail to do. (shrink)

Part of our ordinary conception of our freedom is the idea that commonly when we act—and often even when we don’t act—it is up to us whether we do this or that. This paper examines efforts to spell out what must be the case for this idea to be correct. Several claims regarding the basic metaphysics of agential powers are considered; they are found not to shed light on the issue. Thinking about agents’ psychological capacities provides some illumination, though the (...) idea of freedom remains puzzling. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 61-73 [Access article in PDF] Free Words to Free ManifestaSome Experiments in Art as Gift Sal Randolph Free Words It began this way. Standing nervously in a bookstore, in front of the section on literary theory, hidden from the eyes of the staff, I reached my hand into my bag like a thief and pulled out a hot pink book. I looked (...) up and down the aisle. No one was watching. O.K., now. I slipped it into the shelf among the F's (file under Free) and it was done.So I began my career as in infiltrator of public spaces, a thief not of books but of shelf space, of access. A bypasser of gateways, permissions, and procedures.The book was called Free Words, and was an art project of mine. Its content was a list of 13,000 words I had collected over ten years. I had uncopyrighted the text, placing it in the public domain (no rights reserved), and labeled the book as free. No price tag, no barcode, no ISBN. The back cover said only "this book belongs to whoever finds it." I had printed 1,000 copies of it, and the idea was to create a kind of situation.Someone who came across the book would have to decide what it was and who really owned it. If they wanted it, they would have to decide whether to walk out with it like a shoplifter, or whether to negotiate something [End Page 61] with the sales clerk. Bookstores would have to either purge the book or harbor it. There was a brief explanation and a web address at the back of the book, and if anyone made it to the site there was an invitation to become a distributor of the book, to join in the process of placing it in bookstores and libraries.I spent a few months like that as 2001 came to a close: October, November, December; walking through a New York stunned by September 11, developing the habit of nonobedience. 1 This was the time when the media was telling us to shop, when we were being told to agree,as if agreement and shopping were the definition and extent of our citizenship.At first I was nervous, afraid of being stopped, but after a couple hundred books I relaxed. I was never questioned. The more I did it, the more the commercial space of the city seemed like public space, my space. The city, recovering month by month, felt more like an ecology—a human social ecology, intricate and interdependent. There were more ways of living within it and participating in it than I had supposed.One of the questions raised by cities is who we are in them. How do we find ourselves as individuals, as agents? What kinds of citizenship are possible? Something about this project changed my relationship to the city from being a passive inhabitant of its structures, both social and architectural, to being more active, as I began to feel free to engage those structures more playfully, and to create new structures.As the winter deepened, the Free Words project began to develop in a surprising way. On the website I invited people to become volunteer distributors of the book. I expected that a small number of people would find their way from the book to the website and an even smaller number of those might become distributors. What happened was something quite different: a few people did find the book and the website, but they weren't all interested in simply becoming distributors themselves. Some of them told the story of Free Words on various online forums, journals, and blogs, passing it on through their internet communities. Dozens of people who had never seen a copy of the book found their way to the site, and I began shipping batches of books to volunteers all over the country and the world. I printed more, and then more again.For me the project became like a kind of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 61-73 [Access article in PDF] Free Words to Free ManifestaSome Experiments in Art as Gift Sal Randolph Free Words It began this way. Standing nervously in a bookstore, in front of the section on literary theory, hidden from the eyes of the staff, I reached my hand into my bag like a thief and pulled out a hot pink book. I looked (...) up and down the aisle. No one was watching. O.K., now. I slipped it into the shelf among the F's (file under Free) and it was done.So I began my career as in infiltrator of public spaces, a thief not of books but of shelf space, of access. A bypasser of gateways, permissions, and procedures.The book was called Free Words, and was an art project of mine. Its content was a list of 13,000 words I had collected over ten years. I had uncopyrighted the text, placing it in the public domain (no rights reserved), and labeled the book as free. No price tag, no barcode, no ISBN. The back cover said only "this book belongs to whoever finds it." I had printed 1,000 copies of it, and the idea was to create a kind of situation.Someone who came across the book would have to decide what it was and who really owned it. If they wanted it, they would have to decide whether to walk out with it like a shoplifter, or whether to negotiate something [End Page 61] with the sales clerk. Bookstores would have to either purge the book or harbor it. There was a brief explanation and a web address at the back of the book, and if anyone made it to the site there was an invitation to become a distributor of the book, to join in the process of placing it in bookstores and libraries.I spent a few months like that as 2001 came to a close: October, November, December; walking through a New York stunned by September 11, developing the habit of nonobedience. 1 This was the time when the media was telling us to shop, when we were being told to agree,as if agreement and shopping were the definition and extent of our citizenship.At first I was nervous, afraid of being stopped, but after a couple hundred books I relaxed. I was never questioned. The more I did it, the more the commercial space of the city seemed like public space, my space. The city, recovering month by month, felt more like an ecology—a human social ecology, intricate and interdependent. There were more ways of living within it and participating in it than I had supposed.One of the questions raised by cities is who we are in them. How do we find ourselves as individuals, as agents? What kinds of citizenship are possible? Something about this project changed my relationship to the city from being a passive inhabitant of its structures, both social and architectural, to being more active, as I began to feel free to engage those structures more playfully, and to create new structures.As the winter deepened, the Free Words project began to develop in a surprising way. On the website I invited people to become volunteer distributors of the book. I expected that a small number of people would find their way from the book to the website and an even smaller number of those might become distributors. What happened was something quite different: a few people did find the book and the website, but they weren't all interested in simply becoming distributors themselves. Some of them told the story of Free Words on various online forums, journals, and blogs, passing it on through their internet communities. Dozens of people who had never seen a copy of the book found their way to the site, and I began shipping batches of books to volunteers all over the country and the world. I printed more, and then more again.For me the project became like a kind of... (shrink)

A contrastive rational explanation of a choice cites a reason why the agent made that choice rather than, say, making a different choice, or rather than making no choice at all. It is often said that if, as libertarians maintain, free choices are undetermined by prior events, then it is not possible to provide contrastive rational explanations of them. Alternatively, it is sometimes said that while non-causal contrastive rational explanation of such a choice might be possible, causal contrastive rational explanation (...) is not. Here it is argued that the libertarian requirement is no bar to causal contrastive rational explanation of free choice. (shrink)

Frankfurt-style cases are supposed to show that an agent can be responsible for doing something even though the agent wasn’t able to do otherwise. Neil Levy has argued that the cases fail. Agents in such cases, he says, lack a capacity that they’d have to have in order to be responsible for doing what they do. Here it’s argued that Levy is mistaken. Although it may be that agents in Frankfurt-style cases lack some kind of capability, what they lack isn’t (...) required for them to be responsible for doing what they do. Differences between actions and omissions, and between the requirements for responsibility for these two, are also discussed. (shrink)

Children like Baby G, born with complex chronic medical conditions that compromise function in the long term, are an increasing presence in tertiary-level neonatal intensive care units. The parents and health-care providers of these children are faced with profoundly difficult decisions. Whether severe congenital anomalies with poor prognosis are diagnosed antenatally or are discovered at the time of birth, the issues are vexing, and the impact decisions will have on everyone in the family is profound. What should such decisions be (...) based upon? What values and principles might guide the decision-making process? What moral justifications allow for pursuing.. (shrink)

_Offering a new edition of Dewey’s 1916 collection of essays_ This critical edition of John Dewey’s 1916 collection of writings on logic, _Essays in Experimental Logic—_in which Dewey presents his concept of logic as the theory of inquiry and his unique and innovative development of the relationship of inquiry to experience—is the first scholarly reprint of the work in one volume since 1954. _Essays in Experimental Logic, _edited by D. Micah Hester and Robert B. Talisse, uses the authoritative texts (...) from the _Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953_ and includes as well articles from leading journals representing various contemporary schools of philosophy that criticized Dewey’s experimentalism. Culling materials from six volumes of the chronologically arranged _Collected Works_, this single-volume edition of _Essays_ marks a crucial point in Dewey’s intellectual development: one in which Dewey critically engages idealistic and intuitionist theorists and lays the groundwork for his mature theory of inquiry. The text includes a new introduction by renowned Dewey scholar Tom Burke that places _Essays_ in philosophical and historical context. In addition to the original essays, _Essays in Experimental Logic_ also features five critical essays by Dewey’s contemporaries, including Bertrand Russell, Wendell T. Bush, R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, H. T. Costello, and C. S. Peirce. (shrink)

The behavior of some nightlife-setting patrons would be unacceptable in workplaces or public settings and could cause distress to other patrons. This quantitative study determined 381 young Australian’s descriptive and personal norms regarding four types of sexual behavior. Participants’ personal norms were that these behaviors are wrong, but they reported that the behaviors are common in a nightlife setting. Behaviors such as these could theoretically be prevented by modifying patrons’ descriptive norms with evidence that their beliefs are contrary to individuals’ (...) personal norms of acceptable behavior in nightlife settings. (shrink)

The main purpose of this study was to map school leaders? perceptions concerning the cooperation of the leadership team, the distribution of leadership functions and participative decision?making, and to asses their relative weight in terms of predicting school leaders? job satisfaction. Also, the effect of demographical and structural school variables (i.e. seniority, job experience, school size, size of the leadership team, school type) on school leaders? job satisfaction was examined. A sample of 130 school leaders of 46 large secondary schools (...) completed a self?report questionnaire. The study results indicated that school leaders are highly satisfied with their job. Multiple regression analysis revealed that job satisfaction was significantly related to the cooperation of the leadership team and the school type. The amount of formal distribution of leadership functions and participative decision?making of teachers in the school policy did not have a significant influence on school leaders? job satisfaction. (shrink)

Emotions can be explained as specialized states, shaped by natural selection, that increase fitness in specific situations. The physiological, psychological, and behavioral characteristics of a specific emotion can be analyzed as possible design features that increase the ability to cope with the threats and opportunities present in the corresponding situation. This approach to understanding the evolutionary functions of emotions is illustrated by the correspondence between (a) the subtypes of fear and the different kinds of threat; (b) the attributes of happiness (...) and sadness and the changes that would be advantageous in propitious and unpropitious situations; and (c) the social emotions and the adaptive challenges of reciprocity relationships. In addition to addressing a core theoretical problem shared by evolutionary and cognitive psychology, explicit formulations of the evolutionary functions of specific emotions are of practical importance for understanding and treating emotional disorders. (shrink)

The form of Western mainstream film is the crux of its ideological efficiency: by using established formal techniques, films ensure audiences un- derstand that aesthetic decisions support and clarify the narrative to ensure maximum spectatorial satisfaction. However, some films exploit their formal aesthetics in order to prevent clarification, thwarting satisfaction in favour of viewing practices that can be considered perverse in that they withhold, suspend or obstruct immediate pleasure. Contemporary Western filmmaking in the mid-1990s witnessed the emergence of a distinct (...) group of filmmakers and films that, in the popular discourse of cinematic criticism, were together coded as “difficult” or “perverse.” These films were, as a result of the characteristics we identify below, situated obliquely in relation to the larger economic and artistic struc- tures of a commercially oriented “mainstream” cinema. Included in this new form of cinematic production were films from directors such as Tim Burton: Edward Scissorhands ; David Cronenberg: eXistenZ ; David Fincher: Se7en ; Peter Greenaway: The Baby of Maçon ; David Lynch: Lost Highway ; Quentin Tarantino: Pulp Fiction and Lars von Trier: Breaking the Waves . Whilst Western cinema as a whole has a long history of exploring “difficult” or “perverse” material within the overt or covert content of narrative, plot and story, such films demonstrate a particular relationship between the content being explored and the specific formal characteristics utilised in the delivery of that content. Thus where previous examples would utilise standardised formal techniques as a way of both delivering and containing the difficult or objectionable material, the films instead offer instances where the material of the narrative content seems to bleed backwards, affecting the form and rendering the very materiality of the film itself suspect and problematic. (shrink)

Hester Goodenough Gelber is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Stanford University.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

While the bioethics literature demonstrates that the field has spent substantial time and thought over the last four decades on the goals, methods, and desired outcomes for service and training in bioethics, there has been less progress defining the nature and goals of bioethics research and scholarship. This gap makes it difficult both to describe the breadth and depth of these areas of bioethics and, importantly, to gauge their success. However, the gap also presents us with an opportunity to define (...) this scope of work for ourselves and to help shape the broader conversation about the impact of academic research. Because of growing constraints on academic funding, researchers and scholars in many fields are being asked to demonstrate and also forecast the value and impact of their work. To do that, and also to satisfy ourselves that our work has meaningful effect, we must understand how our work can motivate change and how that change can be meaningfully measured. In a field as diverse as bioethics, the pathways to and metrics of change will likewise be diverse. It is therefore critical that any assessment of the impact of bioethics research and scholarship be informed by an understanding of the nature of the work, its goals, and how those goals can and ought to be furthered. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model that connects individual bioethics projects to the broader goals of scholarship, describing the translation of research and scholarly output into changes in thinking, practice, and policy. One of the key implications of the model is that impact in bioethics is generally the result of a collection of projects rather than of any single piece of research or scholarship. Our goal is to lay the groundwork for a thoroughgoing conversation about bioethics research and scholarship that will advance and shape the important conversation about their impact. (shrink)

Originally published in 1773 in two volumes, and now reissued here together in one, this work by the writer Hester Chapone, a renowned proponent of female education, contains advice delivered in the form of letters to her niece. The first volume deals primarily with matters of religion and morality, while the second volume addresses questions of behaviour and schooling. Unusually for self-improvement books of this era, Chapone recommends that a young woman should have a rigorous education in a wide (...) variety of subjects, including ancient history and geography, as well as instruction in ladylike deportment and mastery of household matters. She exhorts young ladies to avoid vanity and other vices through devoted study of scripture, and writes of the importance of choosing worthy and sensible friends who can be trusted to offer good advice. Chapone's posthumously published works, in two volumes, are also reissued in this series. (shrink)

Patient organizations increasingly play an important role in health care decision-making in Western countries. The Netherlands is one of the countries where this trend has gone furthest. In the literature some problems are identified, such as instrumental use of patient organizations by care providers, health insurers and the pharmaceutical industry. To strengthen the position of patient organizations government funding is often recommended as a solution. In this paper we analyze the ties between Dutch government and Dutch patient organizations to learn (...) more about the effects of such a relationship between government and this part of civil society. Our study is based on official government documents and existing empirical research on patient organizations. We found that government influence on patient organizations has become quite substantial with government influencing the organizational structure of patient organizations, the activities these organizations perform and even their ideology. Financing patient organizations offers the government an important means to hold them accountable. Although the ties between patient organizations and the government enable the former to play a role that can be valued as positive by both parties, we argue that they raise problems as well which warrant a discussion on how much government influence on civil society is acceptable. (shrink)

This comprehensive study offers a balanced assessment of libertarian accounts of free will. Bringing to bear recent work on action, causation, and causal explanation, Clarke defends a type of event-causal view from popular objections concerning rationality and diminished control. He subtly explores the extent to which event-causal accounts can secure the things for the sake of which we value free will, judging their success here to be limited. Clarke then sets out a highly original agent-causal account, one that integrates agent (...) causation and nondeterministic event causation. He defends this view from a number of objections but argues that we should find the substance causation required by any agent-causal account to be impossible. Clarke concludes that if a broad thesis of incompatibilism is correct--one on which both free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism--then no libertarian account is entirely adequate. (shrink)

We characterize equilibrium behavior in a finite horizon multiple-pie alternating offer bargaining game in which both agents have outside options and threat points. In contrast to the infinite horizon case the strength of the threat to delay agreement is non-stationary and decreases over time. Typically the delay threat determines equilibrium proposals in early periods, while the threat to opt out characterizes those in later ones. Owing to this non-stationarity both threats may appear in the equilibrium shares immediately agreed upon in (...) the first period. When the threat to opt out is empty for both agents, the outcome corresponds exactly with the (generalized) Nash bargaining solution. The latter observation may prove useful for designing experiments that are meant to test economic models that include a bargaining stage. (shrink)