author. University Professor in the School of Law, Columbia University. (From July 2006, Professor of Law, New York University.) Earlier versions of this Essay were presented at the Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy at University College London, at a law faculty workshop at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and at a constitutional law conference at Harvard Law School. I am particularly grateful to Ronald Dworkin, Ruth Gavison, and Seana Shiffrin for their formal comments on those occasions and also (...) to James Allan, Aharon Barak, Richard Bellamy, Aileen Cavanagh, Arthur Chaskalson, Michael Dorf, Richard Fallon, Charles Fried, Andrew Geddis, Stephen Guest, Ian Haney-Lopez, Alon Harel, David Heyd, Sam Issacharoff, Elena Kagan, Kenneth Keith, Michael Klarman, John Manning, Andrei Marmor, Frank Michelman, Henry Monaghan, Véronique Munoz-Dardé, John Morley, Matthew Palmer, Richard Pildes, Joseph Raz, Carol Sanger, David Wiggins, and Jo Wolff for their suggestions and criticisms. Hundreds of others have argued with me about this issue over the years: This Essay is dedicated to all of them, collegially and with thanks. (shrink)

By mid-2019 there were more than 80 AI ethics guides available in the public domain. Despite this, 2020 saw numerous news stories break related to ethically questionable uses of AI. In part, this is because AI ethics theory remains highly abstract, and of limited practical applicability to those actually responsible for designing algorithms and AI systems. Our previous research sought to start closing this gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of AI ethics through the creation of a searchable typology (...) of tools and methods designed to translate between the five most common AI ethics principles and implementable design practices. Whilst a useful starting point, that research rested on the assumption that _all_ AI practitioners are aware of the ethical implications of AI, understand their importance, and are actively seeking to respond to them. In reality, it is unclear whether this is the case. It is this limitation that we seek to overcome here by conducting a mixed-methods qualitative analysis to answer the following four questions: what do AI practitioners understand about the need to translate ethical principles into practice? What motivates AI practitioners to embed ethical principles into design practices? What barriers do AI practitioners face when attempting to translate ethical principles into practice? And finally, what assistance do AI practitioners want and need when translating ethical principles into practice? (shrink)

BackgroundThe phenomenon of ‘moral distress’ has continued to be a popular topic for nursing research. However, much of the scholarship has lacked conceptual clarity, and there is debate about what it means to experience moral distress. Moral distress remains an obscure concept to many clinical nurses, especially those outside of North America, and there is a lack of empirical research regarding its impact on nurses in the United Kingdom and its relevance to clinical practice.Research aimTo explore the concept of moral (...) distress in nursing both empirically and conceptually.MethodologyFeminist interpretive phenomenology was used to explore and analyse the experiences of critical care nurses at two acute care trauma hospitals in the United Kingdom. Empirical data were analysed using Van Manen’s six steps for data analysis.Ethical considerationsThe study was approved locally by the university ethics review committee and nationally by the Health Research Authority in the United Kingdom.FindingsThe empirical findings suggest that psychological distress can occur in response to a variety of moral events. The moral events identified as causing psychological distress in the participants’ narratives were moral tension, moral uncertainty, moral constraint, moral conflict and moral dilemmas.DiscussionWe suggest a new definition of moral distress which captures this broader range of moral events as legitimate causes of distress. We also suggest that moral distress can be sub-categroised according to the source of distress, for example, ‘moral-uncertainty distress’. We argue that this could aid in the development of interventions which attempt to address and mitigate moral distress.ConclusionThe empirical findings support the notion that narrow conceptions of moral distress fail to capture the real-life experiences of this group of critical care nurses. If these experiences resonate with other nurses and healthcare professionals, then it is likely that the definition needs to be broadened to recognise these experiences as ‘moral distress’. (shrink)

‘Normative powers’ are capacities to create normative reasons by our willing or say-so. They are significant, because if we have them and exercise them, then sometimes the reasons we have are ‘up to us’. But such powers seem mysterious. How can we, by willing, create reasons? In this paper, I examine whether normative powers can be adequately explained normatively, by appeal to norms of a practice, normative principles, human interests, or values. Can normative explanations of normative powers explain how an (...) exercise of the will can afford us special freedom in determining our reasons? I argue that normative approaches to answering this question prove to be inadequate. To vindicate the thought that normative powers can make our reasons ‘up to us’, we need an altogether different approach to understanding them, one that is located not in the normative but in the metaphysical. I end the paper by sketching a metaphysical explanation of normative powers. This metaphysical defence of normative powers provides a window into a different, more agent-centered way of thinking about rational agency. (shrink)

Offers an analysis of three strongly contrasting primitive civilizations, showing how behavior is influenced by custom and tradition.

There has been increasing debate in recent years about the conceptualization of moral distress. Broadly speaking, two groups of scholars have emerged: those who agree with Jameton’s ‘narrow definition’ that focuses on constraint and those who argue that Jameton’s definition is insufficient and needs to be broadened. Using feminist empirical bioethics, we interviewed critical care nurses in the United Kingdom about their experiences and conceptualizations of moral distress. We provide our broader definition of moral distress and examples of data that (...) both challenge and support our conceptualization. We pre‐empt and overcome three key challenges that could be levelled at our account and argue that there are good reasons to adopt our broader definition of moral distress when exploring prevalence of, and management strategies for, moral distress. (shrink)

This chapter argues that there is a particular kind of ‘internal’ commitment typically made in the context of romantic love relationships that has striking meta-normative implications for how we understand the role of the will in practical normativity. Internal commitments cannot plausibly explain the reasons we have in committed relationships on the usual model—as triggering reasons that are already there, in the way that making a promise triggers a reason via a pre-existing norm of the form ‘If you make a (...) promise to x, then you have a reason to x’. Instead, internal commitments are that in virtue of which one has the special reasons of committed relationships; they are the grounds of such reasons. In this way, the will is a source of practical normativity. (shrink)

While the phenomenon of ‘moral distress’ has been of interest to the nursing community since Jameton first described it in 1984, moral distress is now understood to effect healthcare professionals...

The World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on 11th March 2020, recognising that the underlying SARS-CoV-2 has caused the greatest global crisis since World War II. In this chapter, we present a framework to evaluate whether and to what extent the use of digital systems that track and/or trace potentially infected individuals is not only legal but also ethical.

Within this paper, we discuss Moral Distress Reflective Debriefs as a promising approach to address and mitigate moral distress experienced by healthcare professionals. We briefly review the empirical and theoretical literature on critical incident stress debriefing and psychological debriefing to highlight the potential benefits of this modality. We then describe the approach that we take to facilitating reflective group discussions in response to morally distressing patient cases (“Moral Distress Reflective Debriefs”). We discuss how the debriefing literature and other clinical ethics (...) activities influenced the development of our approach. In particular, we focus on the role of the clinical ethicist as a facilitator with particular emphasis on encouraging perspective-taking and nurturing ethical attunement in a supportive manner. We suggest that this approach reduces the narrowing effects of frustration and anger that are often reported when individuals experience moral-constraint distress. Finally, we provide an example of Moral Distress Reflective Debriefs, elucidating how this supportive process complements ethics consultation and can mitigate the negative effects of moral distress. (shrink)

Austerity, by its very nature, imposes constraints by limiting the options for action available to us because certain courses of action are too costly or insufficiently cost effective. In the context of healthcare, the constraints imposed by austerity come in various forms; ranging from the availability of certain treatments being reduced or withdrawn completely, to reductions in staffing that mean healthcare professionals must ration the time they make available to each patient. As austerity has taken hold, across the United Kingdom (...) and Europe, it is important to consider the wider effects of the constraints that it imposes in healthcare. Within this paper, we focus specifically on one theorised effect—moral distress. We differentiate between avoidable and unavoidable ethical challenges within healthcare and argue that austerity creates additional avoidable ethical problems that exacerbate clinicians’ moral distress. We suggest that moral resilience is a suitable response to clinician moral distress caused by unavoidable ethical challenges but additional responses are required to address those that are created due to austerity. We encourage clinicians to engage in critical resilience and activism to address problems created by austerity and we highlight the responsibility of institutions to support healthcare professionals in such challenging times. (shrink)

Common mental health disorders are rising globally, creating a strain on public healthcare systems. This has led to a renewed interest in the role that digital technologies may have for improving mental health outcomes. One result of this interest is the development and use of artificial intelligence for assessing, diagnosing, and treating mental health issues, which we refer to as ‘digital psychiatry’. This article focuses on the increasing use of digital psychiatry outside of clinical settings, in the following sectors: education, (...) employment, financial services, social media, and the digital well-being industry. We analyse the ethical risks of deploying digital psychiatry in these sectors, emphasising key problems and opportunities for public health, and offer recommendations for protecting and promoting public health and well-being in information societies. (shrink)

We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifically, we focus on the concept of empowerment and ask whether it is adequate for addressing some significant ethical concerns that relate to digital health technologies for mental healthcare. We frame these concerns using five key (...) ethical principles for AI ethics (i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and explicability), which have their roots in the bioethical literature, in order to critically evaluate the role that digital health technologies will have in the future of digital healthcare. (shrink)

In recent years, the phenomenon of moral distress has been critically examined—and for a good reason. There have been a number of different definitions suggested, some that claimed to be consistent with the original definition but in fact referred to different epistemological states. In this paper, we re‐examine moral distress by exploring its relationship with moral agency. We critically examine three conceptions of moral agency and argue that two of these conceptions risk placing nurses' values at the center of moral (...) action when it ought to be the patient's values that shape nurses' obligations. We propose that the conception of moral agency advanced by Aimee Milliken which re‐centers patient values, should be more broadly accepted within nursing. We utilize a case example to demonstrate a situation in which the values of a patient's parents (surrogates) justifiably constrained nurses' moral agency, creating moral distress. Through an examination of constraints on nurse agency in this case, we illustrate the problematic nature of ‘narrow' moral distress and the value of re‐considering moral distress. Finally, we provide an action‐oriented proposal identifying mediating steps that we argue have utility for nurses (and other healthcare professionals) to mediate between experiences of narrow moral distress and the exercise of moral agency. (shrink)

Background There is ongoing debate regarding how moral distress should be defined. Some scholars argue that the standard “narrow” definition overlooks morally relevant causes of distress, while others argue that broadening the definition of moral distress risks making measurement impractical. However, without measurement, the true extent of moral distress remains unknown. Research aims To explore the frequency and intensity of five sub-categorizations of moral distress, resources used, intention to leave, and turnover of nurses using a new survey instrument. Research design (...) A mixed methods embedded design included a longitudinal, descriptive investigator-developed electronic survey with open-ended questions sent twice a week for 6 weeks. Analysis included descriptive and comparative statistics and content analysis of narrative data. Participants Registered nurses from four hospitals within one large healthcare system in Midwest United States. Ethical considerations IRB approval was obtained. Results 246 participants completed the baseline survey, 80 participants provided data longitudinally for a minimum of 3 data points. At baseline, moral-conflict distress occurred with the highest frequency, followed by moral-constraint distress and moral-tension distress. By intensity, the most distressing sub-category was moral-tension distress, followed by “other” distress and moral-constraint distress. Longitudinally, when ranked by frequency, nurses experienced moral-conflict distress, moral-constraint distress, and moral-tension distress; by intensity, scores were highest for moral-tension distress, moral-uncertainty distress, and moral-constraint distress. Of available resources, participants spoke with colleagues and senior colleagues more frequently than using consultative services such as ethics consultation. Conclusions Nurses experienced distress related to a number of moral issues extending beyond the traditional understanding of moral distress (as occurring due to a constraint) suggesting that our understanding and measurement of moral distress should be broadened. Nurses frequently used peer support as their primary resource but it was only moderately helpful. Effective peer support for moral distress could be impactful. Future research on moral distress sub-categories is needed. (shrink)

Russell articulates compelling reasons that bioethicists and health care professionals should take individual responsibility for deconstructing structural injustices in healthcare through in...

The idea of a role in nursing that includes expertise in ethics has been around for more than 30 years. Whether or not one subscribes to the idea that nursing ethics is separate and distinct from bioethics, nursing practice has much to contribute to the ethical practice of healthcare, and with the strong grounding in ethics and aspiration for social justice considerations in nursing, there is no wonder that the specific role of the nurse ethicist has emerged. Nurse ethicists, expert (...) in nursing practice and the application of ethical theories and concepts, are well positioned to guide nurses through complex ethical challenges. However, there is limited discussion within the field regarding the specific job responsibilities that the nurse ethicist ought to have. The recent appearance of job postings with the title “nurse ethicist” suggest that some healthcare institutions have identified the value of a nurse in the practice of ethics and are actively recruiting. Discomfort about the possibility of others defining the role of the nurse ethicist inspired this paper (and special issue). If the nurse ethicist is to be seen as an integral part of addressing ethical dilemmas and ethical conflicts that arise in healthcare, then nurse ethicists ought to be at the forefront of defining this role. In this paper, we draw upon our own experiences as nurse ethicists in large academic healthcare systems to describe the essential elements that ought to be addressed in a job description for a nurse ethicist practicing in a clinical setting linked to academic programs. Drawing upon our experience and the literature, we describe how we perceive the nurse ethicist adds value to healthcare organizations and teams of professional ethicists. (shrink)

Well-designed pragmatic clinical trials (PCTs) are critical for improving healthcare delivery and patient outcomes (Haff and Choudhry 2018), and the article written by Garland et al. (2023) advance...

While Jameton’s (1984) definition of moral distress has been embraced by researchers and scholars for recognizing the many constraints that nurses experience on their moral agency, it has also been...

What kind of affective phenomenon is religious zeal and how does it relate to other affective phenomena, such as moral anger, hatred, and love? In this paper, I argue that religious zeal can be both, and be presented and interpreted as both, a love-like passion and an anger-like emotion. As a passion, religious zeal consists of the loving devotion to a transcendent religious object or idea such as God. It is a relatively enduring attachment that is constitutive of who the (...) zealot is, and it expresses itself in a distinctive set of mental and behavioral dispositions. Most importantly, it motivates uncompromising actions and involves intense, hot, and deep emotions. As an anger-like emotion, religious zeal is an occurrent affective state of mind that is intentionally directed towards a specific object, characteristically a person or group of persons. It condemns the violation of a religious norm that is taken to be of absolute validity and general applicability. It motivates an action aiming at vengeance and retaliation, and it involves intense and hot feelings of hostility towards its object. I argue that rather than reducing the complex phenomenon of religious zeal to one of these two manifestations, we should reflect upon the question of how the two distinct conceptualizations relate to each other. (shrink)

This paper aims to reconstruct Francis Hutcheson's thinking about liberty. Since he does not offer a detailed treatment of philosophical questions concerning liberty in his mature philosophical writings I turn to a textbook on metaphysics. We can assume that he prepared the textbook during the 1720s in Dublin. This textbook deserves more attention. First, it sheds light on Hutcheson's role as a teacher in Ireland and Scotland. Second, Hutcheson's contributions to metaphysical disputes are more original than sometimes assumed. To appreciate (...) his independent thinking, I argue, it is helpful to take the intellectual debates in Ireland into consideration, including William King's defence of free will and discussions of Shaftesbury's views in Robert Molesworth's intellectual circle. Rather than taking a stance on the philosophical disputes about liberty, I argue that Hutcheson aims to shift the focus of the debates towards practical questions concerning control of desire, cultivation of habits, and character development. (shrink)

Background: Nurses face ethical issues and experience moral distress in their everyday work. A nursing ethics champion program was developed at a hospital in the United States. Methods: As part of a quality improvement project, pre- and post-training surveys were developed to assess whether the program was feasible and sustainable, enhanced nurse confidence in recognizing and addressing ethical issues and moral distress, and increased nurse knowledge of institutional resources for addressing the same. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed. Results: Thirteen (...) nurses from both the critical care and medical/surgical settings participated in the program. The program proved feasible. Attrition after the educational sessions raised concerns about sustainability. Survey results suggest an association between participating in the program’s educational sessions and increased nurse confidence in recognizing and addressing ethical issues and moral distress, as well as identifying institutional resources that can assist nurses with the same. Discussion: Opportunities for future nursing ethics champion programs include increasing the interactivity and duration of educational sessions, making programs multidisciplinary, and creating materials for nurses to more easily share with colleagues. It would be valuable for future research to measure the impact of nursing ethics champion programs on nursing turnover. Implications: A nursing ethics champion program has the potential to help nurses feel better equipped to navigate ethical issues and moral distress in their everyday work. (shrink)

This paper is an empirical critique of causal accounts of scientific explanation. Drawing on explanations which rely on nonlinear dynamical modeling, I argue that the requirement of causal relevance is both too strong and too weak to be constitutive of scientific explanation. In addition, causal accounts obscure how the process of mathematical modeling produces explanatory information. I advance three arguments for the inadequacy of causal accounts. First, I argue that explanatorily relevant information is not always information about causes, even in (...) cases where the explanandum has an identifiable causal history. Second, I argue that treating theoretical explanations as reductions from general causal laws does not accurately describe the types of "top-down" explanations typical of dynamical modeling. Finally, I argue that causal/mechanical accounts of explanation are intrinsically vulnerable to the irrelevance problem. (shrink)

A prominent feature of late nineteenth-century psychology was its intense preoccupation with precision. Precision was at once an ideal and an argument: the quest for precision helped psychology to establish its status as a mature science, sharing a characteristic concern with the natural sciences. We will analyse how psychologists set out to produce precision in 'mental chronometry', the measurement of the duration of psychological processes. In his Leipzig laboratory, Wundt inaugurated an elaborate research programme on mental chronometry. We will look (...) at the problem of calibration of experimental apparatus and will describe the intricate material, literary, and social technologies involved in the manufacture of precision. First, we shall discuss some of the technical problems involved in the measurement of ever shorter time-spans. Next, the Cattell-Berger experiments will help us to argue against the received view that all the precision went into the hardware, and practically none into the social organization of experimentation. Experimenters made deliberate efforts to bring themselves and their subjects under a regime of control and calibration similar to that which reigned over the experimental machinery. In Leipzig psychology, the particular blend of material and social technology resulted in a specific object of study: the generalized mind. We will then show that the distribution of precision in experimental psychology outside Leipzig demanded a concerted effort of instruments, texts, and people. It will appear that the forceful attempts to produce precision and uniformity had some rather paradoxical consequences. (shrink)

Grimwade et al highlight the current lack of a universal, standardised approach to the payment of participants taking part in controlled human infection model studies.1 As they discuss, payment for these studies is controversial, with many voicing arguments for and against higher payments, particularly for those studies which involve significant burdens to the participant. The main concerns about overpayment relate to the concepts of undue inducement or coercion, whereas underpayment raises concern about exploitation and unfair treatment. In many healthy volunteer (...) trials compensation for travel, time and inconvenience are generally accepted as fair payment, but payment for risk is less accepted, with a belief that non-therapeutic studies should only incur minimal risks, so payment for risk should not be necessary.2 This paper argues that payment for risk should be included for CHIM studies. Their findings among members of the UK public and CHIM experts from a variety of centres suggest that there is support for greater risks being associated with higher payments for participants. The amount of compensation offered by a trial has to be approved by an ethics committee/institutional review board, and some research suggests that IRB members have concerns about higher payments being offered, with only approximately one-third agreeing that payment should be offered for risk.3 Without agreement and clear guidance for calculating compensation for these types of trial, there is bound to be …. (shrink)

Healthcare professionals are currently working under extreme pressure as they respond to the pandemic outbreak of COVID-19. At the time of writing, there is currently no effective vaccine or anti-viral treatment. The pandemic is fast-moving, relatively unpredictable and of uncertain duration. In many countries, it is placing an enormous stress on healthcare resources and providing care to existing standards is proving difficult. Unfortunately, in some countries, health services have been overwhelmed. The impact of the pandemic on resource-poor countries is of (...) particular concern. This extraordinary situation is raising, or has the potential to raise, many ethical challenges for doctors delivering care to patients. It is possible, for example, that there may be points in this pandemic where decisions need to be made about who should have access to finite specialised intensive care beds, drugs and equipment. This has happened in some countries and, despite efforts by the UK Government to reduce demand and increase supply, it is still possible that this could happen in the UK. Some hospital trusts in the UK are already reporting concerningly low supplies of oxygen and vital medicines such as propofol and alfentanil.1 In these circumstances, where not everyone can be treated, difficult ethical decisions will have to made. For example, can some patients be prioritised over others? How should a doctor decide on which patients to treat? Can treatment be withdrawn from patients who are currently being treated, but are not responding, in order to offer treatment to those who may have a better chance of benefiting? The UK is also reporting concerningly low supplies of vital personal protective equipment for frontline workers, raising the question - what are a doctor’s obligations to treat patients, in circumstances that present a high …. (shrink)

Lacan with the Philosophers creates a dialogue between the oeuvre of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and philosophy. Major philosophical figures to which Lacan vastly referred are examined around key concepts fundamental to philosophy - being, truth, knowledge, the good, the subject.

Citizenship and its education is again gaining importance in many countries. This paper uses England as its primary example to develop a Habermasian perspective on this issue. The statutory requirements for citizenship education in England imply that significant attention be given to the moral and social development of the learner over time, to the active engagement of the learner in community and to the knowledge skills and understanding necessary for political action. This paper sets out a theoretical framework that offers (...) a perspective on learning suitable for these far-reaching aims. We argue that schools need to shift from the currently dominant discourse of accountability to incorporate a discourse of care in order to make room for an effective and appropriate pedagogy for citizenship. Habermas’s social theory gives us a theoretical framework that properly locates schools within the lifeworld as part of civil society. Schools should therefore attend to hermeneutical and emancipatory concerns, not only to strategic interests. We put these in the context of Habermas’s social theory to paint an alternative vision learning for citizenship education which is based in developing the dispositions, values and attitudes necessary for lifelong learning with a view to developing ongoing communicative action. (shrink)

In response to the case study of Mr. Rivers, we will speak to three critical elements for an ethics consultant to address when a consult is requested due to moral distress. First, discern if the re...

This essay traces the development of the philosophical debates concerning active powers and human agency in eighteenth-century Scotland. I examine how and why Scottish philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull, David Hume, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, depart from John Locke’s and other traditional conceptions of the will and how Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart reinstate Locke’s distinction between volition and desire. Moreover, I examine what role desires, passions, and motives play in the writings of these and other Scottish (...) Enlightenment philosophers on human agency and draw attention to their underlying disputes concerning liberty and necessity. I end by reflecting on how classifications of principles of actions changed in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy. (shrink)

Moral distress is a pervasive phenomenon in healthcare for which there is no straightforward “solution.” Rhetoric surrounding moral distress has shifted over time, with some scholars arguing that moral distress needs to be remedied, resolved, and eradicated, while others recognize that moral distress can have some positive value. The authors of this paper recognize that moral distress has value in its function as a warning sign, signaling the presence of an ethical issue related to patient care that requires deeper exploration, (...) rather than evidencing identification of the “right” course of action. Once the experience of moral distress is identified, steps ought to be taken to clarify the moral issue, and, if possible and reasonable, the patient’s values ought to be prioritized. This paper offers concrete actions steps, drawn from theory, which can be used in clinical practice to provide peer support or to facilitate self-reflection for morally distressed individuals. This approach empowers morally distressed individuals to explore ethical issues, identify concrete steps that can be taken, and mitigate feelings of powerlessness that are often associated with moral-constraint distress. The questions guide individuals and peers to reflect first on the micro-space and then more broadly on the institutional culture, facilitating meso- and macro-reflection and action. (shrink)

Ruth Jonathan; Introduction, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 31, Issue 1, 16 December 2002, Pages 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.00042.

Ruth Jonathan; What is an Educational Practice? A Reply to Wilfred Carr, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 21, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 177–180, htt.

The ArgumentThis essay addresses the historiographical question of how to study scientific instruments and the connections between them without rigidly determining the boundaries of the object under historical scrutiny beforehand. To do this, I will explore an episode in the early history of the tachistoscope — defined, among other things, as an instrument for the brief exposure of visual stimuli in experimental psychology. After looking at the tachistoscope described by physiologist Volkmann in 1859, I will turn to the gravity chronometer, (...) constructed by Cattell at Wundt's Leipzig institute of psychology in the 1880s. Taking Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances as a methodological suggestion to travel from one member to another to find out just how members relate to one another, I will investigate part of the family to which both the tachistoscope and the gravity chronometer turn out to belong. A detailed analysis of these instruments, using both historical sources and historical accounts of psychological instruments, may demonstrate that the instrument is not a standard package that, if well applied, will simply secure good results. Each package needs to be assembled again and again; the particular package that is assembled may differ on different occasions. Thus an alternative is developed to an understanding of instruments as univocally functioning material means. (shrink)

Over the past year, technology companies have made headlines claiming that their artificially intelligent (AI) products can outperform clinicians at diagnosing breast cancer, brain tumours, and diabetic retinopathy. Claims such as these have influenced policy makers, and AI now forms a key component of the national health strategies in England, the United States, and China. While it is positive to see healthcare systems embracing data analytics and machine learning, concerns remain about the efficacy, ethics, and safety of some commercial, AI (...) health solutions. This paper argues that improved regulation and guidance is urgently required to mitigate risks, ensure transparency and best practice, Without this, patients, clinicians, and other stakeholders cannot be assured of an app’s efficacy, and safety. (shrink)

In this chapter, I discuss Locke’s contributions to moral psychology. I begin by examining how we acquire moral ideas, according to Locke. Next, I ask what explains why we act morally. I address this question by showing how Locke reconciles hedonist views concerning moral motivation with his commitment to divine law theory. Then I turn to Shaftesbury’s criticism that Locke’s moral view is a self-interested moral theory that undermines virtue. In response to the criticism I draw attention to Locke’s Christian (...) conception of virtue. (shrink)

Ruth Jonathan; Bibliography, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 31, Issue 1, 16 December 2002, Pages 217–220, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.00050.

Ruth M Jonathan; Education, Gender and the Nature/Culture Controversy, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 5–20, https://.