‘Unconscious bias happens by our brains making incredibly quick judgements and assessments without us realising. Biases are influenced by background, cultural environment and experiences and we may not be aware of these views and opinions, or of their full impact and implications. This article opposes this point of view by arguing that bias is not unconscious but is conscious and linked to Charles Mills’ ‘Racial Contract’ and its ‘epistemologies of ignorance’. These epistemologies emerge from what the Equality Challenge Unit calls (...) ‘our background, cultural environment and personal experience’. Asserting that racism stems from ‘unconscious bias’ diminishes white supremacy and maintains white innocence as a ‘will to forget’ institutional racism. In equality and diversity training ‘unconscious bias’ has become a performative act to move beyond racism through training to participate in a constructed ‘post-racial’ reality. The article argues that through decolonizing ‘unconscious bias’, ‘white fragility’ and ‘self-forgiveness’ we can begin to see hidden institutional whiteliness at the base of conscious bias. (shrink)

The focus of this article will be on inserting the words of older women in prison into debates on time, agency and gendered identities in total institutions. Specifically, the article will address the complexity and contradictions of the time of ‘a mediated real’, and how this impacts on embodied identities within prison timescapes. This will be explored through looking at how prison-time as a ‘somatic identity cipher’ functions performatively in the construction of older women’s identities. The article will also examine (...) how female elders in prison become agents and negotiate techniques of discipline. The role of prison-time will be shown to be simultaneously experienced as further punishment while also being resisted as we draw out the relationship between temporality, spaces of incarceration and identification. First, we will locate the field in terms of issues of theory and method. Then we will look at performativity, identity and time in negotiating, acquiescing to and resisting the identity ‘prisoner’. This will enable us to understand the role and meaning of time in relation to how females in prison are compelled to reiterate and negotiate the identity ‘prisoner’ within the discipline of ‘the time of incarceration’. We hope to demonstrate through the voices of the women that there is no single abstract imprisoned body. These are real bodies, fleshy, sensate bodies that experience real pain; at the same time, these bodies are not simply given but also interpreted, mediated and in part constituted in social and cultural meanings. This enables us to show that the body can be both a generator and receptor of meanings. (shrink)

Black beauty shame emerges within the Black/white binary because of the beauty values sedimented in our structure of feeling since African enslavement. This article does not start from white beauty as the ideal, but focuses on the performativity of Black beauty shame as it transforms or intensifies the meanings of parts of the body in Jamaica and its UK diaspora. Using extracts from interviews with UK Jamaican heritage women, the discussion illustrates how Black beauty shame produces such intensification. First, where (...) white beauty is iconic and reproduces the Black other as ‘ugly’, and second, where the Black ‘mixed race’ body is constructed as ‘other’ because of Black Nationalist discourses on beauty. The women’s critique of the shaming event shows that shame is undone through dis-identification as speakers draw on alternative beauty discourses to produce new beauty subjectivities. Dis-identification illustrates the transformational potential of shame as new Black beauty positionings emerge within the diaspora, drawing on beauty ideologies and models from Jamaica and thus destabilising the Black/white binary. (shrink)

Samuel Shirley's splendid new translation, with critical annotation reflecting research of the last half-century, is the only edition of the complete text of Spinoza's correspondence available in English. An historical-philosophical Introduction, detailed annotation, a chronology, and a bibliography are also included.

I explain the notion of contributory injustice, a kind of epistemic injustice, and argue that it occurs within psychiatric services, affecting those who hear voices. I argue that individual effort on the part of clinicians to avoid perpetrating this injustice is an insufficient response to the problem; mitigating the injustice will require open and meaningful dialogue between clinicians and service user organisations, as well as individuals. I suggest that clinicians must become familiar with and take seriously concepts and frameworks for (...) understanding mental distress developed in service user communities, such as Hearing Voices Network, and by individual service users. This is especially necessary when these concepts and frameworks explicitly conflict with medical or technical understandings of users’ experiences. I defend this proposal against three objections. (shrink)

I argue that Schmidtet al, while correctly diagnosing the serious racial inequity in current ventilator rationing procedures, misidentify a corresponding racial inequity issue in alternative ‘unweighted lottery’ procedures. Unweighted lottery procedures do not ‘compound’ (in the relevant sense) prior structural injustices. However, Schmidtet aldo gesture towards a real problem with unweighted lotteries that previous advocates of lottery-based allocation procedures, myself included, have previously overlooked. On the basis that there are independent reasons to prefer lottery-based allocation of scarce lifesaving healthcare resources, (...) I develop this idea, arguing that unweighted lottery procedures fail to satisfy healthcare providers’ duty to prevent unjust population-level health outcomes, and thus that lotteries weighted in favour of Black individuals (and others who experience serious health injustice) are to be preferred. (shrink)

Ethical decision-making is essential to professionalism in engineering. For that reason, ethics is a required topic in an ABET approved engineering curriculum and it must be a foundational strand that runs throughout the entire curriculum. In this paper the curriculum approach that is under development at the Padnos School of Engineering (PSE) at Grand Valley State University will be described. The design of this program draws heavily from the successful approach used at the service academies — in particular West Point (...) and the United States Naval Academy. As is the case for the service academies, all students are introduced to the “Honor Concept” (which includes an Honor Code) as freshmen. As an element of professionalism the PSE program requires 1500 hours of co-op experience which is normally divided into three semesters of full-time work alternated with academic semesters during the last two years of the program. This offers the faculty an opportunity to teach ethics as a natural aspect of professionalism through the academic requirements for co-op. In addition to required elements throughout the program, the students are offered opportunities to participate in service projects which highlight responsible citizenship. These elements and other parts of the approach will be described. “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.” King Solomon. (shrink)

The standard microeconomic analysis of taxation suggests that excise taxes on goods with a price-inelastic demand are more efficient in that they lead to a lower deadweight loss than taxes on goods with price-elastic demand. This argument ignores secondary effects on the rest of the economy. By narrowly focusing on the primary effects on the market where the tax is raised, the overall deadweight loss is underestimated when demand is price-inelastic. Moreover, it is overestimated when demand is price-elastic. This puts (...) into question the validity of the standard textbook argument. In this paper we address this issue by considering how taxes affect consumer behavior in other markets. From this we can clearly see how the impact of an excise tax is not limited to one market in isolation, but is spread over all markets and affects the demand for cash balances. We suggest a simple way to incorporate this important insight into a standard textbook exposition. (shrink)

The value of argumentation in science education has become internationally recognised and has been the subject of many research studies in recent years. Successful introduction of argumentation activities in learning contexts involves extending teaching goals beyond the understanding of facts and concepts, to include an emphasis on cognitive and metacognitive processes, epistemic criteria and reasoning. The authors focus on the difficulties inherent in shifting a tradition of teaching from one dominated by authoritative exposition to one that is more dialogic, involving (...) small-group discussion based on tasks that stimulate argumentation. The paper focuses on how argumentation activities have been designed in school science. Examples of classroom dialogue where teachers adopt the frameworks/plans are analysed to show how argumentation processes are scaffolded. The analysis shows that several layers of interpretation are needed and these layers need to be aligned for successful implementation. (shrink)

How accurate is Kevin Carson’s characterization of “freed” markets? Carson, a left-libertarian “free market anti-capitalist,” portrays free markets as so radically different from actually-existing markets that they are almost unrecognizable. In The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto, he provides an alternative history of industrialization that argues that large-scale industrial organization and production are largely creatures of state intervention and that truly free markets would be characterized mainly by small-scale production for local markets. This paper evaluates Carson’s narrative in (...) order to determine whether his vision of the freed market is credible. I find that Carson fails to provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate that, but for government intervention, national markets would only exist for a few goods. Furthermore, many of the features he believes freed markets would possess are based on fallacious views of competition, knowledge, capital, and entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Shane Glackin's 2019 Philosophical Quarterly article aims to offer a framework for understanding the philosophical debate about the nature of disease and utilise this framework to reply to several standard objections to normativist theories of disease. Specifically, Glackin claims his model avoids three central challenges to normativism, which we term the ‘Flippancy Problem’, ‘Repugnancy Problem’, and the ‘Explanatory Problem’. Although we find Glackin's framework helpful in clarifying the terrain of the debate, we argue these three challenges continue to afflict his (...) preferred construal of the normativist/social constructivist position. (shrink)

Eric C. Ip has recently argued that seriously anorexic service users ought to be assumed to be legally incapacitous to refuse life‐saving artificial nutrition unless they can demonstrate otherwise, reversing the ordinary legal presumption in place to protect patients’ liberty and values. In this response, I argue against this proposal on two grounds. Firstly, the proposal is wrongfully discriminatory; it would expose service users to serious harm, and wrong them in numerous ways, on the basis of their diagnosis alone, without (...) significantly benefitting them in any way relative to the status quo. Secondly, he is unable to show that a large majority of such service users actually are incapacitous to refuse life‐saving artificial nutrition. This means that his proposal would likely involve declaring a large number of actually capacitous patients to be incapacitous, without even the requirement of a formal assessment, and burdening them with the responsibility of proving their clinical team wrong if they wish to avoid deprivation of liberty and/or compelled treatment. Given this, his proposal is indefensible. (shrink)

Crudely put, educational research is unethical when it misrepresents or misidentifies—and so betrays—its putative beneficiaries or the goods and values they hold dear. How can researchers guard against these vulnerabilities? While acknowledging the vulnerabilities of educational research to abuses of trust and representation, and that there is no Archimedean point from which to approach research into people’s practices, we defend a universalist conception of research ethics in education. This universalist conception is developed via an examination of a central debate in (...) feminism, contrasting Alcoff’s positionality, Caughie’s performative conception and Nussbaum’s universalist conception of feminism. (shrink)

This volume covers the philosophical, historical, religious, and interpretative aspects of the ancient Guodian bamboo manuscripts which were disentombed in the Guodian Village in Hubei Province, China, in 1993. Considered to be the Chinese equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls, these manuscripts are archaeological finds whose importance cannot be underestimated. Many of the texts are without counterparts in the transmitted tradition, and they provide unique insights into the developments of Chinese philosophy in the period between the death of Confucius and (...) the writings of Mencius, and beyond. Divided into two parts, the book first provides inter-textual contexts and backgrounds of the Guodian manuscripts. The second part covers the main concepts and arguments in the Guodian texts, including cosmology and metaphysics, political philosophy, moral psychology, and theory of human nature. The thematic essays serve as an introduction to the philosophical significance and the key philosophical concepts/thought of each text contained in the Guodian corpus. Each chapter has a section on the implications of the texts for the received tradition, or for the purpose of comparing some of the text with the received tradition in terms of the key philosophical concepts as well as the reading and interpretation of the texts. The volume covers most of the texts inscribed on the 800-odd slips of the Guodian corpus dated to the fourth century BCE. (shrink)

A case-study of the interaction between philosophical context and observational data in the practice of Science.

The stereotyped pattern of cell commitments during leech embryogenesis is described. The nature of cell commitments during segmentation differs significantly between leech and fruit fly. Despite the constancy of cell fate assignments in normal development, ablation experiments show that cell interactions are essential in setting some of these commitments. Interacting cells follow a positionally determined hierarchy of fate choices. For other cells, which appear to have fates fixed from birth, the possibility of determinative interactions between mother and daughter cells is (...) discussed. (shrink)

During embryogenesis, cell division must be spatially and temporally regulated with respect to other developmental processes. Leech embryos undergo a series of unequal and asynchronous cleavages to produce individually recognizable cells whose lineages, developmental fates and cell cycle properties have been characterized. Thus, leech embryos provide an opportunity to examine the regulation of cell division at the level of individual well‐characterized cells within a community of different types of cells. Isolation of leech homologues of some of the highly conserved regulators (...) of the cell division cycle, and characterization of their patterns of maternal and zygotic expression, indicate that the cell divisions of early leech embryos are regulated by cell type‐specific mechanisms. These studies with leech embryos contribute to the emerging appreciation of the diverse mechanisms by which animals regulate cell division during early development. (shrink)

Zhong 中 is an important notion in early Chinese thought. This essay offers a brief survey of the possible connotations of zhong found in the Baoxun 保訓 text of the Tsinghua University’s Collection of bamboo manuscripts of the Warring States period. By making a preliminary textual analysis and philosophical interpretation of the concept of zhong in relation to ideal rulership as presented in this newly discovered ancient text it is hoped that it will shed some light on the continuing debate (...) on the notion of zhong in early Chinese thought. (shrink)

Falls are a leading cause of serious injury and restricted participation among persons with stroke (PwS). Reactive balance control is essential for fall prevention, however, only a few studies have explored the effects of lesion characteristics (location and extent) on balance control in PwS. We aimed to assess the impact of lesion characteristics on reactive and anticipatory balance capacity, gait, and hemiparetic lower limb function, in PwS. Forty-six subacute PwS were exposed to forward, backward, right and left unannounced horizontal surface (...) translations in 6 increasing intensities, while standing. Fall threshold (i.e., perturbation intensity that results in a fall into the harness system) was measured. In addition, the Berg Balance Scale (BBS), 6 Minute Walk Test (6MWT) and Lower Extremity Fugl-Meyer (LEFM) were measured. Lesion effects were analyzed separately for left- and right-hemisphere damaged (LHD, RHD) patients, using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM). Our results show that voxel clusters where damage exerted a significant impact on balance, gait and lower-limb function were found in the corticospinal tract, in its passage in the corona radiata and in the posterior limb of the internal capsule. Additional significant impact was found to lesions affecting the putamen and the external capsule. Balance, gait, and hemiparetic lower limb function showed much overlap of the corresponding ‘significant’ voxel clusters. Test scores of RHD and LHD patients were affected largely by damage to homologous regions, with the LHD group showing a wider distribution of ‘significant’ voxels. The study corroborates and extends previous findings by demonstrating that balance control, gait, and lower limb function are all affected mainly by damage to essentially the same brain structures, namely - the corticospinal tract and adjacent structures in the capsular-putaminal region. (shrink)

This study examines how low-income African American mothers of children with sickle cell disease cope with the reproductive implications of having passed a genetic disease on to their children. Based on in-depth interviews with 29 African American mothers, I found that most mothers knew about SCD prior to having a child with the disease; many knew they were carriers of the sickle cell trait. In explaining why this knowledge did not lead them to alter their reproductive behaviors, mothers invoked a (...) theme of medical mismanagement; that is, they said the genetic screening programs for SCD did not provide them with enough medical knowledge about the disease. The implication that adequate knowledge about SCD would have affected their childbearing choices, however, is contradicted by their subsequent reproductive behaviors. I argue that the SCD diagnosis threatened motherhood, an important cultural value among low-income African American women, and that they protected their reproductive autonomy by obfuscating SCD medical knowledge. (shrink)

In a modern economy, “equilibrium” means that supply and demand is equal. It is at this point that the allocation of goods and services is at its most efficient, this being because the amount of goods and the amount of goods in demand are equally balanced. The market equilibrium therefore is determined by supply and demand. This paper looks at the concept of “equilibrium” in some of the early Confucian texts and its possible implications in economic activities. In the Confucian (...) context equilibrium, or what can be termed as the ultimate equilibrium, is to be understood in a broader sense where balances and harmony at different levels (e.g. individual and society) need to be sought in order to achieve a model of sustainable development. The ultimate equilibrium may provide an alternative approach to social welfare and economic prosperity creating universal harmony and better living for humans. In Confucian ideology, governing for the welfare of the people is not merely a question of increasing personal income and wealth; it requires implementation on a priority basis, taking into consideration the formation of an orderly society based on the enforcement of moral and ethical standards with the existence of a benevolent government which appropriates things according to the principles of harmony and order to achieve what can be termed as the “great equilibrium”—equilibrium that is not simply defined by balanced economic forces as in modern economic theory; but rather is used to suggest an ideal state of harmony in self fulfilment and socio-political order through incentives and by appropriate means. (shrink)