Governments around the world have faced the challenge of how to respond to the recent outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease. Some have reacted by greatly restricting the freedom of citizens, while others have opted for less drastic policies. In this paper, I draw a parallel with vaccination ethics to conceptualize two distinct approaches to COVID-19 that I call altruistic and lockdown. Given that the individual measures necessary to limit the spread of the virus can in principle be achieved voluntarily (...) as well as through enforcement, the question arises of how much freedom governments ought to give citizens to adopt the required measures. I argue that an altruistic approach is preferable on moral grounds: it preserves important citizen freedoms, avoids a number of potential injustices, and gives people a much-needed sense of meaning in precarious times. (shrink)

This book provides important philosophical insights concerning the kind of creatures we are such that we can experience something we understand as well-being, with these insights then being applied to various areas of social policy and welfare practice. The author defends what he calls The Ontology of Well-Being Thesis (TOWT), addressing ontological questions about the human condition, and how these questions are fundamental to issues concerning what we might know about human well-being and how we should promote it. Yet, surprisingly, (...) these ontological questions are often side-lined in academic, political, and policy and practice based debates about well-being. Addressing these questions, head-on, six features of the human condition are identified via TOWT: human embodiment, finiteness, sociability, cognition, evaluation, and agency. The main argument of the thesis is that these features reveal the conflicting character of human experiences, which can, in turn, have a profound bearing on our experience of well-being. Notably, it is our conflicting experiences of time, emotion, and self-consciousness, which can potentially help us experience well-being in complex and multi-dimensional ways. The author then applies these insights to various social policies and welfare practices, concerning, for example, pensions, disability, bereavement counselling, social prescribing within health settings, the promotion of mental health, and co-production practices. This book is of importance to philosophers, social policy analysts, and welfare practitioners and is also relevant to the fields of psychology, sociology, politics, and the health sciences. (shrink)

The current investigation was designed to examine the association of parenting during late childhood and early adolescence, a time of rapid physical development, with biological propensity for inflammation. Based on life course theory, it was hypothesized that parenting during this period of rapid growth and development would be associated with biological outcomes and self-reported health assessed in young adulthood. It was expected that association of parenting with health would be mediated either by effects on methylation of a key inflammatory factor, (...) Tumor necrosis factor (TNF), or else by association with a pro-inflammatory shift in the distribution of mononuclear blood cells. Supporting expectations, in a sample of 398 African American youth residing in rural Georgia, followed from age 11 to age 19, parenting at ages 11–13 was associated with youth reports of better health at age 19. We found that parenting was associated with changes in TNF methylation as well as with changes in cell-type composition. However, whereas methylation of TNF was a significant mediator of the association of parenting with young adult health, variation in mononuclear white blood cell types was not a significant mediator of the association of parenting with young adult health. The current research suggests the potential value of examining the health-related effects of parenting in late childhood and early adolescence. Further examination of protection against pro-inflammatory tendencies conferred by parenting appears warranted. (shrink)

The disability rights movement (DRM) has often been closely associated with the liberal values of individual choice and independence, or the ‘ethics of agency’, where enhancing the capacity to make autonomous decisions in various policy and practice-based contexts is said to facilitate disabled people's well-being. Nevertheless, other liberal values are derived from what will be termed here the ‘ethics of self-acceptance’. The latter is more disguised in liberalism and the DRM, as rather than emphasising the capacity to make autonomous decisions, (...) self-acceptance focuses on the positive acceptance of individual limitations, but again to enhance well-being. The further argument is that while the ethics of agency and self-acceptance often logically cohere and overlap, through promoting the values of self-respect and relational autonomy, dilemmas arise from our asymmetrical, or uneven, dispositions towards time, and present and future lives and experiences. For example, positively accepting individual limitations allows for a present-oriented immersion in ‘the moment’, but which often requires some suspension of future-oriented goals and aspirations. Understanding some of the implications of this asymmetry, and the dilemmas arising from it, provide important insights concerning approaches to physical and intellectual impairments and the subsequent debates within the DRM, social policy and welfare practice. (shrink)

International law and ethics share a common goal of helping us understand the norms and institutions needed to promote a just world order. Yet each of the two fields has approached this shared task with little regard for the insights of other, and interdisciplinary collaboration is now imperative. This essay shows the complementary nature of inquiries in political and moral philosophy, on the one hand, and international law, on the other, by examining the so-called New Haven School (or policy-oriented jurisprudence), (...) an international law method that explicitly considers values as both inputs and outputs of the process of making law. It finds that the School’s sociological orientation does not adequately integrate ethical inquiries essential to prescribing law, in particular questions about the scope of duties that individuals and states owe those abroad. Using the current legal debate over the extraterritorial application of human rights as an example, the paper shows how approaches from moral and political philosophy can help provide a rigorous and principled basis for the prescription of law, as well as link seemingly unrelated questions of international law to each other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mild Cognitive Impairment:What's in a Name?Steven R. Sabat (bio)Keywordslabeling, mild cognitive impairment, recall memory, selfhood, stereotype threatCorner and Bond (2006) raise a number of important conceptual issues related to the problems involved in defining mild cognitive impairment (MCI), differentiating it from normal aging, the definition of normal aging itself, and ethical issues surrounding the possible adverse effects of a diagnosis of MCI on the individuals thus described. It (...) would seem that portentous ramifications are involved and that clarifying the conceptual issues would be of great value, not only to researchers but also to the ever-growing population of elderly people. In what follows, I address some of these issues further.Problems of Definition and MeasurementOne of the problems that the authors discuss at the outset of their article concerns what methods are appropriate for detecting those with MCI: "Neuropsychological tests alone do not discriminate between normal aged-related memory loss and MCI or dementia and clinical judgment remains central to diagnosis" (Corner and Bond 2006, 5). Of course, to be able to discriminate between normal aged-related memory problems and MCI, we must first be able to define the former. What exactly is normal? As the authors correctly point out, the term has different meanings, one being normative (usual), another being nonpathologic. Is it normal (usual) for some sort of breakdown to occur in brain systems as a function of increased age? If so, is there a threshold age below which the very same physiologic breakdown is unusual? Would such a threshold age, if one existed, be the same for everyone, regardless of genotype and the cumulative interactive effects of nutrition, health, and stress-related factors over a period of decades? In effect, is some sort of memory impairment part of the natural (usual) process of aging for some people at particular ages rather than for others? And exactly what does it mean to be mildly impaired in the cognitive domain?Hogan and McKeith (2001) presented a working group's definition characterizing MCI such that people who complain about memory problems and who also provide objective evidence of such problems, yet who simultaneously display "normal general cognitive function and intact activities of daily living" (Hogan and McKeith 2001, 1131), should be identified and followed. Here again, however, we confront the problem of defining "normal general cognitive function" as well as "normal activities of daily living." Can one have normal general cognitive function without normal memory function? If so, what exactly constitutes [End Page 13] general cognitive function and on what conceptual or theoretical basis is such a definition valid? Furthermore, what sort of memory function are we talking about? Memory can be said to involve a number of stages: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Retrieval can be of the explicit type (conscious recall or recognition of specific information) with which people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) often reveal deficits or of the implicit type (a change in behavior as a result of previous experience of which the person may have no conscious recollection) as demonstrated in people with AD (Knopman and Nissen 1987). That is, people with AD can display deficits in explicit memory functions without similar deficits simultaneously in implicit memory functions.A partial answer to the question about memory loss in MCI may be found in the use of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE; Folstein, Folstein, and McHugh 1975), originally intended to be used as a screening device, but employed more and more frequently as an outcome measure to assess cognitive decline as well as the efficacy of drug treatments. Although the examination purports to test orientation, registration, attention, calculation, recall, language (naming, repeating, reading, writing, three-stage command), and construction, a task analysis reveals that the test is not quite as "global" in the cognitive domain as it is purported to be. For example, ten of the maximum thirty points on the examination are earned for "orientation" in time and place. Yet, all of the questions in this section of the test require intact recall of the relevant information. For example, if a person is asked, "What day of the week is this?" and replies "I don't know," the... (shrink)

In the 1993 general election the Liberal Democratic Party lost power for the first time since it was founded in 1955. The coalition government that followed enacted the most far-reaching political reforms Japan has experienced since the American Occupation. The country has now experienced two elections since these reforms so we can begin to analyze trends and dynamics. It is now possible to make a preliminary evaluation of the effects of these reforms. I evaluate the reforms under three headings: (1) (...) reducing the cost of elections and levels of corruption; (2) replacing candidate-centered with party-centered campaigns; and (3) moving toward a two-party system which would produce alternation in power between the parties of the government and the parties of the opposition. In conclude that, with some notable exceptions, the reforms are working well, about as well as should have been expected. (shrink)

One year ago I entitled my review of Japanese elections . Candidates running against the establishment were defeating candidates who had until recently appeared unbeatable. Most notably, outsider candidates were defeating ainori (supported by all major parties) candidates in gubernatorial elections. A prime example of an outsider candidate defeating the establishment was Prime Minister Koizumi, who defeated the LDP establishment to win the leadership of the LDP. Koizumi's election and subsequent popularity appears to have dampened the trend. Most notably, a (...) well-qualified challenger failed to unseat the incumbent in the Shizuoka gubernatorial election. Once Koizumi's popularity faded, however, the trend in favour of outsiders reappeared. Given an attractive alternative, establishment candidates continue to find themselves in trouble. The clearest recent example comes from the Yokohama mayoral election. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Trungpa's Barbarians and Merton's Titan:Resuming a Dialogue on Spiritual EgotismSteven R. ShippeeA Dialogue Begun: The Meeting of Chögyam Trungpa and Thomas MertonMuch of the dialogue on the spiritual life between Buddhists and Christians has centered on two locations in the United States. The first is Naropa Institute (now University) in Boulder, Colorado. This institution was founded in 1974 by Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan master and lineage holder of both (...) the Nyingma and Kagyü traditions, two of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Under Trungpa's guidance, Naropa hosted an important series of Buddhist-Christian contemplative dialogues in the 1980s.1 A second significant place is Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, the Trappist monastery that became home to Thomas Merton in 1941. Since 1996, and through the efforts of several of the same people who had worked on the Naropa dialogues, the abbey has hosted three interreligious "encounters" sponsored by the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue.2An important link between these dialogues, as well as the initial inspiration for the first of them,3 is the meeting of the two men most famously associated with each of the hosting institutions, Trungpa and Merton. As many of their respective readers know, the two men met in Calcutta on 19 October 1968, and spent several days together.4 This contact was very stimulating to them both and seemed the beginning of a deep friendship. Merton was so impressed with Trungpa that he immediately determined to visit Trungpa's new monastery in Scotland. Trungpa later said, "Meeting Thomas Merton was wonderful,"5 and that he felt he "was meeting an old friend, a genuine friend."6 Despite the brevity of their relationship, during his last talk on 10 December, Merton said he likewise considered Trungpa "a good friend."7 Later that same day, their friendship and dialogue were terminated by Merton's death. Not two months had passed since the meeting in Calcutta. Trungpa called Merton's death "a tremendous loss, to me personally and to the world of genuine spirituality."8Judith Simmer-Brown has provided the fullest picture thus far of the relationship between Trungpa and Merton.9 One of the facts that most intrigues Trungpa's [End Page 109] followers is his own recollection, shared with participants at the third Naropa dialogue, that the two discussed what he called "spiritual materialism" (his most common phrase for spirituality co-opted by ego) at some length over dinner and drinks.10 This article picks up where that recollection leaves off. While we do not know more about the specific content of that discussion, we do have a body of writings from each man on topics relating to the quest and pitfalls of authentic spirituality. A comparative analysis of these proves worthwhile, as further elucidation of what made possible their meeting of the minds and the immediate affection they felt for each other, and certainly as wisdom that still has the power to deepen our spiritual experience today by exposing the manipulations and deceptions to which ego11 subjects even our noblest spiritual aspirations.The challenges to authentic spiritual life were major concerns for both Trungpa and Merton, a leitmotif that characterized almost all of their respective teachings and written works.12 As an extensive examination of these is not possible here, I have set side by side one symbol from each: Trungpa's modification of the traditional Tibetan teachings on the Lalos (kla.klo, literally "barbarians"), which he translated as the "Three Lords of Materialism," and Merton's reflections on the tragic Titan Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods. These two symbols, while certainly not exhaustive of their insights, nonetheless effectively crystallize their respective thoughts on the matter, and thereby allow us to see that Trungpa and Merton shared very striking insights both about the malady of spiritual egotism and about its necessary antidotes.Chögyam Trungpa on Spiritual MaterialismIn talks given from 1970 to 1973, Trungpa gave teachings to his students on "the Three Lords of Materialism," symbolic personifications of the trap to which he referred as spiritual materialism.13 Believing that most of his students were sincere about the spiritual path, he... (shrink)

Liberal egalitarians have been wary of being orientated by the empathetic understanding of others lest it offends the separateness of persons. This worry can be overcome by embracing second‐order as well as first‐order empathetic‐imagination, while doing so strengthens liberal‐egalitarian claims to treat all with equal concern and respect. ‘First‐order’ empathic‐imagination, which accesses objective knowledge about a person’s experience, is a necessary but not sufficient part of relating to others as agents. ‘Second‐order’ empathic‐imagination, encompassing a ‘disposition of surprise’ at an agent’s (...) ability to have a valued life contrary to what is normally and reasonably expected, should also be encouraged. This disposition accepts that making fundamental mistakes in empathic‐imagination is inevitable, but by being disposed to recognize these as mistakes a person is more open to understanding and identifying with ‘disadvantaged others’ who are agents. As a result, policy‐makers and practitioners must recognize a potential tension between promoting social systems that redistribute resources and the image those defined as ‘worse‐off’ hold of themselves. Such interventions need to be sensitive to the positive image those they view as disadvantaged may hold of themselves, while nevertheless recognizing their entitlement to resources to improve their condition. (shrink)

The concepts of judicial independence and the separation of powers are used more as terms of political rhetoric than legal concepts in the British constitution. Responsible government significantly merges the executive and the legislative while parliamentary sovereignty has meant that judicial independence has had a peculiar British meaning, rarely unpacked. In practice, in England, (and presumably in the other UK jurisdictions), individual judges are accorded a high degree of independence, while there is no effective independence of the judiciary collectively as (...) a branch of government. This article then asks what impact current constitutional changes will have on this state of affairs. Adherence to the EU, the growth of judicial review and other factors have already had an important impact; devolution, the Human Rights Act and the reform of the House of Lords may have impacts that will be different in both quality and degree. Coupled with other political changes the end result may well be a more effective separation of powers and more real independence for the judges as a branch of government; but that in turn may call for more open and meaningful democratic control over the appointment of judges. (shrink)

PurposeAdvance directives have been criticized for failing to help physicians make decisions consistent with patients’ wishes. This pilot study sought to determine if an interactive, computer-based decision aid that generates an advance directive can help physicians accurately translate patients’ wishes into treatment decisions.MethodsWe recruited 19 patient-participants who had each previously created an advance directive using a computer-based decision aid, and 14 physicians who had no prior knowledge of the patient-participants. For each advance directive, three physicians were randomly assigned to review (...) the advance directive and make five to six treatment decisions for each of six (potentially) end-of-life clinical scenarios.From the three individual physicians’ responses, a “consensus physician response” was generated for each treatment decision (total decisions = 32). This consensus response was shared with the patient whose advance directive had been reviewed, and she/he was then asked to indicate how well the physician translated his/her wishes into clinical decisions.ResultsPatient-participants agreed with the consensus physician responses 84 percent (508/608) of the time, including 82 percent agreement on whether to provide mechanical ventilation, and 75 percent on decisions about cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).Across the six vignettes, patient-participants’ rating of how well physicians translated their advance directive into medical decisions was 8.4 (range = 6.5-10, where 1 = extremely poorly, and 10 = extremely well). Physicians’ overall rating of their confidence at accurately translating patients’ wishes into clinical decisions was 7.8 (range = 6.1-9.3, 1 = not at all confident, 10 = extremely confident).ConclusionFor simulated cases, a computer-based decision aid for advance care planning can help physicians more confidently make end-of-life decisions that patients will endorse. (shrink)

On 30 June 1994 the Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDPJ, formerly the Japan Socialist Party) joined its historic enemy, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), to form a coalition government in a Japanese equivalent of Italy's . Competition between the conservative LDP and the progressive socialists had defined the Japanese party system since 1955. In this paper we analyze voter reactions to this and other confusing events surrounding the end of the LDP's 38-year dominance. We find, first, that the Japanese (...) electorate was able to make sense of these events. The political space reflected in public opinion mapped the political space reflected in the mass media remarkably well. Secondly, our findings support the idea that attitudes toward political parties are endogenous to the political process: strategic moves by political actors alter the political space within which they maneuver. Coalitions of strange bedfellows force voters to revise their perceptions of political space and reevaluate their attitudes toward the actors involved. Strange bedfellows seemed less strange, friendlier after they had been seen in bed together. (shrink)

This book provides a formal ontology of senses and the belief-relation that grounds the distinction between de dicto, de re, and de se beliefs as well as the opacity of belief reports. According to this ontology, the relata of the belief-relation are an agent and a special sort of object-dependent sense (a "thought-content"), the latter being an "abstract" property encoding various syntactic and semantic constraints on sentences of a language of thought. One bears the belief-relation to a thought-content T just (...) in case one (is disposed as one who) inwardly affirms a certain sentence S of one’s language of thought that satisfies what T encodes, which in turn requires that S’s non-logical parts stand in appropriate semantical relations to items specified by T. Since these items may include other senses as well as ordinary objects, beliefs of arbitrary complexity are automatically accommodated. Within the framework of the formal ontology, a context-dependent compositional semantics is then provided for a fragment of regimented English capable of formulating ascriptions of belief—a semantics that treats substitutional opacity as a genuine semantic datum. Finally, the resulting picture of belief and its attribution is defended by showing how it solves standard puzzles, avoids objections to rival accounts, and satisfies certain adequacy conditions not fulfilled by traditional theories. Along the way, clarification and defense is offered for the ingredient conception of object-dependent senses, and it is shown how adoption of the language of thought hypothesis permits Bertrand Russell’s obscure doctrine of logical forms to be understood in a way that not only vindicates his Multiple Relation theory of de re belief but also reveals the connection between these logical forms and thought-contents. (shrink)

We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross-situational word learning: two global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word occurrence; and two local models, which extract just a single referent from each occurrence. One of these local models, dubbed Pursuit, uses an associative learning mechanism to estimate word-referent probability but pursues and tests the best referent-meaning at any given time. Pursuit is found to perform as well as global models under many conditions extracted from (...) naturalistic corpora of parent-child interactions, even though the model maintains far less information than global models. Moreover, Pursuit is found to best capture human experimental findings from several relevant cross-situational word-learning experiments, including those of Yu and Smith (), the paradigm example of a finding believed to support fully global cross-situational models. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed, most notably that the model characterizes only the earliest stages of word learning, when reliance on the co-occurring referent world is at its greatest. (shrink)

Since publication of the 1986 Carnegie Commission report, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, the professional teaching standards movement has gained noticeable momentum. The professional standards movement in teaching has been fueled by national organizations such as the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the Interstate New Teachers Assessment and Support Consortium, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, and by close collaboration among these four entities. Further, nearly all (...) of the fifty states are embracing the professional standards movement through formal participation in the work of one or more of these organizations. Although the professional standards movement in teaching is strong and growing stronger, its implications are not clear for instructional programs in social foundations of education, either at the teacher preparation or the advanced graduate levels. In response to the standards movement, social foundations educators have a number of options before them, three of which are to (1) largely ignore these developments, as "this too shall pass"; (2) critically interpret and resist these developments through scholarship and collective professional action, as social foundations scholars did with Competency Based Teacher Education in the 1970s; and (3) critically interpret these developments while working to strengthen the potential of the professional teaching standards movement to achieve its stated goal of providing caring and qualified teachers for every classroom in the nation. Of these three options, the last is most advisable, but it presents a considerable challenge to social foundations educators. Although the absence of social foundations skills, perspectives, and understanding should make it very difficult for teacher candidates and teachers to perform well on standards-based teaching assessments, there is no guarantee that these assessments will hold candidates accountable for social foundations learning. Implications for social foundations educators and activists are significant. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that in order for the study of arts education to continue to advance, we must delineate the effects of particular forms of arts education, offered in certain contexts, on specific domains of children’s socioemotional development. We explain why formulating precise hypotheses about the effects of arts education on children’s socioemotional development requires a differentiated definition of each arts education program or activity in question, as well as a consideration of both the immediate and broader contexts (...) in which that program or activity occurs. We then offer the New Victory Theater’s Schools with Performing Arts Reach Kids program as an illustrative example of how these considerations allow for the refinement of hypotheses about the impact of arts education on children’s socioemotional development. (shrink)

Focal adhesion kinase (FAK) is a nonreceptor protein‐tyrosine kinase implicated in controlling cellular responses to the engagement of cell‐surface integrins, including cell spreading and migration, survival and proliferation. Aberrant FAK signaling may contribute to the process of cell transformation by certain oncoproteins, including v‐Src. Progress toward elucidating the events leading to FAK activation following integrin‐mediated cell adhesion, as well as events downstream of FAK, has come through the identification of FAK phosphorylation sites and interacting proteins. A signaling partnership is formed (...) between FAK and Src‐family kinases, leading to tyrosine phosphorylation of FAK and associated ‘docking’ proteins Cas and paxillin. Subsequent recruitment of proteins containing Src homology 2 domains, including Grb2 and c‐Crk, to the complex is likely to trigger adhesion‐induced cellular responses, including changes to the actin cytoskeleton and activation of the Ras‐MAP kinase pathway. (shrink)

To call attention to and motivate action on ethical issues in business or society, messengers often criticize groups for wrongdoing and ask these groups to change their behavior. When criticizing target groups, messengers frequently identify and express concern about harm caused to a victim group, and in the process address a target group by criticizing them for causing this harm and imploring them to change. However, we find that when messengers criticize a target group for causing harm to a victim (...) group in this way—expressing _singular concern_ for the victim group—members of the target group infer, often incorrectly, that the messenger views the target group as less moral and unworthy of concern. This inferred lack of moral concern reduces criticism acceptance and prompts backlash from the target group. To address this problem, we introduce _dual concern_ messaging—messages that simultaneously communicate that a target group causes harm to a victim group and express concern for the target group. A series of several experiments demonstrate that dual concern messages reduce inferences that a critical messenger lacks moral concern for the criticized target group, increase the persuasiveness of the criticism among members of the target group, and reduce backlash from consumers against a corporate messenger. When pursuing justice for victims of a target group, dual concern messages that communicate concern for the victim group _as well as_ the target group are more effective in fostering openness toward criticism, rather than defensiveness, in a target group, thus setting the stage for change. (shrink)

Large-scale sequencing tests, including whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing, are rapidly moving into clinical use. Sequencing is already being used clinically to identify therapeutic opportunities for cancer patients who have run out of conventional treatment options, to help diagnose children with puzzling neurodevelopmental conditions, and to clarify appropriate drug choices and dosing in individuals. To evaluate and support clinical applications of these technologies, the National Human Genome Research Institute and National Cancer Institute have funded studies on clinical and research sequencing under (...) the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research program as well as studies on return of results. Most of these studies use sequencing in real-world clinical settings and collect data on both the application of sequencing and the impact of receiving genomic findings on study participants. They are occurring in the context of controversy over how to obtain consent for exome and genome sequencing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:R. D. Ackerman BELIEVING IN A FICTION: WALLACE STEVENS AT THE LIMITS OF PHENOMENOLOGY The "ring of men" of "Sunday Morning" will chant their "devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, / Naked among them, like a savage source" (CP, pp. 69-70).' Solar nakedness is deferred even as it is named. The problem for belief is the question of appearance and (...) representation. Things appear as and like.... The phenomenological return to things is also a turn to fiction, as Husserl understood: "If anyone loves a paradox, he can really say... that the element which makes up the life of phenomenology... is fiction. ' " The sun is divine, and it is not; it is both naked and clothed, savage and civilized, source (or end) and means. But such paradox is ultimately unsatisfying, and as we will see with Stevens, the need for belief—for an image or idea of totality—forces the issue of fiction and reality. The Stevens we will have in view is not the Stevens—as if there were such a creature. Our Stevens is the one most persuaded by promises such as those of phenomenology, the one most concerned with decreation (reduction) and fresh beginnings, with discovery and recognition, with imagination, the body, and the earth. This is the Stevens for whom the barrier of language presages at last not absence and difference but fictive recovery of presence and identity, the one for whom poetry represents a way of belief beyond mysticism even as it bodes mythic proximity. Finally, this is the Stevens who predominates throughout the prose (as well as in much of the poetry), who tries mightily to secure a belief while disencumbering himself of metaphysics—but alas, I think, with small success. Although Stevens's association of the problem of belief with the idea of fiction occurs in early poems such as "A High-Toned Old Christian 79 80Philosophy and Literature Woman" and "To the One of Fictive Music," his most intensive involvement with fiction as belief dates from the early 1940s and spans the period of his major essays and his last four volumes of poems. He recounts, for instance, a 1942 conversation with a student: "I said that I thought that we had reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognized that it was a fiction. The student said that that was an impossibility, that there was no such thing as believing in something that one knew was not true. It is obvious, however, that we are doing that all the time" (L, p. 430). What does it mean to believe in a fiction? That is my main subject here, as we seek out the limits of the phenomenological Stevens. His letters of this period are preoccupied with the problem of fictive belief: "If one no longer believes in God (as truth), it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else.... A good deal of my poetry recently has concerned an identity for that thing.... In one of the short poems that I have just sent to the harvard advocate, I say that one's final belief must be in a fiction. I think that the history of belief will show that it has always been in a fiction" (L, p. 370). The poem referred to, "Asides on the Oboe," begins: The prologues are over. It is a question now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. (CP, p. 250) Acknowledging that "in the long run, poetry would be the supreme fiction" (L, pp. 430-31), Stevens nonetheless singles out the nominative function of poetry as the essence of its claim to supremacy: "Poetry means not the language of poetry but the thing itself.... The subject matter is what comes to mind when one says of the month of August... 'Thou art not August, unless I make thee so'" (L, p. 377). The quoted line (also from "Asides") underscores the paradox that for Stevens the essence of fiction (the nontrue) is its capacity to nominate the true or the real. This... (shrink)

As sharing and secondary research use of biospecimens increases, IRBs and researchers face the challenge of protecting and respecting donors without comprehensive regulations addressing the human subject protection issues posed by biobanking. Variation in IRB biobanking policies about these issues has not been well documented.

Atomically precise manufacturing (APM) is the assembly of materials with atomic precision. APM does not currently exist, and may not be feasible, but if it is feasible, then the societal impacts could be dramatic. This paper assesses the net societal impacts of APM across the full range of important APM sectors: general material wealth, environmental issues, military affairs, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and space travel. Positive effects were found for material wealth, the environment, military affairs (specifically nuclear disarmament), and space travel. (...) Negative effects were found for military affairs (specifically rogue actor violence and AI. The net effect for surveillance was ambiguous. The effects for the environment, military affairs, and AI appear to be the largest, with the environment perhaps being the largest of these, suggesting that APM would be net beneficial to society. However, these factors are not well quantified and no definitive conclusion can be made. One conclusion that can be reached is that if APM R&D is pursued, it should go hand-in-hand with effective governance strategies to increase the benefits and reduce the harms. (shrink)

Background While it is generally acknowledged that self-prescribing among physicians poses some risk, research finds such behaviour to be common and in certain cases accepted by the medical community. Largely absent from the literature is knowledge about other activities doctors perform for their own medical care or for the informal treatment of family and friends. This study examined the variety, frequency and association of behaviours doctors report providing informally. Informal care included prescriptions, as well as any other type of personal (...) medical treatment (eg, monitoring chronic or serious conditions). Method A survey was sent to 2500 randomly-selected physicians in Colorado, 600 individuals returned questionnaires with usable data. The authors hypothesised: (1) physicians would prescribe the same types of treatment at home as they prescribed professionally; and (2) physicians who informally prescribed addictive medications would be more likely to engage in other types of informal medical care. Results Physicians who wrote prescriptions for antibiotics, psychotropics and opioids at work were more likely to prescribe these medications at home. Those prescribing addictive drugs outside of the office treated more serious illnesses in emergency situations, more chronic conditions and more major medical/surgical conditions informally than did those not routinely prescribing addictive medications. Physicians reported a variety of informal care behaviour and high frequency of informal care to family and friends. Discussion The frequency and variety of informal care reported in this study strongly argues for profession-wide discussion about ethical and guideline considerations for such behaviour. These areas are discussed in the paper. (shrink)

The book_ Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will_, published in 2010 by Columbia University Press, presented David Foster Wallace's challenge to Richard Taylor's argument for fatalism. In this anthology, notable philosophers engage directly with that work and assess Wallace's reply to Taylor as well as other aspects of Wallace's thought. With an introduction by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, this collection includes essays by William Hasker, Gila Sher, Marcello Oreste Fiocco, Daniel R. Kelly, Nathan Ballantyne, (...) Justin Tosi, and Maureen Eckert. These thinkers explore Wallace's philosophical and literary work, illustrating remarkable ways in which his philosophical views influenced and were influenced by themes developed in his other writings, both fictional and nonfictional. Together with _Fate, Time, and Language_, this critical set unlocks key components of Wallace's work and its traces in modern literature and thought. (shrink)

One of the most common views about self-deception ascribes contradictory beliefs to the self-deceiver. In this paper it is argued that this view (the contradiction strategy) is inconsistent with plausible common-sense principles of belief attribution. Other dubious assumptions made by contradiction strategists are also examined. It is concluded that the contradiction strategy is an inadequate account of self-deception. Two other well-known views — those of Robert Audi and Alfred Mele — are investigated and found wanting. A new theory of self-deception (...) relying on an extension of Mark Johnston's subintentional mental tropisms is proposed and defended. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Steven Fuller A FRENCH SCIENCE (WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES) It is of no news to anyone with even a passing interest in the theoretical wranglings of literary critics that deconstruction is on the defensive. This is of special interest to an historian and philosopher of science such as myself because (with the notable exception of Frank Lentricchia's revisionist history of contemporary critical trends) ] most of the recent salvos (...) launched against deconstruction have been supplied by analytic philosophy.2 Indeed, some analytic philosophers have felt bold enough to enter the fray themselves. And as with other Anglo-American incursions into theoretical debates of continental origin, whatever is lost in subtlety and sheer ingenuity is made up for in clarity and commonsense. If there is one theme common to adi analytically inspired attacks on deconstruction, it is that critical method ought to be a systematic articulation of the intuitions of the average reflective reader. To be a literary critic is not to achieve esoteric insight into the uncommunicative nature of texts; rather, it is to become more fully aware of the many ways in which texts do communicate. While such advice may be reassuring, it is certainly not very "philosophical" in the sense of "deeply problematic" that deconstructionists would claim for the nature of texts. And the deconstructionists are right — so I believe. At least, I will try to show that the case for deconstruction, in all its radicalness, can be made with something of the clarity desired by analytic philosophers. A contentious critic might wonder, at this point, why the deconstructionists were not clear in the first place (thereby rendering this article superfluous). The reason, contrary to what certain "friends of deconstruction" in the analytic tradition would have us believe, is that there are few precedents in the recent history of philosophy for claims made by deconstructionists.3 It would indeed be faint praise to find, as Hacking and Rorty have maintained, that the theses of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida were anticipated in the limpid prose style of a Quine, a Goodman, or a Kuhn.4 Why is the latter set of writers so clear, while the former set is so obscure? Our contentious critic might conclude diat clarity of style reflects a clarity of thought, and likewise for obscurity of style. In any case, both friends 2 Philosophy and Literature and foes of deconstruction tend to agree diat whatever is of value in the French texts may be derived with less effort by reading the American ones. The friends want to place deconstruction among several strains oftwentieth-century thought that would dissolve classical philosophy into a critical history of ideas, while the foes (more ingenuously perhaps) want to resume the business of practical criticism as usual and its attendant function (à la F. R. Leavis) of preserving Western Culture. Since the analytic devil can (and will) cite deconstructionist scripture for his own purposes, it is not clear that explicating Derrida will settle matters, especially since deconstruction gives an ironic twist to the search for what an author "had in mind" when he composed a particular text. It is, however, interesting to note that when one analytic philosopher recently presented a paradigm of literary criticism that allegedly compensated for the excesses of deconstruction, he resorted to Kantian talk about the intentions of the author being a "regulative ideal" toward which all responsible practical criticism aspires.5 This paradigm claims to owe to deconstruction the idea that, once an author is separated from his text, die reader becomes unable to verify any hypotheses about what the author meant by what he wrote. However, the evidence surrounding the text's composition (as well as the text itself) may be reconstructed so as to suggest a model of the audioes intentions. In that case, the explanatory adequacy of such a model would be relative to the evidence and methods available to the critic. And so, while the text certainly had a real audior who possessed a set of determinate intentions at the time ofwriting, mere is no reason to think that the most plausible model of the currendy available evidence picks out those intentions. What we have here is the first of two species of... (shrink)

_Thinking about Science, Reflecting on Art: Bringing Aesthetics and Philosophy of Science togethe_r is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between the philosophy of science and aesthetics. With contributions from leading figures from both fields this edited collection engages with such questions as: Does representation function in the same way in science and in art? What important characteristic do scientific models share with literary fictions? What is the difference between interpretation in the sciences and in the arts? Can (...) there be a science of aesthetics? In what ways can aesthetics and philosophy of science be integrated? Aiming to develop the interconnections between the philosophy of science and the philosophy of art more broadly and more deeply than ever before this volume not only explores scientific representation by comparison with fiction but extends the scope of interaction to include metaphysical and other questions around methodology in mainstream philosophy of science, including the aims of science, the characterisation of scientific understanding, and the nature of observation, as well as drawing detailed comparisons between specific examples in both art and the sciences. (shrink)

Extending and expanding Geiger and Feller’s analysis of increasing dispersion in R&D expenditures during the 1980s, the paper analyzes publication and citation counts as well as R&D expenditures for 194 top producers using Web of Science data. We find high and stable levels of inequality in the 1990s and 2000s, combined with robust growth both in the system and on individual campuses, considerable opportunities for short-range mobility and very limited opportunities for long-range mobility. Initial investments in research, private control, and (...) the capacity of wealthy institutions to attract productive faculty are associated with high levels of scientific output. New entrants to the system and those that leave the system are both clustered near the bottom of the hierarchy. (shrink)

This up-to-date collection of more than two dozen real-life cases illustrates the moral issues facing contemporary American journalists. It will help students hone their reasoning skills, encouraging them to think rationally and act with integrity.

This volume includes all Dewey's writings for 1938 except for Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, as well as his 1939 Freedom and Culture, Theory of Valuation, and two items from Intelligence in the Modern World. Freedom and Culture presents, as Steven M. Cahn points out, the essence of his philosophical position: a commitment to a free society, critical intelligence, and the education required for their advance.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Music, Myth, and EducationThe Case of The Lord of the Rings Film TrilogyEstelle R. Jorgensen (bio)In probing the interrelationship of myth, meaning, and education, I offer a case in point, notably, Peter Jackson's film adaptations and Howard Shore's musical scores for J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King.1 Intersecting literature, film, and music (...) allows me to explore various perspectives or ways of meaning making associated with this myth. I then trace some of the implications of the analysis for musical and general education.I am particularly interested in the musical connections with myth evident in societies around the world and well established in the anthropological, ethnomusicological, and philosophical literatures. For example, Steven Feld finds the myth of the muni bird to be foundational to a New Guinea society in shaping musical expression and communal beliefs and practices.2 Likewise, as Lewis Rowell argues, Western music is rooted in and acquires its own mythos of person, power, and musical instruments; Dionysius, Apollo, Lachesis, Clotho, Atropos, Orpheus, Guido of Arezzo, St. Cecilia, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus are among those whose impact on music are legendary, formative, and figurative.3 Associations of particular myths with operatic, orchestral, and choral repertoire in the Western classical tradition also abound, such as Wagner's operatic setting of the Lay of the Nibelung and Sibelius's evocation of the Finnish Vālhālla. Music and myth are interconnected especially in the film music of our time, for example, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Titanic, and the Star Trek and Star Wars series.In The Lord of the Rings, my present focus, Shore's musical scores help to highlight the mythic character of Tolkien's narrative, bridge the externally perceived phenomenal world and the internal and subjective "inner world," interrelate the experience of time—especially past and present—and evoke a sense of wonder and awe that otherwise may be forgotten in pervasively [End Page 44] materialistic societies. Music's role in kindling reverence goes to the heart of what these films share that make them mythic—transcendence, profundity, ambiguity, narrativity, and an aesthetic and didactic character that arouse awe, mystery, and a heightened sense of the human condition. Here, music is primarily representational,4 serving functional as well as aesthetic/artistic roles in expressing such mythic themes as the contest between good and evil (in which good is often more fragile and the odds sometimes insurmountable) and the inevitability of death, in which human beings are often at the whim of capricious gods, natural forces, and their own weakness. It adds emotional and intellectual feeling to the visual images, pointing particular attention to specific scenes and representing the tensions built or released as the narrative and visual images unfold.Music's role in blurring past and present is particularly interesting since it is an art of time. The Lord of the Rings evokes an earlier time of crisis in Middle-earth, when the survival of humanity was in jeopardy. The soundtrack assists the moviegoer to make connections between times and travel imaginatively through time, thereby bringing alive the past and imagined future in the present moment. Boundaries between past and present become fuzzier, and one is helped in moving from one time to another. Leitmotifs are of particular interest in helping to make the ambiguity of the narrative more easily accessible and comprehensible, even at risk of oversimplifying matters—a quality evocative of music's use in the speech-song performances of the Iliad, among other ancient stories.Tolkien's fairytale is not couched for children, as is his earlier The Hobbit, but written unabashedly for adults.5 The Fellowship of the Ring can be seen as an epic fairytale with "a kind of religious significance."6 In her analysis of "life symbols"—or artistic, ritualistic, and mythic systems that are read "non-discursively," having no assigned connotation and therefore felt and grasped imaginatively and intuitively—Susanne Langer suggests that fairytales are a genre below that of myth in the continuum between dream and myth. For her, "myth has … a... (shrink)

The famous Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) espoused the occasionalist doctrine that ‘there is only one true cause because there is only one true God; that the nature or power of each thing is nothing but the will of God; that all natural causes are not true causes but only occasional causes’ (LO, 448, original italics). One of Malebranche’s well-known arguments for occasionalism, known as, the ‘no necessary connection’ argument (or, NNC ) stems from the principle that ‘a true cause… is (...) one such that the mind perceives a necessary connection between it and its effect’ (LO, 450). The outline of this paper is as follows. I explicitly layout NNC and articulate some of its prima facie strengths (§1). I then critically discuss, what I take to be, the two main arguments against NNC of the Lee-Pyle interpretation (§2). The main conclusion from (§2) is that Malebranche did not abandon NNC in his later works given textual evidence from the Dialogues, contrary to the Lee-Pyle interpretation. In (§3) I discuss in what ways Suárez, Leibniz, Régis and Spinoza all accepted the main premise of NNC. Then, I rebut Steven Nadler’s influential and unchallenged criticism that Malebranche conflated causal and logical necessity, and provide a more accurate interpretation of Malebranche that only commits him to a partial reduction of causal to logical necessity (§4). (shrink)

Robotization is an increasingly pervasive feature of our lives. Robots with high degrees of autonomy may cause harm, yet in sufciently complex systems neither the robots nor the human developers may be candidates for moral blame. John Danaher has recently argued that this may lead to a retribution gap, where the human desire for retribution faces a lack of appropriate subjects for retributive blame. The potential social and moral implications of a retribution gap are considerable. I argue that the retributive (...) intuitions that feed into retribution gaps are best understood as deontological intuitions. I apply a debunking argument for deontological intuitions in order to show that retributive intuitions cannot be used to justify retributive punishment in cases of robot harm without clear candidates for blame. The fundamental moral question thus becomes what we ought to do with these retributive intuitions, given that they do not justify retribution. I draw a parallel from recent work on implicit biases to make a case for taking moral responsibility for retributive intuitions. In the same way that we can exert some form of control over our unwanted implicit biases, we can and should do so for unjustifed retributive intuitions in cases of robot harm. (shrink)

Moralization is a social-psychological process through which morally neutral issues take on moral significance. Often linked to health and disease, moralization may sometimes lead to good outcomes; yet moralization is often detrimental to individuals and to society as a whole. It is therefore important to be able to identify when moralization is inappropriate. In this paper, we offer a systematic normative approach to the evaluation of moralization. We introduce and develop the concept of ‘mismoralization’, which is when moralization is metaethically (...) unjustified. In order to identify mismoralization, we argue that one must engage in metaethical analysis of moralization processes while paying close attention to the relevant facts. We briefly discuss one historical example and two contemporary cases related to COVID-19 that we contend to have been mismoralized in public health. We propose a remedy of de-moralization that begins by identifying mismoralization and that proceeds by neutralizing inapt moral content. De-moralization calls for epistemic and moral humility. It should lead us to pull away from our tendency to moralize—as individuals and as social groups—whenever and wherever moralization is unjustified. (shrink)

Preventive vaccination can protect not just vaccinated individuals, but also others, which is often a central point in discussions about vaccination. To date, there has been no systematic study of self- and other-directed motives behind vaccination. This article has two major goals: first, to examine and distinguish between self- and other-directed motives behind vaccination, especially with regard to vaccinating for the sake of third parties, and second, to explore some ways in which this approach can help to clarify and guide (...) vaccination debates and policy. I propose conceiving of vaccination in terms of three basic elements: the vaccination decision-maker, the vaccine recipient and the primary beneficiary. I develop a taxonomy based on the relations between these elements to distinguish four kinds of vaccination: self-protective, paternalistic, altruistic and indirect. I finally discuss the case of human papillomavirus vaccine regulation for men and women to show how each kind of vaccination is associated with and raises specific ethical questions. (shrink)

The potential for vaccines to prevent the spread of infectious diseases is crucial for vaccination policy and ethics. In this paper, I discuss recent evidence that the current COVID-19 vaccines have only a modest and short-lived effect on reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission and argue that this has at least four important ethical implications. First, getting vaccinated against COVID-19 should be seen primarily as a self-protective choice for individuals. Second, moral condemnation of unvaccinated people for causing direct harm to others is unjustified. (...) Third, the case for a harm-based moral obligation to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is weak. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, coercive COVID-19 vaccination policies (e.g., measures that exclude unvaccinated people from society) cannot be directly justified by the harm principle. (shrink)

How do minds emerge from developing brains? According to the representational features of cortex are built from the dynamic interaction between neural growth mechanisms and environmentally derived neural activity. Contrary to popular selectionist models that emphasize regressive mechanisms, the neurobiological evidence suggests that this growth is a progressive increase in the representational properties of cortex. The interaction between the environment and neural growth results in a flexible type of learning: minimizes the need for prespecification in accordance with recent neurobiological evidence (...) that the developing cerebral cortex is largely free of domain-specific structure. Instead, the representational properties of cortex are built by the nature of the problem domain confronting it. This uniquely powerful and general learning strategy undermines the central assumption of classical learnability theory, that the learning properties of a system can be deduced from a fixed computational architecture. Neural constructivism suggests that the evolutionary emergence of neocortex in mammals is a progression toward more flexible representational structures, in contrast to the popular view of cortical evolution as an increase in innate, specialized circuits. Human cortical postnatal development is also more extensive and protracted than generally supposed, suggesting that cortex has evolved so as to maximize the capacity of environmental structure to shape its structure and function through constructive learning. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the idea and ethics of vaccination for the sake of others. It conceptually distinguishes four different kinds of vaccination—self-protective, paternalistic, altruistic, and indirect—based on who receives the primary benefits of vaccination and who ultimately makes the vaccination decision. It describes the results of focus group studies that were conducted to investigate what people who might get vaccinated altruistically think of this idea. It also applies the different kinds of vaccination to ethical issues surrounding COVID-19, such as lockdown (...) measures, routine or mandatory vaccination of healthy children, and the ethical justification of restrictive measures for unvaccinated people. A more general philosophical account of vaccination ethics is ultimately developed, which is based not on moral duties, but on the moral reasons that people may have to get vaccinated for the sake of others. It is argued that such reasons may be stronger or weaker, depending on various factors related to the vaccines in question and the specific epidemiological circumstances. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 6, Page 687-698, July 2022.