Pierre-Alain Tilliette is a Breton writer, who lives with his family in Paris, where he is Conservateur des fonds étrangers at the Bibliothèque de l'Hôtel de Ville. The tragi-comic inventiveness of his fiction, with its Gaelic humor and extraordinary linguistic virtuosity, has made a small stir in France, but is still virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. His first novel, Gapos: vies chimériques, published by LePassage in 2011, described in Le Monde as "une des excellentes surprises de ce début de (...) l'année", placed him squarely in the lineage of Rabelais to Joyce. In 2015, Tilliette's second Bildungsroman-gone-awry, Un sentiment humain... (shrink)

To tackle zoonotic disease threats, a One Health approach is currently commonplace and generally understood as an integrated effort of multiple disciplines to promote the health of humans, animals and the environment. To implement One Health strategies in zoonotic disease control, many countries set up early warning systems, in which human and veterinary health professionals cooperate. These systems, like the Dutch Zoonoses Structure, can be successful to detect emerging disease threats. However, these systems are not well equipped to handle moral (...) dilemmas that can arise in zoonotic disease control, like the culling of healthy animals. This research studies the role of normative presuppositions of professionals involved in zoonotic disease control policies in the Netherlands. We found that these professionals in general adhered to a holistic view of the One Health concept, however, in practice an anthropocentric approach was dominant. Public health was identified as the trumping moral value, which reveals an inherent field of tension with the core of One Health thinking. The lack of ethical expertise in control systems for zoonotic diseases can lead to misconception of ethical principles, like the precautionary principle which is frequently evoked to justify disease control measures. (shrink)

In this paper we review recent UK literature on HRM and ethics and suggest that implicit in many accounts is a perception of a ‘moral hole’ appearing within the employee relations landscape which is based on external, reflective observations of HRM policies and practices. We argue that the investigation of HRM and ethics could be broadened by locating HRM and ethics research more explicitly within the social and cultural realities of organizations and their employees. Finally, we outline and illustrate what (...) a social constructivist approach might add to research in this field and how it might provide insights that help bridge the gap between theory and practice. (shrink)

Orienting biases for speech may provide a foundation for language development. Although human infants show a bias for listening to speech from birth, the relation of a speech bias to later language development has not been established. Here, we examine whether infants' attention to speech directly predicts expressive vocabulary. Infants listened to speech or non-speech in a preferential listening procedure. Results show that infants' attention to speech at 12 months significantly predicted expressive vocabulary at 18 months, while indices of general (...) development did not. No predictive relationships were found for infants' attention to non-speech, or overall attention to sounds, suggesting that the relationship between speech and expressive vocabulary was not a function of infants' general attentiveness. Potentially ancient evolutionary perceptual capacities such as biases for conspecific vocalizations may provide a foundation for proficiency in formal systems such language, much like the approximate number sense may provide a foundation for formal mathematics. (shrink)

Background Increasing social pluralism adds to the already existing variety of heterogeneous moral perspectives on good care, health, and quality of life. Pluralism in social identities is also connected to health and care disparities for minoritized patient (i.e. care receiver) populations, and to specific diversity-related moral challenges of healthcare professionals and organizations that aim to deliver diversity-responsive care in an inclusive work environment. Clinical ethics support (CES) services and instruments may help with adequately responding to these diversity-related moral challenges. However, (...) although various CES instruments exist to support healthcare professionals with dealing well with morally challenging situations in healthcare, current tools do not address challenges specifically related to moral pluralism and intersectional aspects of diversity and social justice issues. This article describes the content and developmental process of a novel CES instrument called the Diversity Compass. This instrument was designed with and for healthcare professionals to dialogically address and reflect on moral challenges related to intersectional aspects of diversity and social justice issues that they experience in daily practice. Methods We used a participatory development design to develop the Diversity Compass at a large long-term care organization in a major city in the Netherlands. Over a period of thirteen months, we conducted seven focus groups with healthcare professionals and peer-experts, carried out five expert interviews, and facilitated four meetings with a community of practice consisting of various healthcare professionals who developed and tested preliminary versions of the instrument throughout three cycles of iterative co-creation. Results The Diversity Compass is a practical, dialogical CES instrument that is designed as a small booklet and includes an eight-step deliberation method, as well as a guideline with seven recommendations to support professionals with engaging in dialogue when they are confronted with diversity-related moral challenges. The seven recommendations are key components in working toward creating an inclusive and safe space for dialogue to occur. Conclusions The Diversity Compass seeks to support healthcare professionals and organizations in their efforts to facilitate awareness, moral learning and joint reflection on moral challenges related to diversity and social justice issues. It is the first dialogical CES instrument that specifically acknowledges the role of social location in shaping moral perspectives or experiences with systemic injustices. However, to make healthcare more just, an instrument like the Diversity Compass is not enough on its own. In addition to the Diversity Compass, a systemic and structural approach to social justice issues in healthcare organizations is needed in order to foster a more inclusive, safe and diversity-responsive care and work environment in health care organizations. (shrink)

Building upon a recent call to renew actor-network theory (ANT) for educational research, this article reconsiders relations between technology and educational theory. Taking cues from actor-network theorists, this discussion considers the technologically-mediated networks in which learning actors are situated, acted upon, and acting, and traces the novel positions of creative capacity and participation that emerging media may enable. Whereas traditional theories of educational technology tend to focus on the harmonization of new technologies with extant curricular goals and educational practices, an (...) educational theory of technology looks to novel forms of technologically-mediated learning experience—from production pedagogies to role play in the virtual—to make visible the surprising relations, techniques, and opportunities that emerging media, and their attendant social contexts, may offer educational research. (shrink)

Is aesthetics a product of evolution? Are human aesthetic behaviors in fact evolutionary adaptations? The creation of artistic objects and experiences is an important aesthetic behavior. But so is the perception of aesthetic phenomena qua aesthetic. The question of evolutionary aesthetics is whether humans have evolved the capacity not only to make beautiful things but also to appreciate the aesthetic qualities in things. Are our near-universal love of music and cute baby animals essential to our species’ evolutionary development, which took (...) place over thousands of years? In other words, do aesthetic practice and appreciation help people to survive or reproduce? Do aesthetic behaviors help to propel natural selection? If so, what does that tell us about ourselves as human beings? What does it tell us about art, our other aesthetic practices, and aesthetic experience? (shrink)

Previous research suggests that exposure to nature may reduce delay discounting and thereby facilitate healthier dietary intake. This pre-registered study examined the impact of online exposure to images of natural scenes on delay discounting and food preferences. It was predicted that exposure to images of natural scenes would be associated with: lower delay discounting; higher desirability for fruits and vegetables ; and delay discounting would mediate the effect of nature-image exposure on food desirability. Adult participants were recruited to an online (...) between-subjects experiment in which they viewed a timed sequence of six images either showing natural landscape scenes or urban scenes. They then completed measures of mood, delay discounting and rated their momentary desire to eat four fruits and vegetables, and four energy-dense foods. There was no statistically significant effect of experimental condition on delay discounting or food desirability. Bayes factors supported the null hypothesis for discounting, and energy-dense food desirability, but provided no strong evidence for either hypothesis for F&V desirability. These findings indicate that brief online exposure to images of nature does not affect momentary impulsivity or energy-dense food preference, whereas for preference for less-energy dense foods, the evidence was inconclusive. (shrink)

This Handbook addresses Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean culture, comparative European literature, vernacular theology, and popular devotion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 33.1 (2003) 60-79 [Access article in PDF] The Secret Power of Suggestion Scipio Sighele and the Postliberal Subject Suzanne R. Stewart-Steinberg He experiments one by one with about thirty young men. [...] Almost all of them respond immediately to his power of fascination by turning stiff throughout their bodies; their faces become contracted, terrified, sometimes cadaverous; they are at the mercy of the fascinator and follow his (...) movements like a magnet. [...] There is something pitiful, spasmodic in their features, something macabre in their gestures. [...] Donato has them all in his power, he attracts them in threes, in sixes, ten at a time, simply by rapidly staring into their eyes, even against their firm will and their obstinate efforts to resist his suggestion. [...] Donato, in the process, never speaks: he thinks, he wants and points. [...] —an eyewitness account, L'Italia (1886) Young male bodies that turn stiff despite their efforts to do otherwise—such were the events to be seen on the stage of the Teatro Scribe in Turin in 1886, events performed under the direction of "Donato" (the Belgian-born Alfred d'Hont), the new theatrical magnetizer of crowds. Enrico Morselli, one of Italy's leading psychiatrists of the period,1 assisted and himself succumbed to the fascination of Donato. In his important 1886 study on animal magnetism and hypnotic states, Morelli provided a rather positive portrait of the man. Donato, in his opinion, was not a vulgar man. First soldier, then state employee, journalist, novelist, poet, and finally student and apostle of animal magnetism, Donato had revolutionized hypnotic practice through his discovery of a phenomenon called "fascination." Donato was blessed with uncommon physical strength, quick and insistent eyes, a great agility of movement and much spirit. He had exchanged the magician's cap for the more sober tuxedo—quite appropriately, for he [End Page 60]rejects fluids, rejects the power and transmission of will; nor does he trade in somnambulist lucidity, in sight without eyes, in divination. He does not claim to have special secrets or gifts. Instead he claims that it is his quick and insistent "gaze" that produces a rapid and sudden shock to the nervous system of sensitive individuals. Where there is no "orgasm," he told me—but more accurately he should have said "predisposition"—his method does not work. [Morselli, Il magnetismo animale 281] What was then so revolutionary about Donato's method? Why were the spectacles at the Teatro Scribe perceived to be so radically new? And above all, why, as Morselli claims, did these shows come close to producing a political crisis right at the center of Europe [Magnetismo 271]?James Braid's discovery in 1842 that hypnotic sleep could be induced by the simple fixation on a luminous object had revolutionized magnetic theory and practice. Braid's was to prove an important discovery, for it made possible the shift from the putative supernatural powers of the hypnotist—based on the theory of the transmission of magnetic fluids or electric currents—to an analysis of characteristics thought to inhere in the hypnotized subject him- or herself. The real cause of hypnosis, its very effectivity, was to be found, as Morselli remarks, not in the magnetizer but in his subject [Magnetismo 32]. A rethinking, within the late-nineteenth-century literature on hypnotism, of what drives the subject, of what makes him act appears predicated then on a very peculiar form of interiority, of self-causation within the subject himself. At the end of its historical trajectory this rethinking would first result in the idea of auto-hypnosis or auto-suggestion, and then, by the beginning of the new century, it would found the psychoanalytic subject, traversed as he is by conflicting desires and topographically split between ego and superego. In both instances, however, obedience is exacted as a result of an internalized command and—and here lies the peculiarity and utter novelty of this subject—for that reason the subject ceases to be master of his own house.In the remarks that follow, I will leave aside Freud's own contributions... (shrink)

In her book, Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett thinks through what ontological, political, and ecological questions would look like if humans could admit that matter and nonhuman things are living, creative agents; the contributors to this issue of Evental Aesthetics begin to think through what aesthetic questions would look like.

Sexual abuse by clergymen, poisoned water, police brutality—these cases each involve two wrongs: the abuse itself and the attempt to avoid responsibility for it. Our focus is this second wrong—the cover up. Cover ups are accountability failures, and they share common strategies for thwarting accountability whatever the abuse and whatever the institution. We find that cover ups often succeed even when accountability mechanisms are in place. Hence, improved institutions will not be sufficient to prevent accountability failures. Accountability mechanisms are tools (...) that people must be willing to use in good faith. They fail when people are complicit. What explains complicity? We identify certain human proclivities and features of modern organizations that lead people to become complicit in the wrongdoing of others. If we focus exclusively on the design of institutions, we will fail to constrain the perpetrators of wrongdoing. Understanding complicity is key to understanding accountability failures. (shrink)

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

Cet article propose un regard historique sur la notion d’exercice en art, à travers le cas du métier de comédien dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Alors qu’une véritable théâtromanie s’empare de la société française, les acteurs et les actrices doivent répondre aux exigences d’un public friand de nouveautés à l’affiche. L’article met en lumière des pratiques peu visibles du travail artistique, comme l’effort de mémorisation des rôles, ou les modalités d’organisation des exercices au sein de la première école (...) dramatique française (1786-1789). Nous montrons également que la reconnaissance croissante de la centralité de l’exercice, à la fois corporel et intellectuel, dans le métier de comédien contribue à définir la spécificité de l’art dramatique dans le second XVIIIe siècle. (shrink)

Dominance feminism and afropessimist theory, despite their critical appearances three decades apart, are undergirded by similar rhetorical strategies, political commitments and argumentative moves. This is the case even as afropessimism’s citational trajectory rarely invokes dominance feminism, and often positions itself as a critique of feminism’s imagined conception of gender as white, one that is thought to be most emphatically announced in the work of scholars like MacKinnon who invest in a gender binary, and in women’s oppressed location in this binary. (...) In this article, I insist on reading dominance feminism and afropessimism together. In so doing, I aspire to challenge afropessimism’s prevailing conception of gender, revealing that while it is often critical of feminist conceptions of gender – particularly conceptualisations of gender that are thought to insist on the shared experiences and positions of women – it actually relies on similar argumentative moves, and even rhetorical seductions, as dominance feminism. (shrink)

Individuals are faced with the many opportunities to pirate. The decision to pirate or not may be related to an individual''s attitudes toward other ethical issues. A person''s ethical and moral predispositions and the judgments that they use to make decisions may be consistent across various ethical dilemmas and may indicate their likelihood to pirate software. This paper investigates the relationship between religion and a theoretical ethical decision making process that an individual uses when evaluating ethical or unethical situations. An (...) ethical decision making model was studied for general unethical scenarios and for the unethical behavior of software piracy. The research model was tested via path analysis using structural equation modeling and was found to be appropriate for the sample data. The results suggest that there is a relationship between religion and the stages of an ethical decision making process regarding general ethical situations and software piracy. (shrink)

In this book, Suzanne Kirschner traces the origins of contemporary psychoanalysis back to the foundations of Judaeo-Christian culture, and challenges the prevailing view that modern theories of the self mark a radical break with religious and cultural tradition. Instead, she argues, they offer an account of human development which has its beginnings in biblical theology and neoplatonic mysticism. Drawing on a wide range of religious, literary, philosophical and anthropological sources, Dr Kirschner demonstrates that current Anglo-American psychoanalytic theories are but (...) the latest version of a narrative that has been progressively secularized over the course of nearly two millennia. She displays a deep understanding of psychoanalytic theories, while at the same time raising provocative questions about their status as knowledge and as science. (shrink)

The Eurocentric canon remains the predominant focus of music education often excluding the role of music and experiences of Black individuals and people of color. This singular perspective creates an incomplete and inaccurate understanding of the comprehensive nature of music and the humans who create, perform, and engage with it. In this article, the author shares her experience as a Black music educator and her aspirations for a music profession that incorporates the full range of human music engagement and expression. (...) The paper begins with a reflection on W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness followed by an exploration of the nuances, complexities, contradictions, and beauty of being a Black educator in a primarily white field. Subsequently, the essay presents four conceptual principles for a reimagined, inclusive music education approach, drawing inspiration from Sylvia Wynter’s “new science of the Word.” These principles advocate retelling the music education narrative to incorporate historically marginalized voices, reorienting music education to be human-centered, embracing interdisciplinary approaches to view music teaching and learning, and acknowledging the power of music in uplifting the human condition. Finally, this paper proposes a pathway for reconciling diverse identities prevalent in American culture with music education and academia. (shrink)

Historically, patients have deferred to physicians′ judgments about appropriate medical care, thereby limiting patient participation in treatment decisions. In this model of medical decision making, physicians typically decided upon the treatment plan. Communication with patients focused on securing their cooperation in accepting a treatment decision that essentially had already been made.

Resistances to sexual and gender rights are shifting and need new theorisations. This article develops the analytical concept of heteroactivism by exploring its relation to abortion debates in Ireland. Heteroactivism as an analytical category examines resistances to sexual and gender rights that seek to reiterate the place of the heteronormative family (both in terms of gender norms and heterosexuality) through activisms that can stand against new legislative orders. The article investigates three texts to explore how the ‘Vote No’ campaign in (...) Ireland discussed ‘loving both’, but in the main thrust of the poster campaign instead focused on the foetus as an ‘unborn child’. Using textual and visual analysis, we show the creation of Ireland through seeking to ‘love both’ and create a distinction from the dangers, and foreign contagion, of England. The article concludes by arguing that ongoing work is needed to explore heteroactivism and its diverse manifestations, including in abortion debates. (shrink)

"In recent years, we have grown accustomed to philosophical language that is intensely self-conscious and rhetorically thick, often tragic in tone. It is enlivening to read Bergson, who exerts so little rhetorical pressure while exacting such a substantial effort of thought.... Bergson's texts teach the reader to let go of entrenched intellectual habits and to begin to think differently—to think in time.... Too much and too little have been said about Bergson. Too much, because of the various appropriations of his (...) thought. Too little, because the work itself has not been carefully studied in recent decades."—from Thinking in Time Henri Bergson, whose philosophical works emphasized motion, time, and change, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. His work remains influential, particularly in the realms of philosophy, cultural studies, and new media studies. In Thinking in Time, Suzanne Guerlac provides readers with the conceptual and contextual tools necessary for informed appreciation of Bergson's work. Guerlac's straightforward philosophical expositions of two Bergson texts, Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, focus on the notions of duration and memory—concepts that are central to the philosopher's work. Thinking in Time makes plain that it is well worth learning how to read Bergson effectively: his era and our own share important concerns. Bergson's insistence on the opposition between the automatic and the voluntary and his engagement with the notions of "the living," affect, and embodiment are especially germane to discussions of electronic culture. (shrink)

What is a Reformed Christian Bioethics? This issue of Christian Bioethics attempts to begin a scholarly answer to this question. Most of the papers are offered by Reformed Protestants. They present a diversity of Reformed thought but at least tend to agree on the primacy of scripture as an authority, the relative authority of historical Reformed figures, and the insufficiency of a purely secular bioethics. As counterpoints to help further define the boundaries of the field two essays by Orthodox Christians (...) bring critiques and questions. This essay provides an overview and context for the issue and the development of the field of Reformed Christian Bioethics. (shrink)

The value of applied philosophy is often taken to consist in its contribution to our understanding of practical issues with which applied philosophy engages and in its contribution to their satisfactory resolution. This chapter examines the relationship between the nature of applied philosophy and its value. It regards the value of applied philosophy as dependent both on its philosophical quality and on its contribution to the understanding and (potential) resolution of practical issues with which it engages. These dual points of (...) reference are difficult simultaneously to fulfill and arguably sometimes in tension with one another. The chapter takes issue with the idea that the value of applied philosophy consists, or ought to consist, in its direct impact on actual policy or practice. (shrink)

This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’ novel River Woman, locating her text in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. I argue that the complex affects that her representation of ‘child-shifting’ produces, can be articulated both in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her, and in the context of the plantation, where ruptured (...) ties at the level of community and culture continue to be reproduced in the personal, emotional and family spheres. I use the concept of marronage, developed in the work of Glissant and Depestre, to define strategies of survival that necessitated actual and imaginative flight or escape, to contextualise the complex affects of the plantation that are repeated and reproduced in the novel's present—the late twentieth-century Caribbean. (shrink)

In this essay Suzanne Rice examines Aristotle's ideas about virtue, character, and education as elements in an Aristotelian conception of good listening. Rice begins by surveying of several different contexts in which listening typically occurs, using this information to introduce the argument that what should count as “good listening” must be determined in relation to the situation in which listening actually occurs. On this view, Rice concludes, there are no “essential” listening virtues, but rather ways of listening that may (...) be regarded as virtuous in the context of particular concrete circumstances. (shrink)

While artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly applied for decision- making processes, ethical decisions pose challenges for AI applica- tions. Given that humans cannot always agree on the right thing to do, how would ethical decision-making by AI systems be perceived and how would responsibility be ascribed in human-AI collabora- tion? In this study, we investigate how the expert type (human vs. AI) and level of expert autonomy (adviser vs. decider) influence trust, perceived responsibility, and reliance. We find that partici- pants (...) consider humans to be more morally trustworthy but less capable than their AI equivalent. This shows in participants’ re- liance on AI: AI recommendations and decisions are accepted more often than the human expert’s. However, AI team experts are per- ceived to be less responsible than humans, while programmers and sellers of AI systems are deemed partially responsible instead. (shrink)

Proportionality is widely accepted as a necessary condition of justified self-defense. What gives rise to this particular condition and what role it plays in the justification of self-defense seldom receive focused critical attention. In this paper I address the standard of proportionality applicable to personal self-defense and the role that proportionality plays in justifying the use of harmful force in self-defense. I argue against an equivalent harm view of proportionality in self-defense, and in favor of a standard of proportionality in (...) self-defense that requires comparable seriousness and takes into account the wrong, as opposed simply to the harm that the victim is fending off. I distinguish the standard of proportionality in self-defense from proportionality in circumstances of necessity, and I discuss whether proportionality is an internal or an external constraint on the right of self-defense. (shrink)

This article examines the growing body of commemorative feminist work on intersectionality – the myriad journals and books that have marked intersectionality’s twentieth anniversary and celebrated the analytic’s field-defining status and cross-disciplinary circulation. I argue that this commemorative scholarship is marked by its own genre conventions, including the emergence of originalism, an investment in returning to the ‘inaugural’ intersectional texts – namely Crenshaw’s two articles (1989, 1991) – and assessing later feminist work on intersectionality by its fidelity to those texts. (...) The article reveals that intersectional originalism is its own practice of re-reading and re-interpretation that has its own complex temporal and racial politics, and which is animated by a desire to rescue intersectionality from critique in a moment in which identity politics are increasingly suspect. (shrink)

I argue that in the Phaedo, Plato maintains that the soul is located in space and is capable of locomotion and of interacting with the body through contact. Numerous interpreters have dismissed these claims as merely metaphorical, since they assume that as an incorporeal substance, the soul cannot possess spatial attributes. But careful examination of how Plato conceives of the body throughout his corpus reveals that he does not distinguish it from the soul in terms of spatiality. Furthermore, assigning spatial (...) attributes to the soul plays an important role in Plato’s account of the relation of body and soul. (shrink)

Do individuals have a positive right of self-defence? And if so, what are the limits of this right? Under what conditions does this use of force extend to the defence of others? These are some of the issues explored by Dr Uniacke in this comprehensive 1994 philosophical discussion of the principles relevant to self-defence as a moral and legal justification of homicide. She establishes a unitary right of self-defence and the defence of others, one which grounds the permissibility of the (...) use of necessary and proportionate defensive force against culpable and non-culpable, active and passive, unjust threats. Particular topics discussed include: the nature of moral and legal justification and excuse; natural law justifications of homicide in self-defence; the Principle of Double Effect and the claim that homicide in self-defence is justified as unintended killing; and the question of self-preferential killing. This is a lucid and sophisticated account of the complex notion of justification, revolving around a critical discussion of trends in the law of self-defence. (shrink)

Moral distress forms a major threat to the well-being of healthcare professionals, and is argued to negatively impact patient care. It is associated with emotions such as anger, frustration, guilt, and anxiety. In order to effectively deal with moral distress, the concept of moral resilience is introduced as the positive capacity of an individual to sustain or restore their integrity in response to moral adversity. Interventions are needed that foster moral resilience among healthcare professionals. Ethics consultation has been proposed as (...) such an intervention. In this paper, we add to this proposition by discussing Moral Case Deliberation (MCD) as a specific form of clinical ethics support that promotes moral resilience. We argue that MCD in general may contribute to the moral resilience of healthcare professionals as it promotes moral agency. In addition, we focus on three specific MCD reflection methods: the Dilemma Method, the Aristotelian moral inquiry into emotions, and CURA, a method consisting of four main steps: Concentrate, Unrush, Reflect, and Act. In practice, all three methods are used by nurse ethicists or by nurses who received training to facilitate reflection sessions with these methods. We maintain that these methods also have specific elements that promote moral resilience. However, the Dilemma Method fosters dealing well with tragedy, the latter two promote moral resilience by including attention to emotions as part of the reflection process. We will end with discussing the importance of future empirical research on the impact of MCD on moral resilience, and of comparing MCD with other interventions that seek to mitigate moral distress and promote moral resilience. (shrink)

Two articles have appeared in Law and Philosophy that provide detailed criticisms of aspects of my account of the justification of individual self-defense. One of these articles misconstrues central aspects of my account. The other raises a less central, but nonetheless an important issue that invites clarification. The criticisms raised in these two articles to which I respond here have important bearing on the nature of the justification of self-defense.

This essay proposes an expansion of the concept of narrative competence, beyond close reading, to include two more skills: the collaborative construction and compelling performance of stories. To show how this enhanced form of narrative competence can be attained, the essay describes Off Script, a cocurricular medical storytelling program with three phases: 1) creative writing workshop, 2) dress rehearsal, and 3) public performance of stories. In these phases, Off Script combines literary studies, creative writing, reflective practice, collegial feedback, and drama. (...) With increased narrative competence, Off Script participants are likely better equipped to engage in more impactful health advocacy and partner with patients more effectively. (shrink)