Veterinary oaths are public declarations sworn by veterinarians, usually when they enter the profession. As such, they may reflect professional and social concerns. Analysis of contemporary veterinary oaths may therefore reveal their ethical foundations. The objective of this article is to contextualize the ethical content of contemporary oaths, in terms of the origin and development of veterinary medicine and wider societal changes such as the intensification of farming and the rise of animal welfare. This informs a comparison of oaths from (...) the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. This analysis suggests some ways in which the oaths might be developed to better reflect contemporary societal values. (shrink)

How should driverless vehicles respond to situations of unavoidable personal harm? This paper takes up the case of self-driving cars as a prominent example of algorithmic moral decision-making, an emergent type of morality that is evolving at a high pace in a digitised business world. As its main contribution, it juxtaposes dilemma decision situations relating to ethical crash algorithms for autonomous cars to two edge cases: the case of manually driven cars facing real-life, mundane accidents, on the one hand, and (...) the dilemmatic situation in theoretically constructed trolley cases, on the other. The paper identifies analogies and disanalogies between the three cases with regard to decision makers, decision design, and decision outcomes. The findings are discussed from the angle of three perspectives: aspects where analogies could be found, those where the case of self-driving cars has turned out to lie in between both edge cases, and those where it entirely departs from either edge case. As a main result, the paper argues that manual driving as well as trolley cases are suitable points of reference for the issue of designing ethical crash algorithms only to a limited extent. Instead, a fundamental epistemic and conceptual divergence of dilemma decision situations in the context of self-driving cars and the used edge cases is substantiated. Finally, the areas of specific need for regulation on the road to introducing autonomous cars are pointed out and related thoughts are sketched through the lens of the humanistic paradigm. (shrink)

How should driverless vehicles respond to situations of unavoidable personal harm? This paper takes up the case of self-driving cars as a prominent example of algorithmic moral decision-making, an emergent type of morality that is evolving at a high pace in a digitised business world. As its main contribution, it juxtaposes dilemma decision situations relating to ethical crash algorithms for autonomous cars to two edge cases: the case of manually driven cars facing real-life, mundane accidents, on the one hand, and (...) the dilemmatic situation in theoretically constructed trolley cases, on the other. The paper identifies analogies and disanalogies between the three cases with regard to decision makers, decision design, and decision outcomes. The findings are discussed from the angle of three perspectives: aspects where analogies could be found, those where the case of self-driving cars has turned out to lie in between both edge cases, and those where it entirely departs from either edge case. As a main result, the paper argues that manual driving as well as trolley cases are suitable points of reference for the issue of designing ethical crash algorithms only to a limited extent. Instead, a fundamental epistemic and conceptual divergence of dilemma decision situations in the context of self-driving cars and the used edge cases is substantiated. Finally, the areas of specific need for regulation on the road to introducing autonomous cars are pointed out and related thoughts are sketched through the lens of the humanistic paradigm. (shrink)

Wie sollen sich autonome Fahrzeuge verhalten, wenn ein Unfall nicht mehr abwendbar ist? Die Komplexität spezifischer moralischer Dilemmata, die in diesem Kontext auftreten können, lässt bewährte ethische Denktraditionen an ihre Grenzen stoßen. Dieser Aufsatz versteht sich als Versuch, neue Lösungsperspektiven mithilfe einer risikoethischen Sichtweise auf die Problematik zu eröffnen und auf diese Weise deren Relevanz für die Programmierung von ethischen Unfallalgorithmen aufzuzeigen. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Frage, welche Implikationen sich aus einer Auffassung von Dilemma-Situationen als risikoethische Verteilungsprobleme im Hinblick (...) auf die Zulässigkeit von entsprechenden Risikoübertragungen ergeben. Dabei wird zunächst eine risikoethische Interpretation des zugrundeliegenden Entscheidungsproblems skizziert, welches durch seine dilemmatische Struktur eine besondere Risikokonstellation begründet. Ausgehend von den Positionen von Sven Ove Hansson und Julian Nida-Rümelin wird für einen deontologisch-risikoethischen Ansatz argumentiert, der auf Individualrechten einerseits und einer interpersonell gerechten Verteilung der entstehenden Schadensrisiken anderseits basiert. Diese beiden Kriterien werden für den Anwendungskontext des autonomen Fahrens konkretisiert. Zum einen wird in Bezug auf das erste Kriterium argumentiert, dass individuelle Rechte genau dann als angemessen gewahrt gelten können, wenn die resultierenden Risikoübertragungen auf die Einzelnen in ihrer absoluten Höhe jeweils zumutbar sind. Zum anderen werden Schwierigkeiten skizziert, die sich hinsichtlich der konkreten Umsetzung des zweiten Kriteriums der Verteilungsgerechtigkeit ergeben. In diesem Zusammenhang werden beispielsweise ethische Herausforderungen in Bezug auf einen möglichen Vorteilsausgleich, das Prinzip der Schadensminimierung sowie individuell unterschiedliche Ausgangsbedingungen der persönlichen Schadensreduktion kritisch in den Blick genommen. (shrink)

Dans cet article, je décris une partie de l’histoire des travaux sur le raisonnement humain mené par les philosophes et les psychologues en psychologie expérimentale. Ce travail interdisciplinaire particulier est intéressant, car il montre de quelles façons la recherche interdisciplinaire peut solidifier certaines idées préconçues omniprésentes dans un domaine particulier. Les travaux en psychologie expérimentale ont démontré que certains systèmes normatifs ne parviennent pas à modéliser le raisonnement dans des contextes de langage naturel. J’affirmerai, par conséquent, que les philosophes devraient (...) se servir de cette recherche psychologique comme motivation pour modifier ces modèles normatifs ou changer radicalement nos idées sur la manière dont ces modèles sont appliqués au raisonnement en langage naturel. (shrink)

Veterinarians serve on the front lines working to prevent animal suffering and abuse. For centuries, their compassion and expertise have improved the quality of life and death for animals in their care. However, modern interest in animal rights has led more and more people to ask questions about the ethical considerations that lie behind common veterinary practices. This Common Threads volume, drawn from articles originally published in the Journal of Animal Ethics (JAE), offers veterinarians and other interested readers a primer (...) on key issues in the field. Essays in the first section discuss aspects of veterinary oaths, how advances in animal cognition science factor into current ethical debates, and the rise of complementary and alternative veterinary medicine and its relationship to traditional veterinary medicine. The second section continues with an essay that addresses why veterinarians have an obligation to educate animal caregivers to look past "cuteness" in order to treat all animals with dignity. The collection closes with three short sections focusing on animals in farming, trade, and research ”areas where veterinarians encounter conflicts between their job and their duty to advocate and care for animals. Contributors: Judith Benz-Schwarzburg, Vanessa Carli Bones, Grace Clement, Simon Coghlan, Priscilla N. Cohn, Mark J. Estren, Elisa Galgut, Eleonora Gullone, Matthew C. Halteman, Andrew Knight, Drew Leder, Andrew Linzey, Clair Linzey, Kay Peggs, Megan Schommer, Clifford Warwick, and James W. Yeates. (shrink)

The debate in Metaphysics of Science concerning the interaction between metaphysics and science has been mainly approached from the perspective of the scientific discipline of physics. In this paper, I address this debate from a different framework, namely that of biology. I pay attention to the recent characterization of Metaphysics of Biology and the different forms in which philosophers use metaphysics when addressing conceptual biological problems. In doing so, I argue that two main lessons can be obtained that can serve (...) to enrich the debate in Metaphysics of Science: i) that the interaction between metaphysics and science seems to be more complex than generally considered; and ii) that the type of metaphysics that is interacting with science when characterizing the ontological status of the world is neither the a priori nor the naturalized one, but a different form of metaphysics that will be labelled here as applied metaphysics. (shrink)

Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of Lehman Brothers, if the Anglophone academy could be said to have arrived at any consensus about the value of Marxist theory, it would be that Marxism was a quaint historical curio at best and a world-historically hubristic folly at worst. Today, however, well on our way through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we live in a moment of greatly renewed interest in Marxist ideas. This curiosity is stoked (...) by, among other factors, the worldwide economic shocks of 2008 and, in more recent times, by impending climate catastrophe, incipient fascisticization, and the still-ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic. Any of these on its own would stand out as a rebuke to the neoliberal triumphalism of the 1990s, famously crystallized in Francis Fukayama's assertion that humanity had arrived at "the end of history," there to find permanently expanding capitalist prosperity. Taken together, they present at least strong prima facie evidence for what Karl Marx identified as the inherently and ineluctably crisis-ridden nature of capital and, therefore, good reason to encounter his writings anew. (shrink)

I argue for the existence of a ‘ratcheting-up effect’: the behavior of moral saints serves to increase the level of moral obligation the rest of us face. What we are morally obligated to do is constrained by what it would be reasonable for us to believe we are morally obligated to do. Moral saints provide us with a special kind of evidence that bears on what we can reasonably believe about our obligations. They do this by modeling the level of (...) sacrifice a person can realistically bear. Exposure to moral saints thus ‘ratchets-up’ our obligations by combating a type of ignorance that would otherwise defeat those obligations. (shrink)

There is a persisting debate about what chemical bonds are and whether they exist. I argue that chemical bonds are real patterns of interactions between subatomic particles. This proposal resolves the problems raised in the context of existing understandings of the chemical bond and provides a novel way to defend the reality of chemical bonds.

One of the most plausible and widely discussed examples of strong emergence is molecular structure. The only detailed account of it, which has been very influential, is due to Robin Hendry and is formulated in terms of downward causation. This paper explains Hendry’s account of the strong emergence of molecular structure and argues that it is coherent only if one assumes a diachronic reflexive notion of downward causation. However, in the context of this notion of downward causation, the strong emergence (...) of molecular structure faces three challenges that have not been met and which have so far remained unnoticed. First, the putative empirical evidence presented for the strong emergence of molecular structure equally undermines supervenience, which is one of the main tenets of strong emergence. Secondly, it is ambiguous how the assumption of determinate nuclear positions is invoked for the support of strong emergence, as the role of this assumption in Hendry’s argument can be interpreted in more than one way. Lastly, there are understandings of causation which render the postulation of a downward causal relation between a molecule’s structure and its quantum mechanical entities, untenable. (shrink)

Moral distress has been well reviewed in the literature with established deleterious side effects for all healthcare professionals, including nurses, physicians, and others. Yet, little is known about the quality and effectiveness of interventions directed to address moral distress. The aim of this integrative review is to analyze published intervention studies to determine their efficacy and applicability across hospital settings. Of the initial 1373 articles discovered in October 2020, 18 were appraised as relevant, with 1 study added by hand search (...) and 2 after a repeated search was completed in January and then in May of 2021, for a total of 22 reviewed articles. This review revealed data mostly from nurses, with some studies making efforts to include other healthcare professions who have experienced moral distress. Education-based interventions showed the most success, though many reported limited power and few revealed statistically lowered moral distress post intervention. This may point to the difficulty in adequately addressing moral distress in real time without adequate support systems. Ultimately, these studies suggest potential frameworks which, when bolstered by organization-wide support, may aid in moral distress interventions making a measurable impact. (shrink)

Holobionts are symbiotic assemblages composed by a macrobe host plus its symbiotic microbiota. In recent years, the ontological status of holobionts has created a great amount of controversy among philosophers and biologists: are holobionts biological individuals or are they rather ecological communities of independent individuals that interact together? Chiu and Eberl have recently developed an eco-immunity account of the holobiont wherein holobionts are neither biological individuals nor ecological communities, but hybrids between a host and its microbiota. According to their account, (...) the microbiota is not a proper part of the holobiont. Yet, it should be regarded as a set of scaffolds that support the individuality of the host. In this paper, we approach Chiu and Eberl’s account from a metaphysical perspective and argue that, contrary to what the authors claim, the eco-immunity account entails that the microorganisms that compose the host’s microbiota are proper parts of the holobiont. Second, we argue that by claiming that holobionts are hybrids, and therefore, not biological individuals, the authors seem to be assuming a controversial position about the ontology of hybrids, which are conventionally characterized as a type of biological individual. In doing so, our paper aligns with the contemporary tendency to incorporate metaphysical resources to shed light on current biological debates and builds on that to provide additional support to the consideration of holobionts as biological individuals from an eco-immunity perspective. (shrink)

A survey on the knowledge and attitudes towards the Austrian organ donation legislation (an opt-out solution) of selected groups of the Austrian population taking into account factors such as age, gender, level of education, affiliation to healthcare professions and health related studies was conducted.

This study tests how various kinds of trust impact attitudes toward euthanasia among the general public. The indication that trust might have an impact on euthanasia attitudes is based on the slippery slope argument, which asserts that allowing euthanasia might lead to abuses and involuntary deaths. Adopting this argument usually leads to less positive attitudes towards euthanasia. Tying in with this, it is assumed here that greater trust diminishes such slippery slope fears, and thereby increases euthanasia acceptance.

Why do racist oppression and capitalist exploitation often seem so inescapable and intractable? To describe and explain adequately the persistence of racist ideology, to specify its role in the maintenance of racial capitalism, and to imagine the conditions of its abolition, we must understand racist ideology as a form of false consciousness. False consciousness gets things “right” at the level of appearance, but it mistakes that appearance for a “deep” or essential truth. This chapter articulates a novel, positive account of (...) first-order false consciousness, which occurs in the case of false beliefs about the world that are sustained and superficially justified by objective social arrangements, and of second-order false consciousness, which occurs in the case of false beliefs about how one has come to hold the beliefs that one does. To dismantle racist ideology requires political movements that craft theoretical interventions highlighting the inessentiality and contingency of despised racial groups’ oppressed status, as well as practical interventions aimed at directly undermining the oppressive conditions that are reflected in racist beliefs about the “naturalness” or “appropriateness” of these groups’ degraded status. (shrink)

Two environmental accidents in the mining industry provide the context for this study of the Mitchell, Agle, and Wood (1997, The Academy of Management Review 22, 853–886) analysis of stakeholder salience. I examine the reactions of two stakeholder groups: shareholder response is examined in terms of changing share returns and risk; management response through change in disclosure. I find the two decision-makers reacted at different times. Management responded to the first accident, though not the second. Shareholders responded to the second (...) accident alone. My findings support the Mitchell, Agle, and Wood (MAW) assertion that stakeholder status is impermanent, and determined through the eyes of the decision-maker. (shrink)

Here is something puzzling. Still Lifes can be expressive. Expression involves movement. Hence, (some) Still Lifes move. This seems odd. I consider a novel explanation to this ‘static-dynamic’ puzzle from Mitchell Green (2007). Green defends an analysis of artistic expressivity that is heavily indebted to work on intermodal perception. He says visual stimuli, like colours and shapes, can elicit experienced resemblances to sounds, smells and feelings. This enables viewers to know how an emotion feels by looking at the picture. The (...) hypothesis is intriguing, but I show that his suggestion that we empathize with the pictorial content is implausible and that this exposes a flaw in the way his argument moves from experiential mappings to experiential-affective mappings. Consequently, I register some reservations about the way Green supposes we detect these cross-modal qualities. (shrink)

Marxism is a materialist theory that centers economic life in its analysis of the human social world. This materialist orientation manifests in explanations that take economic class to play a fundamental causal role in determining the emergence, character, and development of race-and sex-based oppression—indeed, of all forms of identity-based oppression within class societies. To say that labor is mediated by class in a class-based society is to say that, in such societies, the class-based division of that activity which produces and (...) reproduces the human species is the definite form in which labor appears, and that the human life which is the product of that self-making activity bears its stamp. Marxism’s emphasis on economic factors as central in the constitution and development of human life has been seized upon as evidence of its alleged “class reductionism”—its supposed tendency to think of all aspects of human life as direct and simple expressions of a class relation. No such thing follows; quite the opposite, a correct understanding of the relationships among capitalism, racism, and sexism only further highlights how central the struggle against each is to the struggles against any of the others. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Jenefer Robinson’s personalist account of pictorial expression. [1] According to personalism, a picture possesses the expressive properties we attribute to it because we take it that someone expresses E in the work. Robinson’s particular strategy exploits the concept of an implied persona who ‘unifies’ and ‘specifies’ what is expressed. [2] Dominic Lopes challenges this view by attacking what he takes to be a flawed assumption motivating the personalist account: the priority of figure expression. [3] Once (...) we acknowledge this flaw, he argues, there is no good reason to prefer personalism to an impersonalist theory. I will argue that Robinson qua personalist can pre-empt this strike by clarifying the relation between (a) what a picture expresses and (b) what is depicted as expressing in the picture. Rather than leading with the idea that personalism unifies or determines the meaning, I argue that impersonalism diminishes it and that, should it be accepted, we would be left with an impoverished view of what specific art pieces can mean. (shrink)

The emotional state of war-affected populations has become a central concern for international policy-makers in the last decade. Growing interest in war trauma is influenced by contemporary Anglo-American emotionology, or emotional norms, which tends to pathologize ordinary responses to distress, including anger related to survival strategies. The article critically analyses the ascendancy of a therapeutic security paradigm in international politics, which seeks to explain the prevailing political, economic and social conditions in terms of cycles of emotional dysfunctionalism. The article contends (...) that international therapeutic governance pathologizes waraffected populations as emotionally dysfunctional and problematizes their right to self-government, leading to extensive external intervention. However, international therapeutic governance may be detrimental to postwar recovery as well legitimizing a denial of self-government. (shrink)

There has been an exponential rise in use of the term vulnerability across a number of political and policy arenas, including child protection, sexual offences, poverty, development, care for the elderly, patient autonomy, globalisation, war, public health and ecology. Yet despite its increasing deployment, the exact meaning and parameters of this concept remain somewhat elusive. In this article, we explore the interaction of two very different strategies—one in which vulnerability is relied upon by those seeking improved social justice as a (...) mechanism by which to identify, problematise and compel state responses to a universal condition of precarious dependency, and the other in which it is used as a category of neo-liberal governance which legitimates state encroachment whilst constructing ‘vulnerable’ individuals as ‘risk-managers’ who must behave ‘responsibly’ in the face of disadvantage. We suggest that the co-existence of these divergent approaches highlights the fluidity and malleability of the concept of vulnerability. Using sex work as a specific case study, we explore the ways in which vulnerability bears multiple meanings, and has been used in recent times in the furtherance of moralistic and regressive agendas, which collude with, rather than challenge, state power. Without seeking to reject the label or normative import of vulnerability, we call, therefore, for a more circumspect approach to its usage, and a more critical evaluation of recent claims which hail it as a mechanism, preferable to the conventional use of equality paradigms, by which to secure progressive feminist outcomes. (shrink)

We know that microbes contribute to the production of odors that some animals use to communicate, but how common is this phenomenon? Recent studies capitalizing on new molecular technologies are uncovering fascinating associations between microbes and odors of wild animals, but causality is difficult to ascertain. Fundamental questions about the nature of these unique host‐microbe interactions also remain unanswered. For instance, do microbes benefit from signaling associations with hosts? How does microbial community structure influence signal production? How do hosts regulate (...) microbes in order to generate appropriate signals? Here, we review the current state of knowledge on microbially produced signals in animals and discuss key research foci that can advance our understanding of microbial‐based signaling in the animal world. (shrink)

I argue that molecules may not have structure in isolation. I support this by investigating how quantum models identify structure for isolated molecules. Specifically, I distinguish between two sets of models: those that identify structure in isolation and those that do not. The former identify structure because they presuppose structural information about the target system via the Born- Oppenheimer approximation. However, it is an idealisation to assume structure in isolation because there is no empirical evidence of this. In fact, whenever (...) structure is empirically examined it is always partially determined by factors that are absent in isolation. Together with the growing empirical evidence that isolated molecules behave in non-classical ways, this shows that the quantum models that do not identify structure are more faithful representations of isolated molecules. (shrink)

Abstract It would be puzzling if the morally best agents were not so good after all. Yet one prominent account of the morally best agents ascribes to them the exact motivational defect that has famously been called a “fetish.” The supposed defect is a desire to do the right thing, where this is read de dicto . If the morally best agents really are driven by this de dicto desire, and if this de dicto desire is really a fetish, then (...) the morally best agents are moral fetishists. This is puzzling. I resolve the puzzle by showing that on a proper understanding of the interaction between de dicto and de re moral motivation, it is not only not fetishistic, but quite possibly desirable, to be motivated by a de dicto desire to do the right thing. My argument relies partly on an appeal to a non-buck-passing account of moral rightness, according to which rightness is itself an additional reason-giving property over and above the right-making properties of an action. If this account of moral rightness is correct, then we would expect the morally best agents to exhibit de dicto moral motivation. However, since their de dicto desire acts in concert with de re desires, there is no reason to consider it a fetish. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9825-z Authors Vanessa Carbonell, Philosophy Department, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210374, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0374, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

Departing from the thought-provoking conversation between David Theo Goldberg and Achille Mbembe on the driving themes in Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason, this commentary elaborates upon three topics that emerge in this conversation: the role of desire and how it is articulated in black abjection, the politics of care, and contemporary practices of repairing the injustices perpetrated in the context of European modernity. It is emphasized that black reason as a practice of repairing and transformation is especially enacted within contemporary (...) movements like the refugee movements organized around the Black Mediterranean and in the lived freedom archives and abolitionist imaginaries of movements where gender and race cross-cut. Characterized by their transnational dimension and a radical openness towards new beginnings, these expressions of black reason imagine and reinvent justice and democracy anew. (shrink)

Este artigo objetiva realizar uma revisão narrativa sobre a temática da branquitude, de modo a verificar suas definições presentes na literatura, assim como as maneiras como ela se expressa no cotidiano. As produções foram organizadas em um quadro segundo autor e data, discutindo os diferentes aspectos da raça, na realidade brasileira, em diferentes regiões e também da realidade de outros países. Os dados obtidos indicam que a branquitude, em suas diversas representações, configura-se um agente central na manutenção do racismo. Confirmaram-se (...) os problemas da não racialização e os prejuízos centenários dessa relação de poder. É um panorama diverso e complexo, que compreende pessoas com ou sem consciência de si, com variados níveis de privilégios, expressos territorialmente de maneira diferente. (shrink)

BackgroundKnowledge and attitude towards organ donation are critical factors influencing organ donation rate. We aimed to assess the knowledge and attitude towards organ donation in adolescents in Austria and Switzerland.MethodsA paper-based survey was performed in two secondary schools (age range 11–20 years) in Austria and Switzerland. 354/400 surveys were sufficiently answered and analyzed.ResultsOur study found that knowledge on organ donation is scarce in adolescents. Less than 60% of those surveyed thinks that a person is dead when declared brain dead. 84.6% (...) would authorize organ donation after brain death for themselves, but only 69% would authorize organ donation after brain death for a close relative. 93.7% would accept a donor organ if they needed one. Family discussions, rather than school discussions, influenced knowledge on organ donation, the percentage of respondents who have a firm opinion on organ donation and the rate of declaration of this opinion. Age, gender, nationality and religion also influenced knowledge and attitude towards organ donation. Nearly one third of adolescents are of the opinion that selling non-vital organs should be legalized.ConclusionSince having had family discussions, a potentially modifiable factor, was positively associated with knowledge and attitude towards organ donation, we postulate that educational programs stimulating family discussions on organ donation may be a promising strategy to increase knowledge. (shrink)

The moral community is a social community, and as such it is vulnerable to social problems and pathologies. In this essay I identify a particular way in which participation in the moral community can be constrained by social factors. I argue that features of the social world—including power imbalances, oppression, intergroup conflict, communication barriers, and stereotyping—can make it nearly impossible for some members of the moral community to hold others responsible for wrongdoing. Specifically, social circumstances prevent some marginalized people from (...) engaging in what Stephen Darwall calls “felicitous moral address” (Darwall 2006). We should think of some members of the moral community as having “second-class moral citizenship” in ways that parallel second-class political citizenship. The injustice of second-class moral citizenship can be understood by drawing an analogy with Miranda Fricker’s notion of “epistemic injustice” (Fricker 2007). Fricker’s account of how people can be undermined in their capacity as knowers can be extended to show how people can be undermined in their capacity as makers of moral claims, which can be called “claimant injustice”. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present a different perspective through which to examine reduction and emergence; namely, the perspective of chemistry’s relation to physics.

ABSTRACT This article invites us to consider the task of education as we face the end of the world as we have known it. The first part of the article gives an overview of global and educational challenges, drawing attention to how formal education has been complicit in the reproduction of historical and systemic violence, as well as unsustainability. This section also offers a distinction between educational approaches that focus on personal empowerment and the mastery of knowledge and skills, and (...) educational approaches that see the role of education in association with the non-coercive re-arrangement of desires and with responsibility before will. The second part of the paper presents a psychoanalytic experiment that attempts to create a space and the dispositions necessary for difficult conversations about the role of education in preparing us all to confront the potential for social and ecological collapse in our lifetime. (shrink)

Susan Wolf famously claimed that the life of the moral saint is unattractive from the “point of view of individual perfection.” I argue, however, that the unattractive moral saints in Wolf’s account are self-defeating on two levels, are motivated in the wrong way, and are called into question by real-life counter-examples. By appealing to a real-life case study, I argue that the best life from the moral point of view is not necessarily unattractive from the individual point of view.

Nietzsche coins the enigmatic term homo natura to capture his understanding of the human being as a creature of nature and tasks philosophy with the renaturalisation of humanity. Following Foucault's critique of the human sciences, Vanessa Lemm discusses the reception of Nietzsche's naturalism in philosophical anthropology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. She offers an original reading of homo natura that brings back the ancient Greek idea of nature and sexuality as creative chaos and of the philosophical life as outspoken and (...) embodied truth, perhaps best exemplified by the Cynics' embrace of social and cultural transformation. (shrink)

Liberalism is a critically important topic in the contemporary world as liberal values and institutions are in retreat in countries where they seemed relatively secure. Lucidly written and accessible, this book offers an important yet neglected Russian aspect to the history of political liberalism. Vanessa Rampton examines Russian engagement with liberal ideas during Russia's long nineteenth century, focusing on the high point of Russian liberalism from 1900 to 1914. It was then that a self-consciously liberal movement took shape, followed (...) by the founding of the country's first liberal party in 1905. For a brief, revelatory period, some Russians - an eclectic group of academics, politicians and public figures - drew on liberal ideas of Western origin to articulate a distinctively Russian liberal philosophy, shape their country's political landscape, and were themselves partly responsible for the tragic experience of 1905. (shrink)

This paper addresses responses to news about the imposing of a local lockdown in a UK city. The opposition to the measure shows it to be controversial as does the associated rejection of the grounds for taking action against covid more generally, which comes alongside the devaluing of expertise, resistance to public health responses, a proliferation of conspiracy theories and misinformation and the harm that can be caused by focussing on non-adherence to covid measure. The research question for this analysis (...) is therefore: how are arguments about the local lockdown discursively formulated in online discussions? Discursive analysis of online discussions following four newspaper articles identified six arguments used that range from scepticism to conspiratorial: scepticism over (1) the prevalence and; (2) severity of covid; (3) lockdowns generally do not work and (4) the specific city lockdown will not work; (5) lockdowns are overly risk averse; and (6) there are hidden political motives for lockdowns. The discussion shows how both the ‘conspiratorial’ and non-conspiratorial arguments are potentially harmful from a public health perspective. (shrink)

The contribution describes the results of a research on the work activity of counselors in the field of Accreditation of Prior Learning. From an ethnographic observations conducted in a training Social Work organization, we analyse the activity of the counselors during the interviews with the candidates they guide. We seek to understand how the activity they deploy can support the candidate’s development of an experience discourse about his or her work. The research focuses both on the transformations of the candidate’s (...) discourses of experience and on the ways in which what is said about work is transformed within the dialogue between the candidate and the counselor. The question of the counselor’s contribution is central to understanding the development of the discourse of experience in this context. We propose here some answers to this problem based on the analysis of real dialogues by highlighting how different types of movements can be identified in the counselor / candidate exchanges contributing to the developmental dynamic observed. (shrink)