A medical information commons is a networked data environment utilized for research and clinical applications. At three deliberations across the U.S., we engaged 75 adults in two-day facilitated discussions on the ethical and social issues inherent to sharing data with an MIC. Deliberants made recommendations regarding opt-in consent, transparent data policies, public representation on MIC governing boards, and strict data security and privacy protection. Community engagement is critical to earning the public's trust.

Brought to you by: Crop X editors: Jonathan Alexander Perez, Harmony Smith, Corinne Tendorf, David Turturo, and Derek Rahn Williams. Faculty Advisor: David Turturo; Crop X team included: Chaimae Alehyane, Zachary S. Casey, Suzanna Brinez, Jacob Brown, Elizabeth George, Francisco Javier Muniz Ituarte, Brodey Myers. -/- Credits: Huckabee College of Architecture; Graphic Designers: Studio BLDG (Blossom Liu + Danny Gray); English Editor: Luke Studebaker; Spanish Translator: Jessie Forbes; Printer: Die Keure. Cover Photo: Derek Williams. -/- Generously supported by (...) the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University. (shrink)

Heather M. Farley and Zachary A. Smith, Sustainability: If It’s Everything, Is It Nothing? xiv + 176 pp., index. New York: Routledge, 2014. $39.95 Leslie Paul Thiele, Sustainability. viii + 234 p., bibl., index. New York: Polity Press, 2013. $22.95 The authors of both of these books offer new definitions of sustainability. They do so in order to battle “faux interpretations” or “hypocritical” or “unsupported endorsements” of sustainability. While I think many people, including I expect many readers of (...) this journal, would agree that sustainability is a rather imprecise concept that sometimes gets misused, I am not convinced the definitions in these books offer a way forward. Partly this is due to the specific ways the authors develop their discussions, and partly it is due to issues connected to their shared methodological approach, viz. the search for a new, univocal, strong definition. After discussing each book, I examine briefly that shared .. (shrink)

In contemporary discussions, so many moral and political controversies revolve around conflicting demands on resources that it is easy to assume that ethics simply is a means of divvying up a limited pool of coveted goods. Discussions of distributive justice, rights conflicts, environmental‐ism and international relations, for instance, are typically framed along these lines. Since Hobbes, we have been bred on the idea that moral prescriptions are a means of coping with disputes between people who have incompatible designs on finite (...) resources. Even those who have resisted Hobbes' portrait of life as war have done so by appealing to aspects of humanity that Hobbes underestimated (such as capacities for benevolence or empathy), rather than by challenging his premise that people's appetites exceed the resources available to satisfy them. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss three different kinds of disagreement that have been, or could reasonably be, characterized as deep disagreements. Principle level disagreements are disagreements over the truth of epistemic principles. Sub-principle level deep disagreements are disagreements over how to assign content to schematic norms. Finally, framework-level disagreements are holistic disagreements over meaning not truth, that is over how to understand networks of epistemic concepts and the beliefs those concepts compose. Within the context of each of these kinds of (...) disagreement it is not possible for the parties to the dispute to rationally persuade one another through only offering epistemic reasons for their conflicting points of view. However, in spite of the inability to rationally persuade, we explore how it may nevertheless be possible to rationally navigate each of these varieties of deep disagreement. (shrink)

Characterising Liberal and Evangelical theology as positions on a continuum or spectrum is common within Protestant circles. I argue that Liberals and Evangelicals do not share a common conceptual framework but embody competing and incommensurable conceptual schemes. Liberal theology then is not a distortion of true Biblical Christianity, as is often supposed, but rather is an entirely different approach to doing theology, indeed, to seeing the world. What I hope to achieve by way of this paper is to provide a (...) context within which to better understand both Liberal and Evangelical claims, and to offer an explanation as to why the debates between the two schools are seemingly intractable. Further, I hope to encourage Liberals and Evangelicals to pursue the difficult task of understanding each other's position so that genuine dialogue can take place. (shrink)

What model of knowledge does Plato's Socrates use? In this book, Nicholas D. Smith argues that it is akin to knowledge of a craft which is acquired by degrees, rather than straightforward knowledge of facts. He contends that a failure to recognize and identify this model, and attempts to ground ethical success in contemporary accounts of propositional or informational knowledge, have led to distortions of Socrates' philosophical mission to improve himself and others in the domain of practical ethics. He (...) shows that the model of craft-knowledge makes sense of a number of issues scholars have struggled to understand, and makes a case for attributing to Socrates a very sophisticated and plausible view of the improvability of the human condition. (shrink)

The working party on euthanasia set up by the British Medical Association produced its report in 1988 (1). The first of its terms of reference was 'to examine the ethical problems relating to euthanasia, terminal illness, and suicide' and as far as active voluntary euthanasia (AVE) is concerned it failed conspicuously to do its job. The purpose of this article is not to restate the case for AVE but to examine the reason for the failure. (Figures in square brackets refer (...) to sections in the report.). (shrink)

The standard of proof applied in civil trials is the preponderance of evidence, often said to be met when a proposition is shown to be more than 50% likely to be true. A number of theorists have argued that this 50%+ standard is too weak – there are circumstances in which a court should find that the defendant is not liable, even though the evidence presented makes it more than 50% likely that the plaintiff’s claim is true. In this paper, (...) I will recapitulate the familiar arguments for this thesis, before defending a more radical one: The 50%+ standard is also too strong – there are circumstances in which a court should find that a defendant is liable, even though the evidence presented makes it less than 50% likely that the plaintiff’s claim is true. I will argue that the latter thesis follows naturally from the former once we accept that the parties in a civil trial are to be treated equally. I will conclude by sketching an alternative interpretation of the civil standard of proof. (shrink)

Given his attention to the existential elements of our existence, it is not surprising that Søren Kierkegaard offers us an account of friendship. Like much of Kierkegaard’s thought, the account is insightful, rigorous and uncompromising. Kierkegaard entertains the idea of friendship, because those who have theorised and praised this form of sociality promote it as a forum in which a genuine and ethical concern with the other can be fostered. In this sense, friendship can be considered an ‘alternative’ response to (...) the other. Kierkegaard challenges this understanding. What is particularly striking about his reconstruction and criticisms of the traditional account of friendship is that he finds it deficient not only by the light of his own Christian viewpoint; he also finds friendship deficient when judged from the perspective of its own self‐proclaimed ethical foundations. Thus, Kierkegaard concludes that the reciprocity involved in friendship actually betrays its essential selfishness. In considering Kierkegaard’s account of friendship this article argues that his criticisms make serious difficulties for the traditional concept stretching back to the Ancients. The article also argues that Kierkegaard’s alternative, ‘neighbourliness’, is constructed in such a way as to be insufficiently grounded in human sociality and perhaps comes to represent an empty formalism towards the other. It concludes that whilst Kierkegaard’s thought opens up a space for a sociality based on the responsibility to others, Kierkegaard fails to occupy this space. Despite this failure, Kierkegaard sets the task for any future theorisation of friendship as a centre for responsibility towards self and others. (shrink)

Writers on collective action are in broad agreement that in order for a group of agents to form a collective intention, the members of that group must have beliefs about the beliefs of the other members. But in spite of the fact that this so-called "interactive knowledge" is central to virtually every account of collective intention, writers on this subject have not offered a detailed account of the nature of interactive knowledge. In this paper, we argue that such an account (...) is necessary for any adequate analysis of collective intention. Furthermore, we argue that an application of Robert Aumann's theory of interactive knowledge may be used to address several puzzling features of collective intention. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Table of Contents -/- 1. Introduction and Overview: Two Entitlement Projects, Peter J. Graham, Nikolaj J.L.L. Pedersen, Zachary Bachman, and Luis Rosa -/- Part I. Engaging Burge's Project -/- 2. Entitlement: The Basis of Empirical Warrant, Tyler Burge 3. Perceptual Entitlement and Scepticism, Anthony Brueckner and Jon Altschul 4. Epistemic Entitlement Its Scope and Limits, Mikkel Gerken 5. Why Should Warrant Persist in Demon Worlds?, Peter J. Graham -/- Part II. Extending the Externalist Project -/- 6. Epistemic Entitlement and (...) Epistemic Competence, Ernest Sosa 7. Extended Entitlement, Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard 8. Moorean Pragmatics, Social Comparisons and Common Knowledge, Allan Hazlett 9. Internalism and Entitlement to Rules and Methods, Joshua Schecter -/- Part III. Engaging Wright's Project -/- 10. Full Bloodied Entitlement, Martin Smith 11. Pluralist Consequentialist Anti-Scepticism, Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen 12. Against (Neo-Wittensteinian) Entitlements, Annalisa Coliva 13. The Truth Fairy and the Indirect Consequentialist, Daniel Elstein and Carrie S. I. Jenkins 14. Knowledge for Nothing, Patrick Greenough . (shrink)

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein “to be” or werden “to become”, and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a (...) dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein- before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently “sudden” acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms. (shrink)

Did Darwin really do what Kant said was impossible, and serve as a Newton for the biological world? In assessing this question we need to look at both the structure of evolutionary theory and the structure of our explanation-seeking minds. The short answer to the question is yes. Both underestimates and overestimates of the significance of Darwinian explanations derive from psychological habits which may stem from our own evolutionary history.

In this paper, we offer an analysis of ‘group intentions.’ On our proposal, group intentions should be understood as a state of equilibrium among the beliefs of the members of a group. Although the discussion in this paper is non-technical, the equilibrium concept is drawn from the formal theory of interactive epistemology due to Robert Aumann. The goal of this paper is to provide an analysis of group intentions that is informed by important work in economics and formal epistemology.

I respond to two of the main arguments in Rosenberg’s commentary on “Mind, Matter, and Metabolism.” Rosenberg’s claim that metabolic activities are “modularized” in a way that sets them apart from cognitive processes is not true given the broad sense of the “metabolic” employed in my paper, and contemporary neuroscience, including the work on navigation cited by Rosenberg, has begun to yield an understanding of subjectivity and “point of view.”.