This article discusses gift authorship, the practice where co-authorship is awarded to a person who has not contributed significantly to the study. From an ethical point of view, gift authorship raises concerns about desert, fairness, honesty and transparency, and its prevalence in research is rightly considered a serious ethical concern. We argue that even though misuse of authorship is always bad, there are instances where accepting requests of gift authorship may nevertheless be the right thing to do. More specifically, we (...) propose that researchers may find themselves in a situation much similar to the problem of dirty hands, which has been frequently discussed in political philosophy and applied ethics. The problem of dirty hands is relevant to what we call hostage authorship, where the researchers include undeserving authors unwillingly, and only because they find it unavoidable in order to accomplish a morally important research goal. (shrink)

Moral life sometimes involves life-and-death decisions, and philosophers often consider them by examining intuitions about ideal cases. Contemporary philosophical discourse on such matters has been dominated by Trolley-type cases, which typically present us with the need to make decisions on whether to sacrifice one person in order to save a larger number of similar others. Such cases lead to a distinct view of moral dilemmas and of moral life generally. The case I present here, “Hostage Situation,” is quite unlike them (...) and should generate intuitions that differ greatly from those brought forth by standard Trolley-type cases. The implications are surprising and suggest that familiar and widely prevalent perceptions of the normative field are inadequate. (shrink)

The statesman, scientist, and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) lived a divided life. Was he a noble scholar, or a conniving political crook? Was he a homosexual? Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart draw upon previously untapped sources to create a controversial nuanced portrait of the quintessential "Renaissance man", one whose achievements, while enormous, were nonetheless sadly circumscribed by his class and station.

In a recent paper published in this journal, we discussed a phenomenon that we referred to as ‘hostage authorship’. By this we meant a practice where an undeserving person X is included as author o...

Noncompete agreements are among the most commonly used methods to restrict employment. Upwards of 38% of American workers, many of which are low-wage workers, have signed noncompete agreements. These agreements effectively hold those workers hostage to their current employer. This project analyzes the use of noncompete clauses in employment contracts with low-wage workers. We show that noncompetes with low-wage workers are not enforceable in the U.S.; employers nevertheless continue to include noncompete clauses in employment contracts with low-wage workers. We survey (...) states’ attempts to regulate the use of (even unenforceable) noncompetes and argue that current legislation is ineffective at preventing employers from including noncompetes in low-wage worker contracts. We argue that employers’ use of (even unenforceable) noncompete agreements with low-wage workers is wrongfully exploitative of those workers, and we provide suggestions for how states can effectively regulate the use of noncompetes, and thus protect low-wage workers from exploitation, using Virginia’s recently passed noncompete bill as a model. (shrink)

In an e-mail of June 2002, some women on Gender Link noticed that in Polish there is an expression, ‘husband of trust’, used to describe a person in the workplace appointed to represent workers’ interests. This role is more often than not given to women, and yet they are called ‘husbands of trust’. ‘Isn't that strange,’ they said. ‘Isn't it time to change this?’. It is. The change in gender role identities has started with questioning the language. It has started (...) with asking who has produced and is reproducing the language, and for whom. The journey has not stopped there. From looking at language it has continued through social stereotypes, work, labour, money and the division of power, and reached the law and legal system itself. In Poland, the path has been rather circuitous and uneasy for we are, more than many other countries, bound by Catholic tradition mingled with apparent freedom. We had the ethos of Solidarity, and Lech Wałęsa. Wałęsa had a badge of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus on his jacket, which somehow helped label all Polish women, even those still very young, a ‘Mother Pole’. To resist that identity one needed to look beneath the image and be brave enough to call oneself just a woman. This article will try to analyse that process. (shrink)

Peter Winch, following Wittgenstein, was critical of the notion that philosophy could pass judgment on matters like the sense of words, the rationality of actions, or the validity of arguments. His critique had both what we might call a local strand – the insight that criteria of thought and action are not universal but vary between cultures and between practices – and a personal strand – the insight that those local criteria are ultimately given shape through the particular applications made (...) of them by individuals. These strands are prominent, for instance, in Winch’s discussion of cross-cultural understanding as well as his treatment of the distinction between valid reasoning and illicit persuasion. (shrink)

Yablo suggests a ‘hostage crisis’ occurs when an unproblematic statement ϕ entails, and is therefore hostage to, a problematic statement ψ. Yablo proposes a technical solution to this kind of problem by diminishing ϕ to ϕ*, where ϕ* does not entail ψ and thus is not hostage to it. I argue that Yablo’s proposal is unnecessary because the original, undiminished ϕ does not in fact entail ψ. This is what Yablo calls a ‘defiant’ position. I defend defiance by arguing that (...) ϕ and ψ are of different metaphysical weights, which I show through an analysis of their use of quantification. (shrink)

: This essay examines the relationship between nonviolence and trustworthiness. I focus on questions of accountability for people in midlevel positions of power, where multiple loyalties and responsibilities create conflicts and where policies can push people into actions that reinstate hegemonic relations. A case study from crisis counseling is presented in which the (mis)management of the case exacerbated previous violence done to a biracial female. The importance of resistance to dominant ideology is scrutinized.

This essay examines the relationship between nonviolence and trustworthiness. I focus on questions of accountability for people in midlevel positions of power, where multiple loyalties and responsibilities create conflicts and where policies can push people into actions that reinstate hegemonic relations. A case study from crisis counseling is presented in which the management of the case exacerbated previous violence done to a biracial female. The importance of resistance to dominant ideology is scrutinized.

This essay examines the relationship between nonviolence and trustworthiness. I focus on questions of accountability for people in midlevel positions of power, where multiple loyalties and responsibilities create conflicts and where policies can push people into actions that reinstate hegemonic relations. A case study from crisis counseling is presented in which the management of the case exacerbated previous violence done to a biracial female. The importance of resistance to dominant ideology is scrutinized.

This essay examines the relationship between nonviolence and trustworthiness. I focus on questions of accountability for people in midlevel positions of power, where multiple loyalties and responsibilities create conflicts and where policies can push people into actions that reinstate hegemonic relations. A case study from crisis counseling is presented in which the management of the case exacerbated previous violence done to a biracial female. The importance of resistance to dominant ideology is scrutinized.

Conditional cooperation of selfish and rational actors is feasible in repeated encounters. We stress an important alternative for conditional cooperation: credible commitments that can be incurred via voluntary hostage posting (in the sense of pledging a bond). Hostages may facilitate cooperation in different ways. First, they reduce incentives to behave uncooperatively. Second, by offering some compensation for losses, hostages reduce the costs of suffering from uncooperative behavior of the partner. Finally, hostages may serve as signals about characteristics (...) of the partner that are related to his opportunities and incentives to behave uncooperatively. We show that signalling hostages may have lasting effects in durable relations. (shrink)

Traditional work on moral responsibility has for quite some time focused on the compatibility question: is moral responsibility compatible with determinism ? But there is a second question that has also played a central role, though perhaps less explicitly. Call this second question the justificatory question:Can our reactive attitudes, judgments about moral responsibility, and the attendant practice of moral praising and blaming be rationally maintained and justified?It is not uncommon to take providing an answer to the compatibility question to be (...) a necessary step in providing an answer to the justificatory question. One obvious way to respond to the justificatory question is to first assess whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism and then assess the consequences for our attendant attitudes and practices. Compatibilists, for example, provide an affirmative answer to the compatibility question, argue that we can, at least sometimes, be morally res .. (shrink)

Destexhe expands upon the discussion begun in " The Politics of Rescue," stating that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in choosing a humanitarian route rather than a political one, further enabled ethnic cleansing and prolonged the conflict in the Balkans.

We shall have to evolve problem-solvers—galore since each problem they solve creates ten problems more— Piet HeinThe new reproductive technologies, especially in vitro fertilization, have extended the possi- bilities of assisted reproduction to the benefit of the childless couples. At the same time these technologies and their added techniques, however, have fragmented reproduction and exposed the human egg to intervention yet unknown:The embryo may be divided into several embryos; may be sold; donated; cryopreserved; borne by another woman and returned; or (...) used for research;Genetic parentage may be present without sexual intercourse, may be different from social parentage and the natural time-span between fertilization and birth may be interrupted. (shrink)

We shall have to evolve problem-solvers—galore since each problem they solve creates ten problems more— Piet HeinThe new reproductive technologies, especially in vitro fertilization, have extended the possi- bilities of assisted reproduction to the benefit of the childless couples. At the same time these technologies and their added techniques, however, have fragmented reproduction and exposed the human egg to intervention yet unknown:The embryo may be divided into several embryos; may be sold; donated; cryopreserved; borne by another woman and returned; or (...) used for research;Genetic parentage may be present without sexual intercourse, may be different from social parentage and the natural time-span between fertilization and birth may be interrupted. (shrink)

This piece asks a simple question, one simply obvious after the New York Times obituary of Jacques Derrida: how is it, why is it, that his work has been attacked in act and in words? And why more violently than the other great contemporaries of that period, of whom only Kristeva is still alive: Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan? It tries out various possibilities: envy, power struggles among various intellectual groupings of the same generation, the location of philosophy in the present (...) tree of knowledge, to conclude that the particularizing feature of his work which sparked such aggressivity may be his use of language. (shrink)

Muraskas et al. and Hefferman and Heilig present the painfully elusive ethical questions regarding decisionmaking in the care of the extremely low birth weight infants in the intensive care nursery. At what gestation or size do we resuscitate? Can we stop resuscitation after we have started? How much money is too much to spend? Is the distress of the parents of the ELBW infant, the anguish of their caregivers, and the moral and ethical uncertainty of the approach to these infants (...) too much to pay? Who speaks for the neonate: the parent, nurse, attorney, or physician? Ideally these questions should have been answered 30 years ago when modern neonatology embarked on a journey from where it could not return. A new breed of physician, called “neonatologist,” seduced by the high-tech lure and the promise of saving lives previously unsavable pioneered a lucrative and life-saving technological revolution in the care of premature newborns. This rapid advancement in neonatology occurred a few years after the death of a premature infant named Patrick Kennedy in 1963. While the country mourned, medical scientists vowed that this would not happen again. First continuous positive airway pressure, then mechanical ventilation, changed medical care of premature newborns forever. It began an era of euphoria and excitement. Neonatologists raced to push to the edge of newborn viability. What was the youngest salvageable gestational age? What was the smallest that could be saved? Yes, we dreamed, and still do dream of artificial placentas. Ethical questions took a back seat in the search for the edge because the waters were uncharted and the tough questions could not be answered without experience. What was to be the cost in dollars and in anguish to save the Patrick Kennedys of the world? Triumphs led to grave concerns as we approached the edge. However, no advancement in neonatology has ever changed the ultimate questions. (shrink)

The emergence of new obstetrical and neonatal technologies, as well as more aggressive clinical management, has significantly improved the survival of extremely low birth weight infants. This development has heightened concerns about the limits of viability. ELBW infants, weighing less than 1,000 grams and no larger than the palm of one's hand, are often described as of late twentieth century technology. Improved survivability of ELBW infants has provided opportunities for long-term follow-up. Information on their physical and emotional development contributes to (...) developing standards of practice regarding their care. (shrink)

This book promotes a Lacanian approach to silence, arguing that Lacanian psychoanalysis is distinctive for putting a high value on both silence and language. Unlike other disciplines and discourses the authors do not treat silence as a mystical-impossible beyond, at the cost of demoting the value of language and thought. Rather than treating silence with awe and wonder, this book puts silence to work, and it does so in order to deal with the inevitable alienation that comes with becoming speaking-beings. (...) This illuminating book will be of great interest to scholars of Lacan and the psychosocial, as well as more broadly to philosophers and linguists alike. (shrink)

Having been struck by the Levinasian aspects of J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron, this article tries to ‘reveal' Coetzee's novel as a Levinasian narration of how the other ruptures a specific subject's self-regarding egoism, leading the subject to take up its responsibility for the other. Throughout, the concreteness and realism of the novel is considered supplementary to the abstraction of Levinas's philosophical thought. It is demonstrated how the main character in Age of Iron, Elizabeth Curren, is confronted by the other (...) as a face, has her right to be put into question by the other, experiences guilt for her usurpation of the place of the other, which becomes positive in her assuming responsibility for the other. In awakening to the other, Curren moves from a Heideggerean concern with her own death (she is dying of cancer) towards a Levinasian prioritising of the other's life over her own. Her coming into contact with the political violence and oppression of late 1980s South Africa adds to and focuses her expiation for the other. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.24(1) 2005: 22-32. (shrink)

This article is a thoughtful and well written examination of some of the complex issues that have emerged as a result of recent improvements in the treatment of extremely low birth weight (ELBW) infants, including those who weigh 500 to 600 grams or who are believed to be 23 to 24 weeks gestation. The authors argue that the 23 to 24 week gestation period is filled with ambiguity and flexibility in practice relative to active resuscitation. However, such ambiguity and flexibility (...) is likely to prevail whatever the boundary conditions of viability happen to be. Thus moral guidelines that inform the rescue of an infant believed to be 500 to 600 grams or 23 or 24 weeks gestation are likely to be relevant whatever the boundary conditions are. (shrink)

Muraskas et al. and Hefferman and Heilig present the painfully elusive ethical questions regarding decisionmaking in the care of the extremely low birth weight infants in the intensive care nursery. At what gestation or size do we resuscitate? Can we stop resuscitation after we have started? How much money is too much to spend? Is the distress of the parents of the ELBW infant, the anguish of their caregivers, and the moral and ethical uncertainty of the approach to these infants (...) too much to pay? Who speaks for the neonate: the parent, nurse, attorney, or physician? Ideally these questions should have been answered 30 years ago when modern neonatology embarked on a journey from where it could not return. A new breed of physician, called seduced by the high-tech lure and the promise of saving lives previously unsavable pioneered a lucrative and life-saving technological revolution in the care of premature newborns. This rapid advancement in neonatology occurred a few years after the death of a premature infant named Patrick Kennedy in 1963. While the country mourned, medical scientists vowed that this would not happen again. First continuous positive airway pressure, then mechanical ventilation, changed medical care of premature newborns forever. It began an era of euphoria and excitement. Neonatologists raced to push to the edge of newborn viability. What was the youngest salvageable gestational age? What was the smallest that could be saved? Yes, we dreamed, and still do dream of artificial placentas. Ethical questions took a back seat in the search for the edge because the waters were uncharted and the tough questions could not be answered without experience. WhatwastobethecostindollarsandinanguishtosavethePatrickKennedysoftheworld?Triumphsledtograveconcerns asweapproachedtheedge.However,noadvancementinneonatologyhaseverchangedtheultimatequestions. (shrink)

The Spring 1999 issue of CambridgeQuarterly adds to the growing body of academic inquiry into the goals of neonatal intensive care practices. Muraskas and colleagues thoughtfully presented the possibility of nontreatment for neonates born at or under 24 weeks gestation. Jain, Thomasma, and Ragas explained that quality of future life must not be ignored in clinical deliberation. And Hefferman and Heilig described once again the dilemmas nurses face when caring for potentially devastated neonates kept alive by technology. These authors take (...) brave steps by publicly questioning the trend of intensive medical support for most every American-born product of conception. But many questions addressing the goals of neonatal intensive care remain, and few authors have actually tried to distill these goals. (shrink)

The practices of using hostages to obtain concessions and using human shields to deter aggression share an important characteristic which warrants a univocal reference to both sorts of conduct: they both involve manipulating our commitment to morality, as a means to achieving wrongful ends. I call this type of conduct “moral coercion”. In this paper I (a) present an account of moral coercion by linking it to coercion more generally, (b) determine whether and to what degree the coerced agent (...) is liable for the harms resulting from acceding to moral coercion, and (c) investigate factors relevant to determining whether we ought to accede to moral coercion. In so doing, I provide grounds for the intuition that we “allow evil to succeed” when we accede to moral coercion. (shrink)

An early task in fighting oppression is to address undeserved negative judgments and unfriendly stereotypes of the oppressed. Thus early feminism addressed undeserved negative judgments and stereotypes of women. The medical model operative in the terms "Hostage Identification Syndrome" and "Stockholm Syndrome" suggests that the victim is overcome by something like an illness, that the identification process is not voluntary and the victim not morally responsible for her choices. Women have suffered the evils of oppression globally and for millennia. And (...) women have been implicated in perpetrating evils not only of misogyny but of slavery, racism, anti‐Semitism, classism, hatred of sexual diversity, and hatred and fear of the poor. Women can inhabit gray areas in relation to children and in paying male protection rackets for protection against violence. Women have lived in many gray areas, including those of slavery, death camps, and ghettos. (shrink)