Ethical concepts are, or purport to be, normative. They make claims on us: they command, oblige, recommend, or guide. Or at least when we invoke them, we make claims on one another; but where does their authority over us - or ours over one another - come from? Christine Korsgaard identifies four accounts of the source of normativity that have been advocated by modern moral philosophers: voluntarism, realism, reflective endorsement, and the appeal to autonomy. She traces their history, showing how (...) each developed in response to the prior one and comparing their early versions with those on the contemporary philosophical scene. Kant's theory that normativity springs from our own autonomy emerges as a synthesis of the other three, and Korsgaard concludes with her own version of the Kantian account. Her discussion is followed by commentary from G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, and a reply by Korsgaard. (shrink)

An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences. In Discovering Complexity, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson examine two heuristics that guided the development of mechanistic models in the life sciences: decomposition and localization. Drawing on historical cases from disciplines including cell biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, they identify a number of "choice points" that life scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and show how different choices result in divergent (...) explanatory models. Describing decomposition as the attempt to differentiate functional and structural components of a system and localization as the assignment of responsibility for specific functions to specific structures, Bechtel and Richardson examine the usefulness of these heuristics as well as their fallibility—the sometimes false assumption underlying them that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchically organized. When Discovering Complexity was originally published in 1993, few philosophers of science perceived the centrality of seeking mechanisms to explain phenomena in biology, relying instead on the model of nomological explanation advanced by the logical positivists (a model Bechtel and Richardson found to be utterly inapplicable to the examples from the life sciences in their study). Since then, mechanism and mechanistic explanation have become widely discussed. In a substantive new introduction to this MIT Press edition of their book, Bechtel and Richardson examine both philosophical and scientific developments in research on mechanistic models since 1993. (shrink)

The result is nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of moral theory that enables it at last to account for morality's supreme authority--an account that ...

The concept of mechanism is analyzed in terms of entities and activities, organized such that they are productive of regular changes. Examples show how mechanisms work in neurobiology and molecular biology. Thinking in terms of mechanisms provides a new framework for addressing many traditional philosophical issues: causality, laws, explanation, reduction, and scientific change.

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the (...) way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that ill persons are particularly vulnerable to epistemic injustice in the sense articulated by Fricker. Ill persons are vulnerable to testimonial injustice through the presumptive attribution of characteristics like cognitive unreliability and emotional instability that downgrade the credibility of their testimonies. Ill persons are also vulnerable to hermeneutical injustice because many aspects of the experience of illness are difficult to understand and communicate and this often owes to gaps in collective hermeneutical resources. We then argue (...) that epistemic injustice arises in part owing to the epistemic privilege enjoyed by the practitioners and institutions of contemporary healthcare services—the former owing to their training, expertise, and third-person psychology, and the latter owing to their implicit privileging of certain styles of articulating and evidencing testimonies in ways that marginalise ill persons. We suggest that a phenomenological toolkit may be part of an effort to ameliorate epistemic injustice. (shrink)

I argue for an intentional conception of representation in science that requires bringing scientific agents and their intentions into the picture. So the formula is: Agents (1) intend; (2) to use model, M; (3) to represent a part of the world, W; (4) for some purpose, P. This conception legitimates using similarity as the basic relationship between models and the world. Moreover, since just about anything can be used to represent anything else, there can be no unified ontology of models. (...) This whole approach is further supported by a brief exposition of some recent work in cognitive, or usage-based, linguistics. Finally, with all the above as background, I criticize the recently much discussed idea that claims involving scientific models are really fictions. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker claims that a “gap” in collective hermeneutical resources with respect to the social experiences of marginalized groups prevents members of those groups from understanding their own experiences (Fricker 2007). I argue that because Fricker misdescribes dominant hermeneutical resources as collective, she fails to locate the ethically bad epistemic practices that maintain gaps in dominant hermeneutical resources even while alternative interpretations are in fact offered by non-dominant discourses. Fricker's analysis of hermeneutical injustice does not account for the possibility that (...) marginalized groups can be silenced relative to dominant discourses without being prevented from understanding or expressing their own social experiences. I suggest that a gap in dominant hermeneutical resources is ambiguous between two kinds of unknowing: hermeneutical injustice suffered by members of marginalized groups, and epistemically and ethically blameworthy ignorance perpetrated by members of dominant groups. (shrink)

Philosophers of science increasingly believe that much of science is concerned with understanding the mechanisms responsible for the production of natural phenomena. An adequate understanding of scientific research requires an account of how scientists develop and test models of mechanisms. This paper offers a general account of the nature of mechanical models, discussing the representational relationship that holds between mechanisms and their models as well as the techniques that can be used to test and refine such models. The analysis is (...) supported by study of two competing models of a mechanism of speech perception. (shrink)

Pharmaceuticals or other emerging technologies could be used to enhance (or diminish) feelings of lust, attraction, and attachment in adult romantic partnerships. While such interventions could conceivably be used to promote individual (and couple) well-being, their widespread development and/or adoption might lead to “medicalization” of human love and heartache—for some, a source of serious concern. In this essay, we argue that the “medicalization of love” need not necessarily be problematic, on balance, but could plausibly be expected to have either good (...) or bad consequences depending upon how it unfolds. By anticipating some of the specific ways in which these technologies could yield unwanted outcomes, bioethicists and others can help direct the course of love’s “medicalization”—should it happen to occur—more toward the “good” side than the “bad.”. (shrink)

Abstract:In 2015, we published an article entitled “The Medicalization of Love,” in which we argued that both good and bad consequences could be expected to follow from love’s medicalization, depending on how the process unfolded. A flurry of commentaries followed; here we offer some preliminary thoughts in reply to the more substantial of the criticisms that were raised. We focus in particular on the nature of love itself as well as the role it plays (or should play) in our lives; (...) we also touch on a number of practical issues concerning the likely effects of any plausible “real-life” love drugs and conclude with a call for careful regulation. (shrink)

The standard bioethics account is that respecting patient autonomy means ensuring that patients make their own decisions, and that requires that they give informed consent. In fact, respecting autonomy often has more to do with the overall shape and meaning of their health care regimes. Ideally, patients will sometimes take control of their health care but sometimes defer to medical authority. The physician's task is, in part, to inculcate patients into the appropriate good health care regimes.

I address the question of gender bias in ethical theorizing, in particular the claim that an "ethics of justice" is gender biased because it cannot logically accommodate an "ethics of care." I argue against the strong claim that an ethics of justice and an ethics of care are incompatible but suggest that theorizing that crystallizes into a tradition has non-logical as well as logical implications. In order to explain why ethical theorizing has focused on some content and neglected others, one (...) would have to suppose tacit general acceptance of a set of beliefs. It is in considering those beliefs that the charge of gender bias in ethical theorizing might be made to stick. (shrink)

This article will examine how the notion of emotional authenticity is intertwined with the notions of naturalness and artificiality in the context of the recent debates about ‘neuro-enhancement’ and ‘neuro-psychopharmacology.’ In the philosophy of mind, the concept of authenticity plays a key role in the discussion of the emotions. There is a widely held intuition that an artificial means will always lead to an inauthentic result. This article, however, proposes that artificial substances do not necessarily result in inauthentic emotions. The (...) literature provided by the philosophy of mind on this subject usually resorts to thought experiments. On the other hand, the recent literature in applied ethics on ‘enhancement’ provides good reasons to include real world examples. Such case studies reveal that some psychotropic drugs such as antidepressants actually cause people to undergo experiences of authenticity, making them feel ‘like themselves’ for the first time in their lives. Beginning with these accounts, this article suggests three non-naturalist standards for emotions: the authenticity standard, the rationality standard, and the coherence standard. It argues that the authenticity standard is not always the only valid one, but that the other two ways of assessing emotions are also valid, and that they can even have repercussions on the felt authenticity of emotions. In conclusion, it sketches some of the normative implications if not ethical intricacies that accompany the enhancement of emotions. (shrink)

Mechanisms are a way of explaining how biological phenomena work rather than why single elements of biological systems are there. However, mechanisms are usually described as physiological entities, and little or no attention is paid to malfunction as an independent theoretical concept. On the other hand, malfunction is the main focus of interest of applied sciences such as medicine. In this paper I argue that malfunctions are parts of pathological mechanisms, which should be considered separate theoretical entities, conceptually having a (...) priority over physiological sequences. While pathological mechanisms can be described in terms of a Cummins-like mechanistic explanation, they show some unnoticed peculiarities when compared to physiological ones. Some features of pathological mechanisms are considered, such as outcome variability, ambivalence and dependence on a range. (shrink)

In this article, I examine children's reported experiences with stimulant drug treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in light of bioethical arguments about the potential threats of psychotropic drugs to authenticity and moral agency. Drawing on a study that involved over 150 families in the USA and the UK, I show that children are able to report threats to authenticity, but that the majority of children are not concerned with such threats. On balance, children report that stimulants improve their capacity (...) for moral agency, and they associate this capacity with an ability to meet normative expectations. I argue that although under certain conditions stimulant drug treatment may increase the risk of a threat to authenticity, there are ways to minimise this risk and to maximise the benefits of stimulant drug treatment. Medical professionals in particular should help children to flourish with stimulant drug treatments, in good and in bad conditions. (shrink)

Preventive medicine is sometimes criticised as it contributes to medicalization of normal life. The concept ‘medicalization’ has been introduced by Zola to refer to processes in which the labels ‘healthy’ and ‘ill’ are made relevant for more and more aspects of human life. If preventive medicine contributes to medicalization, would that be morally problematic? My thesis is that such a contribution is indeed morally problematic. The concept is sometimes used to express moral intuitions regarding the practice of prevention and health (...) promotion. Through analysis of these intuitions as well as some other moral concerns, I give an explication of the moral problems of medicalization within the context of preventive medicine. (shrink)

This article focuses on the assessment of mechanistic relations with specific attention to medicine, where mechanistic models are widely employed. I first survey recent contributions in the philosophical literature on mechanistic causation, and then take issue with Federica Russo and Jon Williamson’s thesis that two types of evidence, probabilistic and mechanistic, are at stake in the health sciences. I argue instead that a distinction should be drawn between previously acquired knowledge of mechanisms and yet-to-be-discovered knowledge of mechanisms and that both (...) probabilistic evidence and manipulation are essential with respect to newly discovered mechanisms. (shrink)

There once was a time when the concept of equal pay for equal work did not exist, when women of all ages were "girls," when abortion was a back-alley procedure, when there was no such thing as a rape crisis center or a shelter for battered women, when "sexual harassment" had not yet been named and defined. "If conditions are right," Susan Brownmiller says in this stunning memoir, "if the anger of enough people has reached the boiling point, the exploding (...) passion can ignite a societal transformation." In Our Time tells the story of that transformation, as only Brownmiller can. A leading feminist activist and the author of Against Our Will, the book that changed the nation's perception of rape, she now brings the Women's Liberation movement and its passionate history vividly to life. Here is the colorful cast of characters on whose shoulders we stand--the feminist icons Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, and Gloria Steinem, and the lesser known women whose contributions to change were equally profound. And here are the landmark events of the era: the consciousness-raising groups that sprung up in people's living rooms, the mimeographed position papers that first articulated the new thinking, the abortion and rape speak-outs, the daring sit-ins, the underground newspaper collectives, and the inventive lawsuits that all played a role in the most wide-reaching revolution of the twentieth century. Here as well are Brownmiller's reflections on the feminist utopian vision, and her dramatic accounts, rendered with honesty and humor, of the movement's painful internal schisms as it struggled to give voice to the aspirarations of all women. Finally, Brownmiller addresses thatmost relevant question: What is the legacy of feminism today? (shrink)

Many feminists are critical of the practices and institutions that medicalize people’s lives, especially the lives of women and other members of marginalized groups. I argue that this critique does not necessarily imply a rejection of medicine. I give a brief analysis of the concept of medicalization that supports the view that one can desire medicine without desiring medicalization. I then discuss the relations among what is considered natural, socially constructed, and medicalized.

The author of this paper discusses why the issue of financial conflicts of interest in psychiatry has important public health implications for women and why FCOI complicate the informed consent process. For example, when psychiatric diagnostic and treatment guidelines are unduly influenced by industry, informed consent becomes a critical issue, because women may be assigned diagnostic labels that are not valid and may also be receiving imbalanced or even inaccurate information about their mental health treatment options. However, mere disclosure of (...) industry relationships is an insufficient solution. Following Ells, the author offers a more robust account of autonomy, inspired by Foucault, to strengthen informed consent practices. In addition to addressing power relations, this Foucauldian account of autonomy emphasizes the relational and dialogical aspect of the physician–patient relationship. (shrink)

Singh's study of 150 UK and US children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and prescribed psychotropic medication concludes on the basis of interviews with the children that ‘stimulants improve their capacity for moral agency … an ability to meet normative expectations’.1 Reinterpreted in lay language, she finds that, when taking Ritalin, the children conform to the wishes and expectations of their parents and teachers. They get better grades at school and show less ‘oppositional-defiance’. This is not surprising as it (...) is precisely what Ritalin is supposed to do. However, it begs a number of crucial questions. Might it not be that the failure of the child to conform to the expected norms in the non-medicated state is a legitimate expression of the child's own moral agency, rebelling against what he/she experiences as inappropriate …. (shrink)

The VOICES study involved at least one radical move in the decades-old debates about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnosis and stimulant drug treatments: to systematically investigate young people's perspectives and experiences so that these could be included as evidence in social, ethical and policy deliberations about the benefits and risks of these interventions. The findings reported in this article were both surprising and unsurprising to us as researchers. We were surprised at the consistency of children's positive responses to stimulant medication, (...) and at the robustness of the experience of increased capacity for moral agency with medication. We were unsurprised at the insights many young people have into their own behaviours and that of others.I am hopeful that the perspectives of children reported in this article will inspire a fresh public conversation about the ethics of stimulant drug treatments, as well as further research with children. In order to believe that children's perspectives add something new and valuable to the social discourse, one must first view children as capable of reliably reporting their own experiences as part of a well-designed research study. It seems that Steven Rose does …. (shrink)