My modest aim in this piece is to frame and illuminate some of the issues surrounding normative motivation, rather than take a firm position on any of them. I begin by clarifying the key terms in my title of this essay, and unpacking some of the assumptions that underpin its question. I then distinguish four kinds of answers one might give. In this short essay I will not be able to properly develop and evaluate an argument for the view (...) that normative motivations are psychologically primitive, but I will have some comments about what such an argument might look like, and what it would have to show. (shrink)

If there is to be any progress in the debate about what sort of positive moral status Kant can give the emotions, we need a taxonomy of the terms Kant uses for these concepts. It used to be thought that Kant had little room for emotions in his ethics. In the past three decades, Marcia Baron, Paul Guyer, Barbara Herman, Nancy Sherman, Allen Wood and others have argued otherwise. Contrary to what a cursory reading of the Groundwork may indicate, Kant (...) thinks the emotions play an important role in the moral life. I want to extend the work of Baron, Guyer, Herman, Sherman and Wood in three ways. First, I will set out in a diagram Kant's taxonomy of feelings and emotions. Agreement on such a taxonomy should make it easier to evaluate debates about Kant and the emotions. Second, I will focus on a certain subclass of emotions – reason-caused affects – that have previously received little attention, even from these Kant scholars. Third, these scholars base much of their defence of Kant on his later works – especially the Metaphysics of Morals and the Anthropology – but Kant's fairly rich taxonomy of the emotions, including reason-caused affects, is clearly in place at least as early as the Critique of Judgment . I believe that the Critique of Judgment is an importantly ignored resource for understanding the moral role of the emotions for Kant. The third Critique makes positive, philosophically interesting claims about the emotions and morality. Kant emphasizes certain roles for emotions in this work that he develops to the same extent nowhere else. Nevertheless, the Critique of Judgment goes all but unmentioned by many who write on these issues. In what follows, I will defend as many of my claims as possible using the third Critique. (shrink)

Rather than set out an overarching view or take a stand on the debunking of morality tout court, in what follows I’ll explore a divide and conquer strategy. First, I will briefly sketch a debunking argument that, instead of targeting all of morality or human moral nature, has a more narrow focus—namely, the intuitive moral authority of disgust. The argument concludes that as vivid and compelling as they can be while one is in their grip, feelings of disgust should (...) be granted no power to justify moral judgments. Importantly, the argument is grounded in empirical advances concerning the character of the emotion itself. Next, I will step back and consider the argument’s general form. I then point to arguments that others have made that seem to share this form and selective focus, and comment on what such arguments do and do not presuppose. Finally, I locate the selective strategy with respect to other approaches moral debunking. (shrink)

Charlotte Witt covers a remarkable amount of ground in this concise and elegantly written book. Coming in at under 150 pages, she artfully weaves together Aristotle’s theory of functions with contemporary work on cultural transmission and apprenticeship, ideas about self-creation with theories of aspiration and transformative experience, and reflections on the relationships among social norms and games with thoughts about social roles and the nature of hierarchy. At the heart of it is an elaboration and defense of a thoroughly externalist (...) account of social normativity. Witt takes skilled experts, especially artisans like chefs and carpenters, as paradigm cases for theorizing about social normativity. She uses them to argue that the ultimate source of many normative obligations is found not in the acquiescence, attitudes, or any other features internal to those on whom those obligations fall. Rather, the demands are rooted in the world itself, and flow from specific circumstances, especially from the constraints those circumstances impose on different actors in virtue of the tasks they need to perform. The result is a view that depicts social normativity not just as external to individuals but also unavoidably role specific; what is right for a chef is not necessarily right for a carpenter, and what makes for a good nurse might make for a poor drill sergeant. Witt’s presentation of this package of ideas is both careful and austere, and it makes for a wonderfully thought provoking read. Social Goodness: On the Ontology of Social Norms will reward the careful attention of anyone interested in social ontology, especially the metaphysical foundations of normativity, the nature of social norms, and the relationship between social roles and the self. (shrink)

In “Ontologies Relevant to behaviour change interventions: A Method for their Development” Wright, et al. outline a step by step process for building ontologies of behaviour modification – what the authors call the Refined Ontology Developmental Method (RODM) – and demonstrate its use in the development of the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology (BCIO). RODM is based on the principles of good ontology building used by the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry in addition to those outlined in (Arp, Smith, and Spear (...) 2015). BCIO uses as its top-level ontology Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). The methods outlined in Wright, et al. are a valuable contribution to the field, especially the use of formal mechanisms for literature annotation and expert stakeholder review, and the BCIO will certainly play an important role in the extension of OBO Foundry ontologies into the behavioural domain. (shrink)

While those who take a "structuralist" approach to racial justice issues are right to call attention to the importance of social practices, laws, etc., they sometimes go too far by suggesting that antiracist efforts ought to focus on changing unjust social systems rather than changing individuals’ minds. We argue that while the “either/or” thinking implied by this framing is intuitive and pervasive, it is misleading and self-undermining. We instead advocate for a “both/and” approach to antiracist moral education that explicitly teaches (...) how social structures influence ideas about race and how ideas about race shape, sustain, and transform social structures. Ideally, antiracist moral education will help people see how social change and moral progress depend on the symbiotic relations between individuals and structures. We articulate a conception of “structure-facing virtue” that exemplifies this hybrid approach to illuminate the pivotal role moral education plays in the fight for racial justice. (shrink)

Some people insist that they are dead. Rather than starting with the usual assumption that delusions are ‘false beliefs about external reality’ I want to consider how interpreting their claim as a report of a certain kind of anomalous experience assists us in understanding why they are certain, why their claim is immune from evidence to the contrary, and why they do not act in ways we would expect were they to believe their claim to be true of the world. (...) While this helps us understand cases where people do not act on their delusions, more must be said about the people who do act on their delusions. I shall attempt to describe a process where an intense anomalous experience leads to a context-specific narrowing of attention. The ultimate result of this is that the appearance / reality distinction becomes lost in the context of the anomalous experience. The sense of conviction that would be appropriately associated with a report of experience thus becomes inappropriately associated with a claim about external reality. While there have been efforts to provide cognitive therapy for delusional subjects such therapy seems to be based on the notion that confronting them with their contradictions will assist in weakening their sense of certainty about the delusional utterance. I consider whether more progress could be made via empathetic validation of the sense of certainty which is appropriate when associated with the person’s anomalous experience. (shrink)

Janet Malek (91–102, 2019) argues that a “clinical ethics consultant’s religious worldview has no place in developing ethical recommendations or communicating about them with patients, surrogates, and clinicians.” She offers five types of arguments in support of this thesis: arguments from consensus, clarity, availability, consistency, and autonomy. This essay shows that there are serious problems for each of Malek’s arguments. None of them is sufficient to motivate her thesis. Thus, if it is true that the religious worldview of clinical ethics (...) consultants should play no role whatsoever in their work as consultants, this claim will need to be defended on some other ground. (shrink)

The popular belief that our mind either depends on or (in stronger terms) is identical with brain functions and processes, along with the belief that advances in technology in virtual reality and computability will continue, has contributed to the contention that one-day (perhaps this century) it may be possible to transfer one’s mind (or a simulated copy) into another body (physical or virtual). This is called mind-uploading or whole brain emulation. This paper serves as an introduction to the area (...) and some of the major issues that arise from the notion of mind-uploading. The topic of mind/brain uploading is, at present, both a philosophical and scientific minefield. This paper ties together several thoughts on the topic in the popular, philosophical, and scientific literature, and brings up some related issues that might be worth exploring. A challenge is made that uploading a mind from a brain may have intrinsic limitations on what can be uploaded: whatever is uploaded may not be recognizably human, or will be a very limited version. (shrink)

Saigle, Dubljevic, and Racine (2018) claim that Libet-style experiments are insufficient to challenge that agents have free will. They support this with evidence from experimen- tal psychology that the folk concept of freedom is consis- tent with monism, that our minds are identical to our brains. However, recent literature suggests that evidence from experimental psychology is less than determinate in this regard, and that folk intuitions are too unrefined as to provide guidance on metaphysical issues like monism. In light (...) of this, it is worthwhile to examine the authors’ insuf- ficiency claim under the assumption that monism is false and dualism true (our minds are not identical to our brains). We conclude that, were dualism true, then Libet- style experiments would tell us no more about freedom and moral responsibility than what the authors initially claimed, thus further bolstering their point that Libet-style experiments are ill-suited to speak to the free will of agents. In what follows we first discuss some of the reasons to be skeptical of using folk intuitions to make claims about the nature of freedom and moral responsibility. We then draw from the work of E. J. Lowe to demonstrate that Libet-style experiments would likely give the same results regardless of the truth of monism or dualism. (shrink)

The world has surpassed three million deaths from COVID-19, and faces potentially catastrophic tipping points in the global climate system. Despite the urgency, governments have struggled to address either problem. In this paper, we argue that COVID-19 and anthropogenic climate change (ACC) are critical examples of an emerging type of governance challenge: severe collective action problems that require significant individual behavior change under conditions of hyper- partisanship and scientific misinformation. Building on foundational political science work demonstrating the potential for norms (...) (or informal rules of behavior) to solve collective action problems, we analyze more recent work on norms from neighboring disciplines to offer novel recommendations for more difficult challenges like COVID-19 and ACC. Key insights include more attention to (1) norm-based messaging strategies that appeal to individuals across the ideological spectrum or that reframe collective action as consistent with resistant subgroups’ pre-existing values, (2) messages that emphasize both the prevalence and the social desirability of individual behaviors required to address these challenges, (3) careful use of public policies and incentives that make individual behavior change easier without threatening norm internalization, and (4) greater attention to epistemic norms governing trust in different information sources. We conclude by pointing out that COVID-19 and climate change are likely harbingers of other polarized collective action problems that governments will face in the future. By connecting work on norms and political governance with a broader, interdisciplinary literature on norm psychology, motivation, and behavior change, we aim to improve the ability of political scientists and policy makers to respond to these and future collective action challenges. (shrink)

Our focus here is on whether, when influenced by implicit biases, those behavioural dispositions should be understood as being a part of that person’s character: whether they are part of the agent that can be morally evaluated.[4] We frame this issue in terms of control. If a state, process, or behaviour is not something that the agent can, in the relevant sense, control, then it is not something that counts as part of her character. A number of theorists have argued (...) that individuals do not have control, in the relevant sense, over the operation of implicit bias. We will argue that this claim is mistaken. We articulate and develop a notion of control that individuals have with respect to implicit bias, and argue that this kind of control can ground character-based evaluation of such behavioural dispositions. (shrink)

Public attitudes concerning cognitive enhancements are significant for a number of reasons. They tell us about how socially acceptable these emerging technologies are considered to be, but they also provide a window into the ethical reasons that are likely to get traction in the ongoing debates about them. We thus see Conrad et al’s project of empirically investigating the effect of metaphors and context in shaping attitudes about cognitive enhancements as both interesting and important. We sketch what we suspect is (...) a central theme that runs through these public attitudes, but that Conrad el al’s paper elides. We were disappointed that they did not more directly explore the efficacy of frames and metaphors associated with the values of authenticity and self-expression. This seems like a missed opportunity. Based on the premise that individualistic values enjoy centrality in Western and especially North American culture (e.g. Taylor 1989), we hypothesize that metaphors and frames informed by those values will be especially effective in shaping public attitudes. That is, when various kinds of novel enhancement are described as allowing people to more fully express themselves, or as helping people overcome obstacles to being authentic and true to their inner sense of themselves, those enhancements will be considered justified, and their use more likely to be viewed as socially acceptable by the public. We support our contention by drawing on work by Elliott (2004, 2011, c.f. Kadlac 2018), and discuss how this study, and others modeled on it, might shed light on our hypothesis. (shrink)

Grief research in philosophy agrees that one who grieves grieves over the irreversible loss of someone whom the griever loved deeply, and that someone thus factored centrally into the griever’s sense of purpose and meaning in the world. The analytic literature in general tends to focus its treatments on the paradigm case of grief as the death of a loved one. I want to restrict my account to the paradigm case because the paradigm case most persuades the mind that grief (...) is a past-directed emotion. The phenomenological move I propose will enable us to (1) respect the paradigm case of grief and a broader but still legitimate set of grief-generating states of affairs, (2) liberate grief from the view that grief is past directed or about the past, and thus (3) account for grief in a way that separates it from its closest emotion-neighbor, sorrow, without having to rely on the affective quality of those two emotions.If the passing of the beloved causes the grief but is not what the grief is about, then we can get at the nature of grief by saying its temporal orientation is in the past (the event of the passing), but its temporal meaning is the present and future—the new significance of a world with the pervasive absence that is the world without the beloved. The no-longer of grief is a no-longer oriented by a past (that which is no longer) that is referred a present and future (that which is a no-longer understood as not now as it once was). Looking at the griever’s relation to time can tell us much about the pain and the object of grief, then. As the griever puts the past before himself with a certainty about this world “henceforth,” a look at the griever’s lived sense of the fi nality of the irreversibly lost (1) liberates grief from the tendency in the literature to be reduced to a past-directed emotion, (2) accounts for grief ’s intensity, its affective force or poignancy, and thus (3) enables us to separate grief from sorrow according to its intentionalobject in light of the temporal meaning of these emotions. (shrink)

Clinical ethics consultants (CECs) are not moral authorities. Standardization of CECs’ professional role does not confer upon them moral authority. Certification of particular CECs does not confer upon them moral authority (nor does it reflect such authority). Or, so we will argue. This article offers a distinctly Orthodox Christian response to those who claim that CECs—or any other academically trained bioethicist—retain moral authority (i.e., an authority to know and recommend the right course of action). This article proceeds in three (...) parts. First, we discuss recent movements toward the certification of CECs in the United States, focusing primarily on proposals and programs put forth by the American Society for Humanities and Bioethics (ASBH). Second, we outline two secular reasons to be concerned about the relevant trends toward certification. For one thing, certification is currently being advanced via political dominance, rather than gaining authority by reliance on rigorous philosophical argument or reason. For another, the trends operate on the assumption that there exists a secular, content-full, canonical, morality. There is no such morality. Next, we argue that Orthodox Christians should resist the current trends toward certification of CECs. Specifically, we unpack ways in which the ASBH’s certification program (and those like it) conflict with Orthodox claims about moral authority and the moral life more generally. We conclude that Orthodox Christians should resist the current certification trends. (shrink)

The present collection of translations arises from our work within Writing Urban Places, a network of researchers interested in the different ways citizens appropriate meaningful built environments through stories, and in doing so are also better able to integrate with others. A key locus in this respect is what our network has termed the ‘mid-sized’ [or ‘intermediate’] European city. Often afforded only cursory attention in the discussion of both culture and society, overlooked in favour of more usual suspects, such urban (...) places allow for a more de-centred, and on occasions regionally focused, view of urban practices, even as they play host to a significant element of contemporary European life and experience. The quest for meaningfulness and appropriation of the urban environment through co-creative, adaptive, and transformative processes (many of which have a textual quality) became central to the theoretical framework of this initiative. Between the individual places in which such processes could be observed and documented, we hypothesized, arises the problem of intermediation – the move from place to place, and its techniques. Translation, more than a textual practice among others, emerged as a structuring consideration of the project at a European scale. Other Destinations is the outcome of this collective process presented here, offering entry into this work to an English-language readership for the first time. We hope that, even as they bring their cities of origin somewhat closer to a new readership, those readers will be uprooted and moved some distance in the direction of these ‘other destinations.’ -/- The edited volume Other Destinations. Translating the Mid-sized European City thus features English translations of 15 21st century (mainly) literary texts published in different media (books, podcasts, journals, online/social media) originally written in languages other than English and that have not previously been translated into English. The selected texts cover the topic of mid-sized European cities, where mid-sized does not solely refer to the size in terms of geographical scope or the number of inhabitants, but also to their socio-historical context of urban identity where these cities are neither metropolises nor small towns, but “other”, lesser-known European cities. The texts selected to be translated in this edited volume cover cities like Volos, Canakkale, Varna, Plovdiv, Durres, Tirana, Porto, Den Haag, Osijek, Salzburg, Naples, Zrenjanin, Loule and others…. The publication intends to enhance the dissemination and accessibility to an international readership of texts about overlooked urban contexts, “other”, lesser-known European cities, their stories and signifying practices in order to develop a better awareness of these cities, their self-constructions, and their responses to the challenges of the present. (shrink)

The precarious rights of senior citizens, especially those who are highly educated and who are expected to counsel and guide the younger generations, has stimulated the creation internationally of advocacy associations and opinion leader groups. The strength of these groups, however, varies from country to country. In some countries, they are supported and are the focus of intense interest; in others, they are practically ignored. For this is reason we believe that the creation of a network of all these associations (...) is essential. The proposed network would act as a support for the already-existing policies of the United Nations’ High Commission for Human Rights, of independent experts, and of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Older People. All three have long ago recommended the creation of a recognized instrument for uniting presently scattered efforts. The proposed network, therefore, will seek to promote the international exchange of relevant expertise, and it will reinforce the commitments and actions that single countries are currently taking to meet these objectives. For example, informative public events can be organised to promote particular support initiatives and to provide an opportunity for new members of the network to be presented. The network will promote health for senior citizens, disease prevention, senior mobility, safe free time for seniors, alimentary education, protection against new risks and dangers, as well as equity in the services necessary for seniors to adopt new information and communication technologies. In the case of retired academic members, the network will promote equality with respect to continuing use of digital technologies (particularly email), continuing access to research libraries, and the guaranteed ability for seniors to fund their own research programs and to deliver free seminars. (shrink)

The addiction literature is fraught with conceptual confusions, stalled debates, and an unfortunate lack of clear and careful attempts to delineate the phenomenon of addiction in a way that might lead to consensus. My dissertation has two overarching aims, one metaphysical and one practical. -/- The first aim is to defend an account of addiction as the systematic disposition to fail to control one’s desires to engage in certain types of behaviors. I defend the inclusion of desires and impaired control (...) in the definition, and I flesh out the notion of systematicity central to my dispositionalist framework. I engage the so-called ‘disease vs. choice’ debate, criticizing its presupposition that we are dealing here with a dichotomy and arguing that the movement towards a middle ground is the right track to take. I explain how the dispositionalist account can capture this middle ground and how it serves to expand upon existing views, in particular by filling in the metaphysical details. -/- The second aim is to show how the account I defend can help to unify the extant views and disciplinary perspectives in the literature. Both the dispositionalist aspect of my framework and the methodology adopted (applied ontology and systematic metaphysics) can move the literature towards both substantive and methodological unification. This will help to clear up conceptual confusions, resolve (or sometimes dissolve) apparently intractable disputes, situate different research perspectives with respect to each other, facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue, and help to frame important questions about addiction. Finally, I offer the beginnings of an ontology of addiction, which will provide a terminologically well-structured guide to the addiction literature in a way that will facilitate more effective and efficient communication and data management across disciplines. (shrink)

The objective of Working Group 4 of the COST Action NET4Age-Friendly is to examine existing policies, advocacy, and funding opportunities and to build up relations with policy makers and funding organisations. Also, to synthesize and improve existing knowledge and models to develop from effective business and evaluation models, as well as to guarantee quality and education, proper dissemination and ensure the future of the Action. The Working Group further aims to enable capacity building to improve interdisciplinary participation, to promote knowledge (...) exchange and to foster a cross-European interdisciplinary research capacity, to improve cooperation and co-creation with cross-sectors stakeholders and to introduce and educate students SHAFE implementation and sustainability. To enable the achievement of the objectives of Working Group 4, the Leader of the Working Group, the Chair and Vice-Chair, in close cooperation with the Science Communication Coordinator, developed a template to map the current state of SHAFE policies, funding opportunities and networking in the COST member countries of the Action. On invitation, the Working Group lead received contributions from 37 countries, in a total of 85 Action members. The contributions provide an overview of the diversity of SHAFE policies and opportunities in Europe and beyond. These were not edited or revised and are a result of the main areas of expertise and knowledge of the contributors; thus, gaps in areas or content are possible and these shall be further explored in the following works and reports of this WG. But this preliminary mapping is of huge importance to proceed with the WG activities. In the following chapters, an introduction on the need of SHAFE policies is presented, followed by a summary of the main approaches to be pursued for the next period of work. The deliverable finishes with the opportunities of capacity building, networking and funding that will be relevant to undertake within the frame of Working Group 4 and the total COST Action. The total of country contributions is presented in the annex of this deliverable. (shrink)

Kurth wants us to understand and appreciate our anxiety more than we typically do. His concise and crisply written monograph makes a good case that we should. It deepens our understanding of what anxiety is, and of how it animates different facets of our mental and moral lives. The case he builds that, roughly, anxiety is one of the brain’s ways of affectively signaling and responding to uncertainty is clearly argued and meticulously organized. Kurth hits the targets he sets for (...) himself, and advances his agenda in a way that I found largely convincing. The result is a book that is a must-read for anyone working on anxiety and other moral emotions, and that will reward anyone who is curious about the nature and value of this increasingly, and perhaps alarmingly, prominent component of our minds. (shrink)

This paper discusses Kevin Kelly’s recent attempt to justify Ockham’s Razor in terms of truth-finding efficiency. It is argued that Kelly’s justification fails to warrant confidence in the empirical content of theories recommended by Ockham’s Razor. This is a significant problem if, as Kelly and many others believe, considerations of simplicity play a pervasive role in scientific reasoning, underlying even our best tested theories, for the proposal will fail to warrant the use of these theories in practical prediction.

El trabajo desarrollado por las kellys o camareras de piso se caracteriza por encontrarse dentro de lo que se podría denominar como «trabajo de cuidados», aunque se inscribe de lleno en el campo productivo y es una parte vital del sector turístico. Su caso es un claro ejemplo de la intersección entre la precariedad y la invisibilidad de unas tareas que han sido histórica y culturalmente asignadas a las mujeres y condenadas al menosprecio social. En un contexto como el actual, (...) cabe preguntarse sobre las condiciones sociales que subyacen a este colectivo y las implicaciones que se derivan de su situación de invisibilidad en un sector tan precario como el turístico dentro del Estado español, así como sobre el papel de Las Kellys –como asociación– en la reivindicación de los derechos laborales de las trabajadoras. Analizaremos su caso como una muestra de movimiento político y social que lucha por la visibilización de las tareas de cuidados y que contribuye a la repolitización de dichos trabajos en el ámbito público. The work done by the Kellys, or apartment waitresses/cleaners, is characterised by it lying in what could be called “care work”, despite being completely undertaken in the production field and forming a vital part of the tourism sector. Their case is a clear example of the intersection between precarious work and the invisibility of some tasks that have been historically and culturally appointed to women and condemned to social scorn. In today’s context, it is worth considering the social conditions underlying this group of workers and the implications that stem from their situation of invisibility in such a precarious sector as the tourism one in the Spanish State, and the role played by the Kellys, as an association, to claim these female workers’ employment rights. We will analyse their particular case as a clear example of the socio-political movement that struggles to make their care work visible and contributes to the repoliticisation of their work in the public domain. (shrink)

Leibniz wished that his Theodicy (1710) would have as great and as wide an impact as possible, and to further this end we find him in his correspondence with Caroline often expressing his desire that the book be translated into English. Despite his wishes, and Caroline’s efforts, this was not to happen in his lifetime (indeed, it did not happen until 1951, almost 250 years after Leibniz’s death). But even though the Theodicy did not make quite the impact in (...) class='Hi'>England that Leibniz had hoped it would, it did draw some attention from the English intelligentsia. In this paper I shall focus on two responses to the Theodicy that were made in England in the years immediately following its publication. First, I shall consider the response of Michel de la Roche and his efforts to promote the book to an English audience in 1711 (efforts which only came to Leibniz’s attention much later, in 1713). De la Roche’s response was broadly positive, though his admiration for the Theodicy was tempered by his belief that Leibniz had struggled – unsuccessfully – to reconcile free will with divine foreknowledge. Second, I shall consider the largely negative response of George Smalridge, the Bishop of Bristol, who delivered his verdict on the book in a letter to Sophie written in 1714. Leibniz subsequently wrote a point-by-point rebuttal of (most of) Smalridge’s criticisms in a letter to Caroline, conceding only one very minor point to the Bishop. As we shall see, some of the points of substance raised by de la Roche and Smalridge have loomed over the Theodicy ever since. (shrink)

The way that George Kelly treats moving from an act of love to an act of hate, via his formulation of the construct of hostility, may indicate how far apart Kelly’s model and embodied intersubjective approaches stand concerning the issue of the fundamental integrity of experiencing. All feeling and emotion for Kelly expresses an awareness of the relative ongoing success or failure in relating new events to one’s outlook. But his definition of hostility stands out from his account of guilt, (...) anxiety, fear and threat in that it consists of a two-stage process. -/- Kelly defines hostility as “the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favor of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure.” -/- Notice that this definition combines awareness of a validational event(invalidation) with a response to that event(extortion of evidence). Furthermore, as we will see, the way in which the first step is understood determines the sense of the second step, and vice versa. The crucial importance of interpretation in fathoming what Kelly meant by hostility can be demonstrated in the following questions: -/- How far-reaching did he mean his definition to be? Is hostility the same thing as anger, and if so, is there such a thing as healthy, adaptive, anger, or do all forms of anger extort evidence? And what about subtle forms of affective perturbation like irritation and annoyance? Are these also forms of hostility? (shrink)

Welcome to my philosophy page. My central research focus is the elucidation of what I call the radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below I endeavor to articulate the varying ways that radical temporality manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive project and George Kelly’s personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and further defining the nature of this (...) orientation , I have delineated the important ways in which it differs from a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that includes hermeneutic and radical constructivisms, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) cognition, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of corporeal intersubjectivity, autopoietic self-organizing systems theory and American pragmatism. Among the authors whose work I have submitted to critique from the radically temporal perspective are: Francisco Varela (autopoietic self-organizing systems), Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Thomas Fuchs (enactive, embodied ('4EA') cognition), John Protevi (Deleuzian biopolitics), Kym Maclaren ( critical phenomenology) and Jan Slaby (critical neuroscience). -/- I argue that these authors’ accounts of intersubjectivity and empathy, and their integration of affect, motivation, intentionality and will, remain burdened by traditional presuppositions that the radically temporal philosophies of Heidegger et al put into question. -/- . (shrink)

English interpretations, appropriations, and transpositions of the figure of Don Quixote play a pivotal role in eighteenth-century constructions of so-called English national character. A corpus of quixotic narratives worked to reinforce the centrality of Don Quixote and the practice of quixotism in the national literary landscape. They stressed the man from La Mancha’s eccentricity and melancholy in ways inextricable from English self-constructions of these traits.2 This is why Stuart Tave is able to write that eighteenth-century Britons could “recast” Don Quixote (...) in a fashion that followed “national pride” in the “freedom” of their humors.1 However, Don Quixote’s integral place in patriotic self-constructions was troubled by gender. While national character was construed as masculine by default, quixotism’s association with masculinity was complicated by the potential passive penetrability of quixotism and the proliferation of narratives about female quixotic readers. This essay will analyze these tensions. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) are key examples of quixotic texts that respond to the figure of the female quixote by interrogating the relationship between Englishness, masculinity, and quixotism. (shrink)

What is the main characteristic of constructive explanation? In other words, what is the nature of a construct and, consequently, what kind of relationship is there between constructs and behavior? Kelly stated that a "psychological response is initially and basically the outcome of a construing act."(1955, vol. 1, p. 171) Somewhere else, he asserts it in a more clear way: "Since they construe them differently, they will anticipate them differently and will behave differently as a consequence of their (...) anticipations." (Kelly, 1963, p. 90) The relationship between constructs and "psychological response" could be considered in terms of either 'causation' or 'implication'. (shrink)

'Io trace a path from Pico della Mirandola's Renaissance man to the Jacobean malcontents of Marston or Webster is to document not an inflation of hopes for dominion over the natural world, but rather a loss of confidence in the possibility of control over even human affairs. 'For I am going into a wilderness, /Where I shall find nor path, nor friendly clew/To be my guide'.2 The bleak consequences of this lack of direction, leaving traces through into the Restoration period (...) in England, are particularly evident in the free will debate: of Milton's angels,. (shrink)

This article is about the information relevant to decision-making capacity in refusal of life-prolonging medical treatment cases. We examine the degree to which the phenomenology of the options available to the agent—what the relevant states of affairs will feel like for them—forms part of the capacity-relevant information in the law of England and Wales, and how this informational basis varies across adolescent and adult medical treatment cases. We identify an important doctrinal phenomenon. In the leading authorities, the courts (...) appear to count the first-personal phenomenology of the available options among the information that adolescents seeking to refuse life-prolonging treatment must understand and appreciate in order to possess capacity; adults are not held to this (higher) standard. We evaluate this differential treatment in light of philosophical work on transformative choice—decisions involving options whose sensory character, and effect on our values and preferences, are grasped only through experience itself. (shrink)

Dido Belle was the illegitimate daughter of Captain Lindsay, the aristocratic nephew of William Murray, Scottish by birth and Lord Chief Justice of England for many decades. The book tells the story of Dido's life in Lord Mansfield homes, from the time her father begged Lord and Lady Mansfield to be wards of the child Dido to the death at age 88 of Lord Mansfield, mainly cared for by Dido and to Dido's young death at age 43. It also (...) raises issues of financial queries, Wills, Probate, and the place of a woman in society in those days, not quite chattel but not equal to men. (shrink)

This book review begins with a historical overview of the English law of trial by jury and continues to the present topic of plea bargaining. It is both legal and philosophical in its outlook and it is hoped that those who take the time to study this book might find among the many topics at least one such topic of research that will sustain you through legal studies for some years to come. The reviewer makes no apologies for the (...) length of this review as it reflects the tremendous amount of academic labour by many professors and their teams in managing to produce this tome of a research handbook. which the reader is bound to dip into time and time again for years and years to come. It was published in April 2024 when I began the review, but my husband was ill and died in hospital many weeks later, hence the postponement of this review's publication, for which I am very sorry indeed. (shrink)

There are important structural similarities in the way that animals and humans engage in unreflective activities, including unreflective social interactions in the case of higher animals. Firstly, it is a form of unreflective embodied intelligence that is ‘motivated’ by the situation. Secondly, both humans and non-human animals are responsive to ‘affordances’ (Gibson 1979); to possibilities for action offered by an environment. Thirdly, both humans and animals are selectively responsive to one affordance rather than another. Social affordances are a subcategory of (...) affordances, namely possibilities for social interaction offered by an environment: a friend’s sad face invites comforting behavior, a person waiting for a coffee machine can afford a conversation, and an extended hand affords a handshake. I will review recent insights in the nature of the bodily intentionality characteristic of unreflective action. Such ‘motor intentionality’ can be characterized as “our direct bodily inclination to act in a situated, environmental context” (Kelly 2005, p. 106). Standard interpretations of bodily intentionality see grasping an object as the paradigmatic example of motor intentionality. I will discuss the implications of another, novel perspective that emphasizes the importance of unreflective switches from one activity to another (Rietveld 2004) and understands bodily intentionality in terms of adequate responsiveness to a field of relevant affordances. In the final section I will discuss some implications for cognitive neuroscientists who use empirical findings related to the ‘mirror neuron system’ as a starting point for a theory of motor intentionality and social cognition. (shrink)

David Hume is an ardent supporter of the practice of religions toleration. For Hume, toleration forms part of the background that makes progress in philosophy possible, and it accounts for the superiority of philosophical thought in England in the eighteenth century. As he puts it in the introduction to the Treatise: “the improvements in reason and philosophy can only be owing to a land of toleration and of liberty” (T Intro.7; SBN xvii).1 Similarly, the narrator of part 11 of (...) the First Enquiry comments: -/- Our conversation began with my admiring the singular good fortune of philosophy, which, as it requires entire liberty above all other privileges, and chiefly flourishes from the free opposition of sentiments and argu­ mentation, received its first birth in an age and country of freedom and toleration. (EHU 11.2; SBN 132) -/- The toleration to which Hume refers is broader than religious toleration, but in the context of the eighteenth century, religious toleration is clearly the paradigm case. Indeed, religious toleration represents one of the key accomplishments of the culminating event of Hume’s History of England: the Glorious Revolution of 1688. -/- Yet even though religious toleration forms the background of philosophy in general—or perhaps just because it does so—Hume offers precious few arguments for it, and they are, for the most part, given implicitly rather than as formal argu­ ments. Nevertheless, we can distinguish three different, though interrelated, lines of support for toleration in Hume’s thought: (i) an argument based on a general skepticism; (ii) an argument based on a contempt for organized religion; and (iii) a pragmatic argument based on the need for peace and orderly government. From our point of view, what is striking about all of these argument is how un-Lockean they are: Hume does not rely on the idea of a fundamental conceptual separation of church and state, nor on a natural right to freedom of conscience that character­izes writers working in the Lockean tradition. However, of the arguments he gives, only the last, I will argue, has any hope to provide a useful case for toleration. (shrink)

Logic diagrams have been increasingly studied and applied for a few decades, not only in logic, but also in many other fields of science. The history of logic diagrams is an important subject, as many current systems and applications of logic diagrams are based on historical predecessors. While traditional histories of logic diagrams cite pioneers such as Leibniz, Euler, Venn, and Peirce, it is not widely known that Kant and the early Kantians in Germany and England played a crucial (...) role in popularising Euler(-type) diagrams. In this paper, the role of the Kantians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will be analysed in more detail. It shows that diagrams (or intuition in general) were a highly contentious topic that depend on the philosophical attitude and went beyond logic to touch on issues of physics, metaphysics, linguistics and, above all, mathematics. (shrink)

For this study, we will present the most important ecumenical activities of Patriarch Justinian Marina. He was the third Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church between 1948 and 1977. During this period, he was very concerned to establish a relationship with the main ecumenical institutions. We will speak about his dialogue with one of the most important ecumenical group, namely the World Council of Churches, founded in 1948 in Geneva, Switzerland. Of course, the dialogue with the Church of (...) England must to be mentioned. His ecumenical activity was very important for the Orthodox Church, Patriarch Justinian being one of the most important Church leaders who tried and succeeded to be in contact with different religious leaders from Romania and abroad. We do not have to forget that during his time the communist regime ruled our country. In the first part, we will give different historical information about his ecumenical activity and in the second part we will explore his theological thinking about the ecumenical dialogue and movement. (shrink)

If we follow we will see that one third of Rabindranath's Poetry are indication of expand of literature of letters. Viewing the subject variant of multiple thinking of the literature of letters, it seems that Rabindra paragraph could not get full form if he did not present it to us. In his every letters we see subject variant. Religion, Society, city life, Independence of women, Education, thinking about nature, love; nothing left in his script. All letters written by him (...) in different time are contained in books named “Chinnopotro”, “Bhanusinger Potro”, Russiaer Chiti”. His first countable Book “Europe Probashis Potro”, describes the story of his England journey at teenage. In spite of these the number of letters which are written addressing to his wife, son, relative-friend, pal, colleague & co-operator, are not a lesser quantity; some of these are attached in the book “Chiti Patra”.Where we find Rabindranath as a human being. Answers toward questions of Hemantabala Devi (Beloved, personable, Hemantabala is daughter of zaminder Brojendrakishore Roychoudhury of Moimonsing District of Gouripur, & wife of zaminder Brojendrakanta of Rongpur Bhitorbongo. She left her family & had become Baishnav, and in alias name communicated with Rabindranath through writing letters, appreciated for “Sesher kabita” & thus starts corresponding by Rabindranath of miscellaneous religious & socialism questions, we find the thinking of Rabindranath about religion & society. Rabindranath thinks the dirt of body clean through taking bath, but the thinking about clean of mind through taking bath is nothing but foolishness. So, estimating any community as worthless is a sin. All people in spite of different cast & creed should understand that God is devoted always for every era, not let think them personal property which degrades God. If this thinking will not become clearly known to all, till then in ‟India" Gods are degraded, Human being are degraded; never this defame will go away. (shrink)

In 2021, the men’s English national football team reached their first final at a major international tournament since winning the World Cup in 1966. This success followed their previous achievement of reaching the semi-finals (knocked-out by Croatia) at the 2018 World Cup. True to form, the defeats proved unfalteringly English; with the 2021 final echoing previous tournament defeats, as England lost to Italy on penalties. However, what resonated with the predictability of an English defeat, was the accompanying chant, ‘it’s (...) coming home’. A ubiquitous presence throughout the course of both tournaments—while chanted at England football matches, it was also repeated across social media, the press and commercial advertising—the chant originates from the 1996 single, Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home), performed by David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and The Lightning Seeds. In what follows critical attention will be given to examining how the song offers what will be argued is a melancholic outlook. By re-approaching examples of English nostalgia and hubris, this chapter will expose how illustrations of English melancholy offer the potential for promoting collective forms of expression, which, when contextualized alongside England’s lack of footballing success (for the men’s team, at least), can be offset against a melancholic mediation that is cognizant of the centrality of loss—both for the subject and our collective sporting endeavours. (shrink)

James A. Harris's biography of David Hume is the first such study to appear since Ernest Mossner's The Life of David Hume (1954). Unlike Mossner, Harris aims to write a specifically "intellectual biography", one that gives "a complete picture of Hume's ideas" and "relates Hume's works to the circumstances in which they were conceived and written" (vii). Harris's study turns on four central theses or claims about the character of Hume's thought and how it is structured and developed. The claims (...) are: (1) Hume's Treatise has no claim to any sort of "privileged" status in relation to Hume's other major works -- which include his Essays and his History of England. -/- (2) There is no system, doctrine, or fundamental aims or ambitions that serve to unify Hume's thought. -/- (3) Irreligious aims and interests are not of any particular or unique importance for Hume's thought. Moreover, whatever irreligious aims and objectives Hume may have had, they reflect his moderate, neutral and detached attitude to this and all other subjects -- there is no underlying animus or hostility against religion that motivates his contributions to this subject. (4) Hume's thought should be understood and explained not in terms of his concern with some specific subject matter or body of doctrine but rather in terms of his style and his identity as a "philosophical man of letters". -/- The general picture of Hume that emerges from this study, as constructed around these four core theses, is, as I will explain, incomplete, unconvincing and, in important respects, seriously flawed and misleading. -/- . (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that the new emerging discipline cognitive science of religion has a bearing on how to think about the epistemic status of religious beliefs. Both defenders and opponents of the rationality of religious belief have used cognitive theories of religion to argue for their point. This paper will look at the defender-side of the debate. I will discuss an often used argument in favor of the trustworthiness of religious beliefs, stating that cognitive science of religion (...) shows that religious beliefs are natural and natural beliefs ought to be trusted in the absence of counterevidence. This argument received its most influential defense from Justin Barrett in a number of papers, some in collaboration with Kelly James Clark. I will discuss their version of the argument and argue that it fails because the natural beliefs discovered by cognitive scientists of religion are not the religious beliefs of the major world religions. A survey of the evidence from cognitive science of religion will show that cognitive science does show that other beliefs come natural and that these can thus be deemed trustworthy in the absence of counterevidence. These beliefs are teleological beliefs, afterlife beliefs and animistic theistic beliefs. (shrink)

-/- Only this experience … -/- Thirty years ago a young British soldier found himself in a conflict in which Christians were killing Christians. When he protested that involving the Army would provoke more violence from both sides, his government ordered him into a military psychiatric hospital, to be treated - on arrival - for schizophrenia. Instead, the hospital staff found him perfectly sane. Meanwhile, under their observation, he had a spectacular spiritual experience. He had previously decided that God is (...) just a delusion. Here now was a perfect setting for a modern revelation: not only that God is an authentic human experience, but that it is very likely the human experience. Modern atheists are surely right to claim that God has little to do with biology - and physicists, that God little to do with physics. Yet without an understanding of what this intense and complex experience is actually like - and what cultural changes it can inspire - human history is virtually incomprehensible. When he was later training to become a maths teacher at Cambridge University in England, both philosophers and theologians urged him to find a way to express his inspiration through his teaching. He was soon a head of mathematics at one of England’s most prestigious international schools. There he realised that orthodox mathematics instruction does a great deal of moral and social harm - as well as being obviously ineffective. Mathematics should teach youngsters to think honestly, critically and constructively - even to accept other’s criticisms gladly. This is what democracy requires. But youngsters in schools are usually rewarded more for their dishonesty. They learn to resent others’ ability, to reject any criticism. These are major reasons why modern democracies fail. In the last century the same habits of teaching arguably handed power to Stalin and Hitler. Both called their politics ‘scientific’. Both savagely destroyed criticism and dissent. Both enjoyed popular support. These tendencies are active today. In 473959 he describes how his revelation became the foundation of his life - then of his teaching. He explains how teaching mathematics properly and effectively will preserve children’s natural honesty, encourage and support their natural desire to think, to understand and to treat others honestly. In this way, he believes, there is even a possibility of ending the ancient conflicts between Jews, Christians and Muslims: by combining the fundamental moral principles of their most famous exponents. -/- … makes understanding human history possible! (shrink)

According to the High Court in England and Wales, the primary purpose of legal interventions into the lives of vulnerable adults with mental capacity should be to allow the individuals concerned to regain their autonomy of decision making. However, recent cases of clinical decision making involving capacitous vulnerable adults have shown that, when it comes to medical law, medical ethics and clinical practice, vulnerability is typically conceived as opposed to autonomy. The first aim of this paper is to detail (...) the problems that arise when the courts and health care practitioners respond to the vulnerability of capacitous adults on the basis of such an opposition. It will be shown that not only does the common law approach to vulnerability fail to adequately capture the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults, the conception of vulnerability and autonomy in oppositional terms leads to objectionably paternalistic health care responses that undermine the autonomy of vulnerable patients as well as clinical and legal interventions that violate their autonomy. In response, the second aim of this paper is to show that the concepts of autonomy and vulnerability are necessarily entwined and, on that basis, the focus should be on promoting the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults where possible. In order to make this case, the paper explains the limitations of standard approaches to the autonomy of vulnerable adults and, in their place, offers a conception of legitimate, self-authorised autonomy that is fundamentally dependent on intersubjective practices of recognition. (shrink)

Recently, I have proposed an extension of the framework of the ethics of collegiality (Berber & Subotić, forthcoming). By incorporating an anti-individual perspective and the notion of epistemic competence, this framework can reveal the epistemic virtue/vice relativism, which, in turn, charts the tension between being a good colleague and an efficient, loyal employee. In this paper, however, I want to sketch how the ethics of collegiality could be applied to practical domains, such as the historical accountability and atonement of corporations (...) that participated in the anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich and contributed to the Holocaust by using slave or forced labor. New studies suggest that corporations ought to engage in deeper historical reflection and ethical dialogue between Shoah survivors and top managers to address the issue of industrial compliance (Federman 2021), whereas most of the work on this topic traditionally focused on the issue of reparations litigation (Kelly 2016, Neuborne 2003). Through the notions of collective institutional epistemic vice and institutional ethos (Fricker 2021), the upshot is to assess whether it is feasible for corporations to be genuinely repentant regarding their role in the Holocaust thanks to the ethics of collegiality instead of merely offering compensation. I will argue that instead of emphasizing ethical leadership and the top-down approach to the (re-)implementation of values in corporate conduct, the spotlights should be on the bottom-up approach grounded in collegial solidarity among all employees. (shrink)

A crucial question in relation to support designed to enable the legal capacity of people with mental disabilities concerns when support constitutes undue influence. This article addresses this question in order to facilitate the development of law and policy in England and Wales, by providing a normative analysis of the different approaches to undue influence across decisions about property, contracts, health, finances, and accommodation. These are all potential contexts for supporting legal capacity, and, in doing so, the article compares (...) approaches to undue influence that are rarely considered together. -/- Drawing on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, third sector and public body documents, and law in England and Wales, the analysis identifies six models that conceptualise undue influence in terms of: modes of influence; an overborne will; an inference from the situation; an overborne will understood as a mental incapacity; an overborne will in connection with vulnerability; and impaired discursive control. This final approach is a novel proposal for understanding undue influence. The analysis highlights key policy-relevant issues that distinguish the models, and generates a deliberative framework for navigating them, with the ‘overborne will’, ‘inference-based’, and ‘discursive control’ models identified as potentially fitting for the support context. (shrink)

Empirical research indicates that feelings of disgust actually affect our moral beliefs and moral motivations. The question is, should they? Daniel Kelly argues that they should not. More particularly, he argues for what we may call the irrelevancy thesis and the anti-moralization thesis. According to the irrelevancy thesis, feelings of disgust should be given no weight when judging the moral character of an action (or norm, practice, outcome, or ideal). According to the anti-moralization thesis, feelings of disgust should not be (...) allowed a role in, or harnessed in the service of, moral motivation. In this paper, I will argue against both theses, staking out a moderate position according to which feelings of disgust can (but needn’t always) play a proper role in aid of moral belief formation and moral motivation. (shrink)

This paper examines the concept of liberty at the heart of Sarah Chapone’s 1735 work, The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives. In this work, Chapone (1699-1764) advocates an ideal of freedom from domination that closely resembles the republican ideal in seventeenth and eighteenth- century England. This is the idea that an agent is free provided that no-one else has the power to dispose of that agent’s property—her “life, liberty, and limb” and her material possessions—according to (...) his arbitrary will and pleasure, without being accountable to the law. This paper shows how Chapone uses this ideal to ground her arguments against those laws that put married women in a worse condition than slavery, and to call for the establishment of reasonable and just safeguards for a woman’s personal property and property in her children. More than this, it is argued, in this text Chapone articulates a feminist ideal that is both negative freedom from domination and positive freedom to be one’s own master or arbiter. Her work thus occupies a unique—and hitherto unrecognized—place in the history of feminist philosophy. (shrink)

Does it matter that almost all juries in England and Wales are all-White? Does it matter even if this result is the unintended and undesired result of otherwise acceptable ways of choosing juries? Finally, does it matter that almost all juries are all-White if this has no adverse effect on the treatment of non-White defendants and victims of crime? According to Cheryl Thomas, there is no injustice in a system of jury selection which predictably results in juries with no (...) minority members so long as this result is not deliberate, and does not adversely affect the treatment of minority defendants and victims of crime. My view is different. In and of itself, I believe, something is wrong with a system of jury selection that predictably results in all-White juries in a diverse society, such as our own. Absent reason to believe that we lack a better alternative to current modes of jury selection, a commitment to democratic government and to the equality of citizens – or so I will argue – condemns existing arrangements as unjust, whether or not they have adverse effects on jury decisions, or on the ways in which our society approaches issues of race and crime. (shrink)

William Molyneux (1656–1698) was an Irish experimental philosopher and politician, who played a major role in the intellectual life in seventeenth-century Dublin. He became Locke’s friend and correspondent in 1692 and was probably Locke’s philosophically most significant correspondent. Locke approached Molyneux for advice for revising his Essay concerning Human Understanding as he was preparing the second and subsequent editions. Locke made several changes in response to Molyneux’s suggestions; they include major revisions of the chapter ‘Of Power’ (2.21), the addition of (...) the chapter ‘Of Identity and Diversity’ (2.27), and the addition of the so-called Molyneux Problem (2.9.8). Molyneux repeatedly requested that Locke develops his views on morality. Additionally, their correspondence turned to questions concerning education and Molyneux’s keen interest in the topic likely prompted Locke to publish Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693. Moreover, Molyneux drew on Locke’s anonymously published Two Treatises of Government in his The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated, which was first published in the spring of 1698. Molyneux revealed Locke’s authorship of Two Treatises against Locke’s will, yet their friendship continued until Molyneux’s untimely death in October 1698. (shrink)

This brilliant and challenging book provides an overview and defence of 'luck egalitarianism', one that helpfully connects debates on luck egalitarianism to debates on what aspects of our lives egalitarians should try equalise (the 'equality of what?' debate/the debate on the 'metric' of equality) and on what respect, if any, it makes sense to see each other as equals. The book illuminates different conceptions of luck, as found in the philosophical literature, clarifies the difference between telic and deontic equality, and (...) explains the 'levelling down' problem and the way that this affects luck egalitarians, and egalitarians more generally. For these reasons, the book provides a handy introduction to a range of philosophical debates about equality amongst analytic philosophers, whether or not one is particularly interested in luck egalitarianism. However, this is not an easy book to read, and while it is advertised as suitable for advanced undergraduates, I find it hard to imagine using it in any undergraduate course I have taught in the United States, England, France or Switzerland. But this is definitely a book that masters and doctoral students should be able to read by themselves and that will be helpful for teachers preparing classes on luck egalitarianism or on equality more generally. (shrink)

In “Now the French are invading England” (Analysis 62, 2002, pp. 34-41), Komarine Romdenh-Romluc offers a new theory of the relationship between recorded indexicals and their content. Romdenh-Romluc’s proposes that Kaplan’s basic idea, that reference is determined by applying a rule to a context, is correct, but we have to be careful about what the context is, since it is not always the context of utterance. A few well known examples illustrate this. The “here” and “now” in “I am (...) not here now” on an answering machine do not refer to the time and place of the original utterance, but to the time the message is played back, and the place its attached telephone is located. Any occurrence of “today” in a newspaper or magazine refers not to the day the story in which it appears was written, nor to the day the newspaper or magazine was printed, but to the cover date of that publication. Still, it is plausible that for each (token of an) indexical there is a salient context, and that “today” refers to the day of its context, “here” to the place of its context, and soon. Romdenh-Romluc takes this to be true, and then makes a proposal about what the salient context is. It is “the context that Ac would identify on the basis of cues that she would reasonably take U to be exploiting.” (39) Ac is the relevant audience, “the individual who it is reasonable to take the speaker to be addressing”, and who is assumed to be linguistically competent and attentive. (So Ac might not be the person U intends to address. This will not matter for what follows.) The proposal seems to suggest that it is impossible to trick a reasonably attentive hearer about what the referent of a particular indexical is. Since such trickery does seem possible, Romdenh-Romluc’s theory needs (at least) supplementation. I present two examples of such tricks. (shrink)

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, large-scale research and pharmaceutical regulatory processes have proceeded at a dramatically increased pace with new and effective, evidence-based COVID-19 interventions rapidly making their way into the clinic. However, the swift generation of high-quality evidence and the efficient processing of regulatory authorisation have given rise to more specific and complex versions of well-known research ethics issues. In this paper, we identify three such issues by focusing on the authorisation of molnupiravir, a novel antiviral medicine aimed (...) at reducing the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to multiply in the body, for clinical use by the National Health Service in England and the concomitant testing of molnupiravir through the large-scale Platform Adaptive trial of Novel antiviRals for eArly treatMent of COVID-19 In the Community randomised control trial. By analysing the ways in which the authorisation and clinical use of molnupiravir complicate standard approaches to clinical equipoise, standard of care and participant consent in the PANORAMIC randomised control trial, we will explain some of ethical implications for clinical trials that aim to study the efficacy and safety of new COVID-19 and other therapeutics when conditional authorisation has already been granted and when such treatments have already been made available to patients by national health providers. (shrink)