We examined the relationship between leader behavioral integrity and leader behavioral courage using data from two studies. Results from Study 1, an online experiment, indicated that behavioral manifestations of leader behavioral integrity and situational adversity both have direct main effects on behavioral manifestations of leader courage. Results from Study 2, a multisource field study with practicing executives, indicated that leader behavioral courage fully mediates the effects of leader behavioral integrity on leader performance and leader executive image. Implications of these findings (...) and future directions are discussed. (shrink)

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one’s past, can serve as a resource for individuals coping with discomforting experiences. The experience of bereavement poses psychological and physical risks....

Rich sensorimotor interaction facilitates language learning and is presumed to ground conceptual representations. Yet empirical support for early stages of embodied word learning is currently lacking. Finding evidence that sensorimotor interaction shapes learned linguistic representations would provide crucial support for embodied language theories. We developed a gamified word learning experiment in virtual reality in which participants learned the names of six novel objects by grasping and manipulating objects with either their left or right hand. Participants then completed a word–color match (...) task in which they were tested on the same six words and objects. Participants were faster to respond to stimuli in the match task when the response hand was compatible with the hand used to interact with the named object, an effect we refer to as affordance compatibility. In two follow up experiments, we found that merely observing virtual hands interact with the objects was sufficient to acquire a smaller affordance compatibility effect, and we found that the compatibility effect was driven primarily by responses with a compatible hand and not by responses in a compatible spatial location. Our results support theoretical views of language which ground word representations in sensorimotor experiences, and they suggest promising future routes to explore the sensorimotor foundations of higher cognition through immersive virtual experiments. (shrink)

Spontaneous eye blink rate has been linked to attention and memory, specifically working memory. sEBR is also related to striatal dopamine activity with schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease showing increases and decreases, respectively, in sEBR. A weakness of past studies of sEBR and WM is that correlations have been reported using blink rates taken at baseline either before or after performance of the tasks used to assess WM. The goal of the present study was to understand how fluctuations in sEBR during (...) different phases of a visual WM task predict task accuracy. In two experiments, with recordings of sEBR collected inside and outside of a magnetic resonance imaging bore, we observed sEBR to be positively correlated with WM task accuracy during the WM delay period. We also found task-related modulation of sEBR, including higher sEBR during the delay period compared to rest, and lower sEBR during task phases that place demands on visual attention. These results provide further evidence that sEBR could be an important predictor of WM task performance with the changes during the delay period suggesting a role in WM maintenance. The relationship of sEBR to DA activity and WM maintenance is discussed. (shrink)

Little research has explored the perceptions of military medical providers in the deployed environment and how their perceptions may change over time across an extended military conflict. To our knowledge, no studies have examined military medical providers’ opinions on readiness for their roles in the post-9/11 contingency operations. What has been published indicates that, during the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom, military medical providers often deployed with little notice and minimal formal training. The present report examines data obtained from multiple (...) cohorts of military medical providers (N = 321) deployed to Iraq between 2005 and 2009. Despite varying degrees of support from the U.S. public, our findings indicate that U.S. Air Force military medical providers’ support for the people of Iraq, their belief in the mission, and their ability to influence change did not vary with time. (shrink)

More’s retirement at Chelsea after his resignation lasted less than two years, a time which he devoted to write his books of controversy (especially during 1533), while trying to keep himself away from public life. The life of the ex-Chancellor contrasts with the Emperor’s frantic activity in Italy, Spain and Northern Africa. As the situation of Catherine of Aragón worsened, the possibility of war between England and Charles V became more and more real. And yet, a careful revision of (...) available data proves that the Emperor never considered this course of action seriously: his real concerns were the Turks, the strengthening of his alliance with the Pope to face Lutheranism, and the ever hostile Francis I. As an epilogue to this research, I will bring into consideration the Emperor’s words of praise about the English Chancellor, as reported presumably by Sir Thomas Elyot. (shrink)

Austin and Jean moved into a flat in Chelsea, and on Wednesday 16 April 1941 a massive bomb exploded behind their building. Austin was not seriously hurt but Jean had to spend five weeks in hospital before returning to college to prepare for Finals. She also discovered she was pregnant. Austin supported her with letters of advice and encouragement, and she went on to get a First. After her exams, they went on holiday to Scotland to introduce Jean to (...) Austin’s parents, and when they returned, Austin went back to working on North African Intelligence. The comparative accuracy of his estimates of Rommel’s losses was a factor which led to the dismissal of the current British leadership in the theatre, and its replacement by the team which would eventually win at El Alamein in late 1942. In early February 1942, Jean gave birth to their first child, Fanny. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

(Invited contribution to a special issue of Philosophy in honor of Sam Scheffler) - To live meaningfully, we can’t just be receptacles for the right sorts of activities – it has to matter that it’s us living our lives. Something is missing in valuable activities, if the same value could be achieved by anyone who performs the task. Meaningfulness requires that it be our own ideals, personalities, and priorities contributing to the value of what we do. Recognizing this can shed (...) light on our relationship with meaning in three ways. First, it shows a distinctive reason that autonomy is important: what we do without autonomy will lack meaning. Second, it helps us understand a challenge we encounter when facing trade-offs between different types of meaning, navigating between opportunities to have a few of our characteristics matter widely (e.g., as a filmmaker or an activist) and intimate contexts in which much more of who we are matters to a small group of people. Finally, if living meaningfully involves our central characteristics shaping what’s valuable about our actions, then discovering pre-set purposes (e.g., from fate, God, or the cosmos) might actually undermine our capacity to live meaningful lives. (shrink)

This paper offers a new psychological reading of the Pyrrhonian Skeptic and their way of life (the so-called Skeptic Way). The Pyrrhonist, I suggest, has three peculiar psychological hallmarks: (1) she is psychologically compelled to inquire after the truth, (2) she is persistently and repeatedly disturbed by anomaly in the facts, and (3) she is able to achieve tranquility (_ataraxia_) as a result of suspension of judgment (_epochē_). This new psychological interpretation has two payoffs. First, it helps us resolve the (...) “inquiry problem”—how can the Pyrrhonist possibly engage in genuine inquiry into the truth, when it also seems to the Pyrrhonist that holding beliefs of any kind, but particularly evaluative beliefs, causes psychological disturbance? Second, it allows us to appreciate a new kind of value for Pyrrhonism, what I term _psychological value_. We can discern two distinct types of _ataraxia_, both a moderate type resulting from the simple, temporary cessation of inquiry and a more significant, enduring type achieved by failing to hold any evaluative beliefs. On the whole, the Pyrrhonist fares better than the non-Pyrrhonist by acquiring both forms of _ataraxia_ more regularly. (shrink)

Informed consent is ethically incomplete and should be redefined as empowered consent. This essay challenges theoretical assumptions of the value of informed consent in light of substantial evidence of its failure in clinical practice and questions the continued emphasis on autonomy as the primary ethical justification for the practice of consent in health care. Human dignity—rather than autonomy—is advanced from a nursing ethics perspective as a preferred justification for consent practices in health care. The adequacy of an ethic of obligation (...) (namely, principlism) as the dominant theoretical lens for recognising and responding to persistent problems in consent practices is also reconsidered. A feminist empowerment framework is adopted as an alternative ethical theory to principlism and is advanced as a more practical and complete lens for examining the concept and context of consent in health care. To accomplish this, the three leading conceptions of informed consent are overviewed, followed by a feminist critique to reveal practical problems with each of them. The need for a language change from informed to empowered consent is strongly considered. Implications for consent activities in clinical practice are reviewed with focused discussion on the need for greater role clarity for all involved in consent—beyond and inclusive of the patient‐physician dyad, as the practice and improvement of consent is necessarily a transdisciplinary endeavour. Specific concrete and practical recommendations for leveraging nursing expertise in this space are presented. Perhaps what is most needed in the discourse and practice of consent in health care is nursing. (shrink)

We’re often unsure what morality requires, but we need to act anyway. There is a growing philosophical literature on how to navigate moral uncertainty. But much of it asks how to rationally pursue the goal of acting morally, using decision-theoretic models to address that question. I argue that using these popular approaches leaves some central and pressing questions about moral uncertainty unaddressed. To help us make sense of experiences of moral uncertainty, we should shift away from focusing on what it’s (...) rational to do when facing moral uncertainty, and instead look directly at what it’s moral to do about moral uncertainty—for example, how risk averse we morally ought to be, or which personal sacrifices we’re morally obligated to make in order to reduce our risk of moral wrongdoing. And orthodox, expectation-maximizing, decision-theoretic models aren’t well-suited to this task—in part because they presuppose the answers to some important moral questions. For example, if approaching moral uncertainty in a moral way requires us to “maximize expected moral rightness,” that’s, itself, a contentious claim about the demands of morality—one that requires significant moral argument, and that I ultimately suggest is mistaken. Of course, it’s possible to opt, instead, for a variety of alternative decision-theoretic models. But, in order to choose between proposed decision-theoretic models, and select one that is well-suited to handling these cases, we first would need to settle more foundational, moral questions—about, for example, what we should be willing to give up in order to reduce the risk that we’re acting wrongly. Decision theory may be able to formalize the conclusions of these deliberations, but it is not a substitute for them, and it won’t be able to settle the right answers in advance. For now, when we discuss moral uncertainty, we need to wade directly into moral debate, without the aid of decision theory’s formalism. (shrink)

Often, we’re unsure what morality requires, and a debate has emerged about whether our moral uncertainty and beliefs about morality matter to what we should do. I argue that (1) our moral-epistemic circumstances (our beliefs, credences, and evidence about moral norms) matter to what we morally ought to do; (2) many objections to this view are only problems if we assume all moral norms are sensitive to our moral-epistemic circumstances; and finally, (3) we should avoid this with an account that (...) incorporates procedural norms that are sensitive to our moral-epistemic circumstances (analogous to legal due process norms) and substantive norms that are not sensitive to them (analogous to norms of substantive justice). (shrink)

Our moral judgments are fallible, and we’re often uncertain what morality requires. I argue that, in the face of these challenges, it’s not only rational to use effective procedures for trying to be moral – we have a moral responsibility to do so, and being reckless when navigating moral uncertainty, is, itself, a form of moral wrongdoing. These strategic requirements present a large class of under-explored norms of morality. I use these norms to address moral and social questions concerning, for (...) example, interpersonal toleration, exceptions to moral rules in high-stakes cases, and principal-agent relationships (such as those between lawyers and clients). -/- (email for full text). (shrink)

Employing a constructionist framework of emotion, this study examines whether parental language during emotion belief discussions predicts parents’ self-reported beliefs about emotion and child emotion regulation (ER). 102 parents of children ages 8 through 12 participated in focus groups about emotion beliefs, and nine months later, completed questionnaires on their emotion beliefs and child ER. Focus group content was analyzed for positive and negative emotion talk, cognitive process talk, and an established linguistic marker of psychological distancing. Parents’ positive emotion talk (...) and parental linguistic distancing when discussing their child’s (but not their own) emotion experiences positively predicted beliefs about children’s emotional capabilities. Finally, negative emotion talk negatively predicted parental beliefs about children’s capacity to control their own emotions and the value of anger expression as well as child ER. Current findings contribute to our understanding of how parental communication patterns about emotions may influence emotion beliefs and child emotion development. (shrink)

My focus is on the contemporary astrobiological activity of Messaging ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (METI). This intentional astrobiological signaling typically involves embedding digital communications in powerful radio signals and transmitting those signals out into the cosmos in an explicit effort to make contact with extraterrestrial others. Some who criticize METI express concern that contact with technologically advanced extraterrestrial life could be seriously harmful to Earth or humanity. One popular response to this critique of messaging is an appeal to causal impotence sometimes referred (...) to as the ‘Barn Door’ Argument—we are already engaged in many other detectable activities not intended for cosmic communication. If the Barn Door Argument is correct, then those who engage in messaging arguably have a moral excuse. They are permitted to continue messaging because there is no point in abstaining. I develop three ways in which the claim of causal impotence in the Barn Door Argument could be understood. I evaluate each of these in turn and demonstrate that only one is appropriate to contemporary messaging. However, this interpretation does not generate the moral excuse on which the proponents of the Barn Door Argument rely; thus, the argument fails. Finally, I entertain and respond to candidate objections. (shrink)

We seek to bring Black bodies and lives into full view within the enterprise of Indigenous health research to interrogate the unquestioned good that is taken to characterize contemporary Indigenous health research. We articulate a Black bioethics that is not premised upon a false logic of beneficence, rather we think through a Black bioethics premised upon an unconditional love for the Black body. We achieve this by examining the accounts of two Black mothers, fictional and factual rendering visible the racial (...) violence Black bodies have been subjected to. We call for a Black bioethics that reimagines the Black body as beautiful and belonging—to both someone and somewhere. (shrink)

In three studies, we examined food as an elicitor of nostalgia. Study 1 participants visualised eating either a nostalgic or regularly consumed food. Study 2 participants visualised consuming 12 foods. Study 3 participants consumed 12 flavour samples. Following their food experiences, all participants responded to questions regarding the profile of food-evoked nostalgia (i.e. autobiographical relevance, arousal, familiarity, positive and negative emotions) and several psychological functions (i.e. positive affect, self-esteem, social connectedness, meaning in life). Study 2 and 3 participants also reported (...) their state nostalgia. Results revealed that food is a powerful elicitor of nostalgia. Food-evoked nostalgia has a similar contextual profile to previously examined elicitors, but is a predominantly positive emotional experience. Food-evoked nostalgia served multiple psychological functions and predicted greater state nostalgia. (shrink)

People often think there are moral duties that hold irrespective of the consequences, until those consequences exceed some threshold level – that we shouldn’t kill innocent people in order to produce the best consequences, for example, except when those consequences involve saving millions of lives. This view is known as “threshold deontology.” While clearly controversial, threshold deontology has significant appeal. But it has proven quite difficult to provide a non-ad hoc justification for it. This chapter develops a new justification, showing (...) that acting like a threshold deontologist is a good strategy for being moral, given our uncertainty and imperfect moral knowledge. And failing to use good strategies for being moral is, itself, morally bad. (shrink)

Moral judgment has typically been characterized as a conflict between emotion and reason. In recent years, a central concern has been determining which process is the chief contributor to moral behavior. While classic moral theorists claimed that moral evaluations stem from consciously controlled cognitive processes, recent research indicates that affective processes may be driving moral behavior. Here, we propose a new way of thinking about emotion within the context of moral judgment, one in which affect is generated and transformed by (...) both automatic and controlled processes, and moral evaluations are shifted accordingly. We begin with a review of how existing theories in psychology and neuroscience address the interaction between emotion and cognition, and how these theories may inform the study of moral judgment. We then describe how brain regions involved in both affective processing and moral judgment overlap and may make distinct contributions to the moral evaluation process. Finally, we discuss how this way of thinking about emotion can be reconciled with current theories in moral psychology before mapping out future directions in the study of moral behavior. (shrink)

This book is a contribution both to Aristotle studies and to the philosophy of nature, and not only offers a thorough text based account of time as modally potentiality in Aristotle’s account, but also clarifies the process of “actualizing time” as taking time and looks at the implications of conceiving a world without actual time. It speaks to the resurgence of interest in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and will become an important resource for anyone interested in Aristotle’s theory of time, of (...) its relationship to Aristotle’s larger project in the Physics, and to time’s place in the broader scope of Aristotelian natural science. Graduate students and scholars researching in this area especially will find the authors arguments provocative, a welcome addition to other recent publications on Aristotle’s Treatise on Time. ​. (shrink)

The costs of privacy losses don’t only come from what others know about us, but also what they don’t know. Living with limited privacy can involve bits and pieces of our lives being observed in isolation: surveillance algorithms may only call attention to activities with certain features, social media followers may scroll past half of our posts, and no observer is likely to experience the full context of our words and actions. And distinctive structural features of being under observation make (...) it difficult to correct misconceptions observers form when they lack context. So, losing privacy can create pressure for us to lead more fragmented lives, lives that seem okay when encountered as isolated sound bites, rather than richer, coherent wholes. But many of the especially meaningful aspects of our lives—lasting interpersonal connections, long-term goals and projects, and personal growth and change—are extended over longer periods of time and woven into our lives in more complicated ways. Focusing on producing good fragments can undermine features of our lives that we usually recognize as meaningful. In this sense, part of privacy’s value is underappreciated: privacy can help us to lead more meaningful lives—or at least reduce one obstacle to it. (shrink)

_Brill's Companion to the Reception of Presocratic Natural Philosophy in Later Classical Thought_ explores both explicit and hidden influences of Presocratic (6-4th c. BCE) early scientific concepts, such as nature, elements, principles, soul, organization, causation, purpose, and cosmos in Platonic, Aristotelian, and Hippocratic philosophy.

Traditional accounts of legal ethics put lawyers in a difficult position. They require lawyers to take on surprisingly high risks of wrongdoing when they navigate the narrow passage between differing demands of legal ethics. And this occurs even if we accept the standard conception of legal ethics on its own terms while disregarding possible clashes with external norms. According to the standard conception of lawyers’ ethical responsibilities, lawyers should “zealously” advocate for their clients—further their clients’ interests right up to the (...) limits of the law. Under this view, a lawyer might violate ethical obligations to their client if they decline to take effective, legally permissible steps out of moral squeamishness or because they’re inclined to be generous with adversaries. But these same traditional views take lawyers to be ethically obligated to not violate the law. On the standard conception, lawyers must approach that line for their clients, but not cross it. And both a lawyer’s duties to the client and their duties to obey the law are treated as moral obligations. According to standard accounts of professional ethics, when a lawyer falls short of these duties, it is a moral failing. -/- Navigating these two requirements—finding the line but not crossing it—seems to require a very high level of clarity about both the law and the legally relevant facts. And that clarity may be difficult to achieve in ordinary legal practice. Real life involves uncertainty about the law and legally relevant facts, often with too little time to resolve it. But the structure of lawyers’ obligations means that when they face uncertainty, they may not be able to use one approach that’s common in day-to-day life: avoid a questionable activity just in case it’s morally wrong and opt for an alternative that’s clearly morally permissible. For a lawyer, there may not be an alternative that is clearly morally permissible. Instead, this avoidance strategy would often mean a lawyer either errs in the direction of violating an obligation to a client or errs in the direction of violating obligations to the law. If standard accounts of lawyers’ ethical obligations are correct, then we are asking lawyers to assume an unusually high risk of moral wrongdoing. And it may be unfair to lawyers to expect them to take this on. In other areas, our legal system provides standards for what it takes to move from one way of handling an ambiguous circumstance to another—“proof beyond a reasonable doubt” or a “preponderance of the evidence,” for example. These are messy and imperfect. But lawyers are left with even less guidance—the equivalent of telling a jury to “be sure to get it right” and saying very little about what to do when it’s unclear what “right” involves. (shrink)

Despite the prominent argument for equal educational opportunity for women inWe examine carefully Plato’s argument for the equal nature of women in.

This paper examines the resilience of farmers markets in Michigan to the system shock of the global COVID-19 pandemic, questioning how the response fits into market goals of food sovereignty. Adapting to shifting public health recommendations and uncertainty, managers implemented new policies to create a safe shopping experience and expand food access. As consumers directed their shopping to farmers markets looking for safer outdoor shopping, local products, and foods in short supply at grocery stores, market sales skyrocketed with vendors reporting (...) selling more than ever before, but the longevity of this change remains unclear. Our data collected via semi-structured interviews with market managers and vendors, and survey data from customers from 2020 to 21, suggest that despite the widespread impact of COVID-19, there is not sufficient evidence consumers will continue to shop at farmers markets at the rates they did in 2020-21. Furthermore, reasons consumers flocked to farmers markets do not align with market priorities for increased food sovereignty, as increased sales alone are not a sufficient driver for this goal. We question how markets can contribute to broader sustainability goals or serve as alternatives to capitalist and industrial modes of agricultural production, problematizing the role of markets in the food sovereignty movement. (shrink)

Pietsch, Chelsea In a claim of negligence, plaintiffs must be able to prove that they have suffered some sort of damage or loss. Proving damage is usually a straightforward task which involves making a comparison between the plaintiff's position before and after the alleged negligence. However, what damage has been done if a doctor's negligence results in the conception and subsequent birth of a child? Is it ever possible to conceive of life as damage? These questions must ultimately be (...) addressed in wrongful birth claims where parents seek compensation for the conception and/or birth of a life that would not have existed but for the doctor's negligent advice or treatment. However, they are not as easy for judges to answer as you may think. Judges have a duty to resolve such matters - not with reference to vague notions of 'common sense' or 'community interests' - but in accordance with established law. However, what if there is no statute or precedent that speaks on the matter? How should judges resolve such 'novel' issues? Can judges rely on 'common sense' or arguments about 'community interests' in these limited circumstances? The question of whether or not a child may be categorised as damage for the purpose of satisfying a claim in negligence is such an issue. In this essay I acknowledge that, in the absence of guiding legal rules and principles, judges have no choice but to resolve novel questions on grounds of policy considerations. I suggest, however, that a distinction should be made between legal and public policy and that reliance on the former, not the latter, may be used to assert that children are blessings, not injuries. While it may be morally desirable for the issue to end there, this is not the case. Legal policy has also developed the notion of reproductive autonomy in such a way that suggests the opposite may also be true. In an attempt to resolve these conflicting values, I propose the damage in wrongful birth cases is not the conception and/or birth of a child but rather a doctor's infringement on their patient's reproductive autonomy, which warrants legal recognition in the form of compensation. (shrink)

Pietsch, Chelsea The definition and meaning of mercy from the point of view of life-ending decisions or euthanasia is discussed. The different ways in which mercy can be interpreted are highlighted.

This paper defends the Pyrrhonian skeptic against the objection that, because she lives entirely without belief (adoxastōs) in pursuit of psychic tranquility (ataraxia), she is unable or unlikely to act ethically, particularly in unjust sociopolitical contexts. This objection takes the form of three connected charges: (1) the skeptic lacks the moral psychological resources needed to deliberate and act as an ethical agent ought; (2) even if in principle she has these resources, she is likely to just perform whatever action causes (...) the least psychic disturbance regardless of whether it is morally objectionable; and (3) in order to engage in decision-making procedures that would result in ethical action, she would need to hold some beliefs, thus rendering her adoxastōs Skeptic Way inconsistent. This paper refutes these charges by arguing that the Pyrrhonist is not wholly without moral psychological resources needed for acting ethically by illuminating the role that preferences and desires (i.e., “pro-attitudes”) play in her decision-making procedures and showing that these attitudes are distinct enough from belief to preserve her adoxastōs Skeptic Way, while also being stable and persistent enough to guide her actions in a way that is both reliable and predictable. I demonstrate that the kind of states of affairs the Pyrrhonist’s pro-attitudes are likely to be reliably directed toward are those that orient her toward morally praiseworthy actions and away from conformism in unjust sociopolitical contexts. Indeed, I argue she might even be more likely to act ethically in some sociopolitical contexts than her dogmatic peers, whether these be philosophical dogmatists or ordinary people. Consequently, I assert that the Pyrrhonist can be a robust – though certainly atypical – moral agent whose preferences and desires give us reason to be cautiously optimistic about viewing at least some elements of her philosophical way of life as morally praiseworthy. (shrink)

Those who do not exist cannot be harmed. If someone is not worse off than she otherwise would have been, she is not harmed. Together, these claims entail that the individuals in non-identity cases are not harmed, because no one who exists is made worse off. While these claims might be true at the individual level, their truth does not preclude our having harm-based concerns about future persons in general. These concerns are justified when we recognize the responsibility we have (...) over certain offices that persons come to fill. By positing an account of de dicto harm and arguing for its moral relevance, I provide a solution to the non- identity problem that coheres nicely with our intuitions regarding harm, responsibility, and obligations to future persons. (shrink)

Informed consent is ethically incomplete and should be redefined as empowered consent. This essay challenges theoretical assumptions of the value of informed consent in light of substantial evidence of its failure in clinical practice and questions the continued emphasis on autonomy as the primary ethical justification for the practice of consent in health care. Human dignity—rather than autonomy—is advanced from a nursing ethics perspective as a preferred justification for consent practices in health care. The adequacy of an ethic of obligation (...) (namely, principlism) as the dominant theoretical lens for recognising and responding to persistent problems in consent practices is also reconsidered. A feminist empowerment framework is adopted as an alternative ethical theory to principlism and is advanced as a more practical and complete lens for examining the concept and context of consent in health care. To accomplish this, the three leading conceptions of informed consent are overviewed, followed by a feminist critique to reveal practical problems with each of them. The need for a language change from informed to empowered consent is strongly considered. Implications for consent activities in clinical practice are reviewed with focused discussion on the need for greater role clarity for all involved in consent—beyond and inclusive of the patient‐physician dyad, as the practice and improvement of consent is necessarily a transdisciplinary endeavour. Specific concrete and practical recommendations for leveraging nursing expertise in this space are presented. Perhaps what is most needed in the discourse and practice of consent in health care is nursing. (shrink)

Though largely a theoretical endeavour, environmental ethics also has a practical agenda to help humans achieve environmental sustainability. Environmental ethicists have extensively debated the grounds, contents and implications of our moral obligations to nonhuman nature, offering up different notions of an ‘environmental ethic’ with the presumption that, if humans adopt such an environmental ethic, they will then engage in less environmentally damaging behaviours. We assess this presumption, drawing on psychological research to discuss whether or under what conditions an environmental ethic (...) might engender pro-environmental behaviour. We focus discussion on three lines of scholarship in the environmental ethics literature, on 1) intrinsic value, 2) care ethics, and 3) the land ethic. We conclude by commenting generally on both the limits and transformative potential of an environmental ethic in its larger sociocultural context. (shrink)

Horror movies have discovered an easy recipe for making people creepy: alter their eyes. Instead of normal eyes, zombies’ eyes are vacantly white, vampires’ eyes glow with the color of blood, and those possessed by demons are cavernously black. In the Academy Award winning Pan’s Labyrinth, director Guillermo del Toro created the creepiest of all creatures by entirely removing its eyes from its face, placing them instead in the palms of its hands. The unease induced by altering eyes may help (...) to explain the uncanny valley, which is the eeriness of robots that are almost—but not quite—human. Much research has explored the uncanny valley, including the research reported by MacDorman & Entezari, which focuses on individual differences that might predict the eeriness of humanlike robots. In their paper, they suggest that a full understanding of this phenomenon needs to synthesize individual differences with features of the robot. One theory that links these two concepts is mind perception, which past research highlights as essential to the uncanny valley. Mind perception is linked to both individual differences—autism—and to features of the robot—the eyes—and can provide a deeper understanding of this arresting phenomenon. In this paper, we present original data that links uncanniness to the eyes through aberrant perceptions of mind. (shrink)

This chapter considers Sappho of Lesbos an early philosopher of time. It compares the use of temporal markers, especially “now” (nun) in Sappho’s poetry to Aristotle’s usage of the same term in the context of his treatise on time in Physics IV.10–14. Likewise, it looks at Aristotle’s analysis of phantasia in De Anima III and in the Parva Naturalia as well as Eva Stehle’s reading of Sappho’s Tithonos poem to suggest ways that both Aristotle and Sappho account for an ability (...) to experience the past, what was “once” (pota), in the present, now. The chapter concludes that Sappho, like Aristotle, was a thinker primarily engaged with the existence and experience of natural beings and, as such, of the ways natural beings primarily act and interact with each other in the world. From such an engagement developed a theory of time. Sappho may have been a hidden influence on Aristotle’s understanding of the relationship between being, beings, and time; nevertheless, her poetry is instructive to all of us still grappling with these issues today. (shrink)

Background. Prodromal Alzheimer’s disease (AD) clinical trials enroll patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and their study partners. This study examined trial enrollment decision-making and risk for misunderstanding trial information presented in an informed consent process for prodromal AD trials.Methods. We performed structured interviews with patients with MCI and individuals who could serve as their study partners. We presented details of a hypothetical prodromal AD trial, followed by questionnaires to assess involvement of the study partner in trial decisions, patient capacity (...) to consent, and patient health numeracy skills.Results. Among 65 patient participants, most were male (66%) and non-Hispanic White (88%) with a mean (standard deviation) age of 74.9 (8.4) years. Among 57 study partners, most were spouses (83%), female (74%), and non-Hispanic White (91%) with a mean (standard deviation) age of 70.3 (13.6). Most patient participants (66%) and study partners (72%) reported they would make enrollment decisions in partnership; 28% of patient participants said they would make the decision themselves, with input from a study partner. Twenty-five patient participants (38%) lacked capacity to consent to the trial; 38% demonstrated impaired health numeracy. Seventeen patient participants (26%) demonstrated both a lack of capacity and impaired health numeracy, among whom seven reported they would make enrollment decisions on their own, with input from a study partner.Conclusions. Some patients with MCI demonstrated a lack of capacity to consent, impaired health numeracy, or both, putting them at risk for misunderstanding trial information in the consent process for a prodromal AD clinical trial. (shrink)

This is a translation of the second chapter of F.W.J. Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erlaüterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre. It is preceded by a brief introduction in which I situate the chapter within Schelling's oeuvre and suggest that it is not only an early articulation of Schellingian Naturphilosophie, but also prescient, anticipating Schelling's later positive philosophy.

Der Begriff εὐβίοτος (gut leben) und verwandte Begriffe tauchen in Aristoteles’ Beobachtungen des Vogellebens in der Historia Animalium IX auf. Diese Forschungsnotiz vergleicht die Wiedergabe von Aristoteles’ Begriff in griechischen, lateinischen und arabischen Manuskripten sowie in modernen und zeitgenössischen Übersetzungen ins Englische, Französische und Deutsche und argumentiert, dass die Wiedergabe, beginnend mit den humanistischen Übersetzern des 15. Jahrhunderts, Georg von Trapezunt und Theodor Gaza, unpassend war. Die Freiheiten, die man sich bei der Überinterpretation von Aristoteles’ Begriff nahm, könnten verschleiert haben, (...) was er über die Fähigkeiten der Vögel ausdrücken wollte. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article considers the second treatise of Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre (Treatises Explaining the Idealism of the Science of Knowledge, 1796/97), a lesser-known work from the early Schelling. Here, Schelling proposes to defend the critical position insofar as it purports to be a system based on human reason, but instead he issues a backhanded critique of the assumption on behalf of the critical philosophers to try and limit the bounds of pure reason by means of (...) their own use of reason. Schelling then offers an alternative way to think about the relationship of mind (Geist) and matter in nature. This article argues that Schelling's actual explanation of the critical philosophy as a position founded by reasonable minds ultimately belies his promise to defend it, thus calling into question that Schelling's thought prior to 1800 was a mere reiteration of Kantian/Fichtean transcendentalism. (shrink)