Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform many aspects of scholarly publishing. Authors, peer reviewers, and editors might use AI in a variety of ways, and those uses might augment their existing work or might instead be intended to replace it. We are editors of bioethics and humanities journals who have been contemplating the implications of this ongoing transformation. We believe that generative AI may pose a threat to the goals that animate our work but could also be (...) valuable for achieving those goals. In the interests of fostering a wider conversation about how generative AI may be used, we have developed a preliminary set of recommendations for its use in scholarly publishing. We hope that the recommendations and rationales set out here will help the scholarly community navigate toward a deeper understanding of the strengths, limits, and challenges of AI for responsible scholarly work. (shrink)

ExcerptIn my assessment, the first Trump presidency was always something of a non-event: pace Trump’s rhetorical bloviation—which has provoked almost a decade of histrionics about fascism that have become an article of faith for the urbane left—his presidency did not represent any distinctive departure from American politics as usual,1 with the partial exception of a relatively dovish foreign policy that saw no new wars begun during his tenure. COVID-19 constituted an exceptional interlude but was hardly Trump’s doing, and his administration’s (...) response to it (despite some contradictory statements from the man himself) was ultimately mainstream. (shrink)

The new generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and especially the large language models (LLMs) of which ChatGPT is the most prominent example, have the potential to transform many aspects o...

ExcerptAt the beginning of 2025, Donald Trump and the GOP resumed control over state institutions that had been generally hostile to them, and indeed had worked to undermine and unseat the previous Trump administration. Given the role played by many within the state apparatus in opposing Trump, persecuting his supporters, and trying to jail him, dealing with this must appear to the new government as an urgent political necessity. However, this situation poses an immediate conundrum: to what extent can these (...) institutions be made politically neutral or even turned into pro-Republican organs, and to what extent is it desirable or necessary to dismantle them? (shrink)

ExcerptIn this essay, I discuss the role of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) discourse and policy in relation to contemporary higher education, principally with reference to the situation in the United States. I will argue that this discourse has raised significant challenges for the pursuit of truth in the university, both by determining a priori the answers to important questions and by feeding into an increasing subordination of truth to other concerns in the functioning of the university. In making this (...) argument, I consciously echo David Pan’s recent commentary in this journal on the way DEI in higher education is undermining liberal democracy. I will argue, however, that DEI is imbricated in our society far more deeply than Pan’s analysis allows, with a vital role as the schema used paradoxically to justify increasing economic inequality. The appropriate response to the subordination of truth to DEI then, on my account, is to leverage truth to attack DEI by exposing its insidious and self-occluding social function. (shrink)

Is it possible to advance democracy by empowering ordinary citizens to make key decisions about the design of political institutions and policies? In 2004, the government of British Columbia embarked on a bold democratic experiment: it created an assembly of 160 near-randomly selected citizens to assess and redesign the province's electoral system. The British Columbia Citizens' Assembly represents the first time a citizen body has had the power to reform fundamental political institutions. It was an innovative gamble that has been (...) replicated elsewhere in Canada and in the Netherlands, and is gaining increasing attention in Europe as a democratic alternative for constitution-making and constitutional reform. In the USA, advocates view citizens' assemblies as a means for reforming referendum processes. This book investigates the citizens' assembly in British Columbia to test and refine key propositions of democratic theory and practice. (shrink)

The new generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and especially the large language models (LLMs) of which ChatGPT is the most prominent example, have the potential to transform many aspects o...

Biologists energetically debate terminology in ecology and evolution, but rarely discuss general strategies for resolving these debates. We suggest focusing on metaphors, arguing that, rather than looking down on metaphors, biologists should embrace these terms as the powerful tools they are. Like any powerful tool, metaphors need to be used mindful of their limitations. We give guidance for recognizing metaphors and summarize their major limitations, which are hiding of important biological detail, ongoing vagueness rather than increasing precision, and seeming real (...) rather than!gurative. By keeping these limitations in mind, metaphors like adaptive radiation, adaptive landscape, biological invasion, and the ecological niche can be used to their full potential, powering scienti!c insight without driving research off the rails. (shrink)

Livestock systems across the world are transformed by capitalist forces. Understanding these social, economic, and cultural transformations is important because it has major implications for rural populations across the world. Traditionally, the study of livestock systems has been organized along the conceptual classification of ranching in North America and Australia and pastoralism in Africa and Asia, but this intellectual division has limited our understanding because of a priori assumptions about the extent to which these systems have been shaped by capitalism. (...) The goal of our paper is to outline a conceptual framework to come to a better understanding of the different ways that livestock systems across the globe have become more and less capitalist. We use a comparative approach that considers a wide range of livestock systems in different parts of the world, ranging from pastoralism in open access and communally held grasslands to ranching in privately owned and fenced rangelands, and industrial agriculture, to examine the diversity, complexity, and dynamics of these systems at the intersection with capitalism. We describe how livestock keepers across the world adopt, adapt to, and challenge capitalist logics and offer new ways to raise livestock in the twenty-first century. One of the emergent themes of our review is the persistence of pastoral values and identities across livestock systems. (shrink)

The doctrine of perspectivism -- Educational implications of perspectivism : empathizing with the other -- The doctrine of self-overcoming -- Educational implications of self-overcoming : embodying reason, embracing struggle -- The doctrine of the order of rank -- Educational implications of the order of rank : creating a culture of emulation -- The doctrine of a reseentiment -- Educational implications of ressentiment : cultivating a disposition of gratitude -- Conclusion : Nietzsche's pedagogical vision for the good life.

While a great deal has been written on Plato's Lysis in philosophy and philology journals over the last thirty years, nothing has been published on Lysis in the major Anglo-American philosophy of education journals during that time. Nevertheless, this dialogue deserves attention from educators. In this essay, Mark Jonas argues that Lysis can serve as a model for educators who want to move their students beyond mere aporia, but also do not want to dictate answers to students. Although the (...) dialogue ends in Socrates's affirmation of aporia, his affirmation is actually meant to persuade his interlocutors to reflect on an epiphany they had previously experienced. In what follows, Jonas offers a close reading of relevant passages of Lysis, demonstrating the way that Socrates leads his interlocutors to an epiphany without forcing his answers upon them. (shrink)

More than one philosopher has expressed puzzlement at the very idea of feminist epistemology. Metaphysics and epistemology, sometimes called the ‘core’ areas of philosophy, are supposed to be immune to questions of value and justice. Nevertheless, many philosophers have raised epistemological questions starting from feminist-motivated moral and political concerns. The field is burgeoning; a search of the Philosopher's Index reveals that although nothing was published before 1981 that was categorized as both feminist and epistemology, soon after, the rate of publication (...) in feminist epistemology rose to between 15 and 25 articles per year.1 At the same time, social epistemology was also beginning to grow as a separate identifiable field of inquiry. (shrink)

Researchers must infer “what babies know” based on what babies do. Thus, to maximize information from doing, researchers should use tasks and tools that capture the richness of infants' behaviors. We clarify Gibson's views about the richness of infants' behavior and their exploration in the service of guiding action – what Gibson called “learning about affordances.”.

ExcerptAs I noted in Telos 205, in a narrow election result such as the 2020 one, almost any factor that affected the election could reasonably be deemed decisive.1 The 2024 result is no different: inasmuch as Trump’s victory rested on his ability to carry seven key states, it demonstrates nothing so much as the great power of marginal forces in American politics today. The consternation of so many on the left—how could this happen?— reflects a lack of awareness of the (...) precariousness of their victory in 2020. That had been secured through overwhelming dominance over the public sphere, including a near-stranglehold on the media, both legacy and social, and a far larger fiduciary base enabling far higher campaign spending with more operatives. Little has changed in this regard in 2024 either, but there has been a marginal change in the media landscape, to which Trump’s victory can in my view be attributed. There are other factors that I think were equally decisive inasmuch as I think Trump would not have won without these: one would be Trump’s choice of J. D. Vance as his vice president and Vance’s subsequent commanding media performances; another would be Trump’s own appearances on podcasts; still another would be the Harris campaign’s contrasting strategy, including celebrity endorsements; another would be the choice, apparently by Joe Biden, of Harris as replacement candidate, after a catastrophic failure by the DNC to manage Biden’s decline with an open primary race. However, without Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, I suspect none of these other factors would have been able to influence the race decisively, insofar as such things can only influence the public to the extent and in the manner that the media allow the public to be exposed to them. (shrink)

Avi Mintz (2008) has recently argued that Anglo-American educators have a tendency to alleviate student suffering in the classroom. According to Mintz, this tendency can be detrimental because certain kinds of suffering actually enhance student learning. While Mintz compellingly describes the effects of educator’s desires to alleviate suffering in students, he does not examine one of the roots of the desire: the feeling of compassion or pity (used as synonyms here). Compassion leads many teachers to unreflectively alleviate student struggles. While (...) there are certainly times when compassion is necessary to help students learn, there are other times when it must be overcome. Compassion in the classroom is a two-edged sword that must be carefully employed; and yet it is often assumed that it is an unequivocal good that ought to trump all other impulses. In this article I hope to raise awareness concerning the promises and pitfalls of compassion in education by examining the theories of two historical figures who famously emphasised compassion in their philosophical writings: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche. Rousseau and Nietzsche argue that compassion is a powerful educational force but that it must be properly employed. For Rousseau and Nietzsche, compassion is necessary to develop self-mastery in human beings—the ultimate goal of education—but it is a compassion that must hurt in order to help. My hope is that Rousseau’s and Nietzsche’s ideas on compassion will encourage thoughtful reflection on the uses and abuses of compassion in education. (shrink)

ExcerptIn 2021, in the pages of this journal, I contended that a coalition of interests in the United States had coalesced in opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump and duly taken power through the vehicle of Joe Biden.1 This coalition includes the Democratic Party, corporate elites, the media, academia, and—the subject of the present article—the national security (natsec) state. In that earlier piece, I focused on particular components of this coalition: legacy and social media. I went on in a (...) subsequent Telos piece to examine another of its elements: the academy.2 These fractions all appear, however, to be relatively minor players. While I argue that the legacy media have staged a counterrevolution to seize back control of the public sphere, this exhausts their parochial, pecuniary agenda; beyond this, they are simply part of a wider activist liberal cause. Contemporary liberal activism is in turn ideologically rooted in ideas propagated by sectors of the academy and hegemonic within it, but this has not, on my analysis, empowered the academy so much as the forces that make it increasingly redundant. (shrink)

IntroductionAs we near the semicentennial of the 1976 publication of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, for all its influence in the interim, this work remains today extraordinarily challenging in relation to our sexual mores. In this article, I will attempt to reapply its insights to analyze contemporary trends in sexuality and gender. Questions that I will consider include the continuing applicability of Foucault’s analyses, to what extent and how they may need to be revised in light of (...) historical developments, and what reading Foucault can tell us about our contemporary conjuncture. I will argue that volume 1 of The History of Sexuality remains highly relevant in this regard, although I will also indicate some ways in which things have moved on since Foucault’s time, and thus in which his thesis might be modified. Despite Foucault having apparently been extremely influential on academic thinking about sex, we seem nonetheless to have become or remained “other Victorians,” perversely mimicking the nineteenth-century sexology that Foucault pilloried. I will argue that we have continued to believe exactly the great myths about sex that Foucault sought to dispense with: namely, that sexuality has primarily been shaped by historic “repression,” that sexuality needs to be “liberated” from this repression, and that there is a “truth of sex” that is on the side of freedom. These beliefs have all mutated, however, to the extent that questions of sex (like many other social questions) are increasingly oriented around individual identities and the supposed sovereignty of the individual to determine their own truth. (shrink)

Electronic media present tremendous opportunities for improving the nature of society. I will address how discourse affects society, and how changes in media may improve societal discourse.

ExcerptIn this essay, I analyze the modern institution of liberal democracy in the context of the historical development of “biopolitics,” as conceptualized seminally by Michel Foucault in the mid-1970s. I will argue that the principal virtue of liberal democracy is its social stability, and that the principal danger to it—and by extension the stability of Western societies—is its underlying tendency toward “autoimmunity,” as classically theorized by Jacques Derrida, which is to say, toward destroying itself in an attempt to safeguard itself (...) against misidentified threats. (shrink)

In theories of guiding states through objective, impersonal standards and administrative techniques, the ruler was assigned several crucial roles. First, whereas objective standards (primarily written laws) were to constrain all human actions, such standards also had to be adapted to changing material conditions. The power to suspend existing laws and replace them with new ones was assigned by several texts—most notably in the opening chapter of the Book of Lord Shang (Shangjunshu 商君書)—to the ruler. Second, the ruler was charged with (...) checking or constraining the tendency of officials to abuse both their positions and the laws by forming factions to subvert objective standards. This role, as theorized in detail in the Han Feizi 韓非子, was carried out through a combination of self-mastery and administrative techniques. Finally, the ruler was charged with maintaining absolute mastery of the rewards and punishments which were the keys to enforcing the administrative techniques, and for leading all subjects to adhere to the model provided by written laws and other public standards. This article will discuss each of these roles, referring above all to the Han Feizi which provided the most elaborate theory of such a government, discuss problems noted by several modern scholars with the ruler’s performance of these roles, and finally show how various Warring States texts sought to solve these problems through the idea of the ruler’s creation of a supremely potent self through rigorous intellectual self-cultivation. (shrink)

In Book II of the Republic, Socrates briefly depicts a city where each inhabitant contributes to the welfare of all by performing the role for which he or she is naturally suited. Socrates calls this city the `true city ' and the `healthy one'. Nearly all commentators have argued that Socrates' praise of the city cannot be taken at face value, claiming that it does not represent Socrates' preferred community. The point of this paper is to argue otherwise. The claim (...) is that Socrates genuinely believes the city is a healthy and desirable city, and that he believes that the First City is in fact superior to the Kallipolis. (shrink)

Political philosophers rarely take on the topic of political corruption, despite the fact that corruption is so costly to human wellbeing, and so clearly separates well-governed from poorly governed polities. Ceva and Ferretti's book is the most complete attempt to remedy this deficit to date. Their key contribution is to conceptualize institutions in such a way that the offices they define link clearly to public ethics. Officeholders are accountable for their power mandate, not just within a hierarchy, but ethically, because (...) their duties serve the public purposes that justify the institution. This said, their approach works best for impartial institutions in which the public duties of offices are clear and actionable, such as professional bureaucracies. We also need an ethically driven conception of political corruption for political institutions that contain and channel political partiality, especially democratic institutions within which the ethical purposes of public legislation are argued, deliberated, and voted. Extending a public ethics account of political corruption to democratic institutions can and should be a next step in this important project. (shrink)

Let’s say that an act requires Person-Affecting Justification if and only if some alternative would have been better for someone. So, Lucifer breaking Xavier’s back requires Person-Affecting Justification because the alternative would have been better for Xavier. But the story continues: While Lucifer evades justice, Xavier moves on and founds a school for gifted children. Xavier’s deepest values become identified with the school and its community. When authorities catch Lucifer, he claims no Person-Affecting Justification is needed: because the attack set (...) Xavier on his life’s path, it’s no longer true that the alternative would have been better by the standard of what Xavier now values most. An unappealingly paternalistic way to hold Lucifer to account is to discount Xavier’s preferences as merely adaptive. Instead, I propose understanding the persons of Person-Affecting Justification to be not persons but person stages. This allows us to hold Lucifer to account without having to discount Xavier’s actual preferences, and has interesting implications for compensatory justice, including making sense of reparations for historical wrongs. (shrink)

Democracy, rule of the people, is comprised of complex webs of accountabilities between people and those who use power to govern on their behalf. Democratic accountability is comprised of justifications for these uses of power, combined with distributions of empowerments in such a way that those affected can sanction its use. Key problems for democracies include forming principals and agents among whom accountability relations might hold, designing institutions that limit costs of accountability mechanisms so they can be used by citizens, (...) and developing forms of accountability that match the increasing scale and complexity of political issues and organizations. (shrink)

Despite the periodic table having been discovered by chemists half a century before the discovery of electronic structure, modern designs are invariably based on physicists’ definition of periods. This table is a chemists’ table, reverting to the phenomenal periods that led to the table’s discovery. In doing so, the position of hydrogen is clarified.

Many teachers in teacher education programs are cursorily introduced to Dewey's ‘epochmaking’ ideas on interest and effort through discussions based on the need for child-centered pedagogies that utilize students' interests. Unfortunately, this strategy often tacitly encourages teachers to over-rely on students' interests. In this paper, I recommend a way of introducing Dewey's conception of interest that avoids the common pitfall of over-reliance on students' interests. I argue that if we focus on the changes Dewey made to the expression of his (...) philosophy during a seventeen-year period, we can help illuminate the force of his theory while protecting against unfortunate misinterpretations. (shrink)

Critics of reliability theories of epistemic justificationoften claim that the `generality problem' is an insurmountabledifficulty for such theories. The generality problem is theproblem of specifying the level of generality at which abelief-forming process is to be described for the purposeof assessing its reliability. This problem is not asintractable as it seems. There are illuminating solutionsto analogous problems in the ethics literature. Reliabilistsought to attend to utilitarian approaches to choices betweeninfinite utility streams; they also ought to attend towelfarist approaches to social (...) choice situations that donot demand full aggregation of individual welfares.These analogies suggest that the traditional `single number'approach to reliability is misguided. I argue that a newapproach – the `vector reliability' approach – is preferable.Vector reliability theories associate target beliefs withreliability vectors – that is, structured collections ofreliability numbers – and construct criteria of epistemicjustification that appeal to these vectors. The bulk of thetheoretical labor involved in a reliability account of epistemicjustification is thus transferred from picking a uniquereliability number to constructing a plausible criterionof epistemic justification. (shrink)

In this essay, we outline the central thesis of our recent book: A Platonic Theory of Moral Education: Cultivating Virtue in Contemporary Democratic Classrooms. We argue that the ethical, epistemological, political, and metaphysical doctrines typically attributed to Plato are not doctrines Plato holds, or at least are not doctrines that he holds in the way he is interpreted to have done. We claim that if we understand Plato’s relationship to these supposed doctrines better, we would discover that Plato’s views are (...) not wildly implausible or ill-suited for contemporary democracies and the schooling they provide for their children. Rather, they are plausible and well-suited to contemporary democratic education. This essay briefly outlines some of our reasons for holding this position. (shrink)

Some adaptationist explanations are regarded as maximally solid and others fanciful just-so stories. Just-so stories are explanations based on very little evidence. Lack of evidence leads to circular-sounding reasoning: “this trait was shaped by selection in unseen ancestral populations and this selection must have occurred because the trait is present.” Well-supported adaptationist explanations include evidence that is not only abundant but selected from comparative, populational, and optimality perspectives, the three adaptationist subdisciplines. Each subdiscipline obtains its broad relevance in evolutionary biology (...) via assumptions that can only be tested with the methods of the other subdisciplines. However, even in the best-supported explanations, assumptions regarding variation, heritability, and fitness in unseen ancestral populations are always present. These assumptions are accepted given how well they would explain the data if they were true. This means that some degree of “circularity” is present in all evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary explanation corresponds not to a deductive structure, as biologists usually assert, but instead to ones such as abduction or induction. With these structures in mind, we show the way to a healthier view of “circularity” in evolutionary biology, and why integration across the comparative, populational, and optimality approaches is necessary. (shrink)

In his 2001 article 'Teaching to Lie and Obey: Nietzsche on Education', Stefan Ramaekers defends Nietzsche's concept of perspectivism against the charge that it is relativistic. He argues that perspectivism is not relativistic because it denies the dichotomy between the 'true' world and the 'seeming' world, a dichotomy central to claims to relativism. While Ramaekers' article is correct in denying relativistic interpretations of perspectivism it does not go far enough in this direction. In fact, the way Ramaekers makes his case (...) may actually encourage the charge of relativism, especially when it comes to his appropriation of perspectivism for education. This article proposes to pick up where Ramaekers left off. It will argue that Nietzsche's denial of the opposition between the 'true' world and the 'seeming' world opens up the possibility for the reestablishment of truth, albeit in a modified form. After examining Nietzsche's modified 'realist' epistemology, the paper will explore the implications of it for his philosophy of education. It will be argued that Nietzsche's educational philosophy is founded on his concept of perspectivism in so far as he demands that students be rigorously inculcated into a pedagogical framework that teaches students to discriminate between 'true' and 'false' perspectives. This framework is essential for the development of an intellectually robust and life-affirming culture. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of self-overcoming has been largely misinterpreted in the philosophy of education journals. The misinterpretation partially stems from a misconstruction of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, and leads to a conception of self-overcoming that is inconsistent with Nietzsche’s educational ideals. To show this, I examine some of the prominent features of the so-called “debate” of the 1980s surrounding Nietzsche’s conception of self-overcoming. I then offer an alternative conception that is more consistent with Nietzsche’s thought, and (...) provides a more nuanced understanding of Nietzsche’s “anti-democratic” pedagogy. Ultimately, I argue that while Nietzsche’s educational philosophy is not egalitarian, it can be effectively utilized in “democratic” classrooms, assuming his concept of self-overcoming is properly construed. (shrink)

Cognition and Temporality argues that both verbal grammar and figural grammar have their cognitive basis in twelve characteristic forms of judgment, distributed among individuals in human populations throughout history. These twelve logical forms are context-free and language-free foundations in our attentional awareness, and shape all verbal and figural statements. Moreover, these types of historical judgment are psychogenetic inheritances in a population, and each serves a distinct problem-solving function in the human species. Through analysis of verbal and figural statements, the author (...) contends, the researcher can find evidence of these forms of judgment, and in turn analyze how the event to which those statements attend is formally constructed by that judgment. This construction guides how the event is assessed, approached, and engaged in the process of problem-solving. Artists and aestheticians in the early twentieth century--including Wassily Kandinsky, Stephen C. Pepper, and Andrew Paul Ushenko--have all posited an inherited attentional perspective in individuals, manifested in the logical correspondence between their distinctive verbal and figural grammars. Cognition and Temporality elaborates these claims, arguing that while the styles of well-known artists and writers are conditioned by the public styles of a particular time period, variations in personal style manifest one's inherited form of judgment, and the characteristic grammars that express that form. Through rigorous visual and stylistic analysis, the author demonstrates the expression of these forms among notable writers and artists across history. The result is a wide-ranging and provocative contribution to phenomenology, aesthetic philosophy, and cultural history. (shrink)

‘‘Adaptive radiation’’ is an evocative metaphor for explosive evolutionary divergence, which for over 100 years has given a powerful heuristic to countless scientists working on all types of organisms at all phylogenetic levels. However, success has come at the price of making ‘‘adaptive radiation’’ so vague that it can no longer reflect the detailed results yielded by powerful new phylogeny-based techniques that quantify continuous adaptive radiation variables such as speciation rate, phylogenetic tree shape, and morphological diversity. Attempts to shoehorn the (...) results of these techniques into categorical ‘‘adaptive radiation: yes/no’’ schemes lead to reification, in which arbitrary quantitative thresholds are regarded as real. Our account of the life cycle of metaphors in science suggests that it is time to exchange the spent metaphor for new concepts that better represent the full range of diversity, disparity, and speciation rate across all of life. (shrink)

The volume begins with what is in common to contemporary phenomenological historians and historiographers. That is the understandings that temporality is the core of human judgment conditioning in its forms how we consciously attend and judge phenomena. For every phenomenological historian or historiographer, all history is an event, a span of time. This time span is not external to the individual, rather forms the content and structure of every judgment of the person. It is the logic used by the individual (...) to structure the phenomenon attended. Rather than the phenomenon being seen as something solely external, it is understood by phenomenologists as also of our immediate awareness and thought. Thus, the phenomenological method discerns all judgment as based upon one’s span of attention of inner or outer phenomena.. There is an intentionality to attention. One intends one’s own foci. Attention is the temporal duration of that intending. The volume offers a text that enables contemporary historians, graduate students, and even undergraduates who are well taught, to understand both the history of phenomenology as a method of inquiry, and the contemporary practice of phenomenological historical and historiographical thought. (shrink)

"Explores the concept of the social contract and how it shapes citizenship. Argues that the modern social contract is an account of the ethical and cultural conditions upon which modern citizenship depends"--Provided by publisher.

The purpose of this study was to examine how moral reasoning develops for 236 students enrolled in either a diversity course or a management course. These courses were compared based on the level of diversity inclusion and type of pedagogy employed in the classroom. We used causal modelling to compare the two types of courses, controlling for the effects of demographic (i.e., race, gender), curricular (i.e., previous course-related diversity learning) and pedagogical (i.e., active learning) covariates. Results showed that students enrolled (...) in the diversity course demonstrated higher levels of moral reasoning than students enrolled in the management course. In addition, results show that previous diversity courses as well as current enrolment in a diversity course contributed to moral reasoning gains. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

Across Tibet during the 1940s, young Han Chinese weather observers became stranded at their weather stations, where they faced illness, poverty and isolation as they pleaded with their superiors for relief. Building on the premise that China exercised ‘imperial nationalism’ in Tibet, and in light of scholarship that emphasizes the desirous ‘gaze’ of imperial observers toward the frontier, this essay considers how the meteorological archive might disrupt our understanding of the relationship between observation and empire. Meteorology presented a new way (...) of viewing the landscape that deliberately disregarded the embodied experience of the observer in favour of instrument-mediated readings. The process produced a bifurcated archive, in which stations disseminated quantitative weather charts as a matter of public interest while privately recording the embodied and often miserable experiences of observational staff on the frontier. Unpublished letters between observers and supervisors offer a rare glimpse into the frontier as experienced by reluctant or unwilling agents of the state. (shrink)

Despite impressive advances, the consensus remains that we cannot yet justify creation of genetically modified babies. This paper raises a puzzle for the consensus to the extent that it rests on concerns about risks to those modified babies. Although it is hard to justify disabling someone who already exists, I argue that it is presumptively permissible to create a disabled person who would not otherwise exist. So, which kind of metaphysical risk does early editing pose? A hard to justify risk (...) of disabling someone, or a presumptively permissible risk of creating someone who happens to be disabled? I will show how clinical and metaphysical considerations push in opposite directions, creating a dilemma for the consensus: The stronger the case that editing risks serious disability, the stronger the case that it would be an identity-altering, presumptively permissible instance of creating a disabled person. (shrink)