Quill R Kukla

The pragmatic texture of second-person calls such as requesting, ordering, inviting, and entreating is complex. None of these speech acts are interchangeable. All are appropriate in some contexts and inappropriate in others, and all can be enabled or precluded by specific power relations. We argue that one cannot understand either the origin or the structure of many of our ethically significant normative statuses and relationships without attending to how they are instituted and modified by calls and the uptake they receive. Our model also enables us to give a close analysis of various forms of defiance and transgression.

Practical ethics is a peculiar field; it has no agreed-upon methods or foundations and takes a wide variety of forms. Its relationship to traditional “pure” philosophical ethics is contested and inconsistent. Since its beginnings, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics has been at the forefront of methodological reflections on the nature, grounding, and appropriate standards for practical ethics. Institute scholars such as Tom Beauchamp, Robert Veatch, and Henry Richardson have been among the most influential philosophers engaged in such metaethical conversations. Correspondingly, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal has hosted some of the most vigorous debates in this subfield. In this issue of the journal, we..

Truth-telling is a project that is both gripping and problematic for Rousseau, as he is both captured by an ideal of telling as complete, undistorted discernment, documentation and communication, and also haunted by the fear that telling can never be this innocent. For Rousseau, as for Kant, telling does not leave the told untouched; rather, telling gives us a type of contact with objects that is marked and mediated by the process of telling itself, and hence the possibility of immediately grasping objects through telling is forever lost to us. The drive to capture things in themselves, which originates, according to Kant, in a formal principle of reason, shows up in Rousseau's writings as a nostalgia that governs and animates inquiry. I will read Rousseau, and the traumas of truth-telling he articulates, as important pretexts for Kant's critical epistemology. Rousseau discloses tensions that infect his truth-telling practices. Kant seeks to neutralize these tensions, not by dissolving them, but rather by translating them into the terms of transcendental philosophy and thus showing how they can be defused and rendered harmless in their empirical form, so as to secure the possibility of proper truth-telling.

Many recent theorists have argued that the self is socially constituted, or “decentered” by its social world. With surprising consistency, and in various ways, this decentered self has been gendered feminine, by feminists and non‐feminists alike. In this paper I explore whether there is any special link between femininity and decenteredness. I distinguish between two different ways that the self might be decentered – by its position within a cultural order, or by its interactions and relations with particular others. I then ask whether either of these potential forms of decenteredness bear a specific connection to femininity, and I try to spell out several such connections that are suggested by contemporary feminist theoretical writings. I argue that most of these cannot be made plausible or coherent. However, I conclude that there are some senses in which feminine selves are especially decentered, although it appears that the link depends upon women's disempowered social position, and not upon anything to do with femininity as a distinctive identity.

Epistemologists generally think that genuine warrant that is available to anyone must be available to everyone who is exposed to the relevant causal inputs and is able and willing to properly exercise her rationality. The motivating idea behind this requirement is roughly that an objective view is one that is not bound to a particular perspective. In this paper I ask whether the aperspectivality of our warrants is a precondition for securing the objectivity of our claims. I draw upon a Sellarsian account of perception in order to argue that it is not; rather, inquirers can have contingent properties and perspectives that give them access to forms of rational warrant and objective knowledge that others do not have. The universal accessibility of reasons, on my account, is not a precondition for the legitimacy of any actual warrant, but rather a regulative ideal governing inquiry and communication

Over the last several years, as cesarean deliveries have grown increasingly common, there has been a great deal of public and professional interest in the phenomenon of women 'choosing' to deliver by cesarean section in the absence of any specific medical indication. The issue has sparked intense conversation, as it raises questions about the nature of autonomy in birth. Whereas mainstream bioethical discourse is used to associating autonomy with having a large array of choices, this conception of autonomy does not seem adequate to capture concerns and intuitions that have a strong grip outside this discourse. An empirical and conceptual exploration of how delivery decisions ought to be negotiated must be guided by a rich understanding of women's agency and its placement within a complicated set of cultural meanings and pressures surrounding birth. It is too early to be 'for' or 'against' women's access to cesarean delivery in the absence of traditional medical indications – and indeed, a simple pro- or con- position is never going to do justice to the subtlety of the issue. The right question is not whether women ought to be allowed to choose their delivery approach but, rather, taking the value of women's autonomy in decision-making around birth as a given, what sorts of guidelines, practices, and social conditions will best promote and protect women's full inclusion in a safe and positive birth process.

Philosophers have often posited a foundational calling voice, such that hearing its call constitutes subjects as responsive and responsible negotiators of normative claims. I give the name ldquo;transcendental conscience to that which speaks in this founding, constitutive voice. The role of transcendental conscience is not – or not merely – to normatively bind the subject, but to constitute the possibility of the subject's being bound by any particular, contentful normative claims in the first place. I explore the ontological and temporal status of transcendental conscience, using Heidegger's account of conscience in Being and Time as my textual touchstone. I ask what performative structure the call of conscience might have that would enable it to constitute normative responsiveness, and I raise some temporal conundrums surrounding this structure. I argue that it is incoherent to attempt to give a literal, chronological account of the origin of normative grip and response. I suggest that we can best understand the founding calls of conscience, not as literal events occurring in regular time, but as events that can only show up retrospectively, as occurring in an ever-receding, unlocalizable past, and that these calls can only be figured mythically and metaphorically. Appropriating a Derridean term, I claim that the voice of transcendental conscience must be that of a lsquo;ghost, whose call binds us by haunting us – a haunting that is no less transcendentally necessary for its inability to be translated into a literal historical event.

The summer issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal highlights a range of controversial issues that will incite spirited disagreement amongst our readers. These five papers each take up complex contemporary ethical challenges and develop creative strategies to resolve them. Together they represent our continued commitment to publishing theoretically rigorous, empirically informed, and practically relevant work in bioethics.In “HPV and the Ethics of CDC’s Vaccination Requirements for Immigrants,” Mark Navin offers a timely defense of immunization mandates for migrants, extending the contentious debates taking place in the United States to the domain of immigration justice. Navin begins by critiquing the..

: The principle of equipoise traditionally is grounded in the special obligations of physician-investigators to provide research participants with optimal care. This grounding makes the principle hard to apply in contexts with limited health resources, to research that is not directed by physicians, or to non-therapeutic research. I propose a different version of the principle of equipoise that does not depend upon an appeal to the Hippocratic duties of physicians and that is designed to be applicable within a wider range of research contexts and types—including health services research and research on social interventions. I consider three examples of ethically contentious research trials conducted in three different social settings. I argue that in each case my version of the principle of equipoise provides more plausible and helpful guidance than does the traditional version of the principle

Several accounts of representation in cognitive systems have recently been proposed. These look for a theory that will establish how a representation comes to have a certain content, and how these representations are used by cognitive systems. Covariation accounts are unsatisfactory, as they make intelligent reasoning and cognition impossible. Cummins' interpretation-based account cannot explain the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive systems, nor how certain cognitive representations appear to have intrinsic meaning. Cognitive systems can be defined as model-constructers, or systems that use information from interpreted models as arguments in the functions they execute. An account based on this definition solves many of the problems raised by the earlier proposals

As a culture, we have a tendency to measure motherhood in terms of a set of signal moments that have become the focus of special social attention and anxiety; we interpret these as emblematic summations of women's mothering abilities. Women's performances during these moments can seem to exhaust the story of mothering, and mothers often internalize these measures and evaluate their own mothering in terms of them. "Good" mothers are those who pass a series of tests—they bond properly during their routine ultrasound screening, they do not let a sip of alcohol cross their lips during pregnancy, they give birth vaginally without pain medication, they do not offer their child an artificial nipple during the first six months, they feed their children maximally nutritious meals with every bite, and so on. This reductive understanding of mothering has had counterproductive effects upon health care practice and policy, encouraging measures that penalize mothers who do not live up to cultural norms during signal moments, while failing to promote extended narratives of healthy mothering.

In this book, Paul Redding argues both that Hegel’s thought is making a resurgence in some quarters of analytic philosophy, and that such a resurgence is well-deserved and will bear future fruit. He begins with Bertrand Russell’s story of analytic philosophy as born out of a rejection of Hegelian thought, and traces the development of an alternative path through analytic philosophy that moves through Frege, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Evans, and finds its fullest contemporary form in Brandom and McDowell. This alternative path, he claims, has important historical roots in Hegel, although not in Russell’s caricatured version of him.Redding reads Hegel as the direct inheritor of Kant and Aristotle, especially with respect to logic, the role of the singular in thought, and the nature of evaluative judgment, and he argues that Hegel gives us the materials with which to overcome Sellars’ myth of the given productively. He also gives extended readings of Hegel’s principle of determinate negation and rejection of the principle of non-contradiction, as well as of the ontology of Hegelian Spirit as the unity of substance and subject, all designed to reveal these components of Hegelian thought as productive resources for analytic philosophers