Quill R Kukla

In Games: Agency as Art, Thi Nguyen has given us a deep and compelling picture of agency as much more layered, volatile, environment-dependent and discontinuous than it appears in most philosophical accounts. Games ‘inscribe … forms of agency into artifactual vessels’.1 1 When we play a game, we take up a form of agency, including a set of motivations, values and goals, which has been artificially provided by the game. Our purpose in playing, in the kinds of gameplay that interest Nguyen, is to have the aesthetic experience of first-personally exercising the kind of agency sculpted by the game. As we move in and out of gameplay, we take up and drop values, motives, and goals that are provided to us by the game. Games can expand our autonomy and the richness of life by allowing us to practice different forms of agency, taking on different ends for the aesthetic experience of striving to meet them. While I am on board with these central moves of Nguyen’s book, in this essay I will argue that the situation is substantially messier than Nguyen portrays it as being. Game play, I will claim, is inextricably embedded and entangled in its larger social, material and cultural context. Conversely, I will argue, everyday life is routinely sculpted in ways Nguyen claims are distinctive of games.

Our autonomy can be compromised by limitations in our capacities, or by the power relationships within which we are embedded. If we insist that real consent requires full autonomy, then virtually no sex will turn out to be consensual. I argue that under conditions of compromised autonomy, consent must be socially and interpersonally scaffolded. To understand consent as an ethically crucial but nonideal concept, we need to think about how it is related to other requirements for ethical sex, such as the ability to exit a situation, trust, safety, broader social support, epistemic standing in the community, and more.

It is with great pleasure and a sense of urgency that we present this KIEJ double issue on ethical issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sheer range of ethical concerns raised by the pandemic, combined with the speed with which these problems emerged, is staggering and unprecedented in our generation. We have tried to give space to papers that raise immediately pressing ethical issues that have not received much discussion in popular media. Topics range from fundamental questions about how we set up our public health infrastructure, to ethical issues in scientific communication and the translation of science into policy, to the impact of the pandemic on people with intellectual disabilities, to the ethics of...

Traditional moral explorations of sexual violation are dyadic: they focus on the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, considered in relative isolation. We argue that the moral texture of sexual violation and its fallout only shows up once we see acts of sexual violation as acts that occur within an ecosystem. An ecosystem is made up of dwellers and an environment embedded in a broad, thick, interdependent, and relatively stable web of norms, practices, environments, material and institutional structures. We argue that many of the important and interesting harms wrought by sexual violation can only be understood as ecological harms. To illustrate this, we focus on sexual violations that occur within a specific type of ecosystem, namely an academic department with a graduate program. We examine the possible damaging effects of sexual violation on the ecology of a department. We also consider what makes an ecosystem resilient and relatively able to self-repair, and how sexual violation within an ecosystem may weaken its self-repairing resources. We show that looking at sexual violation through this ecological lens lets us identify harms that are otherwise obscured or difficult to locate.

I explore the role that values and interests, especially ideological interests, play in managing and balancing epistemic risks in medicine. I will focus in particular on how diseases are identified and operationalized. Before we can do biomedical research on a condition, it needs to be identified as a medical condition, and it needs to be operationalized in a way that lets us identify sufferers, measure progress, and so forth. I will argue that each time we do this, we engage in epistemic risk balancing that inevitably draws upon values and interests, often including social and ideological values. My main interest here is in the conceptualization of infertility as a disease. Infertility is a rich test case for exploring the interplay between interests and epistemic risk management. There is no uncontested or standardized definition of infertility. The various definitions of it are internally ambiguous and tension-ridden, and in spectacular contradiction with one another. Many interest groups who are invested in framing infertility as a pressing problem deserving of social and medical redress are quick to insist that it is a legitimate ‘disease,’ but they cannot agree on which disease it is, what its symptoms or diagnostic markers are, or even what its basic ontology is. I suggest that there are political explanations for this epistemic mess. Indeed, I contend that there are good scientific and ethical reasons to reduce away the category of ‘infertility,’ especially understood as a scientific or medical category; I argue that we should excise the concept from our research and clinical practices.

Our lead article in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Jonathan Kaplan’s “Self-Care as Self-Blame Redux: Stress as Personal and Political,” opens up an entirely new and clearly important topic for bioethicists: the concept and role of ‘self-care.’ Advice for ‘self-care’ is everywhere, and often this advice takes the form of a kind of moral imperative: we owe ourselves self-care and have a responsibility to care for ourselves. Meanwhile, typical suggested self-care practices focus on individual behaviors and purchases, rather than social interventions. Moreover, they very often require quite a bit of time, money, organization, and energy to complete. These include yoga classes, meditation, diet...

It is the great honor of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal to present this special issue celebrating the career and bioethical contributions of LeRoy Walters. Professor Walters is the former Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, which he has been affiliated with since its inception in 1971 until his recent retirement from his position as Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. Professor of Christian Ethics. Trained as a philosopher and a theologist, LeRoy Walters was also a lifelong political activist, fighting for social justice and protections for the vulnerable. He was also a visionary who played a substantial role in creating and building the field of bioethics, and in bridging the divide between academia and the...

This issue's lead article, Alison Reiheld's "Rightly or For Ill: The Ethics of Individual Memory," takes up a topic that is manifestly deserving of philosophical analysis, and routinely important in our private and public interactions, and yet as far as I know it has never before received systematic treatment: the ethics of memory. That is, Reiheld asks, when are we morally blameworthy or praiseworthy for remembering, forgetting, or encoding a memory in a specific way, and what are the ethical principles that should govern our practices of remembering and forgetting? As Reiheld points out, this set of questions only makes sense once we understand remembering and forgetting as constructive activities involving...

The goal of this paper is to give an account of the pragmatic and social function of slurs, taken as speech acts. I develop a theory of the distinctive illocutionary force and pragmatic structure of slurs. I argue that slurs help to produce subjects who occupy social identities carved out by pernicious ideologies, and that they do this whether or not anyone involved intends for the slur to work that way or has any particular feelings or conscious thoughts associated with using or being targeted by the slur. I offer an Althusser‐inspired account of what an ideology is, as well as of the mechanisms by which slurs can serve to cue and strengthen ideologies. A slur, I argue, is a kind of interpellation, which reduces its target to a generic identity and derogates and subordinates its target. I explore how slurs and ideologies work in tandem to constitute and fortify one another. I end by applying my account to see how well it fits and helps illuminate three quite different, especially complex slurs.

This quarter’s issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal dives deeply into questions concerning who is the proper target of medical interventions, and under what circumstances. Mary Jean Walker and James Franklin’s article, “An Argument Against Drug Testing Welfare Recipients,” and Maggie Taylor’s “Too Close to the Knives: Children’s Rights, Parental Authority, and Best Interests in the Context of Elective Pediatric Surgeries” both ask hard questions about when medical interventions can be imposed without consent, purportedly in order to secure non-medical, social benefits for their recipients. Lauren Freeman and Saray Ayala López’s “Sex Categorization in Medical Contexts: A Cautionary Tale,” questions who...

I explore how we negotiate sexual encounters with one another in language and consider the pragmatic structure of such negotiations. I defend three theses: Discussions of consent have dominated the philosophical and legal discourse around sexual negotiation, and this has distorted our understanding of sexual agency and ethics. Of central importance to good-quality sexual negotiation are sexual invitations and gift offers, as well as speech designed to set up safe frameworks and exit conditions. Sexual communication that goes well does not just prevent harm; it enables forms of agency, pleasure, and fulfillment that would not otherwise be possible.

This issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal contains a couple of papers that may be difficult to read for some: one concerning the sexual violation of young Black boys and one on the Guatemalans who were intentionally infected with sexually transmitted diseases and sexually abused in the hands of the United States government and other US-based institutions. I’m honored and proud to be publishing these papers in the journal; both dive headfirst into formidably painful topics of enormous social and ethical importance. However, readers should understand before reading these papers that they contain descriptions of sexual violation within relationships of gross power inequality...

I explore how gender can shape the pragmatics of speech. In some circumstances, when a woman deploys standard discursive conventions in order to produce a speech act with a specific performative force, her utterance can turn out, in virtue of its uptake, to have a quite different force—a less empowering force—than it would have if performed by a man. When members of a disadvantaged group face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that they are entitled to perform—and in particular when their attempts result in their actually producing a different kind of speech act that further compromises their social position and agency—then they are victims of what I call discursive injustice. I examine three examples of discursive injustice. I contrast my account with Langton and Hornsby's account of illocutionary silencing. I argue that lack of complete control over the performative force of our speech acts is universal, and not a special marker of social disadvantage. However, women and other relatively disempowered speakers are sometimes subject to a distinctive distortion of the path from speaking to uptake, which undercuts their social agency in ways that track and enhance existing social disadvantages.

This season’s issue includes two articles on a quickly expanding topic in bioethics: the ethics of enhancement. There are many kinds of enhancement both actual and imagined: we can enhance people’s physical, aesthetic, cognitive, or moral capacities, for instance; individuals might choose particular enhancements, parents might choose them for their future children, or states might institute them at the widespread population level; the enhancements might be technologically complex or take the form of low-tech education and training; they might be permanent genetic features or swappable technological prosthetics; and so forth. Many discussions of the ethics of enhancement are concerned..

This work seeks to take seriously the common philosophical claim that individual subjects are constituted by their social world. A detailed understanding this claim requires an analysis of what is involved in being a subject, of the nature of 'the social', and of the possible constitutive relationships between these. I begin with a critical history of the idea that subjects are norm-followers, and that social groups constitute individuals by demanding their conformity to norms. I trace this 'conformity theory' through the thought of Rousseau, Hegel, Mead, and Althusser, to its manifestation in contemporary continental and Anglo-American philosophy. I criticize this theory for being unable to sufficiently accommodate creativity and social resistance. I go on to develop an account of subjects as not only norm-followers but also sense-makers, who have identities in virtue of their engagement in narrative dramas. Such subjects are socially constituted in at least two ways: through their 'dialogical' interactions with particular others , and through their position in a public culture which determines what counts as a meaningful possibility for action. This understanding of subjectivity allows me to develop a new account of the nature of social groups--such as groups based on gender, class and nationality--which provides an alternative to the conformity theory. Social groups contribute to individual identities not only by imposing norms, but also by providing sense-making resources, in the form of literary and artistic traditions as well as the actual lives and dramas of members. My account allows us to understand creativity and social resistance as enabled by subjects' membership in social groups, and it reveals how the internal diversity of a group can strengthen rather than compromise its role in individual identities. I end with a discussion of the political implications of my work

This volume explores the relationship between Kant's aesthetic theory and his critical epistemology as articulated in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The essays, written specially for this volume, explore core elements of Kant's epistemology, such as his notions of discursive understanding, experience, and objective judgment. They also demonstrate a rich grasp of Kant's critical epistemology that enables a deeper understanding of his aesthetics. Collectively, the essays reveal that Kant's critical project, and the dialectics of aesthetics and cognition within it, is still relevant to contemporary debates in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and the nature of experience and objectivity. The book also yields important lessons about the ineliminable, yet problematic place of imagination, sensibility and aesthetic experience in perception and cognition.

Mass Hysteria examines the medical and cultural practices surrounding pregnancy, new motherhood, and infant feeding. Late eighteenth century transformations in these practices reshaped mothers' bodies, and contemporary norms and routines of prenatal care and early motherhood have inherited the legacy of that era. As a result, mothers are socially positioned in ways that can make it difficult for them to establish and maintain healthy and safe boundaries and appropriate divisions between public and private space

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..

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.

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.

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.

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