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.

I argue that interpretivists ought to broaden and enrich the constitutive standards of interpretability and epistemic agency that they have inherited from classic Davidsonian theory. Drawing heavily upon John Haugeland’s recent account of objective truth- telling, I claim that in order to be an interpretable epistemic agent at all, a being must have various kinds of practical commitments that cannot be reduced to combinations of beliefs and desires.On the basis of this claim, I argue that radical interpreters must appeal to many commitments held by their interpretees other than assents to observation sentences and commitments to sincerity; hence the interpretive tools available in the Davidsonian toolbox are insufficient. I suggest that we ought to take the behaviors manifesting the various commitments that constitute epistemic agency as straightforwardly available from a third-personal observational perspective, and thus as no threat to the basic spirit of interpretivism.At the same time, I claim that these behaviors cannot be individuated in non-normative, physicalist terms, so my account should indeed pose a threat to naturalists of a certain stripe. I end by revisiting and moderately revising Davidson's notorious deflation of the problem of radical skepticism.

This quarter’s issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal is unusual, because it hosts a symposium focused Brian Earp’s provocative and groundbreaking article, “Between Moral Relativism and Moral Hypocrisy: Reframing the Debate on ‘FGM.’” Along with Earp’s article, we are presenting critical responses by Richard Shweder, Robert Darby, and Jamie Nelson. Earp tackles the ethics of female genital cutting or “mutilation”. This is a difficult topic that brings on board gender inequity, the integrity of the body, the value of cultural traditions, sexuality, colonialism, ethnocentrism, and other fraught axes of reflection. Earp argues against the common view that all...

Reasoning well about risk is most challenging when a woman is pregnant, for patient and doctor alike. During pregnancy, we tend to note the risks of medical interventions without adequately noting those of failing to intervene, yet when it's time to give birth, interventions are seldom questioned, even when they don't work. Meanwhile, outside the clinic, advice given to pregnant women on how to stay healthy in everyday life can seem capricious and overly cautious. This kind of reasoning reflects fear, not evidence.

Mothers serve as an important layer of the health-care system, with special responsi-bilities to care for the health of families and nations. In our social discourse, we tend to treat maternal “choices” as though they were morally and causally Self-contained units of influence with primary control over children's health. In this essay, I use infant feeding as a lens for examining the ethical contours of mothers’ caretaking practices and responsibilities, as they are situated within cultural meanings and institutional pressures. I give a close critical reading of the content and strategy of the new breastfeeding advocacy campaign sponsored by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. I argue that the campaign is unlikely to substantially increase breastfeeding rates, unresponsive and even hostile to many women's actual concerns about breastfeeding, and well positioned to produce shame and compromise agency among the women it targets.

Fertile grounds for theoretical inquiry can be found in the oddest corners. Contemporary television programming provides viewers with several talk shows of the grotesque, as I will call them, in which the aim of each episode is to put some monstrous human phenomenon on display with the help of a host and a participating studio audience. In this paper I will try to support the unlikely claim that these talk shows, which include The Jerry Springer Show and Sally Jesse Raphael (among others), provide remarkably fruitful foci for theoretical attention. My plan is to give a reading of the ideological structure of talk shows of the grotesque. In particular, my interest lies in a relatively recent strand of ideological theory that has treated questions concerning the nature and reproduction of ideology as serious ontological questions: questions that go to the heart of our philosophical understanding of subjectivity, autonomy, and the metaphysics of belief and other intentional attitudes. Here I take the work of Louis Althusser, Judith Butler, and Slavoj i ek as paradigmatic and seminal representatives of this type of theorizing. My eye, in this paper, will be turned toward showing how the contemporary talk show of the grotesque provides us with a case study through which we can productively interrogate this new theoretical turn in our understanding of ideology. After spending a substantial amount of time laying down some theoretical groundwork, during which I take a selective and usurious tour through recent theories of ideology, performativity, and the constitution of subjectivity, I will analyze the talk show phenomenon by dividing it into four levels of participatory activity: those of the host, the guests, the studio audience, and the television audience. I will argue..

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.

Three years ago, as my fortieth birthday disappeared into the far distance in my rearview mirror, driven by a combination of vanity and fear of my own mortality and decrepitude, I committed to getting in shape.I’ve always been fairly active: I have always walked a lot, commuted by bike when that was plausible, avoided driving whenever possible, and just generally been high energy. But a childhood full of failure at team sports and a lack of innate gifts in the coordination department scared me off for decades from formal physical activity. Indeed, I was convinced that I hated working out—that I would always hate it, no matter what, and that it would always take a tremendous and ongoing act of sheer will power to do...

This issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal continues two conversations that have been developing in this journal over the last few years, and introduces a new and timely one. Kevin Elliot and Paul Mushak’s paper, “Structured Development and Promotion of a Research Field: Hormesis in Biology, Toxicology, and Environmental Regulatory Science,” continues an ongoing debate in this journal over the role of values in shaping scientific methodology and communication, and how this role should be managed at the level of policy. We inaugurated this discussion in our June 2012 special issue on Science, Expertise, and Democracy, and have followed up with multiple articles on science and values. David..

When Sandra Harding called for an epistemology of science whose systematic attention to the gendered Status of epistemic agents renders it ‘less partial and distorted’ than ‘traditional’ epistemologies, some commentators recoiled in horror. Propelled by ‘a mad form of the genetic fallacy’ they said, she descends ‘the slide to an arational account of science.’ On a less melodramatic reading, feminist epistemologies such as Harding's advocate not irrationalism, but senses of rationality more expanded than those which they associate with ‘traditional’ epistemology.