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999Emotions and Distrust in ScienceInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 28 (5): 713-730. 2020.In our interactions with science, we are often vulnerable; we do not have complete control of the situation and there is a risk that we, or those we love, might be harmed. This is not an emotionall...
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61Epistemic BunkersSocial Epistemology 37 (2): 197-207. 2023.One reason that fake news and other objectionable views gain traction is that they often come to us in the form of testimony from those in our immediate social circles – from those we trust. A language around this phenomenon has developed which describes social epistemic structures in terms of ‘epistemic bubbles’ and ‘epistemic echo chambers’. These concepts involve the exclusion of external evidence in various ways. While these concepts help us see the ways that evidence is socially filtered, i…Read more
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56Jonathan Matheson, Rico Vitz : The Ethics of Belief: Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-968652-0, 253 pages, £45.00Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (5): 1105-1106. 2015.The editors of this collection set out with the intention of extending the debate in the ethics of belief beyond its traditional topics, such as whether it is ever permissible to form beliefs on insufficient evidence, and if pragmatic concerns should play a role in responsible belief formation. The result is that this collection covers an expansive range of material.Some of the topics that are covered are in keeping with the traditional bounds of the literature, such as whether direct doxastic c…Read more
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50Moral Responsibility, Culpable Ignorance and Suppressed DisagreementSocial Epistemology 32 (5): 287-299. 2018.Ignorance can excuse otherwise blameworthy action, but only if the ignorance itself is blameless. One way to avoid culpable ignorance is to pay attention when epistemic peers disagree. Expressed disagreements place an obligation on the agent to pay attention when an interlocutor disagrees, or risk culpable ignorance for which they might later be found blameworthy. Silence, on the other hand, is typically taken as assent. But in cases of suppressed disagreement, the silenced interlocutor has info…Read more
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43Mono-Causal and Multi-Causal Theories of Disease: How to Think Virally and Socially about the Aetiology of AIDSJournal of Medical Humanities 41 (2): 107-121. 2020.In this paper, I utilise the tools of analytic philosophy to amalgamate mono-causal and multi-causal theories of disease. My aim is to better integrate viral and socio-economic explanations of AIDS in particular, and to consider how the perceived divide between mono-causal and multi-causal theories played a role in the tragedy of AIDS denialism in South Africa in the early 2000s. Currently, there is conceptual ambiguity surrounding the relationship between mono-causal and multi-causal theories i…Read more
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33Chronicles of communication and power: informed consent to sterilisation in the Namibian Supreme Court’s LM judgment of 2015Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38 (2): 145-162. 2017.The 2015 judgment of the Namibia Supreme Court in Government of the Republic of Namibia v LM and Others set an important precedent on informed consent in a case involving the coercive sterilisation of HIV-positive women. This article analyses the reasoning and factual narratives of the judgment by applying Neil Manson and Onora O’Neill’s approach to informed consent as a communicative process. This is done in an effort to understand the practical import of the judgment in the particular context …Read more
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31Beliefs, values and emotions: An interactive approach to distrust in sciencePhilosophical Psychology 37 (1): 240-257. 2024.Previous philosophical work on distrust in science has argued that understanding public distrust in science and scientific interventions requires that we pay careful attention not only to epistemic considerations (that is, beliefs about science), but also to values, and the emotional contexts in which assessments of scientific credibility are made. This is likely to be a truncated list of relevant factors for understanding trust/distrust, but these are certainly key areas of concern. The aim of …Read more
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26Objectivity in science and law: A shared rescue strategyInternational Journal of Law and Psychiatry 64. 2019.The ideal of objectivity is in crisis in science and the law, and yet it continues to do important work in both practices. This article describes that crisis and develops a shared rescue strategy for objectivity in both domains. In a recent article, Inkeri Koskinen attempts to bring unity to the fragmented discourse on objectivity in the philosophy of science with a risk account of objectivity. To put it simply, she argues that we call practitioners, processes, and products of science objective …Read more
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25Towards and African Political Philosophy of Needs (2021) is an edited collection of ten chapters on the topic of needs in contemporary African political and soc.
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13Holly Wardlow. Fencing in AIDS: Gender, Vulnerability and Care in Papua New Guinea (review)Public Health Ethics 15 (2): 204-205. 2022.
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13Cases as methodological tools: John Forrester: Thinking in cases. Cambridge: Polity, 2017, 220pp, $69.95 HBMetascience 27 (2): 221-222. 2018.
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Ubuntu and the law: some lessons for the practical application of UbuntuIn Leonhard Praeg & Siphokazi Magadla (eds.), Ubuntu: curating the archive, University of Kwazulu-natal Press. 2014.