MSU Grad Conference: Abstracts

9TH ANNUAL
GRADUATE PHILOSOPHY CONFERENCE
February 15-16, 2008 / Keynote Alice Dreger / Featured Faculty Stephen Esquith

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Michigan State University
Department of Philosophy
503 South Kedzie Hall
East Lansing, MI
48824-1032

517/355-4490
email: philconf@msu.edu

VASSILIKI LEONTIS
"Medical Human Research in Developing Countries: A Feminist Universalist Approach to Women’s Human Flourishing"

This paper argues that the principlist bioethical framework, as a normative guide of medical research, has limited ethical power because it conducts narrow, procedural evaluations of research ethical issues. Research ethics, and especially questions of justice, must be primarily analyzed in the specific social, economic, and political context in which trials are conducted. This paper briefly explores the structure of the principlist framework in its relevance for medical research. The transnational ACTG 076 clinical trials are presented as a case study for global research and bioethical evaluation. Nussbaum’s human capabilites model is proposed as an alternative, contextualist framework of medical research ethics for its particular focus on the ethics and politics of distributive justice, a crucial issue in the contexts of health care and medical research.

JUSTIN REMHOF
"Nietzsche’s Weapon of War: The Method
of Science"

There is an undeniable tension in Nietzsche’s view of science. In his early view, science provides us with a powerful enterprise for generating knowledge without dependence on metaphysical presuppositions or posits. This sits in conflict with his later view, which holds that science must fall victim to metaphysical dogmatism via a presumptuous faith in the absolute value of truth. I show that this tension is important because it brings to the fore methodological concerns for fixing belief. This leads to Nietzsche’s praise of the scientific method, which I believe is consistent throughout. Uniquely, we see that the methodological attitude constitutive of critical science is as a part of the scientific method as the procedural, concrete method itself. I argue Nietzsche lauds the method because it is the most effective means for coming to have knowledge in a world void of necessary, absolute, or fixed truth. This acclaim is thus aligned with, and originates from, his criticism of metaphysical dogmatism. Denying the moral desire to propagate an incorrigible vision of the world, Nietzsche argues we must place the project of knowledge within the realm of an interpretive pluralism, informed by the doctrine of perspectivism. Through perspectivism we see that scientific truth is of secondary importance to the method that brings us to believe one position over the next.

featured faculty STEPHEN ESQUITH
"Teaching as a Vocation: Recognizing the Political Responsibilities of Everyday Bystanders"

Teaching as a vocation, as I shall use this phrase, is not a commitment to civic education in the liberal sense of teaching tolerance of others and respect for their individual freedoms. It is related to the problem of recognition, but not in the familiar sense of learning how to recognize the other. Rather, by teaching as a vocation I mean the activity of teaching everyday bystanders how to recognize their own roles within institutions that have contributed to and benefited from severe violence against others. After briefly defining what I mean by severe violence, I discuss three aspects of this ideal of teaching as a vocation. The argument moves from general reflections on what it means to teach democratically and critically, to a more personal discussion of my own experience of trying to teach more responsibly. It is the conjunction of democratic, critical, and responsible teaching that I wish to suggest constitutes teaching as a vocation. Those who practice teaching as a vocation in this three-fold sense I call citizen-teachers for reasons that I hope will be apparent by the end of this essay.

JEN RINALDI
"The Moral Obligation to Forgive"

In this paper, I will argue that we have the moral obligation to forgive. I will explain what I mean by forgiveness, which is a kind of response to wrongdoing. I will move on to define obligation as a prescription for treatment that arises in our relationships. In order to understand whether there is a moral obligation to forgive, then, it is important that I explore the person to whom one would have such an obligation. I will explain what it would mean to have an obligation to wrongdoers to forgive them and I will reveal how such an obligation would be problematic. I will move on to explore whether we have an obligation to forgive for the sake of our own well being, and I will conclude that in light of this, forgiveness is an appropriate and obligatory response to injustice.

ADAM SHECHTER
"Patient Responsibility and Reciprocity: How the Ethics of Transplantation Can Illuminate Health Care Generally"

Organ transplantation in the United States is an exception to the widely believed idea that those who can afford medical services will almost always receive them. The issue of organ scarcity trumps the aforementioned capitalist idea that usually informs American health care. In addition, surgeons are hesitant to operate on patients whom they deem medically “unfit” to receive transplants. An alcoholic with liver disease, for example, may be denied a liver transplant, or asked to remain “on the wagon” for an extended period of time, on the grounds that his subsequent drinking would likely waste a valuable scarce resource. This requirement also helps to ensure that two of the primary goals of health care—treatment and subsequent health of the patient—are maintained.

Here, I will expand on the notion of patient responsibility for health care in a way that will be both consistent with the primary goals of health care, and also with the important notion of respect for patient autonomy. Using the current model of organ transplantation as my foundation, I intend to analyze the reasons why patients are sometimes asked to change their lives before being given transplants. While scarcity of organs is often cited as the primary reason for such requests, I will argue that it does not have to be the only explanation. Arguments concerning medical futility, for example, are often used to show that there are limitations on the demands a patient can make on medical professionals. Such arguments do not, however, provide adequate explanation for why patient responsibility is an important issue. Nor do claims that patient responsibility is nothing more than a reflection of the individual moral considerations of the medical professionals involved. By contrast, I will argue that there are cases under which a physician is completely morally justified in rejecting a patient for treatment, even if scarcity is not an issue.

Finally, I will maintain that the effects of a modified view of patient responsibility would not be limited to the patient. In addition, it would become necessary for medical professionals to take seriously the lifestyles and choices of the patient that, in turn, will create a stronger notion of the patient as person than is currently in place today. I do not intend to reinvent the wheel with this project. Rather, I wish to gauge modern intuitions of people both in and out of the medical field in order to better understand the ways in which patients are viewed as active participants in their own health care.

JOSE FERNANDEZ
"Kant’s Feeling: Why Aesthetic Judgments are
De Dicto Exemplary Necessary"

Ascriptions of modal necessity pertain not only to propositions, but also to feelings. In the Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant argues that a feeling of beauty is the necessary satisfaction instantiated by the free play of the cognitive faculties, which are the grounds for a judgment of taste. Unlike the modes of necessity ascribed to judgments in Kant’s other critical works, e.g., the metaphysical and nomological necessity found in the Critique of Pure Reason or the moral necessity grounded in transcendental freedom in the Critique of Practical Reason, the mode of necessity ascribed to a judgment of beauty is exemplary necessity. Moreover, the manifold forms of necessary ascriptions, i.e., conceptual, moral, exemplary, etc., can be expressed by employing the de re/de dicto distinction. Thus in this paper, I argue that since Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment has no truck with concepts that have objects as their content, a judgment of beauty in the form ‘x is beautiful’ can only be read as de dicto exemplary necessary.

keynote ALICE DREGER
"Why Phallometers Worked, and Evidence Didn't: Philosophical Aspects of the Intersex Rights Movement"

This talk draws on the decade of work I have done as a leader in the intersex rights movement. After providing a brief history of the movement and a synopsis of its successes and failures, I'll talk about various philosophical aspects of the movement. We will consider matters of representation (visual and textual), the politics of my being a non-intersex academic in this movement, the roles of evidence and narrative in medicine and medical ethics, the political-philosophical contexts of the movement, and other salient issues.

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You can view abstracts from prior years at the archives.