Dark Enlightenment

Review of Jeremy Zallen, American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865

Sympathetic Physics: The Keely Motor and the Laws of Thermodynamics in Nineteenth-Century Culture

In Philadelphia in the 1870s, John Worrell Keely announced the invention of a fantastic new motor that could, he promised, drive locomotives, power factories, and even defy gravity without fuel or heat. The Keely Motor became the most notorious perpetual motion scheme of the nineteenth century, attracting believers and investors for nearly thirty years. This article explores the “work” the motor performed for Keely, his supporters, and his critics—not physical work, but financial, cultural, and psychological. To investors, the Keely Motor represented a dream of riches without effort. To Keely’s critics, the motor offered an opportunity to defend the legitimacy of the new industrial economy. And to Keely’s staunchest supporters, including the author and heiress Clara Moore, the motor was a rebuke to the laws of thermodynamics and the parsimonious political economy, the pessimistic theology, and the anti-feminist psychiatry those laws were alleged to support

The Psychedelic Dasein: Modelling the Effects of Psilocybin with Heidegger’s Phenomenology

This paper argues that the mystical experience induced by psilocybin (understood through the tradition of Heideggerian phenomenology) modulates the attuned understanding of oneself, the world, and how the individual relates to the world. This kind of particular experience is not accessible to the individual through ordinary consciousness, therefore psilocybin may give us access to a new kind of understanding. This understanding may offer a solution to the empirical deficiencies surrounding the short-term and long-term effects of psilocybin, such as how a meagre two to three high doses have yielded unprecedented results in the treatment of tobacco addiction, and in the treatment of depression and anxiety in terminally ill patients. The consensus in the literature suggests that it is not solely the molecular and physiological mechanisms responsible for the results. In addition to the physiological mechanisms, a mystical experience associated with it must be present, without which the long-term effects are not catalyzed. Scientific explanations are limited in explaining the relationship between attuned understanding, the individual, and the world, but conversely, phenomenology does, hence why it may be a better method of analysis. The argument made posits that the mystical experience enables one to reconstitute oneself at an ontological level shows that the work of Heidegger should be applied to ameliorate the empirical deficiency as a potential tentative framework for understanding its broader phenomenal mode of action. The primary reason for this is that Heidegger’s work describes an analogous mechanism concerning modes of attunement which may shift our totality of relevance and the context of our understanding and the meaning of the contents of our lives. This paper concludes that Heidegger’s phenomenology can offer a new explanation of how psilocybin works at the phenomenal level

Modeling the Function of Narrative in Expertise

The use of narrative is ubiquitous in the development, exercise, and communication of expertise. Expertise and narrative, as complex cognitive capacities, have each been investigated quite deeply, but little attention has been paid to their interdependence. We offer here the position that treating these two domains together can fruitfully inform the modeling of expert cognition and behavior, and present the framework we have been using to develop this approach, the SGOMS macro-cognitive architecture. Finally, we briefly explore the role of narrative in an SGOMS model of cooperative video game playing

Righting Health Policy: Bioethics, Political Philosophy, and the Normative Justification of Health Law and Policy

In Righting Health Policy, D. Robert MacDougall argues that bioethics needs but does not have adequate tools for justifying law and policy. Bioethics’ tools are mostly theories about what we owe each other. But justifying laws and policies requires more; at a minimum, it requires tools for explaining the legitimacy of actions intended to control or influence others. It consequently requires political, rather than moral, philosophy. After showing how bioethicists have consistently failed to use tools suitable for achieving their political aims, MacDougall develops an interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy. On this account the legitimacy of health laws does not derive from the morality of the behaviors they require but derives instead from their role in securing our equal freedom from each other. MacDougall uses this Kantian account to show the importance of political philosophy for bioethics. First, he shows how evaluating kidney markets in terms of the legitimacy of prohibiting sales rather than the morality of selling kidneys reverses the widely accepted view that Kantian philosophy supports legally prohibiting markets. Second, MacDougall argues that an account of political authority is necessary for settling longstanding bioethics debates about the legal and even moral standards that should govern informed consent

Must Consent Be Informed? Patient rights, state authority, and the moral basis of the physician\u27s duties of disclosure

Legal standards of disclosure in a variety of jurisdictions require physicians to inform patients about the likely consequences of treatment, as a condition for obtaining the patient’s consent. Such a duty to inform is special insofar as extensive disclosure of risks and potential benefits is not usually a condition for obtaining consent in non-medical transactions. What could morally justify the physician’s special legal duty to inform? I argue that existing justifications have tried but failed to ground such special duties directly in basic and general rights, such as autonomy rights. As an alternative to such direct justifications, I develop an indirect justification of physicians’ special duties from an argument in Kant’s political philosophy. Kant argues that pre-legal rights to freedom are the source of a duty to form a state. The state has the authority to conclusively determine what counts as “consent” in various kinds of transactions. The Kantian account can subsequently indirectly justify at least one legal standard imposing a duty to inform, the reasonable person standard, but rules out one interpretation of a competitor, the subjective standard

Intervention principles in pediatric health care: the difference between physicians and the state.

According to various accounts, intervention in pediatric decisions is justified either by the best interests standard or by the harm principle. While these principles have various nuances that distinguish them from each other, they are similar in the sense that both focus primarily on the features of parental decisions that justify intervention, rather than on the competency or authority of the parties that intervene. Accounts of these principles effectively suggest that intervention in pediatric decision making is warranted for both physicians and the state under precisely the same circumstances. This essay argues that there are substantial differences in the competencies and authorities of physicians and the state, and that the principles that guide their interventions should also be conceived differently. While both the best interests standard and the harm principle effectively incorporate important aspects of physicians’ ethical obligations, neither adequately reflects the state’s ethical obligations. In contrast to physicians, the state has major obligations of distributive justice and neutrality that should form an integral part of any proposed ethical principles guiding state intervention in pediatric decision making. The differences are illustrated by examining recent cases involving parental refusal of chemotherapy in aboriginal Canadian communities and parental refusal of blood transfusions by Jehovah’s Witnesses

Sometimes Merely as a Means: Why Kantian Philosophy Requires the Legalization of Kidney Sales

Several commentators have tried to ground legal prohibitions of kidney sales in some form of Kant’s moral arguments against such sales. This paper reconsiders this approach to justifying laws and policies in light of Kant’s approach to law in his political philosophy. The author argues that Kant’s political philosophy requires that kidney sales be legally permitted, although contracts for such sales must remain unenforceable. The author further argues that Kant’s approach to laws, such as those governing kidney distribution, was formed in part by considering and rejecting an assumption frequently employed in the bioethics literature, namely, that legal duties can be grounded directly in moral duties. The author explains some of Kant’s reasons for rejecting this assumption and concludes that arguments pertaining to the legality of kidney sales developed on the basis of Kant’s moral philosophy should no longer be considered tenable