Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Payment For Egg Donation And Surrogacy, Bonnie Steinbock

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the ethics of egg donation. It begins by looking at objections to noncommercial gamete donation, and then takes up criticism of commercial egg donation. After discussing arguments based on concern for offspring, inequality, commodification, exploitation of donors, and threats to the family, I conclude that some payment to donors is ethically acceptable. Donors should not be paid for their eggs, but rather they should be compensated for the burdens of egg retrieval. Making the distinction between compensation for burdens and payment for a product has the advantages of limiting payment, not distinguishing between donors on the basis …

Realist Ennui And The Base Rate Fallacy, P.D. Magnus, Craig Callender

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

The no‐miracles argument and the pessimistic induction are arguably the main considerations for and against scientific realism. Recently these arguments have been accused of embodying a familiar, seductive fallacy. In each case, we are tricked by a base rate fallacy, one much‐discussed in the psychological literature. In this paper we consider this accusation and use it as an explanation for why the two most prominent ‘wholesale’ arguments in the literature seem irresolvable. Framed probabilistically, we can see very clearly why realists and anti‐realists have been talking past one another. We then formulate a dilemma for advocates of either argument, answer …

The Price Of Insisting That Quantum Mechanics Is Complete, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

The Bare Theory was offered by David Albert as a way of standing by the completeness of quantum mechanics in the face of the measurement problem. This paper surveys objections to the Bare Theory that recur in the literature: what will here be called the oddity objection, the coherence objection, and the context-of-the-universe objection. Critics usually take the Bare Theory to have unacceptably bizarre consequences, but to be free from internal contradiction. Bizarre consequences need not be decisive against the Bare Theory, but a further objection—dubbed here the calibration objection—has been underestimated. This paper argues that the Bare Theory is …

Reid’S Dilemma And The Uses Of Pragmatism, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Peter Baumann offers the tantalizing suggestion that Thomas Reid is almost, but not quite, a pragmatist. He motivates this claim by posing a dilemma for common sense philosophy: Will it be dogmatism or scepticism? Baumann claims that Reid points to but does not embrace a pragmatist third way between these unsavory options. If we understand ‘pragmatism’ differently than Baumann does, however, we need not be so equivocal in attributing it to Reid. Reid makes what we could call an argument from practical commitment, and this is plausibly an instance of what William James calls the pragmatic method.

American Catholic Lay Groups And Transatlantic Social Reform In The Progressive Era, Laura Wittern-Keller

History Faculty Scholarship

Lay Catholic Social Reform Groups Get Their Due

Speak of Progressive Era reform groups and most people will reflexively think of Protestant efforts like settlement houses, charitable aid societies, and temperance crusades. In the Progressive Era, though, Catholic laity also formed active voluntary organizations to work for temperance, rural colonization (resettlement of urban immigrants to rural areas), port programs (assistance for newly arrived immigrants), charitable aid, and urban neighborhood improvement (settlements). The considerable contribution of Catholics to social reform and charitable works has been neglected in much of the scholarly literature about Progressive Era reform groups. Even the literature on …

Bargaining In Two Languages: Conversational Functions Of Transactional Code-Switching, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Studies on the pragmatic functions of code-switching, in opposition to its macro sociolinguistic significance or syntactic structure, have been largely influenced by Gumperz's pioneering classification presented in the chapter he dedicated to this topic in his 1982 book, Discourse strategies. Many other taxonomies followed Gumperz's initial proposal (Appel and Muysken 1987, Poplack 1988, Romaine 1989, Heller 1992) in spite of the usually claimed difficulty in interpreting and predicting the exact functions of code-switching in any given bilingual context. Their purpose has been to identify the sociopragmatic motivation for the occurrence of a particular code-switched utterance and ultimately classify it under …