This article explores and complicates notions of public and private urban mobility through the exploration of one site of transport, the Kowloon railway terminus in Hung Hom, Hong Kong. It considers the question: how did the conflicts and tensions between public and private forms of mobility affect policies for the urban environment in colonial Hong Kong? This article explores the Hung Hom railway terminus and its tensions and interactions with automobility and other forms of transport, most pertinently the bus network. Hong Kong's imperial and colonial context further throws into question seemingly straightforward divisions of public and private mobility.

This article presents a new approach to understanding ritual: embodied world construction. Informed by phenomenology and a philosophy of embodiment, this approach argues that rituals can (re)shape the structure of an individual's perceptual world. Ritual participation transforms how the world appears for an individual through the inculcation of new perceptual habits, enabling the perception of objects and properties which could not previously be apprehended. This theory is then applied to two case studies from an existing ethnographic study of North American evangelicalism, indicating how the theory of embodied world construction can shed new light on how individuals are shaped by ritual practice.

In response to Pascal's famous wager argument for adopting Christian belief, Denis Diderot noted that ‘An Imam could just as well reason this way’. In this article, I will show how Diderot's observation about Pascal's argument can legitimately be made about Alvin Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology (RE) and its use in defending the rationality of Christian belief. Plantinga's RE can, with some minor adjustments, easily be adopted by Muslims. I shall argue that an Islamic analogue of Plantinga's Christian RE presents an undercutting rationality defeater for Christian belief for those reflective Christians who adopt Plantinga-style religious epistemology. I call this defeater the ‘Diderot Objection’ to Plantinga's RE. As part of my discussion, I will consider how Plantinga attempts to respond to this sort of objection and will show why his response runs into difficulties.

This paper will ask whether the legal status presently afforded to nonhuman animals ought to influence regulatory debates concerning human cerebral organoids. The New York Courts recently refused to grant a writ of habeas corpus to Happy the Elephant as she was property rather than a legal person while at the same time accepting that she is a moral patient deserving of rights protection. An undesirable situation has therefore arisen in which the law holds a being with moral status to be incapable of benefitting from legal redress due to their legal status as property.

The author argues that this is something that we ought to avoid when designing the regulatory framework which will govern the use of human cerebral organoids. Yet, a difference exists in that, whereas the judges already accept Happy is a moral patient, there is presently no consensus around the moral status of organoids. This paper will consider whether human cerebral organoids have passed the moral threshold of sentience. If they have, or are close to doing so, regulators ought to consider their legal status in advance so as to ensure that adequate limitations are placed on this usage so as to avoid unethical practices.

In this article, I explore a Wittgensteinian approach to blasphemy. While philosophy of religion tends to have very little to say about blasphemy, we can note two key, typically unchallenged, assumptions about it. First, there is the Assertion from Anywhere Assumption: whether one can successfully blaspheme is entirely independent of one's religious views, commitments, or way of life. Second, there is the Act of Communication Assumption: blasphemy is essentially an act of assertion. I contend that a Wittgensteinian approach rejects both assumptions and, thus, reorients our conception of blasphemy. Take two characteristically Wittgensteinian claims. First, religious statements/beliefs have a different ‘grammar’ than empirical propositions. Second (and relatedly), holding religious beliefs necessarily connects with how one lives. Wittgensteinian blasphemy rejects the Assertion from Anywhere Assumption: to blaspheme, one must be in or have been in the religious framework one blasphemes. Being entirely outside of that context divests one's blasphemy from its proper content. Second, Wittgensteinian blasphemy rejects the Act of Communication Assumption: if religious belief is centrally a form of life, then blasphemy must be lived out as well. Wittgensteinian blasphemy is less about the utterances one makes and more about how one's life intersects (or fails to intersect) with religiosity.

This article presents a revised version of negative utilitarianism. Previous versions have relied on a hedonistic theory of value and stated that suffering should be minimized. The traditional rebuttal is that the doctrine in this form morally requires us to end all sentient life. To avoid this, a need-based theory of value is introduced. The frustration of the needs not to suffer and not to have one’s autonomy dwarfed should, prima facie, be decreased. When decreasing the need frustration of some would increase the need frustration of others, the case is deferred and a fuller ethical analysis is conducted. The author’s perceptions on murder, extinction, the right to die, antinatalism, veganism, and abortion are used to reach a reflective equilibrium. The new theory is then applied to consumerism, material growth, and power relations. The main finding is that the burden of proof should be on those who promote the status quo.

The generation of three-dimensional cerebral organoids from human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hPSC) has facilitated the investigation of mechanisms underlying several neuropsychiatric disorders, including stress-related disorders, namely major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Generating hPSC-derived neurons, cerebral organoids, and even assembloids (or multi-organoid complexes) can facilitate research into biomarkers for stress susceptibility or resilience and may even bring about advances in personalized medicine and biomarker research for stress-related psychiatric disorders. Nevertheless, cerebral organoid research does not come without its own set of ethical considerations. With increased complexity and resemblance to in vivo conditions, discussions of increased moral status for these models are ongoing, including questions about sentience, consciousness, moral status, donor protection, and chimeras. There are, however, unique ethical considerations that arise and are worth looking into in the context of research into stress and stress-related disorders using cerebral organoids. This paper provides stress research-specific ethical considerations in the context of cerebral organoid generation and use for research purposes. The use of stress research as a case study here can help inform other practices of in vitro studies using brain models with high ethical considerations.

This article looks at the question of whether and how there can be a theistic expansive naturalism. In light of Fiona Ellis's work, I will identify a crucial issue for this research programme moving forward, namely, the question of ‘which God?’. Ellis seeks to develop a metaphysical framework that offers a rationale for incorporating theism into naturalism, and the acceptance of God comes through a reflection on our relation to value. Offering a sympathetic interpretation of her position, the article will suggest that Ellis's conception of God has been significantly modified in her more recent writings, moving from a rather ‘thick’ conception of God to more a modest account. I will suggest a move toward a ‘less thick’ position is preferable.

This study examines preference organization in adult second language classrooms in relation to possible -isms—utterances which are hearably racist, classist, (hetero)sexist, or otherwise exclusionary, although their exclusionary nature may be (re)negotiated in situ. A collection of sixty-one possible -isms from a corpus of fifty-five hours of video-recorded English second language classes was examined using conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. The analysis shows that participants orient to solidarity by supporting -isms, progressivity by deleting -isms, and moral accountability by challenging -isms; however, participants prioritize solidarity, enacting it early, even in cases of deletion and challenges. I argue that this preference organization is rooted in the institutional roles and objectives of adult second language classrooms, where presumably competent members of diverse cultures aim to foster an environment for active participation. Findings underscore the importance of conducting microanalyses of talk-in-interaction to uncover structural constraints which facilitate the reproduction of systemic exclusion. (-isms, preference, conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, classroom interaction, exclusion in interaction)*

The first and greatest commandment according to Jesus, and so the one most central to Christian practice, is the command to love God. We argue that this commandment is best interpreted in aretaic rather than deontic terms. In brief, we argue that there is no obligation to love God. While bad, failure to seek and enjoy a union of love with God is not in violation of any general moral requirement. The core argument is straightforward: relations of intimacy should not be morally imposed upon autonomous beings. We contend that such reasoning applies to human beings' relationship to God. So, even if our ultimate end is to enjoy communion with God, God has no right that human beings seek a relationship with him. If this is correct, then the command to ‘love God’ is not the sort of moral principle that can be supported by threats of hellfire or other forms of coercion.

The 1950s represent a foundational decade in Nepal's constitutional history. In the wake of decolonization in British India, the “year 7 revolution” (1950–51) grew out of the alliance between King Tribhuvan Shah and Nepal's democratic political parties created in India against the Rana autocratic regime in Kathmandu. Eventually the pro-democracy forces prevailed, and a crucial political transition began. Two constitutions were promulgated, the 1951 Interim Constitution and the 1959 Constitution. Both short lived and only partially implemented, these documents, however, laid the foundations of Nepal's constitutional edifice for years to come. Constitution building became a marker of sovereignty understood in terms of independence and an assertion of popular sovereignty. However, in the fraught Cold War context, the preoccupation with securing political stability by constitutional means that centered around the Shah monarchy prevailed, even at the expense of democracy. As such, the shift from a traditional notion of sovereignty from above to a modern concept of sovereignty from below remained incomplete. These aspirations, however, were not extinguished even by 30 years of royal autocracy under the Panchayat regime (1960–90) and lived on to this day to inform demands for constitutional reform, democratization, and inclusion. The present analysis is based on Nepali primary legal sources, archival material from the United Kingdom and United States National Archives, and the Ivor Jennings Private Papers.

Conventional monotheist religious believers commonly believe that God will sometimes assist them, will be on their side. God, in other words, they believe, is an asset. Conceptually an asset is anything (such as a person or an object) that can assist one, something that is prima facie good to possess or to have on one's side, that is likely to or can assist one to make one's life go better, overall. Having assets can have weighty implications, including moral ones. I argue that here the implications are quite surprising, and indeed paradoxical. In particular, the religious will have in certain circumstances good reasons, and sometimes even moral obligations, to give up their interests for those who lack such assets, namely secular non-believers. The claim is not that religious people actually see things in this way but that, normatively, given their beliefs, many of them should, in the sense of the subjective ‘ought’. This can be relevant both in this world and concerning the next. Moreover, in many situations plausible religious replies are not sufficient to block the move. This topic has not, to the best of my knowledge, ever been seriously analysed philosophically.