Moral and political philosophers no longer condemn harm inflicted on nonhuman animals as self-evidently as they did when animal welfare and animal rights advocacy was at the forefront in the 1980s, and sentience, suffering, species-typical behavior, and personhood were the basic concepts of the discussion. The article shows this by comparing the determination with which societies seek responsibility for human harm to the relative indifference with which law and morality react to nonhuman harm. When harm is inflicted on humans, policies concerning negligence and duty of care and principles such as the ‘but for’ rule and the doctrine of double effect are easily introduced. When harm is inflicted on nonhumans, this does not happen, at least not any more. As an explanation for the changed situation, the article offers a shift in discussion and its basic terminology. Simple ethical considerations supported the case for nonhuman animals, but many philosophers moved on to debate different views on political justice instead. This allowed the creation of many conflicting views that are justifiable on their own presuppositions. In the absence of a shared foundation, this fragments the discussion, focuses it on humans, and ignores or marginalizes nonhuman animals.

How can an individual’s Moral Compass address the question of whether or not to help a patient to shorten and end his or her life? Moral Compass has been defined as that set of values and experiences that guides each individual’s decisions and conduct in relation to others and to society. Can a robot be programmed to have a moral compass? If we were only considering rules of conduct, then perhaps yes, that would be possible. We could establish a series of rules and sanctions that a computer assisted robot could rigorously apply for any violation. The state and many religions already do that, and many individuals are quite comfortable with rigorous, unbendable rules. Most rules, however, have exceptions, so perhaps the robots of the future can be designed to be flexible, that is, human.

Nocebo effects occur when an individual experiences undesirable physiological reactions caused by doxastic states that are not a treatment’s core or characteristic features.1 As Scott Gelfand2 points out, there are numerous studies that have shown that the disclosure of a treatment’s side effects to a patient increases the risk of the side effects. From an ethical point of view, nocebo effects caused by the disclosures of side effects present a challenging problem. On the one hand, clinicians’ duty to inform patients of the consequences (including possible side effects) of their treatments is critical in ensuring that patients’ autonomy is respected. Patients cannot act autonomously if relevant information is withheld from them (without their consent, perhaps). On the other hand, clinicians also ought to minimize harm to patients.

This paper begins with a simple illustration of the choice between individual and population strategies in population health policy. It describes the traditional approach on which the choice is to be made on the relative merits of the two strategies in each case. It continues by identifying two factors—our knowledge of the consequences of the epidemiological transition and the prevalence of responsibility-sensitive theories of distributive justice—that may distort our moral intuitions when we deliberate about the choice of appropriate risk-management strategies in population health. It argues that the confluence of these two factors may lead us to place too much emphasis on personal responsibility in health policy.

One of the more draining aspects of being a clinical ethicist is dealing with the emotions of patients, family members, as well as healthcare providers. Generally, by the time a clinical ethicist is called into a case, stress levels are running high, patience is low, and interpersonal communication is strained. Management of this emotional burden of clinical ethics is an underexamined aspect of the profession and academic literature. The emotional nature of doing clinical ethics consultation may be better addressed by utilizing concepts and tools from clinical psychology. Management of countertransference, the natural emotional reaction by the therapist toward the patient, is a widely discussed topic in the psychotherapeutic literature. This concept can be adapted to the clinical ethics encounter by broadening it beyond the patient-therapist relationship to refer to the ethics consultant's emotional response toward the patient, the family, or other members the healthcare team. Further, it may aid the consultant because a recognition of the source and nature of these reactions can help maintain ‘critical distance’ and minimize bias in the same way that a psychologist maintains neutrality in psychotherapy. This paper will offer suggestions on how to manage these emotional responses and their burden in the clinical ethics encounter, drawing upon techniques and strategies recommended in the psychotherapeutic literature. Using these techniques may improve consultation outcomes and reduce the emotional burden on the clinical ethicist.

This paper argues that the existing definition of pandemics is not nuanced enough, because it is predicated solely on the criterion of spread, rather than on the criteria of spread and severity. This definitional challenge is what I call ‘the conflation problem’: there is a conflation of two different realities of global health, namely global health emergencies (i.e., severe communicable diseases that spread across borders) and nonemergencies (i.e., communicable or noncommunicable diseases that spread across borders and that may be severe). To put this argument forth, this paper begins by discussing the existing and internationally accepted definition of pandemics, its requirements, as well as its strengths (section 1). Section 2 then considers the problem with the standard definition of pandemics (i.e., the conflation problem) and some examples of it. Finally, section 3 evaluates some practical implications of the conflation problem to then explore conceptual clarity as the adequate solution.

Where postcolonial studies often retain a focus on the imperial metropole, decolonial analysis takes as an imperative the re-location of the critical nexus into former colonies. Yet with this shift there emerges a recalcitrant question about the need for decolonial analysis in the centre: if decolonization is something that happens in the periphery, why, for instance, should we engage with it in the United Kingdom? While this question might have been less pressing in music studies in the 1990s when systematic approaches to decolonial analysis first started gaining traction, I argue that the amnesiac appeals to the Anglosphere which have accompanied the Brexit vote implore us to consider the possibilities of decolonial analysis in musicology anew. I suggest that decolonial analysis can be reconfigured through the notion of the coloniality/modernity bind to turn the decolonial gaze upon the musical subject in the metropole.

This article develops a method of understanding concepts from the Parisian Surrealist movement in music using Poulenc's treatment of cadences and fifth relations as a case study. Although music was rejected by the group's figurehead André Breton as ‘the most profoundly confusing’ of all arts, many composers were keenly involved in Surrealist circles. Notably, Poulenc's acquaintance with major figures led him to set much of their literary work. But his engagement with their aesthetic principles extends deep into the musical form. After assessing Poulenc's flirtation with the movement's ideas, I ally William Caplin's codification of the cadence to the Surrealist objet trouvé. Combining Robert Hatten's musical ‘markedness’ and literary theorist Willard Bohn's model of Surrealism in art and literature, I explore how Poulenc's music engages with the Surrealist treatment of objects, automatism, and Apollinaire's ‘fantôme véritable’.

The verbal prefix out- in its scalar-comparative sense is among the most productive English locative prefixes. Although several authors make use of the construction as a test environment for verb classification, few studies have looked at its semantics in any depth. Moreover, previous work on this prefix relies on fairly small databases or self-generated data, and no reliable corpus-based investigations are available, calling into question the usefulness of present semantic analyses and the application of the construction as a test environment.

This study aims at remedying these shortcomings via presenting a database culled mostly from COCA and iWeb. Based on the analysis of the wide range of attestations in the database it is shown that existing generalizations and previous semantic analyses are wrong and that particular restrictions proposed in the literature are not borne out by the data. Several claims, including core features of the formalizations offered in the literature, have to be discarded. Furthermore, alleged base-restrictions on the input out- allows are shown to be far too restrictive. This holds for verbal as well as adjectival and nominal bases. It is shown that approaches that deny the existence of category-changing prefixes are misguided.

Overall, the construction is more flexible regarding possible interpretations and more promiscuous with respect to possible bases than previously thought. At the same time, the system is not unrestricted. Generalizing over the data, this article lays out the requirements and specific challenges any full formal account of out- will have to match.

This contribution takes the form of an uncommon case report. It discusses an action brought to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) before the final decision has been rendered. The author believes this is justified because the innovative character of the procedural and substantive reasoning of the application could be of interest to a wider public. This may be the case even if the CJEU eventually dismisses the action as being inadmissible, leaving the substantive questions undecided. The applicants in Carvalho and Others v. European Union claim that European Union (EU) law does not limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as strictly as is required by EU human rights and international law. The case note explains the parties in the case, the acts being challenged, the relief being sought, and the content and application of the relevant procedural and substantive law. The case is illustrative of the high barriers for direct access to the CJEU, and suggests how they might be overcome. It is also a laboratory for examining the interface of climate science, economics, and law. At this interface, available emissions budgets and the technical and economic feasibility of emissions reductions are calculated and made legally relevant. Carvalho is based on the applicants’ conviction that, where the EU assumes a regulatory competence such as that of GHG emissions reduction, it must exercise it in accordance with its human rights and international obligations.