Chapter 3 explains our research methods, data collection and ethics. In this chapter, we focus on how we have addressed the typical challenges of interpreter bias in studying online offensive language. To mitigate these issues, we ground our study in naturally occurring data flagged as offensive by the targets themselves. We also introduce the reader to the world of social media content creators and discuss who the targets in our study are, and provide some demographic information about them. We discuss the use of Sketch Engine as a tool to address our primary objective of exploring the formal, lexical, semantic and discursive strategies involved in the construction of offensive language. We also discuss Wmatrix5, a corpus tool used to explore the semantic dimensions of offensive language. In addition, we explain how quantitative analysis was combined with thematic and linguistic-pragmatic approaches to examine how frequency and context shape offensive meanings. Chapter 3 further outlines our ethical considerations, including the responsible handling of data and the protection of participant anonymity, throughout the research process.

The Conclusion formulates the ethical role that I attribute to multi-scalar poetics in the context of an accelerating ecological crisis. I argue that narrative fiction can enable response-ability towards multiple scales of life and scale-bound perspectives. I expand the concept of scalar irony, which I defend here as an eco-political mode of attention that fiction enables for the reader. Returning to the question of analogy, I argue against the temptation to hierarchise non-analogical tropes above analogical ones, and propose that literature’s power lies in its capacity to turn all tropes into sites of epistemic and ethical negotiation.

Chapter 4 discusses the ethical potential of fictional trans-scalar encounters. Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) confront human characters with unfamiliar scales of existence: the slow time of trees, the multitudinous identity of forest or flock, the accelerating time of climate change, and the geographical patterns of collective migration. Both novels highlight disjunctions between scales as a key obstacle to environmental response-ability, by contrasting a sacrificed location with globalisation’s discourse of prosperity. These stories also highlight the fractures between individual and species-scale behaviour, and the difficulty of relating to the self as species. These fault lines lead me to ask whether allegorical narrative might in itself constitute a hindrance to trans-scalar ethics by smoothing out disjunctions and scale effects. I suggest that metalepsis acts as a counterweight to allegory in these novels. By construing trans-scalar encounters as frame-breaking events, metalepsis opens up the possibility of ethical relation.

The Introduction observes that a significant strand of twenty-first-century fiction is attempting to connect the human to other-than-human scales. I suggest that this fiction performs epistemic and ethical work because it foregrounds relations of biological and ecological interdependence. I situate my study in the context of scale theory and outline the eco-political and symbiopolitical stakes of scalar rhetoric. I then highlight the different ways in which multi-scalar poetics stimulate ontological and ethical questioning, produce new conceptions of self, agency, and environment, and ultimately enable ecological response-ability. Scale-switching, I argue, is not only a significant writing practice but a necessary reading methodology. I then introduce the three main devices analysed in the book: critical synecdoche, ontological metalepsis, and scalar irony.

Ethics, for Emerson, begins in perceiving the “wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world” such that ethics, in thinking and in living, is a matter of being “allied to all.” In this view, the “infinitude of the private man” – often yoked to the concept of “self-reliance” – names a metaphysical and ontological fact at the heart of Emerson’s ethics: human existence within a web of interconnections. This chapter draws widely from Emerson’s oeuvre to show how he unites “severe science with a poetic vision,” seeing and seeking to express how “Our life is consentaneous and far-related.” His work teaches us to see kinships between ethics, aesthetics, religion, science, and politics, and to consider ethics a practice of observing the intimacies in which we exist and in which the ethical question “How shall I live?” begins living in us.

Balancing autonomy and beneficence remains an ongoing challenge in the ethical treatment of patients with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders of thought. Psychiatric advance directives (PADs) offer one mechanism through which individuals can guide their own care, but unlike medical advance directives, they are not widely utilized in the United States. They are also highly limited by state law in the scope of their legal authority. This article explores the evidentiary basis for PADs as well as the legal and ethical issues that arise in the use of PADsin individuals with schizophrenia, arguing that providers’ fears of complete opt-out from care by patients are likely unfounded and that PADs offer a powerful tool through which individuals with schizophrenia can ensure meaningful consideration of their own values and goals.

Rydenfelt begins by considering how some classical pragmatists approached the question of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment. With that background in place, Rydenfelt proceeds to argue that pragmatism provides a unique perspective on questions within contemporary environmental philosophy and ethics. Influenced by idealism but rejecting its invidious distinction between humans and nonhumans, appropriating the worldview of post-Darwinian science but refusing to see philosophy as just another one of the special sciences, pragmatism makes room for a distinct approach to philosophical questions about the environment. One of the most important of those questions is that of the value of nature, and environmental pragmatism understands the pursuit of such normative questions as empirical and experimental, thus attempting to connect normative theory with social practice. Still, it offers no quick and easy solutions but instead recognizes that the pursuit of philosophical questions about nature, like philosophical inquiry generally, and like scientific inquiry even more generally, is a long-term endeavor.

Drawing from both the medieval Scholastic philosophical-theological tradition and Aristotelian virtue ethics, Thomas Aquinas offers a comprehensive and nuanced account of the virtuous life – one that suggests fruitful relationships not only with contemporary philosophical and theological discussions but also with recent empirical work. In this short chapter, I sketch the big picture using an Aristotelian, four-causes approach. Section 1 mainly addresses the final cause or telos of virtue: ultimately, perfect happiness in eternal life – although a good earthly life affords “a certain participation” in happiness. Section 2 considers virtue’s quasi-material causes: reason and the appetites, including the intellectual appetite or will. Section 3 focuses on the formal causes (modes) of virtue in general and of the cardinal and theological virtues in particular, as well as the relationships between various virtues in the larger structure of Thomistic virtue ethics – including the possibility of a unity of the virtues. And Section 4 discusses proposed efficient causes of such virtues, drawing on the various ways in which virtues are developed and related to each other in the Thomistic picture. Throughout, I consider connections between Aquinas’s account of the virtuous life and contemporary work in ethics, psychology, and education.

This chapter addresses one of the most important areas of philosophy – ethics – and uses it to examine aspects of the role of the law in education. Of all the areas of philosophy, more has probably been written about ethics, and over a longer period, than any other. In addition, all cultures are structured around a fundamental ethical system: the law. However, irrespective of their importance, both subjects are currently notable for their lowly status within the teacher education curriculum.