How do people respond to others' accidental behaviors? Reward and punishment for accidents might be depend on the actor's intentions, or instead on the unintended outcomes she brings about. Yet, existing paradigms in experimental economics do not include the possibility of accidental monetary allocations. We explore the balance of outcomes and intentions in a two-player economic game where monetary allocations are made with a "trembling hand": that is, intentions and outcomes are sometimes mismatched. Player 1 allocates $10 between herself and (...) Player 2 by rolling one of three dice. One die has a high probability of a selfish outcome, another has a high probability of a fair outcome, and the third has a high probability of a generous outcome. Based on Player 1's choice of die, Player 2 can infer her intentions. However, any of the three die can yield any of the three possible outcomes. Player 2 is given the opportunity to respond to Player 1's allocation by adding to or subtracting from Player 1's payoff. We find that Player 2's responses are influenced substantially by the accidental outcome of Player 1's roll of the die. Comparison to control conditions suggests that in contexts where the allocation is at least partially under the control of Player 1, Player 2 will punish Player 1 accountable for unintentional negative outcomes. In addition, Player 2's responses are influenced by Player 1's intention. However, Player 2 tends to modulate his responses substantially more for selfish intentions than for generous intentions. This novel economic game provides new insight into the psychological mechanisms underlying social preferences for fairness and retribution. (shrink)

Understanding life through its origins reveals the groundwork underlying the differentiations of its autonomous generative matrixes. Following the primogenital matrix of generation, the three generative matrixes of the specifically human sense of life establish humanness within the creative human condition as the existential sphere of sharing-in-life.

BackgroundAn increasing number of studies utilize intracranial electrophysiology in human subjects to advance basic neuroscience knowledge. However, the use of neurosurgical patients as human research subjects raises important ethical considerations, particularly regarding informed consent and undue influence, as well as subjects’ motivations for participation. Yet a thorough empirical examination of these issues in a participant population has been lacking. The present study therefore aimed to empirically investigate ethical concerns regarding informed consent and voluntariness in Parkinson’s disease patients undergoing deep brain (...) stimulator (DBS) placement who participated in an intraoperative neuroscience study.MethodsTwo semi-structured 30-minute interviews were conducted preoperatively and postoperatively via telephone. Interviews assessed participants’ motivations for participation in the parent intraoperative study, recall of information presented during the informed consent process, and participants’ postoperative reflections on the research study.ResultsTwenty-two participants (mean age = 60.9) completed preoperative interviews at a mean of 7.8 days following informed consent and a mean of 5.2 days prior to DBS surgery. Twenty participants completed postoperative interviews at a mean of 5 weeks following surgery. All participants cited altruism or advancing medical science as “very important” or “important” in their decision to participate in the study. Only 22.7% (n = 5) correctly recalled one of the two risks of the study. Correct recall of other aspects of the informed consent was poor (36.4% for study purpose; 50.0% for study protocol; 36.4% for study benefits). All correctly understood that the study would not confer a direct therapeutic benefit to them.ConclusionEven though research coordinators were properly trained and the informed consent was administered according to protocol, participants demonstrated poor retention of study information. While intraoperative studies that aim to advance neuroscience knowledge represent a unique opportunity to gain fundamental scientific knowledge, improved standards for the informed consent process can help facilitate their ethical implementation. (shrink)

The paper develops a philosophical account of emotions experienced and communicated on the internet, and, in particular, in the context of social media use. A growing body of research across disciplines has investigated the distinctive features of emotions in the digital age, and a key question in this regard concerns whether online emotions are the same kind of phenomena as those undergone offline. In this paper, I contribute to addressing this question by suggesting that the structure and characteristic features of (...) internet-mediated emotions can be accounted for within the perspective of Peter Goldie’s narrative theory of emotion. To do so, I first offer a reconstruction of Goldie’s conception of emotions as complex, dynamic, episodic and structured phenomena. I then move to show how the experience of emotions on social media like Facebook displays the characteristics which are at the core of Goldie’s account, proceeding to suggest that this enables us to better understand some of the features of emotions undergone on the internet. More specifically, I argue that the intensity, persistence and contagiousness of some online emotions can be better understood if we adopt Goldie’s framework. (shrink)

The nature of the self is an important point at which philosophy and literature intersect. Text, Body and Indeterminacy acknowledges this connection by forging a link between the philosophical concept of the self and the category of the literary character. The philosophical horizon of Text, Body and Indeterminacy is delineated by the neo-pragmatist debate on selfhood. The book entwines the ideas of Richard Rorty and Richard Shusterman by stressing similarity in their aestheticizing of ethics and by showing the difference in (...) their understanding of the self as textual or bodily. The characters created by Pater and Wilde are freshly assessed within this dual philosophical perspective. Their doppelgngers are seen as the forerunners of postmodernist concepts: the cerebral fl[neur is reflected in Rortys model ironist, and the sensuous aesthete returns through Shustermans notion of the somatic self. Text, Body and Indeterminacy establishes how Pater renders his protagonists through discursive patternstropes of Decadence, philosophical theorems, and mythsonly to subvert these vocabularies and to emphasize the reality of the body, the extra-textual dimension of the self. It also shows how Wildes sensuous personae, both bodily and indeterminate, transcend the vocabularies available to the Wildean fl[neurs. Through its interpretations, Text Body and Indeterminacy uniquely combines literary portraits by Pater and Wilde, highlights interlocking themes and, in every reading, points to the ethical gains of tilting the idea of selfhood into the somatic realm. (shrink)

This paper examines Cécile Fabre’s cosmopolitan reductionist approach to war. It makes three main points. First, I show that Fabre must ‘thin down’ justice’s content in order to justify the cosmopolitan claim that the same rights and duties bind people everywhere. Second, I investigate Fabre’s account of the values at stake in national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Can cosmopolitanism explain why it is permissible to fight in defense of one’s political community? I doubt it. I argue that Fabre’s reductionist approach (...) cannot justify national self-defense in many cases. Finally, I explore the role that authoritative institutions play in specifying the rights and duties we have under cosmopolitan justice. I believe Fabre takes an overly simple view of the relationship between rights, duties, and authoritative institutions. A more complex account may leave less space for private war on the part of individuals than she does. (shrink)

The paper presents different criteria of meaning formulated on the ground of contemporary empiricism, and shows their shortcomings. None of them respects all intuitions that empiricists have connected with the notion of meaning. The main thesis is that these intuitions can never be respected conjointly, for some of them exclude others. Consequently it is showed that the perfect empirical criterion of meaning does not exist.

This chapter sets out to briefly introduce the theory of the legal form as originally conceived by Evgeny Pashukanis, a famous early Soviet legal scholar. Firstly, it will provide an account of Pashukanis's life, tragically cut short during the Great Terror. Secondly, it will move onto summarising his theory of the legal form through three theses: (i) Commodity Form Thesis, (ii) Bourgeois Law Thesis, and (iii) Withering Away Thesis. Thirdly, it will compare these theses to the positions on law and (...) state advanced by his various interlocutors, past and contemporary, namely Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Petr Stuchka, and Andrey Vyshinsky. Fourthly, it will analyse the similarities and differences identified in the previous section, drawing conclusions as to the cause of Pashukanis's downfall. It will be eventually pointed out that Pashukanis's theory was fundamentally unsuitable to the project of Soviet state-building, which explains why viewing law and state from Pashukanist lens was contested and eventually abandoned. (shrink)

This monograph examines the origins of modern and modernist moral confusion and the deterioration of the Judeo-Christian values and contemporary boundaries between Right and Wrong. It traces the ethical shift to the ideas of Hobbes and Bentham, the peculiar universe of Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky, the new religion of Tolstoy and the destroyed God of Nietzsche, ending with the psychoanalytical commandments of Freud and the mire of sexual identity of Foucault and Paglia.

In this paper, I explore some of the ambivalent potential of Graham Harman’s post-humanist object-oriented ontology for thinking about human beings as objects, and for how to be with human beings as objects. In particular, I consider the work of feminist phenomenologists attuned to objectification as both having a tradition of object-orientation and as already contesting the idealism that Harman opposes. Objectified human beings inhabit a site of ontological duality, often knowing themselves as objects for others, who thus experience the (...) ontological and epistemological disruptions that can emerge from the human activity of objectification. Absence of these analyses in OOO constitutes an important oversight, since the analyses draw attention not only to object relations among human beings, but thereby also point to ways of understanding human concept relations with non-human objects. (shrink)

Background Concepts of health have been widely discussed in the philosophy and ethics of medicine. Parallel to these theoretical debates, numerous empirical research projects have focused on subjective concepts of health and shown their significance for individuals and society at various levels. Only a few studies have so far investigated the concepts of health of non-professionals and professionals involved in long-term home care and discussed these empirical perspectives regarding moral responsibilities. Objectives To identify the subjective concepts of the health of (...) non-professionals (care recipients, informal caregivers) and professionals (registered nurses) involved in long-term home care and to discuss them against the background of existing normative guidelines addressing non-professionals and professionals’ responsibilities and rights concerning health. Research design A qualitative design was chosen to explore subjective concepts of health. Data were collected by semi-structured interviews; content analysis was applied according to Mayring. Participants and research context Twenty-eight interviews were conducted with non-professionals and professionals in long-term home care arrangements in Northern Germany. Ethical considerations Ethics approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Board at the University Medicine Greifswald (BB123/16). Findings Non-professionals and professionals consider health as a capability that enables them to participate in social activities and live their own lives according to their preferences. The former regard health particularly as a feeling and an attitude, the latter as the absence of disease with a focus on mental and emotional well-being. Both groups highlight the unsurpassable value of health and the personal responsibility for it. Discussion Normative guidelines applicable to practice in long-term home care discuss responsibilities and rights unevenly and raise several problems regarding non-professionals and professionals’ subjective concepts of health. Conclusion Individuals’ concepts of health are relevant for the subsequent interpretation of rights and responsibilities and should, thus, be reflected upon to address health-related needs effectively. (shrink)

There are (at least) two ways to think of the differences in basic concepts and typologies that one can find in the different scientific practices that constitute a research tradition. One is the fundamentalist view: the fewer the better. The other is a non-fundamentalist view of science whereby the integration of different concepts into the right abstraction grounds an explanation that is not grounded as the sum of the explanations supported by the parts. Integrative concepts are often associated with idealizations (...) that can successfully set the stage for different phenomena to be compared or for explanations of different phenomena to be considered as jointly increasing our understanding of reality beyond that which each explanation provides separately. In this paper, our aim is to argue for the importance of the notions of an ?affordance? and ?scaffolding? as integrative concepts in the cognitive sciences. The integrational role of the concept of affordance is closely related with the capacity of affordances to generate the scaffoldings leading to the integration. The capacities of affordances that turn them into (stable) scaffoldings explain why such notions are often used interchangeably (as we shall see). On this basis, we aim to show that the concepts of affordance and scaffolding provide the sort of epistemic perspective that can overcome common complaints about the limits and unity of the cognitive sciences once claims about extended cognition are taken seriously. (shrink)

Fazekas and Overgaard () present a novel, multidimensional model that explains different ways in which conscious representations can be degraded. Moreover, the authors discuss possible mechanisms that underlie different kinds of degradation, primarily those related to attentional processing. In this letter, we argue that the proposed mechanisms are not sufficient. We propose that attentional mechanisms work differently at various processing stages; and factors that are independent of attentional ones, such as expectation, previous experience, and context, should be accounted for if (...) we are aiming to construct a comprehensive model of conscious visual perception. (shrink)

This paper aims to critique the phenomenon of advanced patient autonomy and choice in healthcare within the specific context of self-testing devices. A growing number of self-testing medical devices are currently available for home use. The premise underpinning many of these devices is that they assist individuals to be more autonomous in the assessment and management of their health. Increased patient autonomy is assumed to be a good thing. We take issue with this assumption and argue that self-testing provides a (...) specific example how increased patient autonomy and choice within healthcare might not best serve the patient population. We propose that current interpretations of autonomy in healthcare are based on negative accounts of liberty to the detriment of a more relational understanding. We also propose that Kantian philosophy is often applied to the healthcare arena in an inappropriate manner. We draw on the philosophical literature and examples from the self-testing process to support these claims. We conclude by offering an alternative account of autonomy based on the interrelated concepts of relationality, care and responsibility. (shrink)

Research in phenomenology and philosophy of psychiatry has suggested that psychopathological disturbances of experience often involve an alteration of one's ‘sense of possibility’, dependent upon the presence of specific ‘existential feelings’ (Ratcliffe 2012). In this paper I provide an extended account of how the engagement with certain narratives can lead to a transformation of one's sense of possibility by eliciting affective experiences that are not consonant with the person's existential feelings. More precisely, I claim that, even when the experience of (...) some types of emotion is generally precluded by a restricted sense of possibility, such emotions may be aroused by particular self-narratives, and I explore how this dynamic can give rise to enduring and wide-ranging affective changes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women and Health Research:A Report from the Institute of MedicineAnna C. Mastroianni (bio), Ruth Faden (bio), and Daniel Federman (bio)In recent years, claims have been made by segments of the research community and by women's health advocacy groups that clinical research practices and policies have not benefitted women's health to the same extent as men's health. Central to these claims has been an assertion that women have been inadequately (...) represented as subjects of clinical studies and that as a result neither health conditions unique to women—e.g., menopause—nor women's manifestations of health problems affecting both sexes—e.g., heart disease—have been investigated sufficiently.The scientific community, including federal agencies that sponsor and regulate clinical studies, is increasingly responsive to these claims and is taking steps to raise the level of women's participation in clinical studies. Controversy and concern have surrounded these actions, however. Two of the claims that have been made are: (1) that women are more difficult to study than men because of their cyclical hormonal changes; and (2) that conducting gender-specific subgroup analyses would increase the size of study populations, raise the cost of studies, and thereby reduce the number of studies that could be performed with the limited resources available. In addition, controversy over the inclusion of women of childbearing potential and pregnant women has been particularly salient. Concerns have been expressed about avoiding potential harm to existing or potential fetuses and about the possible legal and financial ramifications of such harm. A further concern involves the perceived difficulties in enrolling women in studies and retaining them for the duration of the studies.Against this backdrop, the Office of Research on Women's Health at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in October 1992 to establish the Committee on the Ethical and Legal Issues Relating to the Inclusion of Women in Clinical Studies. The Committee's charge was to: (1) consider the ethical and legal implications of including women, particularly pregnant women and women of childbearing potential, in clinical studies; (2) examine known instances of litigation regarding injuries to research subjects [End Page 55] and describe existing legal liabilities and protections; and (3) provide practical advice on these issues for consideration by NIH, institutional review boards (IRBs), and clinical investigators.The 16 Committee members came from diverse backgrounds: bioethics, law, epidemiology and biostatistics, public health policy, obstetrics and gynecology, clinical research, pharmaceutical development, social and behavioral sciences, and clinical evaluative sciences.1 Chaired by two of the authors of this article, Ruth Faden and Daniel Federman, and coordinated by the third, IOM Study Director Anna Mastroianni, the Committee met five times over a fourteen-month period, convened a one-and-one-half day invitational workshop, and commissioned several background papers. The Committee's deliberations were complicated by the announcement of new federal policies late in its term. Specifically, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued guidelines (FDA 1993) to replace its 1977 guidelines, which prohibited the inclusion of women of childbearing potential in early phases of most clinical drug trials. In addition, Congress passed the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 (P.L. 103-43), which contains provisions mandating the inclusion of women and racial and ethnic minorities in NIH-sponsored clinical research. In February 1994, the IOM Committee publicly issued its final report and recommendations, Women and Health Research: Ethical and Legal Issues of Including Women in Clinical Studies, publishing the workshop presentations and commissioned papers in a separate volume.Deliberations of the CommitteeA number of issues arose at the outset as the Committee considered its charge. A few members initially believed that verification of the underrepresentation of women relative to men in clinical studies as a whole was a prerequisite to providing policy recommendations. Others believed that such an examination would be an important contribution to the knowledge base, but that it was not necessary for addressing the Committee's charge. As summarized in the Committee's report, the Committee's research indicated that firm conclusions about the relative underrepresentation of women could not be drawn from the available data because of the lack of systematic information... (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper investigates from a phenomenological perspective the origins of self-illness ambiguity. Drawing on phenomenological theories of affectivity and selfhood, I argue that, as a phenomenon which concerns primarily the ‘personal self’, self-illness ambiguity is dependent on distinct alterations of affective background orientations. I start by illustrating how personhood is anchored in the experience of a specific set of non-intentional affects – i.e. moods or existential feelings – alterations of which are often present in mental ill-health. Also through the (...) exploration of the phenomenology of acute and long-term anxiety, I suggest that self-illness ambiguity originates in the presence of moods or existential feelings that are in tension with the ones that structure the person’s experience prior to the onset of the illness or when its symptoms are not experienced. More specifically, I claim that due to their ability to ‘block’ or ‘suspend’ some of the person’s affective and cognitive responses, such affective orientations may unsettle one’s self-defining evaluative perspective, leading to uncertainty and doubting about one’s personal self. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the two types of self-deception, usually labeled straight and twisted self-deception. In straight cases the self-deceptive belief coincides with the subject’s desire. In twisted cases, by contrast, the self-deceptive belief opposes the subject’s desire as in the example of Othello’s conviction of Desdemona’s infidelity. Are both these contrasting types of deceptive beliefs cases of SD? The argument of this paper shall answer this question in the positive, yet in different way from the unitary explanation of straight and (...) twisted SD proposed by Alfred Mele. The causal account of SD claims to provide a unitary and simple explanation for both straight and twisted SD, and considers such a unitary explanation as a specific virtue of the causal view. Within the same causal model, the difference between straight and twisted self-deception is explained by a difference in the motivational state that in twisted cases is dominated by emotions. The paper will critically examine this claim, and advance an alternative explanation based on a different view of self-deception where emotions play a role alongside wishes both in straight and in twisted case. (shrink)