We present a developmental perspective regarding the difference in perceptions toward privacy between young and old. Here, we introduce the notion of privacy conceptions, that is, the specific ideas that individuals have regarding what privacy actually is. The differences in privacy concerns often found between young and old are postulated as the result of the differences found in their privacy conceptions, which are subsequently linked to their developmental life stages. The data presented have been obtained through a questionnaire distributed among (...) adolescents, young adults, and adults and provide support for this developmental perspective. This study is one of the first to include adolescents when investigating the privacy concerns among young and old. The results show that the privacy conceptions held by adolescents indeed differ from those held by young adults and adults in keeping with the expectations as seen from a developmental perspective. In addition, the areas in which the differences in privacy conceptions are found also reflect the strongest relationship with concerns. As such, these findings present an alternative perspective to the commonly held notion that young people are less concerned about privacy. (shrink)

Informed consent bears significant relevance as a legal basis for the processing of personal data and health data in the current privacy, data protection and confidentiality legislations. The consent requirements find their basis in an ideal of personal autonomy. Yet, with the recent advent of the global pandemic and the increased use of eHealth applications in its wake, a more differentiated perspective with regards to this normative approach might soon gain momentum. This paper discusses the compatibility of a moral duty (...) to share data for the sake of the improvement of healthcare, research, and public health with autonomy in the field of data protection, privacy and medical confidentiality. It explores several ethical-theoretical justifications for a duty of data sharing, and then reflects on how existing privacy, data protection, and confidentiality legislations could obstruct such a duty. Consent, as currently defined in the General Data Protection Regulation – a key legislative framework providing rules on the processing of personal data and data concerning health – and in the recommendation of the Council of Europe on the protection of health-related data – explored here as soft-law – turns out not to be indispensable from various ethical perspectives, while the requirement of consent in the General Data Protection Regulation and the recommendation nonetheless curtails the full potential of a duty to share medical data. Also other legal grounds as possible alternatives for consent seem to constitute an impediment. (shrink)

The UK Genethics Club was established in November 2001 in order to provide a national forum of ethics support for the profession of clinical genetics in the UK. The forum brings together health professionals, medical ethicists and lawyers and support is provided through detailed discussion of cases and sharing of good practice. Clinical genetics professionals had previously voiced concerns about making extremely difficult ethical decisions, with profound implications, in something of a vacuum. Professionals saw a lack of guidance in the (...) area and lack of time for discussion of difficult cases as reasons for this. This paper describes the origins of the group and gives (anonymized) examples of some of the types of issues discussed. (shrink)

Social fears emerging in adolescence can have negative effects on emotional well-being. Yet the mechanisms by which these risks occur are unknown. One possibility is that associative learning results in fears to previously neutral social stimuli. Such conditioned responses may alter subsequent processing of social stimuli. We used a novel conditioning task to examine how associative processes influence social fear and attention orienting in adolescents. Neutral photographs were paired with socially rewarding or aversive stimuli during conditioning; a dot-probe task then (...) assessed biases in attention orienting. The social conditioning task modified subjective ratings of the neutral stimuli. Moreover, for the neutral stimulus that was paired with the aversive stimulus, the strength of conditioning showed a relationship with subsequent attentional vigilance. The findings elucidate mechanisms by which negative peer experiences during adolescence may affect emotional processing. (shrink)

One of the major issues in the debate about the future of health care is how to keep costs under control while meeting growing demands for care. Addressing that, especially on an international scale, is far from easy. How are we to determine what the demands for care will most likely be? Even if it is not possible to estimate the future number of dependent elderly persons with any precision, it is hard to ignore the most probable scenario: a substantial (...) increase in the number of the oldest old. (shrink)

We thank Parker and Wright for engaging in this roundtable debate in such a spirited way. The ‘Pharmacogenetic [test] to Avoid Loss of Hearing’ (PALOH) Trial is the first time a genetic point of care test has been applied in the acute neonatal setting; therefore, it is not surprising that questions have been raised which require debate, discussion and clarification. Parker and Wright misattribute several assumptions to the roundtable authors, which we would like to clarify here. Since they raise wider (...) questions about the PALOH trial itself, several of the roundtable discussants have made a joint response. (shrink)

In topical philosophy of religion the word 'given' plays an important role. However the meaning of this word is ambiguous. The word refers not only to the factual reality (datum) but also to what is given as a gift to someone (donum). This ambiguity leads toan unclear mixture of philosophical and religious positions. Therefore an analysis of such mixture is necessary. The main question of this analysis is how faith and religion on the one hand, and ontology and reason on (...) the other hand, influence each other? Isn'tit so that in the religious domain nobody can be convinced with and by rational means? In the first section, the question on the reality of the ultimate meaning as the momentfrom where man is motivated to lead his life, is explored. In the second section the idea is developed that philosophical insights are meaningful with regard to religious meaning only if they are referred back to religious faith. In the third section the question posited is whether philosophical reflection does not loose its original motivationalcontext if it isn't referred back to its original point of departure. This analysis is worked out against the background of I. Verhack's book: De mens en zijn onrust. Over het raadsel van de beweging. (shrink)

Nie war Freundschaft populärer als heute. Sie gilt als entscheidende Zutat für ein gutes und glückliches Leben. Viele haben auch viele Freunde - jedoch will sich das versprochene Glück nicht so recht einstellen. Woran liegt das? Björn Vedder verknüpft in seiner Zeitdiagnose der Freundschaft philosophische Überlegungen mit der Analyse von popkulturellem Material sowie literarischen Klassikern. Er zeigt, was Freundschaft heute bedeutet, wie sie (auch zu uns selbst) gelingen kann und warum Facebook-Freunde echte Freunde sind. Dabei nimmt er die pessimistischen (...) Kulturkritiken der Gegenwart ernst, teilt deren Defätismus aber nicht, sondern zeigt Wege aus den Pathologien der modernen Freundschaft auf. (shrink)

Without suggesting that Kant is responsible for the rise of hermeneutical philosophy, there are some developments in his philosophy which are important in relation to hermeneutics. Kant made the distinction between things‐in‐themselves and phenomena or appearances (see Article 2, kant). The world we know depends on a conceptual projection of categories of our mind; we do not have access to the things‐in‐themselves, but only to interpretations of things such as they appear to us, after they have been edited by the (...) understanding. This domestication of rationality led to the fideism of Jacobi: if reason can not bring us to reality, the only instance that can give us any sense of an objective and real world is faith with a kind of “knowledge” which is higher than our rational knowledge. In his early On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) followed Jacobi in denying the pretensions of rational knowledge and determined religious sentiment to be a source of “knowledge” which transcends rational understanding (Vedder 1994). This background of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics is important to acknowledge. Therefore in this essay I will emphasize the fragility of hermeneutical knowledge for Schleiermacher. First I shall explain the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher; then I shall examine the relation between hermeneutics and dialectics. (shrink)

There is a paucity of experimental data addressing how peers influence adolescent risk-taking. Here, we examined peer effects on risky decision-making in adults and adolescents using a virtual social context that enabled experimental control over the peer “interactions”. 40 adolescents (age 11-18) and 28 adults (age 20-38) completed a risk-taking (Wheel of Fortune) task under 4 conditions: in private; while being observed by (fictitious) peers; and after receiving ‘risky’ or ‘safe’ advice from the peers. For high-risk gambles (but not medium-risk (...) or even gambles), adolescents made more risky decisions under peer observation than adults. Adolescents, but not adults, tended to resist ‘safe’ advice for high-risk gambles. Although both groups tended to follow ‘risky’ advice for high-risk gambles, adults did so more than adolescents. These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between the effects of peer observation and peer advice on risky decision-making. (shrink)

It is well established that microRNAs (miRNAs) induce mRNA degradation by binding to 3′ untranslated regions (UTRs). The functionality of sites in the coding domain sequence (CDS), on the other hand, remains under discussion. Such sites have limited impact on target mRNA abundance and recent work suggests that miRNAs bind in the CDS to inhibit translation. What then could be the regulatory benefits of translation inhibition through CDS targeting compared to mRNA degradation following 3′ UTR binding? We propose that these (...) domain‐dependent effects serve to diversify the functional repertoire of post‐transcriptional gene expression control. Possible regulatory benefits may include tuning the time‐scale and magnitude of post‐transcriptional regulation, regulating protein abundance depending on or independently of the cellular state, and regulation of the protein abundance of alternative splice variants. Finally, we review emerging evidence that these ideas may generalize to RNA‐binding proteins beyond miRNAs and Argonaute proteins. (shrink)

The question of the sense or meaning of religious behavior is something different from praying or religious activity itself. If one wants to understand religious activity (or if someone wants to explain his actions), one speaks from a distanced concern with regard to this activity or behavior. In a certain sense, activity must be postponed in order to produce an interpretation. The thinking way of giving an account is a different activity, another act, than the act (in this case the (...) religious act) to which the reflecting act of thinking refers. In the first part of this paper, the question is posed as to how religious activity can be understood in terms of hermeneutic reflection. Thisquestion arises from the insight that the rationality of onto-theological thinking is no longer able to understand religious behavior. The second part poses the question as to whether religious activity can be understood from the perspective of a hermeneutical reason. (shrink)

While Susan Moller Okin found much to celebrate in Rawls's earlier articulation of his theory of justice, she worried that his later turn to political liberalism evacuated his theory of its feminist potential. Here, I argue that we need not be so pessimistic: some of the strongest arguments for pursuing certain feminist projects can and should be made from within a politically liberal framework. In advancing this claim, I develop Rawls's idea of primary goods—namely those goods that all citizens need (...) qua citizens—as a key conceptual resource for arguing for the elimination of the gendered division of labor using public reason. Drawing on recent empirical literature, I point out that the gendered division of labor continues to distribute to women an unfair allocation of primary goods. I then advocate for a specific public policy, which I call Gender Egalitarian Daddy Quota—a parental leave policy that sets aside time specifically for fathers to encourage men and women to engage in childcare related leave-taking to similar extents—on the grounds that this policy would help secure a fairer distribution of primary goods, and thus is required as a matter of justice. (shrink)

Should Proverbs be read as prose or poetry? Considering the language craft is of essential significance for a hermeneutical enquiry into the biblical book of Proverbs. Five suppositions to support the presupposition that Proverbs is best read as poetry were considered.

This rejoinder is a reply to the authors' criticisms of Vedder's original review of Norms of Liberty that seeks to clarify why the difficulties present in their attempt to establish the modern right to liberty on the foundation of Greek nobility and Aristotelian eudaemonism are insuperable.

In his very early work, Heidegger was already fascinated by the problem of time, which became more and more radicalized in his thinking. The experience of time, and its connection to the status of philosophical concepts, forms the background of Heidegger’s reading of Paul in his 1920-21 lecture course, 'Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion.' In discussing the peculiarity of philosophical concepts, Heidegger points out that their uncertainty is by no means accidental, but is in fact endemic to them. This (...) amounts to a definitive step away from the Platonic, Cartesian and Hegelian tradition and its ideal of certainty. In this article the author begins by presenting Heidegger’s description of the phenomenon of time. Then he presents his reformulation of the status of philosophical concepts, and he ends by showing how this is present in Heidegger’s analysis of the letters of Saint Paul. Especially in Heidegger’s interpretation of the letters to the Thessalonians, he shows how the actualization of factical life is understood on the basis of the ‘parousia,’ the second coming of Christ. An essential moment of the orientation of factical life appears in the articulation of the actualization of the lived life; this is historicality. The meaning of human existence appears in existence as historicality. The way in which factical life lives time is the actualization of historicality. (shrink)

The leading question of this article is the way Gadamer interpreted Schleiermacher. Already in Truth and Method Gadamer interpreted Schleiermacher trough the eyes of Dilthey. This resulted in the idea that Schleiermacher was interested in restoring the original meaning of a text. Gadamer never abandoned this psychological interpretation of Schleiermacher. This is a result from the fact that Gadamer did not involve Schleiermacher’s dialectic in his hermeneutics. Because of this Gadamer never mentioned the kinship between Schleiermacher and his own theory (...) of interpretation. In Schleiermacher dialectic and hermeneutics are connected in the same way text constitution and text interpretation are connected. The art of speaking and of understanding are joined together in such a way that they imply each other. They are linked to each other like speaking and hearing . This means that a text is always the result of both. The other, the reader, the interpreter is already there in the constitution of the text. Schleiermacher writes, as a predecessor of Gadamer, in his Dialektik “The more a text is dialogic, the more complete it is” . In this way constitution and interpretation of a text are dependent on each other. By emphasizing the dialogical structure of our knowledge, Schleiermacher opens the way to a broader insight into the world. Through dialogue we can go beyond the limits of our selves and attain a relative universality. We learn to see things from different points of view. We can find traces of this in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, but Gadamer was not able to see that. (shrink)

In the past, biblical scholarship has neglected the hermeneutical contribution that an imaginal engagement with the text may make. The author’s aim in this article was to develop theological imagination as a hermeneutical device. This was done by briefly considering the concurrence in the hermeneutic contributions of three interpreters of biblical texts, with specific regard to their understanding of biblical imagination. These were Walter Brueggemann, Paul Ricoeur and Ignatius of Loyola. Their hermeneutical contributions concur in their understanding of a biblically (...) informed imagination, and it is specifically this aspect of the concurrence of their thought that was explored. An illustration from Proverbs 14:27, which draws on the metaphor and biblical motif of the fountain or source of life, was put forward to demonstrate how the concurrence in the contributions of these biblical interpreters may influence an imaginal engagement with the text.Keywords: Old Testament; Proverbs; Hermeneutics; The fear of the Lord/Yahweh; Walter Brueggemann; Paul Ricoeur; Ignatius of Loyola; Imaginal engagement. (shrink)

A Ricoeurian hermeneutic affords readers of the Old Testament an opportunity to access the biblical text anew as a source and norm for faith. Reese gave a convenient summarising description of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach. Ricoeur organised his considerations around four poles, namely distanciation, objectification, projecting of a world, and appropriation. These operate as the structuring considerations of a Ricoeurian hermeneutic and were illustrated with a sample proverb from the collection Proverbs 10:1–15:33.

KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) confronts us withphenomena that can intuitively be grasped as highly problematic, but arenevertheless difficult to understand and articulate. Many of theseproblems have to do with what I call the ``deindividualization of theperson'': a tendency of judging and treating persons on the basis ofgroup characteristics instead of on their own individual characteristicsand merits. This tendency will be one of the consequences of theproduction and use of group profiles with the help of KDD. Currentprivacy law and regulations, (...) as well as current ethical theoryconcerning privacy, start from too narrow a definition of ``personaldata'' to capture these problems. In this paper, I introduce the notionof ``categorical privacy'' as a starting point for a possible remedy forthe failures of the current conceptions of privacy. I discuss some waysin which the problems relating to group profiles definitely cannot besolved and I suggest a possible way out of these problems. Finally, Isuggest that it may take us a step forward if we would begin to questionthe predominance of privacy norms in the social debate on informationtechnologies and if we would be prepared to introduce normativeprinciples other than privacy rules for the assessment of newinformation technologies. If we do not succeed in articulating theproblems relating to KDD clearly, one day we may find ourselves in asituation where KDD appears to have undermined the methodic andnormative individualism which pervades the mainstream of morality andmoral theory. (shrink)

Gezeigt wird wie Heideggers Denken des Seins interpretiert werden kann als sein Denken des Verlangens. Es wird darauf hingewiesen dass beim frühen Heidegger Begriffe wie „ὂρµξις“ und „Wille“ anwesend sind, und bestimmt werden als Bewegung der Transzendenz im Entwurf auf Möglichkeit als Möglichkeit. Auch wird gezeigt dass Begriffe wie „das Ungenügende“ und „der Überfluss“ im Entwurf auf Möglichkeiten eine Bedeutung haben. Im eigentlichen Entwurf auf Möglichkeit ist der Überfluss an Möglichkeiten unüberholbar. Dagegen ist die Neugier eine Bewegung die das Mögliche (...) nicht sein lässt‚ sondern das Mögliche nur noch als Wirklichkeit begehrt. Beim späteren Heidegger wird das Sein verstanden als Mögen. Dieses Mögen wird ausgelegt als Verlangen weil das Mögen enerseits eine Zuneigung ist und andererseits das Austragen der Differenz ist. Gezeigt wird wie beim späteren Heidegger der eigentliche Entwurf auf Möglichkeit substantiviert wird als Mögen des Seins. Um diese Zuneigung zu dem Sein anzudeuten braucht Heidegger Begriffe wie „Lange-Zeit“‚ „Langen“‚ „Langmut“‚ und „Langeweile“. Diese Wörter sind verwandt mit dem Wort „Verlangen“ das ursprünglich „differre“ bedeutet. (shrink)

Recently, the outsourcing of Information Technology activities to offshore locations has been gaining significant momentum, with some associated backlash by the workforce in the United States. Based on their 2005 survey [6], Global Insight, a private consulting firm, estimated that U.S. companies will spend about $38.2 billion in offshore IT services by 2010, compared with about $15.2 billion in 2005, primarily because the expected cost savings will grow by $11.7 billion in the same time period. Binder writing in "Foreign Affairs" (...) [2] states that offshoring expenditures will continue to increase dramatically, and the changes the offshoring phenomenon will bring will transform society. This paper focuses on the social impact of offshoring and the effects of the weighing of costs and benefits as a result of offshoring activities. (shrink)