Transhumanism is a challenging movement that invites us to rethink what defines humanity, including what we value and regret the most about our existence. Vulnerability is a key concept that require thorough philosophical scrutiny concerning transhumanist proposals. Vulnerability can refer to a universal condition of human life or, rather, to the specific exposure to certain harms due to particular situations. Even if we are all vulnerable in the first sense, there are also different sources and levels of vulnerability depending on (...) concrete social circumstances. Recently, Michael Hauskeller argued about a fundamental incompatibility between transhumanism and vulnerability. He understands vulnerability as an existential category, linked to woundability and mortality. This idea is akin to ontological vulnerability, but it does not notice some important features of social vulnerability. On the other side, transhumanism is a complex and non-homogeneous movement. Here we distinguish between a strong and a weak version of transhumanism. We will propose that the salience of vulnerability is only diminished in the radical one, while a moderate version can reconcile vulnerability with human enhancement. Thus, vulnerability, a concept that has recently gained much importance as an anthropological category in contemporary ethics, is not necessarily at odds with any transhumanist project. (shrink)

The commons and care are two topics that have gained presence in public and political discourses in recent years and seem to have a special affinity to one another. In this article, I propose that there are two different approaches to the relationship between the commons and care, arguing in favor of one of them: care in common or community care. In this way, I claim that care can be defined as what is done to maintain certain commons, forging the (...) bonds that shape communities according to ethical standards. These standards can be established in accordance with the ethics of care and in continuity with the political tradition of the commons. (shrink)

Sorority has gained relevance in latest feminist discourses, in Spain and in the wide world. While in Spain its use is recent, other historical periods of feminism have already produced important reflections on the subject that can illuminate the contemporary analysis. The idea of sorority that is currently used can be examined through several components: the trust in the testimonies of all women, the appeal to emotionality, to care and to shared vulnerability, and the appreciation of the unity between women (...) over and above their differences. The political strength of the women's alliance, however, is not without drawbacks. All these aspects deserve a careful consideration in order to construct a politically fruitful concept of sorority. (shrink)

In this article, I propose an ethical analysis of assistive domestic robots for older users. In doing so, I illustrate my inquiry with the example of ROB-IN assistive robot. ROB-IN is a Spanish project which is devoted to developing a robot that will perform in the private home of nondependent, aged users. It is aimed to help people in their daily activities and contribute to appropriate health monitoring. One of their potentially most useful features is related to data gathering and (...) sharing. For the inquiry on the ethical underpinnings of this case, I develop a framework for domestic assistive robots for competent older adults drawn on the ethics of care. I assess that this type of robots could be ethically appraised attending to their impact on the well-being and autonomy of users. I approach autonomy from a relational perspective, and I delve into the relationship between autonomy and well-being through the concept of paternalism. I argue that this type of assistive robots should never act paternalistically. Given ROB-IN great implications regarding privacy, I subsequently explore the ways in which the privacy of users should be respected in their interaction with assistive robots, focusing on the relation with autonomy and well-being. Lastly, I highlight the need for avoiding ageism. This investigation focuses on aged users, but it is suggested that the situation of caregivers should be also the object of further investigations. (shrink)

Care ethics has been advanced as a suitable framework for evaluating the ethical significance of assistive robotics. One of the most prominent care ethical contributions to the ethical assessment of assistive robots comes through the work of Aimee Van Wynsberghe, who has developed the Care-Centred Value-Sensitive Design framework (CCVSD) in order to incorporate care values into the design of assistive robots. Building upon the care ethics work of Joan Tronto, CCVSD has been able to highlight a number of ways in (...) which care practices can undergo significant ethical transformations upon the introduction of assistive robots. In this paper, we too build upon the work of Tronto in an effort to enrich the CCVSD framework. Combining insights from Tronto’s work with the sociological concept of _emotional labor_, we argue that CCVSD remains underdeveloped with respect to the impact robots may have on the emotional labor required by paid care workers. Emotional labor consists of the managing of emotions and of emotional bonding, both of which signify a demanding yet potentially fulfilling dimension of paid care work. Because of the conditions in which care labor is performed nowadays, emotional labor is also susceptible to exploitation. While CCVSD can acknowledge some manifestations of unrecognized emotional labor in care delivery, it remains limited in capturing the structural conditions that fuel this vulnerability to exploitation. We propose that the idea of _privileged irresponsibility,_ coined by Tronto, helps to understand how the exploitation of emotional labor can be prone to happen in roboticized care practices. (shrink)

Transparency is a quality of corporate social responsibility communication that enhances the relationship between the investors and the company. The objective of this paper is to analyze if the transparency of the sustainability reports is affected by the relationship of companies in different industries with their stakeholders. If this were the case, it would indicate that the pressure of significant stakeholders determines the required level of transparency of the reports. We find that the pressure of some groups of stakeholders improves (...) the quality of transparency of the reports. We extend previous research by studying the effect of stakeholder group pressure on transparency when reporting sustainability. Our results show that transparency is affected by ownership, along with size and global region. (shrink)

Blanca Rodríguez López, Nuria Sánchez Madrid and Adriana Zaharijević, 2021, Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion. Historical and Critical Essays, Palgrave Macmillan, 232 pp.

El objetivo de esta investigación es poner de manifiesto la importancia de las imágenes de vestir marianas y, también, las joyas y accesorios que presentan. Se plantearán las bases y claves de un lenguaje no verbal que actúa como testimonio de la devoción además de las relaciones sociales y económicas del momento que las marcan. Merced a los casos analizados, se comprobará cómo, con gran frecuencia, se une a la piedad popular de pueblos y de las culturas de determinados acontecimientos (...) de la zona. Los resultados demostrarán la importancia dada y valores atribuidos a este tipo de iconografía. (shrink)

Research on salesperson creativity remains as one of the most under-researched topics in the sales literature despite the evidence that encouraging creativity in the sales domain is a source of competitive advantage. This paper aims to fill this research gap by exploring the influence of perceived ethical climate on salesperson creative performance, paying special attention to the role that emotions play in this process. Data provided by 176 supervisor–salesperson dyads confirm that the trust/responsibility dimension of an ethical climate is positively (...) related to salesperson creative selling by increasing salespeople's organizational pride. Similarly, the perception of unethical selling practices negatively affects salesperson organizational pride, reducing the expression of creative behaviors. Moreover, the negative effect of unethical selling practices on creative performance is stronger (more negative) when salespeople's identification with an organization increases. Managerial implications and future research directions are also addressed. (shrink)

With size, voting discipline, and technical resources superior to those of most Brazilian parties, in the last two decades, the support of the Agrarian Caucus has become crucial for the realization of presidents’ legislative agenda. In a country where 87 percent of the population is urban, how have representatives of the agrarian elites become key players in bargaining on nonagrarian issues? This article argues that Brazilian agrarian elites have been so successful because they have devised an electoral strategy that maximizes (...) their leverage in a fragmented party system with ideologically weak right-wing parties. Empirically, I show how agrarian elites in Brazil finance legislative campaigns, mobilize voters, and subsidize the legislative work of politicians from their ranks, independently of their partisan affiliation. Theoretically, I discuss the advantages of a candidate-centered electoral strategy: self-representation and multipartisanship. While self-representation has granted agrarian elites direct access to agenda-setting positions within Congress, having members in many parties has increased the number of agenda-setting positions they can control and guaranteed their presence in the legislative coalition of right- and left-wing presidents alike. (shrink)

This article analyses the determinants associated with the use of the Integrated Report as a corporate reporting model for sustainability information. IRs provide information regarding the use and interdependence of different company resources. The previous literature has identified determinants behind the presentation of IRs at the country level as well as at the company level. Our work contributes to the literature by using a novel statistical approach that addresses the likelihood of the non-independence of data: companies in the same country (...) are more similar to one another than are companies from different countries. Our results confirm significant inter-country variance, which may be partially explained by the existence of specific regulations and the individualism vs. collectivism dimension. Although we confirm the effect of company-level determinants, our results do not support the role of specific variables tested as determinants. (shrink)

Altruism and solidarity are concepts that are closely related to organ donation for transplantation. On the one hand, they are typically used for encouraging people to donate. On the other hand, they also underpin the regulations in force in each country to different extents. They are often used indistinctly and equivocally, despite the different ethical implications of each concept. This paper aims to clarify to what extent we can speak of altruism and solidarity in the predominant models of organ donation. (...) It also raises the ethical question of whether these categories are adequate as a basis for such models, bearing in mind that organs are a scarce resource and that a shortage of them may mean that fewer lives are saved or improved. (shrink)

Considering public moral attitudes is a hallmark of the anticipatory governance of emerging biotechnologies, such as heritable human genome editing. However, such anticipatory governance often overlooks that future morality is open to change and that future generations may perform different moral assessments on the very biotechnologies we are trying to govern in the present. In this article, we identify an ’anticipatory gap’ that has not been sufficiently addressed in the discussion on the public governance of heritable genome editing, namely, uncertainty (...) about the moral visions of future generations about the emerging applications that we are currently attempting to govern now. This paper motivates the relevance of this anticipatory gap, identifying the challenges it generates and offering various recommendations so that moral uncertainty does not lead to governance paralysis with regard to human germline genome editing. (shrink)

The concept of dignity is proliferating in ethical, legal, and policy discussions of AI, yet dignity is an elusive term with multiple philosophical interpretations. The authors argue that the unspecific and uncritical employment of the notion of dignity can be counterproductive for AI ethics.

Environmental protection presents a challenge for commodity-producing democracies. To account for the enforcement of environmental laws in decentralized systems, this article proposes a multilevel approach that highlights the importance of national laws and subnational implementation rules to the politics of enforcement. This approach contrasts with prominent scholarship that focuses on sanctions and the electoral incentives and bureaucratic resources of enforcers. The advantages of the multilevel approach are demonstrated by the enforcement of the native forest protection regime in the Argentine Chaco (...) Forest, which is shaped not only by whether sanctions on illegal deforestation are applied by subnational authorities but also by the design of both the national law and subnational regulations. The article employs quantitative data and case studies based on extensive fieldwork to show how affected subnational organized interests influenced the design of the NFPR and the provincial regulations that weaken or strengthen enforcement. (shrink)

La educación patrimonial crítica es un enfoque didáctico que facilita al alumnado reconsiderar su relación con el entorno. Busca promover el sentido de pertenencia, la empatía y el respeto por la diversidad de perspectivas, empoderando a los estudiantes como agentes de cambio social, a través del ejercicio de la ciudadanía democrática. De este modo, favorece el cuestionamiento de narrativas dominantes y la recuperación de la memoria democrática, dándole voz a todas aquellas historias ocultas y sometidas al olvido. Con el presente (...) estudio se pretende contribuir a la reparación de pasados difíciles mediante una situación de aprendizaje que emplea métodos activos de enseñanza y se lleva a cabo en las aulas de Bachillerato de un centro educativo rural, localizado en la Ribeira Sacra ourensana. Los resultados que se muestran parecen indicar que además de recuperar patrimonializar la memoria democrática de la zona, se promovió el diálogo intergeneracional y se favoreció el desarrolló de pensamiento crítico en el alumnado. (shrink)

Disability has been traditionally understood as a medical condition. However, people with disabilities have claimed in recent decades for a dephatologized social model of disability—i.e. the functi...

Rationale, aims and objectives Given the increasing prevalence of cataract and demand for cataract extraction surgery, patients must often wait to undergo this procedure. We validated a previously developed priority scoring system in terms of clinical variables, pre-intervention health status, appropriateness of surgery and gain in visual acuity (VA) and health-related quality of life (HRQoL).Methods Explicit prioritization criteria for cataract extraction created by a variation of the Research and Development (RAND) and University of California Los Angeles appropriateness methodology were retrospectively (...) applied to a prospective cohort of 5257 patients on waiting lists to undergo cataract by phacoemulsification at 17 hospitals in Spain. Demographic data, clinical data and data related to surgical technique were collected by trained ophthalmologists. Patients were evaluated by their ophthalmologist before the intervention and 6 weeks afterward. They also completed, by mail, the Visual Function Index (VF-14) before the intervention and 3 months afterward.Results High-priority patients experienced greater improvement in VA and HRQoL than those classified as intermediate or low-priority (P < 0.0001), even after adjusting by VA and the VF-14 score at baseline. The time to intervention was the same for high-priority patients as it was for intermediate and low-priority patients.Conclusions The priority score we developed identified patients most likely to experience the greatest improvements from cataract extraction. Use of this tool could provide a fairer and more rational way to prioritize patients for cataract extraction. (shrink)

The origin of chordates and the consequent genesis of vertebrates were major events in natural history. The amphioxus (lancelet) is now recognised as the closest extant relative to the stem chordate and is the only living invertebrate that retains a vertebrate‐like development and body plan through its lifespan, despite more than 500 million years of independent evolution from the stem vertebrate. The inspiring data coming from its recently sequenced genome confirms that amphioxus has a prototypical chordate genome with respect to (...) gene content and structure, and even chromosomal organisation. Pushed by joint efforts of amphioxus researchers, amphioxus is now entering a new era, namely its maturation as a laboratory model, through the availability of a large amount of molecular data and the advent of experimental manipulation of the embryo. These two facts may well serve to illuminate the hidden secrets of the genetic changes that generated, among other vertebrates, ourselves. (shrink)

The growing body of research on interdisciplinarity has encouraged a more in depth analysis of the relations that hold among academic disciplines. In particular, the incursion of one scientific discipline into another discipline’s traditional domain, also known as scientific imperialism, has been a matter of increasing debate. Following this trend, Scientific Imperialism aims to bring together philosophers of science and historians of science interested in the topic of scientific imperialism and, in particular, interested in the conceptual clarification, empirical identification, and (...) normative assessment of the idea of scientific imperialism. Thus, this innovative volume has two main goals. Indeed, the authors first seek to understand interdisciplinary relations emerging from the incursion of one scientific discipline into one or more other disciplines, such as in cases in which the conventions and procedures of one discipline or field are imposed on other fields; or more weakly when a scientific discipline seeks to explain phenomena that are traditionally considered proper of another discipline’s domain. Secondly, the authors explore ways of distinguishing imperialistic from non-imperialistic interactions between disciplines and research fields. (shrink)

El docente de Música en secundaria asume un itinerario formativo que privilegia el desarrollo de capacidades técnico-musicales sobre lo didáctico-pedagógico. Este estudio analiza la percepción del profesorado en Galicia en lo que respecta en su capacitación para la creación musical, respecto al resto de competencias musicales, transversales y pedagógicas. Mediante un estudio exploratorio a través de cuestionario, se concluye que la creación es concebida como uno de los aspectos menos prioritarios, así como uno de los menos movilizados en la práctica. (...) Ello posibilita el diseño de nuevas líneas investigativas y formativas en el ámbito de la formación del profesorado. (shrink)

Este artículo trata de inventariar y enjuiciar las críticas que desde la filosofía de la ciencia se han realizado al psicoanálisis freudiano desde hace 30 años atrás y que hasta la fecha aún gozan de buena salud entre algunos profesores de metodología de la ciencia y algunos psicólogos que quier..

O trabalho se ocupa da infância como expressão estética em dois filmes do alemão Wim Wenders, Alice nas cidades e Lisbon Story. Para isso procura construir um jogo entre ambos, em que cada uma das obras aparece simultaneamente como testemunho histórico e síntese de questões que dizem respeito à existência e às próprias possibilidades do cinema. Comparecem, portanto, o amor, a amizade, a memória, a reelaboração do passado, as cidades, o progresso e a regressão, bem como as técnicas de captação (...) e produção de imagens e sons, os destinos e a memória do cinema como inconsciente onírico de uma época. O apoio se encontra principalmente em Walter Benjamin, nem tanto em seus comentários sobre cinema, mas muito mais no que se refere ao que escreveu sobre a infância na cidade, demarcando, assim, como Wenders o fará, um olhar infantil, oblíquo em relação ao seu destino, mas não infantilizado, sobre as coisas do mundo. (shrink)

El concepto de comunidad, acuñado en el siglo XIX por Ferdinand Tönnies, sigue constituyendo el sustrato del pensamiento de la vida cotidiana, pero también de formulaciones teóricas y políticas. En particular, está detrás de la idea de mediación comunitaria, con la que nos proponemos nuevas utopías de autogestión de los conflictos. Sin embargo, el marco social en el que se creó el concepto ha cambiado profundamente, sobre todo a partir de los últimos 40 años al calor de la llamada “globalización”. (...) El artículo explora estos cambios, y sugiere hacia donde pueden abrirse las nuevas interpretaciones, mostrando además cómo estos afectarían a la mediación comunitaria. (shrink)

El presente trabajo hace un análisis de los distintos usos que ha adoptado la memoria histórica en el Estado español desde la posguerra hasta la actualidad, diferenciando entre lo que denomina memoria como valor de cambio, propia del franquismo, y memoria como valor de uso, propia de la época que empieza desde finales de 1990 inicios de 2000, y cuyo texto de referencia es la vigente Ley 52/2007, de 26 de diciembre, de Memoria Histórica. El artículo hace un análisis crítico (...) del concepto de memoria que se desprende de la citada Ley y reivindica la necesidad de activar “otra” memoria útil para hacer frente a las actuales políticas de desmantelamiento de la democracia y los derechos. (shrink)

When it comes to communication of pain, Anna Wierzbicka (2012) takes issue with the scientific definition of pain and turns to natural semantic metalanguage (NSM). However, “pain” is not one of the 64 semantic primes in NSM, and therefore Wierzbicka suggests words such as “body,” “bad,” and “don’t want.” This blurs the boundaries between pain and other aversive sensations and it also challenges certain clinical features of the pain experience.

En los tiempos que corren parece ser que se ha ido gestando un nuevo tipo de sociedad en la que el consumismo es el núcleo moral de la vida. Todo hoy está sometido a la lógica de un mercado que tiene como nota preponderante la seducción; de ahí que lo lúdico y lo estético pretendan operar hoy en día como ejes integradores de la cultura. Embellecerse exteriormente y divertirse han devenido deberes, tanto que la gente suele sentirse avergonzada de trabajar (...) mucho y no gozar más, de no disponer de más tiempo libre para disfrutar más, con lo cual resulta evidente que seguimos viviendo bajo el signo de la desmesura: en la Modernidad vivimos para trabajar, hoy trabajamos para consumir. (shrink)