Respecting and protecting the confidentiality of data and the privacy of individuals regarding the information that they have given as participants in a research project is a cornerstone of complying with accepted research standards. However, in longitudinal studies, establishing and maintaining privacy is often challenging because of the necessity of repeated contact with participants. A novel internet-based solution is introduced here, which maintains privacy while at the same time ensures linkage of data to individual participants in a repeated measures design. (...) With the use of the anonymous repeated measurements via email (ARME) procedure, two separate one-way communication systems are established through ad hoc email accounts and a secure study website. Strengths and limitations of the approach are discussed. (shrink)

This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline.

Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.

Rabbi Simcha Wasserman was a rosh yeshivah; kiruv pioneer; advisor; foster father; storyteller; transmitter of tradition; founder of yeshivos; hatzalah activist. This book captures him speaking with patience, simplicity, and intellect, about burning topics such as Holocaust, Kabbalah, Providence, and child-rearing. Includes a biographical sketch.

The debate over persistence is often cast as a disagreement between two rival theories—the perdurantist theory that objects persist through time by having different temporal parts at different times, and the endurantist theory that objects persist through time by being wholly present at different times. This way of framing the debate over persistence involves both an important insight and an important error. Unfortunately, the error is often embraced and the insight is often ignored. This paper aims to correct both of (...) these mistakes, and thus clarify the debate over persistence. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Proposals for allocating scarce lifesaving resources in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic have aligned in some ways and conflicted in others. This paper attempts a kind of priority setting in addressing these conflicts. In the first part, we identify points on which we do not believe that reasonable people should differ—even if they do. These are (i) the inadequacy of traditional clinical ethics to address priority-setting in a pandemic; (ii) the relevance of saving lives; (iii) the flaws of first-come, (...) first-served allocation; (iv) the relevance of post-episode survival; (v) the difference between age and other factors that affect life-expectancy; and (vi) the need to avoid quality-of-life judgments. In the second part, we lay out some positions on which reasonable people can and do differ. These include (i) conflicts between maximizing benefits and priority to the worst off; (ii) role-based priority; and (iii) whether patients’ existing lifesaving resources should be subject to redistribution. (shrink)

Priority setting in healthcare is a highly contentious area of public decision making, in which different values often support incompatible policy options and compromise can be elusive. One promising approach to resolving priority-setting conflicts divides the decision-making process into two steps. In the first, a set of eligible options is identified; in the second, one of those options is chosen by a deliberative process. This paper considers the first step, examining proposals for identifying a set of options eligible for deliberation. (...) It focuses on the approach proposed by Anders Herlitz, which limits deliberation to options that are on a par; neither better or worse than, nor strictly equal to the alternatives. Once these “maximal” options are identified, the choice among them is made though a deliberative process that acknowledges the difficult tradeoffs which must be made. While parity and kindred notions are clearly useful in resolving some priority-setting conflicts, this paper argues that the conflicts that arise in setting priorities make it as difficult to decide which options are on a par as it is to decide among those options. The paper draws on priority-setting debates that occurred during the recent pandemic to illustrate the challenges in identifying eligible options: There may be sharp disagreement about how to understand and individuate relevant values; about whether certain values are relevant in a priority-setting context; about how to establish parity between “consequential” and “deontic” options, and about whether one option remains on a par with others after it is modified in various ways. (shrink)

When a patient lacks decision-making capacity, then according to standard clinical ethics practice in the United States, the health care team should seek guidance from a surrogate decision-maker, either previously selected by the patient or appointed by the courts. If there are no surrogates willing or able to exercise substituted judgment, then the team is to choose interventions that promote a patient’s best interests. We argue that, even when there is input from a surrogate, patient preferences should be an additional (...) source of guidance for decisions about patients who lack decision-making capacity. (shrink)

In his thoughtful defence of very modest moral enhancement, David DeGrazia1 makes the following assumption: ‘Behavioural improvement is highly desirable in the interest of making the world a better place and securing better lives for human beings and other sentient beings’. Later in the paper, he gives a list of some psychological characteristics that ‘all reasonable people can agree … represent moral defects’. I think I am a reasonable person, and I agree that most if not all items on the (...) lists do represent moral defects—I certainly would regard them as such in a close family member or friend. But if I were in the business of ‘making the world a better place and securing better lives for human beings and other sentient beings’, I would hesitate to prescribe moral enhancement for everyone with these acknowledged defects. A lot of good work, from removing tumours to negotiating treaties, may be best done by people with serious moral defects.For a simple consequentialist, a moral defect is just a trait that tends to make the world a worse place. Not being a consequentialist, I think that moral defects should be identified independently of their tendency to produce worse outcomes. For this reason, I think it's necessary to qualify DeGrazia's starting assumption—I think behavioural improvement may sometimes be undesirable if our goal is to make the world a better place. My reasons will be familiar to readers of Bernard Williams.As …. (shrink)

In Midstream, photographer Richard Wasserman documents the entire length of the 156-mile Chicago River and gives readers a glimpse into a mostly hidden landscape. As the twentieth century was drawing to a close and the city's industrial manufacturing era was rapidly waning, Wasserman took note of increased efforts to clean, beautify, and conserve the river, and he felt an urgent need to preserve the memory of Chicago's brawling past. As the project progressed and the photographer found himself captivated (...) by the river's extraordinarily diverse uses and visually rich landscape, he grew determined to capture the river in its entirety, in its varying moods and seasons, and from every possible vantage point during a time of rapid transformation. Midstream is the culmination of this ten-year project, in which there was always one more location to explore and another moment to capture. The result is a remarkable record of the Chicago River, revealing the nature of the waterway as it changed throughout the seasons and in relation to the dramatic extremes of Chicago weather. Scenes that had been hidden by foliage in the summer were unveiled in the winter when the trees shed their leaves. During dry spells when the water level fell, artifacts that were usually submerged became visible and offered tantalizing hints of the past. Wasserman's experiences along the riverbanks varied by location: in forest preserves he captured images of deer, beaver, and muskrats in the midst of idyllic flora; in dense urban areas his subjects were nineteenth-century factories and warehouses, many of which have been converted to offices and apartments, standing shoulder to shoulder with gleaming new office towers and condominium buildings. With an essay by Julia S. Bachrach, Midstream will be a significant resource and a lasting documentation of the Chicago River during the first decade of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In their comprehensive article, Bayefsky and Berkman outline a framework for limiting access to certain types of fetal genetic information through professional self-regulation. Given the rap...

More than 20 years ago, the pioneering pediatric ethicist William Bartholome wrote a fiery letter to the editor of this journal because he thought a recently published statement on pediatric assent, from the Committee on Bioethics of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), showed insufficient respect for children. That AAP statement, like its 2016 update, asserts that pediatric assent should be solicited only when a child’s dissent will be honored. Bartholome objected that pediatricians should always solicit children’s assent and that (...) they should acknowledge and apologize when they treat children over their objections even when they must do so to promote children’s best interests. We think Bartholome was right. In this brief commentary, we elaborate on his perspective about the moral value of pediatric assent, and we suggest improvements to the corresponding clinical guidance. (shrink)

This volume represents the state of the art in research on the controversial Muslim legal scholar, theologian and man of letters Ibn azm of Cordoba (d. 456/1064), who is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant minds of Islamic Spain.

In this paper, I argue that the contemporary relationship between children and advertising can be seen as illustrative of Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power and docile body production. I contend that, within the context of a consumption-based economy, an individual’s prime utility is her rate of personal consumption. Therefore, the subjection of children to ubiquitous advertising can be seen as the discipline through which the utility of personal consumption is maximized.

Symbolic arithmetic is fundamental to science, technology and economics, but its acquisition by children typically requires years of effort, instruction and drill1,2. When adults perform mental arithmetic, they activate nonsymbolic, approximate number representations3,4, and their performance suffers if this nonsymbolic system is impaired5. Nonsymbolic number representations also allow adults, children, and even infants to add or subtract pairs of dot arrays and to compare the resulting sum or difference to a third array, provided that only approximate accuracy is required6–10. Here (...) we report that young children, who have mastered verbal counting and are on the threshold of arithmetic instruction, can build on their nonsymbolic number system to perform symbolic addition and subtraction11–15. Children across a broad socio-economic spectrum solved symbolic problems involving approximate addition or subtraction of large numbers, both in a laboratory test and in a school setting. Aspects of symbolic arithmetic therefore lie within the reach of children who have learned no algorithms for manipulating numerical symbols. Our findings help to delimit the sources of children’s difficulties learning symbolic arithmetic, and they suggest ways to enhance children’s engagement with formal mathematics. We presented children with approximate symbolic arithmetic problems in a format that parallels previous tests of non-symbolic arithmetic in preschool children8,9. In the first experiment, five- to six-year-old children were given problems such as ‘‘If you had twenty-four stickers and I gave you twenty-seven more, would you have more or less than thirty-five stickers?’’. Children performed well above chance (65.0%, t1952.77, P 5 0.012) without resorting to guessing or comparison strategies that could serve as alternatives to arithmetic. Children who have been taught no symbolic arithmetic therefore have some ability to perform symbolic addition problems. The children’s performance nevertheless fell short of performance on non-symbolic arithmetic tasks using equivalent addition problems with numbers presented as arrays of dots and with the addition operation conveyed by successive motions of the dots into a box (71.3% correct, F1,345 4.26, P 5 0.047)8.. (shrink)

Several hundred thousand intellectually talented 12-to 13-year-olds have been tested nationwide over the past 16 years with the mathematics and verbal sections of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Although no sex differences in verbal ability have been found, there have been consistent sex differences favoring males in mathematical reasoning ability, as measured by the mathematics section of the SAT (SAT-M). These differences are most pronounced at the highest levels of mathematical reasoning, they are stable over time, and they are observed (...) in other countries as well. The sex difference in mathematical reasoning ability can predict subsequent sex differences in achievement in mathematics and science and is therefore of practical importance. To date a primarily environmental explanation for the difference in ability has not received support from the numerous studies conducted over many years by the staff of Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) and others. We have studied some of the classical environmental hypotheses: attitudes toward mathematics, perceived usefulness of mathematics, confidence, expectations/ encouragement from parents and others, sex-typing, and differential course-taking. In addition, several physiological correlates of extremely high mathematical reasoning ability have been identified (left-handedness, allergies, myopia, and perhaps bilateral representation of cognitive functions and prenatal hormonal exposure). It is therefore proposed that the sex difference in SAT-M scores among intellectually talented students, which may be related to greater male variability, results from both environmental and biological factors. (shrink)

This is a paper about the nature of metaphysical laws and their relation to the phenomenon of vagueness. Metaphysical laws are introduced as analogous to natural laws, and metaphysical indeterminism is modeled on causal indeterminacy. This kind of indeterminacy is then put to work in developing a novel theory of vagueness and a solution to the sorites paradox.

Jon Elster reports that in 1940, and again in 1970, the U.S. draft lottery was challenged for falling short of the legally mandated ‘random selection’. On both occasions, the physical mixing of the lots appeared to be incomplete, since the birth dates were clustered in a way that would have been extremely unlikely if the lots were fully mixed. There appears to have been no suspicion on either occasion that the deficiency in the mixing was intended, known, or believed to (...) favor or disfavor any identifiable group. If the selection was non-random in the way charged, Elster asks, was it unfair? (shrink)

What is the relation between a clay statue andthe lump of clay from which it is made? According to the defender of the standardaccount, the statue and the lump are distinct,enduring objects that share the same spatiallocation whenever they both exist. Suchobjects also seem to share the samemicrophysical structure whenever they bothexist. This leads to the standard objection tothe standard account: if the statue and thelump of clay have the same microphysicalstructure whenever they both exist, how canthey differ in their (...) de re temporalproperties, de re modal properties and soon? In this paper I develop amereological answer to this question – thestatue and the lump differ with respect totheir parts and this explains theirdifference with respect to de re temporalproperties, de re modal properties andthe like. (shrink)

When it comes to the relationship between art and nature, research on Adorno’s aesthetics usually centres on his discussion of Kant and Hegel. While this reflects Adorno’s own position – his comprehension of this relationship is to a large extent developed through a critical re-reading of both the Kantian and the Hegelian position – I argue that we are able to gain important insights into Adorno’s aesthetics and the central art–nature relation by reading his ideas in the light of Schelling’s (...) conception of this relationship. The article focuses on the similarities between Schelling’s notion of nature’s productivity and Adorno’s understanding of natural beauty. It concludes with a discussion on Adorno’s re-evaluation of the reconciliatory power of the exemplary unity of the artwork in conjunction with Schelling’s comparison between artwork and organism, as well as his concept of the construction of nature. (shrink)

David Lewis famously defends a counterfactual theory of causation and a non-causal, similarity-based theory of counterfactuals. Lewis also famously defends the possibility of backward causation. I argue that this combination of views is untenable—given the possibility of backward causation, one ought to reject Lewis's theories of causation and counterfactuals.

David Lewis has long defended an analysis of counterfactuals in terms of comparative similarity of possible worlds. The purpose of this paper is to reevaluate Lewis’s response to one of the oldest and most familiar objections to this proposal, the future similarity objection.

What would be objectionable about sports doping if it were safe and legal? Some ethicists have justified their qualms about doping by invoking elusive distinctions between the natural and the artificial. But the harm in doping and other biotechnological enhancements is best understood in terms of the values of athletic competition—specifically, the spectators' identification with the performers, and the continuity and comparability of athletic achievement over time. Instead of endorsing categorical bans on specific enhancements, David Wasserman recommends caution informed (...) by a clear perception of the values at stake. (shrink)

Previous studies have found that narrative input conveyed through different media influences the structure and content of children’s narrative retellings. Visual, televised narratives appear to elicit richer and more detailed narratives than traditional, orally transmitted storybook media. To extend this prior work and drawing from research on narrative elaboration, the current study’s main goal was to identify the core plot component differences (the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a story) between children’s retellings of televised versus traditional storybook (...) narratives. However, because children also differ individually in their IQ, we further incorporated this variable into our analysis of children’s narrative retellings. For our purpose, a novel coding schema was developed, following and extending the existing narrative elaboration approaches. Participants were 46 typically developing children aged 4–5 years from Germany. The current study incorporated two narrative input conditions to which children were randomly assigned: in the video condition, children watched a non-verbal, visually conveyed, televised story from a DVD; and in the book condition, children read the story with an adult and experienced an orally conveyed version in the form of a book with minimal accompanying pictures. In both conditions, the same story was conveyed. After including IQ as a covariate in our analyses, results show that the children from the video condition gave significantly more elaborated retellings, particularly across the who, what, and where (sub-)components. Differences between the conditions in the component when, how and why did not reach statistical significance. Our findings indicate that different media types entail differential cognitive processing demands of a story, resulting in type-specific memories and narratives. The effect of different medial conditions was significant and persisted when individual differences in cognitive development were considered. Consequences for children’s development, education, and interaction with and within today’s digital world are discussed. (shrink)

Noninvasive, prenatal whole genome sequencing may be a technological reality in the near future, making available a vast array of genetic information early in pregnancy at no risk to the fetus or mother. Many worry that the timing, safety, and ease of the test will lead to informational overload and reproductive consumerism. The prevailing response among commentators has been to restrict conditions eligible for testing based on medical severity, which imposes disputed value judgments and devalues those living with eligible conditions. (...) To avoid these difficulties, we propose an unrestricted testing policy, under which prospective parents could obtain information on any variant of known significance after a careful informed consent process that uses an interactive decision aid to deliver a mandatory presentation on the purposes, techniques, and limitations of genomic testing, as well as optional resources for reflection and consultation. This process would encourage thoughtful, informed deliberation... (shrink)

We agree with Emily Walsh (2020) that the current preferences of patients with dementia should sometimes supersede those patients’ advance directives. We also agree that consensus clinical ethics guidance does a poor job of explaining the moral value of such patients’ preferences. Furthermore, Walsh correctly notes that clinicians are often averse to treating patients with dementia over their objections, and that this aversion reflects clinical wisdom that can inform revisions to clinical ethics guidance. But Walsh’s account of the moral value (...) of the preferences of patients with dementia suffers from three major problems: (1) it does not engage the actual practices of clinical ethics; (2) it provides an inadequate account of why these patients’ preferences matter; and (3) it offers a poor explanation of clinicians’ intuitions in these cases. Her arguments engage a philosophical debate that is largely irrelevant to clinical practice and she therefore leaves pressing real-world clinical ethics questions unaddressed. After underscoring some of Walsh’s main points, we will discuss each of these shortcomings. (shrink)

During evaluative conditioning, a neutral conditional stimulus becomes pleasant or unpleasant after pairings with a positive/negative unconditional stimulus. Measures of US expectancy are...

This study aims to analyze what drives and prevents the purchasing of eco-friendly products across different consumer groups and develops a conceptual model embracing the positive altruistic, positive ego-centric, and negative ego-centric antecedents of eco-friendly product purchase intention and behavior. We empirically validate the conceptual model for green and non-green consumers. Data are analyzed using structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis of the two groups. The results confirm the relevance of the determining factors in the model and show significant differences (...) in eco-friendly product purchasing patterns between green and non-green consumers. Altruistic motives are more important for green than for non-green consumers. Negative ego-centric motives affect the purchase intentions of non-green consumers more than the intentions of green consumers, whereas the impact of negative motives on behavior is stronger for green than for non-green consumers. The first contribution of this paper is the development and testing of a parsimonious model of eco-friendly products purchasing that embraces both positive and negative antecedents, which have been theoretically suggested in the past but have rarely been empirically tested together. The second contribution of this study is that it develops insight into the specific antecedents of eco-friendly products purchasing for green and non-green consumers to assess potential similarities and differences in eco-friendly products purchasing process, the hypothesized antecedents, their impact on eco-friendly products purchase intention and behavior, and the intention–behavior relation. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 36, Issue 1, pp 28 - 39 This article reviews Andrew Fitzmaurice’s recent book _Sovereignty, Property and Empire 1500–1800_ with a critical examination of the author’s analysis of Hugo Grotius. Unlike other works of intellectual history that focus on the relationship between empire and political theory, this book offers a refreshing account of how Western political thought also provided a critique of empire. Using the law of occupation to explain the origin of property and political society, Fitzmaurice (...) demonstrates how ‘occupation’ was used to both justify and criticise extra-European imperial expansion. His analysis of Grotius is centred on ‘occupation’, explaining that even though Grotius’s political thought supports an imperialistic thesis, there is also evidence of anti-imperialist sentiments running through his works. I argue, however, that whilst Fitzmaurice provide a sound and interesting account of the role occupation plays in explaining Grotius’s two different accounts of property in _De Indis_ and _De jure belli ac pacis_, he disregards the broader philosophical implications this has for Grotius’s theory of property. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the organization of assistance in multilingual interaction in Swedish residential care. The data that form the basis for the study cover care encounters involving three residents with a language background other than Swedish, totalling 13 hours and 14 minutes of video documentation. The empirical data consists of a collection of 134 instances where residents seek assistance with the realization of a practical action. For this article, three examples that involve the manipulation of an object have (...) been selected for analysis. We use the concept of ‘recruitment’ to encompass the various methods by which assistance is sought in the care encounter. In the first example, the need for assistance concerns the transfer of an object that is recognizable and physically available for both participants. This, in combination with the resident’s gestural work that pinpoints the description of the action, facilitates its realization. In the second and third examples, the realization of the action becomes more difficult because the object involved is not recognizable for the caregiver. The article highlights the collaborative ways in which residents manage to support their talk through bodily practices, and the strong and empathetic engagement with which caregivers become involved in interpreting the meaning of these practices. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for care provision in multilingual circumstances. (shrink)

Questa ricerca, attraverso alcune letture incrociate di Michel Foucault e di Claude Lévi-Strauss, mette in luce l’attualità di due grandi pensatori che pongono al centro delle loro teorie il tema della distanza, dell’altro da sé e del ritorno a sé per comprendere il ruolo del soggetto nella civiltà occidentale. Al di là delle rilevanti differenze che li contraddistinguono, Foucault e Lévi-Strauss percorrono due cammini teorici volti a decostruire il rapporto tra verità e soggetto nella civiltà occidentale adottando una prospettiva della (...) distanza e dell’allontanamento da sé, quali tecniche per comprendere se stessi. Da una parte il concetto foucaultiano di eterotopia, in quanto «spazio assolutamente altro», permette di comprendere i meccanismi attraverso i quali ci si proietta in un altrove senza luogo preciso per localizzare se stessi. Il campo dell’etnologia, sarà dunque letto attraverso la lente foucaultiana, quale «eterotopologia», o scienza eterotopica, per eccellenza. Dall’altra, questo concetto sarà analizzato alla luce di quello che Lévi-Strauss ha definito nel saggio sui Tre umanesimi una «tecnica dello straniamento», ovvero un metodo che permette di pensare se stessi grazie al confronto con l’Altro, con culture di altri luoghi ed altri tempi: per conoscere il soggetto che è l’uomo, non si può non prescindere da un lavoro di continui raffronti e paragoni tra diverse società nel tempo e nello spazio. (shrink)