Opponents of cosmopolitanism often dismiss the position on the grounds that cosmopolitan proposals are completely unrealistic and that they fly in the face of our human nature. We have deep psychological needs that are satisfied by national identification and so all cosmopolitan projects are doomed, or so it is argued. In this essay we examine the psychological grounds claimed to support the importance of nationalism to our wellbeing. We argue that the alleged human needs that nationalism is said to satisfy (...) are: (i) either more complex than initially one might think or (ii) do not necessarily provide very strong grounds for the theses advocated by nationalists or (iii) can be well met in alternate ways than through national identification. Moreover, commitment to cosmopolitanism is not antithetical to meeting these needs: rather, more cosmopolitan worldviews can do quite well in meeting the needs of interest. Moreover, we argue that since nationalism is a fluid and socially constructed phenomenon, quite open to the influence of other factors, the current evidence suggests that central aspects of cosmopolitanism are quite feasible and realistic. (shrink)

Neither of the two central moral and political obstacles to human embryonic stem cell research survives critical scrutinyThis paper argues that neither of the two central moral and political obstacles to human embryonic stem cell research survives critical scrutiny: first, that derivation of HESCs requires the destruction of human embryos which are full human persons or are at least deserving of respect incompatible with their destruction; second, that creation of HESCs using somatic cell nuclear transfer or cloning is immoral. First, (...) different sources of HESCs are distinguished and the distinct moral objections that might apply to each. Second, it is argued that none of the properties plausibly conferring personhood on an entity is possessed by human embryos, and then shown how destruction of an embryo for research with the prospect of important medical benefits can be compatible with respecting it. Third, it is shown that the main objection to human cloning is only to reproductive cloning and that the objection to creating human beings with the intention of destroying them does not apply to SCNT. Finally, the concern that acquiring human eggs for SCNT would involve exploiting women donors is addressed, and it is shown how that can be avoided.Human embryonic stem cell research has become one of the more politically and morally controversial issues of our time. There is wide variability in what HESC research, if any, is permitted in countries around the world. Within the United States HESC research was a major issue in the last presidential election and some states, such as California, are devoting substantial public monies to fund this research while others prohibit it. In this paper I will explore some of the main obstacles to reaching consensus on this issue in the hope of at least narrowing the disagreement …. (shrink)

Alzheimer's disease is characterized by amyloid-beta peptide -loaded plaques in the brain. Abeta is a cleavage fragment of amyloid-beta protein precursor and over production of APP may lead to amyloidogenesis. The regulatory region of the APP gene contains consensus sites recognized by the transcription factor, specificity protein 1 , which has been shown to be required for the regulation of APP and Abeta. To understand the role of SP1 in APP biogenesis, herein we have characterized the relative distribution and localization (...) of SP1, APP, and Abeta in various brain regions of rodent and primate models using immunohistochemistry. We observed that overall distribution and cellular localization of SP1, APP, and Abeta are similar and neuronal in origin. Their distribution is abundant in various layers of neocortex, but restricted to the Purkinje cell layer of the cerebellum, and the pyramidal cell layer of hippocampus. These findings suggest that overproduction of Abeta in vivo may be associated with transcriptional pathways involving SP1 and the APP gene. (shrink)

In my article above, I cite an earlier article by Frances Kamm, ‘Deciding Whom to Help, Health-Adjusted Life Years, and Disabilities’, in Public Health, Ethics, and Equity, eds. S. Anand, F. Peters, and A. Sen circulated as a working paper of the Center for Population Studies, Harvard University). However, I failed to correctly identify her position on one view that she took up in that article, and also failed to cite a proposal she developed in that article similar to one (...) I took up in my paper. (shrink)

In spite of the wide variety of approaches to ethics training it is still debatable which approach has the highest potential to enhance professionals’ integrity. The current effort assesses a novel curriculum that focuses on metacognitive reasoning strategies researchers use when making sense of day-to-day professional practices that have ethical implications. The evaluated trainings effectiveness was assessed by examining five key sensemaking processes, such as framing, emotion regulation, forecasting, self-reflection, and information integration that experts and novices apply in ethical decision-making. (...) Mental models of trained and untrained graduate students, as well as faculty, working in the field of physical sciences were compared using a think-aloud protocol 6 months following the ethics training. Evaluation and comparison of the mental models of participants provided further validation evidence for sensemaking training. Specifically, it was found that trained students applied metacognitive reasoning strategies learned during training in their ethical decision-making that resulted in complex mental models focused on the objective assessment of the situation. Mental models of faculty and untrained students were externally-driven with a heavy focus on autobiographical processes. The study shows that sensemaking training has a potential to induce shifts in researchers’ mental models by making them more cognitively complex via the use of metacognitive reasoning strategies. Furthermore, field experts may benefit from sensemaking training to improve their ethical decision-making framework in highly complex, novel, and ambiguous situations. (shrink)

There are substantial data establishing that surrogates are often mistaken in predicting what treatments incompetent patients would have wanted and that supplements such as advance directives have not resulted in significant improvements. Rid and Wendler’s Patient Preference Predictor (PPP) proposal will attempt to gather data about what similar patients would prefer in a variety of treatment choices. It accepts the usual goal of patient autonomy and the Substituted Judgment principle for surrogate decisions. I provide reasons for questioning sole reliance on (...) autonomy when surrogates, not patients, are deciding and for giving some independent weight to patient well-being. Moreover, that family members, typical surrogates, will know best what the patient if incompetent would have wanted is not the only reason why they are chosen. The more pressing problem is that the PPP would fail to remove the more serious mistakes that empirical psychology over the last few decades has shown to infect such decision making. (shrink)

The ethical implications of the growth of for-profit health care institutions are complex. Two major moral criticisms of for-profit medicine are analyzed. The first claim is that for-profit health care institutions fail to fulfill their obligations to do their fair share in providing health care to the poor and so exacerbate the problem of access to health care. The second claim is that profit seeking in medicine will damage the physician-patient relationship, creating conflicts of interest that will diminish the quality (...) of care and erode patients' trust in their physicians and the public's trust in the medical profession. The authors conclude that while the continued expansion of for-profit health care may exacerbate in some respects problems of access, trust and conflicts of interest, it is a mistake to consider these problems as unique to for-profit health care; they are problems for not for-profit health care as well. Though these issues justify continuing moral concern, they do not at this time provide decisive grounds for substantially curbing or eliminating for-profit enterprise in health care. (shrink)

Within the rough ground that is the field of education there is a complex web of ethical obligations: to prepare our students for their future work; to be ethical as educators in our conduct and teaching; to the ethical principles embedded in the contexts in which we work; and given the Southern context of this work, the ethical obligations we have to this land and its First Peoples. We put out a call to colleagues whose work has been concerned with (...) the pedagogies of professional ethics, the ethical burdens of institutional injustice, and the application of ethical theory to education’s applied fields. In the responses we received it can be seen that ethical concerns in education are broad ranging, covering terrain varying from the preparation of preservice teachers, ethics in higher education, early childhood and care, educational leadership, relational and communicative ethics. Perhaps it could also be argued that this paper demonstrates Gibbon’s observation that ‘Assumptions about the particularity of this time as new and ripe with opportunity to make a difference through philosophy of education are not new and there’s much to learn from the persistence of wanting to imagine that they are’. However, while the field of ethics is perennially concerned with human relations and pedagogical interventions to improve these, the responses collected here show that educational ethics is far from static. Educational ethics is a field that continues to develop in response to changing contexts. (shrink)

When firms face crisis, the instant and open channels of social media communication create a double-edged sword. While corporations can more quickly communicate with stakeholders, any missteps will have drastic and nearly immediate repercussions. What are the relationships among social media, subjective norms, attitudes, and intentions during corporate crisis? We explore this phenomenon via a study of a crisis faced by Lowe’s, an international home improvement store, and how current and potential customers reacted. By utilizing a structural equations model to (...) examine an integrated model of multiple constructs, we find that Facebook usage is associated with behavioral intent, perceptions of ethicality, and attitudes toward the organization. Counter intuitively, we find that an increase in participant Facebook usage is negatively related to felt subjective norms. Our findings indicate that beyond the traditional relationships examined by the Theory of Reasoned Action (e.g., norms, attitudes, and behavioral intent), that social media and subjective norms have a strong relationship with general attitudes and ethical attitudes toward an organization. (shrink)

Transplantation of vital organs has been premised ethically and legally on "the dead donor rule" (DDR)—the requirement that donors are determined to be dead before these organs are procured. Nevertheless, scholars have argued cogently that donors of vital organs, including those diagnosed as "brain dead" and those declared dead according to cardiopulmonary criteria, are not in fact dead at the time that vital organs are being procured. In this article, we challenge the normative rationale for the DDR by rejecting the (...) underlying premise that it is necessarily wrong for physicians to cause the death of patients and the claim that abandoning this rule would exploit vulnerable patients. We contend that it is ethical to procure vital organs from living patients sustained on life support prior to treatment withdrawal, provided that there is valid consent for both withdrawing treatment and organ donation. However, the conservatism of medical ethics and practical concerns make it doubtful that the DDR will be abandoned in the near future. This leaves the current practice of organ transplantation based on the "moral fiction" that donors are dead when vital organs are procured. (shrink)

Conventional medical ethics and the law draw a bright line distinguishing the permitted practice of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from the forbidden practice of active euthanasia by means of a lethal injection. When clinicians justifiably withdraw life-sustaining treatment, they allow patients to die but do not cause, intend, or have moral responsibility for, the patient's death. In contrast, physicians unjustifiably kill patients whenever they intentionally administer a lethal dose of medication. We argue that the differential moral assessment of these two practices (...) is based on a series of moral fictions – motivated false beliefs that erroneously characterize withdrawing life-sustaining treatment in order to bring accepted end-of-life practices in line with the prevailing moral norm that doctors must never kill patients. When these moral fictions are exposed, it becomes apparent that conventional medical ethics relating to end-of-life decisions is radically mistaken. (shrink)

Among the extensive correspondence of Timothy I, Catholicos of the Church of the East, are two letters which refer to his collobaration in a translation of Aristotle's Topics into Syriac and Arabic, commissioned by the Caliph al-Mahdī. An annotated English translation of both letters is provided. Dans la volumineuse correspondance de Timothée I, Catholicos de l'Église orientale, deux lettres renvoient à sa collaboration à la traduction des Topiques d'Aristote en syriaque et en arabe, commandée par le Calife al-Mahdī. On trouvera (...) ici la traduction annotée en anglais de ces deux lettres. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

The sporadic nature of Alzheimer's disease argues for an environmental link that may drive AD pathogenesis; however, the triggering factors and the period of their action are unknown. Recent studies in rodents have shown that exposure to lead during brain development predetermined the expression and regulation of the amyloid precursor protein and its amyloidogenic beta-amyloid product in old age. Here, we report that the expression of AD-related genes [APP, BACE1 ] as well as their transcriptional regulator were elevated in aged (...) monkeys exposed to Pb as infants. Furthermore, developmental exposure to Pb altered the levels, characteristics, and intracellular distribution of Abeta staining and amyloid plaques in the frontal association cortex. These latent effects were accompanied by a decrease in DNA methyltransferase activity and higher levels of oxidative damage to DNA, indicating that epigenetic imprinting in early life influenced the expression of AD-related genes and promoted DNA damage and pathogenesis. These data suggest that AD pathogenesis is influenced by early life exposures and argue for both an environmental trigger and a developmental origin of AD. (shrink)

With over 10 000 bases of DNA being sequenced around the world per minute, it is vital that ethical discussion continues to keep pace with genetic research. This contribution by four top theorists in bioethics carefully considers the implications of the many ways genetic information will influence human health and reproduction, by considering “the most basic moral principles that would guide public policy and individual choice concerning the use of genetic interventions in a just and humane society” (4–5). Proceeding with (...) the themes of rights, justice, and harm, problems addressed by the authors include: the significance of the moral difference between treating genetic disease and altering personality characteristics; whether the utilisation of prenatal interventions to avoid disability discriminates against the disabled, and who should have control …. (shrink)

Rita Nakashima Brock, Carter Heyward and Susan Thistlethwaite intend, in their respective theological projects, to create a vision of feminist eros uncomplicated by violence. They envision feminist eros as a means to bring theology back to earth and into the body, and encourage women to seek the good within themselves and their relationships with others. Brock, Heyward and Thistlethwaite resist social injustices, particularly the intertwined structures of patriarchy and multi-national capitalism. According to these feminist theologians, the (...) structures of injustice have sedimented into a seemingly intractable and unobserved geography of habits and attitudes. Brock, Heyward and Thistlethwaite want to expand theological imagination to territories that lie beyond these oppressive systems through a critical feminist perspective, and to recover possibilities inherent in a hitherto unattended and constant feature of the landscape, the connections between all that exists, inanimate, animate, animal, human. This revisioning constitutes a new and dynamic gospel of feminist eros. (shrink)

Une des difficultés de la philosophie de l’être de Thomas d’Aquin est la multiplicité des sens de la notion d’ esse dans les différents lieux du corpus. En vue de mettre de l’ordre dans le sens et l’origine des formules de Thomas, deux herméneutiques opposées se sont affrontées depuis le milieu du xx e siècle sur sa pensée authentique. Après avoir présenté les arguments des uns et des autres, on aborde la question difficile de l’articulation des aspects immanent et transcendant (...) de l’être au sein de l’entité. (shrink)

M'illumino/d'immenso - I'm lit/with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable - (...) in case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality. (shrink)

A recente obra é organizada por Élodie Boublil e Christine Daigle. Boublil é, segundo ficha técnica no final do livro, graduada na Universidade de Sorbonne (Paris I) e em L'Institut d'études politiques (Sciences-Po) de Paris. Atualmente doutora-se na Universidade McGill e leciona filosofia na Escola Internacional das Nações Unidas, em Nova Iorque. Seus estudos são mesmo em torno de Husserl, Heidegger e Nietzsche. Daigle é professora de filosofia e ocupa a cadeira de Chanceler por Excelência em Pesquisa na Brock (...) University. Seus estudos se dão mesmo em torno de Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir e Nietzsche. (shrink)

A historical perspective on the future of the car Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-3 DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9479-z Authors Peter D. Norton, Department of Science, Technology and Society, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4744, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

As a version of creationism—which claims that fictional charac- ters are created by authors who write characters into existence by penning their names in their works—abstract creationism claims that fictional objects are abstract entities. However, I want to modify the conception of what constitutes a fictional object. In short, I am going to give a defense of abstract creationism that offers answers to the questions, as outlined by Stuart Brock, of ontology, identity, and plenitude by developing a claim that—except (...) for rigidly referring proper names—fictional terms and nonfictional terms are all abstract objects.Working off the debates surrounding abstract creationism, and with a nod to D. M. Armstrong's... (shrink)