The concept of performance has gradually become established in health policies. Presented as necessary and positive, it is often reduced to efficiency, which results in policies and management styles aimed at optimisation. While they are supposed to guarantee the sustainability of our healthcare systems, these practices have made them fragile. Insights from the life sciences help us understand why. Indeed, biologists observe that living beings do not prioritise optimisation but robustness. To cope with fluctuations, a robust organisation operates with redundancies, (...) apparent waste, heterogeneity, organised fluctuations, slowness, and hesitation. It functions sub‐optimally. This article offers a theoretical reflection and management directions for more robust healthcare systems. (shrink)

This the tenth volume in the Vancouver Studies in Cogntive Science series. It concerns metarepresentation: the construction and use of representations that represent other representations. Metarepresentations are ubiquitous among human beings, whenever we think or talk about mental states or linguistic acts, or theorize about the mind or language. It is crucial to the unconscious process we use to divine the mental states of others, and ultimately to any workable theory of the mind. This volume collects previously unpublished studies on (...) the subject by an interdisciplinary group of contributors, including: Daniel Dennett, Alvin Goldman, Keith Lehrer, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. (shrink)

This study proposes a philosophical analysis of the public discourse that accompanies the cultural policy in Romania: justifications and finalities of State intervention in the cultural field, as well as representations of the roles that the public authorities attribute to culture/art. The objective is to bring into light the philosophical, political and aesthetical values that found and legitimise the cultural policies and shape the relationship between State and artists/art. It is basically about understanding the nature of representations on culture and (...) art that underlie the State intervention in the cultural field and, consequently, to determinate the ethos of the cultural policy in post-communist Romania and to expose the constraints that are still limiting its exercise. (shrink)

Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen’s (1996) influential account of “cultures of honor” speculates that honor norms are a socially-adaptive deterrence strategy. This theory has been appealed to by multiple empirically-minded philosophers, and plays an important role in John Doris and Alexandra Plakias’ (2008) antirealist argument from disagreement. In this essay, I raise four objections to the Nisbett-Cohen deterrence thesis, and offer another theory of honor in its place that sees honor as an agonistic normative system regulating prestige competitions. Since my (...) account portrays honor norms as radically different from liberal ones, it actually strengthens Doris and Plakias’ case in some respects: cultures of honor are not merely superficially different from Western liberal ones. Nonetheless, the persistent appeal of honor’s principles, and their moral plausibility in certain contexts, suggests not antirealism, but pluralism—a reply on behalf of realism that itself has considerable empirical support. (shrink)

This paper will introduce the notion of a naming convention and use this paradigm to both develop a new version of the Second Incompleteness Theorem and to describe when an axiom system can partially evade the Second Incompleteness Theorem.

This paper links two domains of recent interest in science and technology studies, complexity and ignorance, in the context of knowledge practices observed among synthetic biologists. Synthetic biologists are recruiting concepts and methods from computer science and electrical engineering in order to design and construct novel organisms in the lab. Their field has taken shape amidst revised assessments of life’s complexity in the aftermath of the Human Genome Project. While this complexity is commonly taken to be an immanent property of (...) biological systems, this article presents an epistemological view of complexity according to which complexity relates to a specific scientific theory or model and refers to that which exceeds the theory or model’s explanatory power. This epistemological view allows us to narrate a particular story about the changing relationship between biology and synthetic biology in the last decade and accounts for early knowledge practices in synthetic biology that “ignored” biology. This article further argues that while the failure of ignorance to produce clear-cut results for synthetic biologists has led practitioners back to biology, the entanglements between different pragmatic orientations and ways of knowing trouble the implications of this return for assessments of the complexity of biological systems. (shrink)

I take a close look at Bernard Williams’s paper "Moral Luck," which put this notion on the philosophical agenda. Williams’s focal example is the painter Paul Gauguin. According to Williams, Gauguin’s morally dubious decision to desert his family so as to pursue an artistic career can be redeemed only by his partially fortuitous success as a painter. This is shown by the consideration that a successful Gauguin would not be able to regret his decision, whereas failure would have prompted regret. (...) I suggest that the best way to understand this claim is to see Gauguin’s decision to become an artist as a constitutive decision, which launches what for him proved to be a defining project. One cannot coherently regret the realization of such a project or the decision that gave rise to it because that would amount to wishing to be someone else: conditions of personal identity set the limits on the counterfactuals about ourselves that we can intelligibly entertain. However, not being able to regret the constitutive elements of one’s life is not the same as approving of these elements. So I disagree with Williams’s ultimate conclusion that the inability to regret a decision signals some justification for it, no matter how attenuated. (shrink)

The leader–member relationship has been identified as a key determinant of successful working relationships and business outcomes in China. A high-quality leader–member relationship helps managers and employees to meet the demands they face and gives them the opportunity to develop socially, emotionally and morally. Such relationships form the basis of the overall well-being and success of the organisation. This article contributes to relationally oriented leadership theories and more specifically to the leader–member exchange theory by examining the theory in the context (...) of Western expatriate managers and Chinese employees in China. The first aim of the study is to analyse the similarities and differences between the LMX theory, which owes its origins to Western corporate experience, and the social and moral norms of guanxi, a crucial element in the Chinese value system. Since Westerners and Chinese people can give different interpretations to guanxi, the second aim of the article is to discuss the ethical challenges to the Western manager arising from guanxi. The findings of this study have implications not only for China, but also for other Chinese communities where guanxi is endorsed and practised. (shrink)

Data science is not simply a method but an organising idea. Commitment to the new paradigm overrides concerns caused by collateral damage, and only a counterculture can constitute an effective critique. Understanding data science requires an appreciation of what algorithms actually do; in particular, how machine learning learns. The resulting ‘insight through opacity’ drives the observable problems of algorithmic discrimination and the evasion of due process. But attempts to stem the tide have not grasped the nature of data science as (...) both metaphysical and machinic. Data science strongly echoes the neoplatonism that informed the early science of Copernicus and Galileo. It appears to reveal a hidden mathematical order in the world that is superior to our direct experience. The new symmetry of these orderings is more compelling than the actual results. Data science does not only make possible a new way of knowing but acts directly on it; by converting predictions to pre-emptions, it becomes a machinic metaphysics. The people enrolled in this apparatus risk an abstraction of accountability and the production of ‘thoughtlessness’. Susceptibility to data science can be contested through critiques of science, especially standpoint theory, which opposes the ‘view from nowhere’ without abandoning the empirical methods. But a counterculture of data science must be material as well as discursive. Karen Barad’s idea of agential realism can reconfigure data science to produce both non-dualistic philosophy and participatory agency. An example of relevant praxis points to the real possibility of ‘machine learning for the people’. (shrink)

Framed as a consideration of the other contributions to the present volume of the Journal of Indian Philosophy, this essay attempts to scout and characterize several of the interrelated doctrines and issues that come into play in thinking philosophically about the doctrine of svasaṃvitti, particularly as that was elaborated by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Among the issues thus considered are the question of how mānasapratyakṣa (which is akin to manovijñāna) might relate to svasaṃvitti; how those related doctrines might be brought to (...) bear with respect to some problems addressed with reference to the further doctrine (also closely related to svasaṃvitti) concerning pramāṇaphala; and the distinctiveness of Dharmakīrti’s sahopalambhaniyama argument for svasaṃvitti. A question recurrently considered throughout the essay has to do with whether (following Akeel Bilgrami) svasaṃvitti reflects a perceptual or a constitutive understanding of self-awareness. (shrink)

Nine codes of ethics from companies in the Swedish financial sector were subjected to a content analysis to determine how they address and treat employees. The codes say a great deal about employee conduct and misconduct but next to nothing about employee rights, their rightful expectations or their value to the firm. The normative analysis – echoing some of the value-based HRM literature – draws on the foundational values of respect, equality, reciprocity and care. The analysis shows that most of (...) the codes are in conflict with these values. Such a treatment is then in conflict with fairness and risks harming the employees. Some of the features that make these codes ethically problematic are typical of how corporate codes have been described in previous code studies. Consequently, the normative analysis reaches beyond the scope of this material and in the end, what is at stake, is a very typical code design. (shrink)

For paediatric medicine to advance, research must be conducted specifically with children. Concern about poor recruitment has led to debate about payments to child research participants. Although concerns about undue influence by such ‘compensation’ have been expressed, it is useful to determine whether children can relate the time and inconvenience associated with participation to the value of payment offered. This study explores children's ability to determine fair remuneration for research participation, and reviews payments to children participating in research. Forty children (...) were interviewed before outpatient visits at two London Hospitals: Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital and the Whittington Hospital District General Hospital. Children were asked to value their involvement in two hypothetical research scenarios – the first an ‘additional blood sample’, the second also involving daily oral oil capsules taken for a fortnight before further venesection. Background knowledge about familiarity with money, and experience with hospitalisation was assessed. The mean valuation of involvement in the second scenario (£13.18) was higher than in the first (£2.84) (p<0.001). This higher valuation persisted when children were categorised into groups ‘aged 12+’ and ‘below 12’. Those undergoing a blood test on the day placed a higher valuation on participation in the second scenario (£10.43, £21.67, p=0.044). These children aged 8–16 demonstrated the capacity to discern a fair valuation for participation in medical research. The monetary sums are influenced by the time and inconvenience involved in the research, and by the extent of recent experience with hospital procedures. The authors review current ethical thinking regarding payments to child research participants and suggest that a fair wage model might be an ethically acceptable way to increase participation of children in research. (shrink)

After proposing an alternative definition of what “law” (jurisprudential concept) is, this article demonstrates the impossibility of identifying “the law” (what law-makers announce, relative to a particular jurisdiction) as something that is in a particular way. Rather, the law is a more or less abstract range of options. Drawing upon this conclusion, the article calls for a reassessment of how we view the role of law-makers. We need to remove the mystery that surrounds the law so as to provide for (...) greater transparency. This transparency can be gained by requiring law-makers to declare their inescapable biases where they influence their lawmaking. (shrink)