How does the use of military drones affect the legal, political, and moral responsibility of different actors involved in their deployment and design? This volume offers a fresh contribution to the ethics of drone warfare by providing, for the first time, a systematic interdisciplinary discussion of different responsibility issues raised by military drones. The book discusses four main sets of questions: First, from a legal point of view, we analyse the ways in which the use of drones makes the attribution (...) of criminal responsibility to individuals for war crimes more complicated and what adjustments may be required in international criminal law and in military practices to avoid ’responsibility gaps’ in warfare. From a moral and political perspective, the volume looks at the conditions under which the use of military drones by states is impermissible, permissible, or even obligatory and what the responsibilities of a state in the use of drones towards both its citizens and potential targets are. From a socio-technical perspective, what kind of new human machine interaction might drones bring and which new kinds of shared agency and responsibility? Finally, we ask how the use of drones changes our conception of agency and responsibility. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in ethics and to those in law, politics and the military involved in the design, deployment and evaluation of military drones. (shrink)

In the target article by Kolbe and de Melo-Martin (2023), the authors discussed several shortcomings of major instruments of moral distress, including the Moral Distress Scale (MDS) (Corley et al....

This article presents results from a self-report survey of misconduct behaviours and the stress students (n = 916) experienced at one Canadian community college. Results showed that students engaged in a variety of contract cheating behaviours, and experienced a myriad of stressors both in and outside the college context, including traumatic life events. Those who engaged in commercial contract cheating and inappropriate sharing behaviours experienced significantly higher levels of stress. This result differed by type of stress suggesting that not all (...) stress may lead to violation behaviour. Results also suggest that some students are exposed to more stress than others, which could put them at higher risk for engaging in contract cheating. Understanding contract cheating using the stress process framework draws our attention to how a student’s location in the social institutions of work, family, and school, how their positions of advantage or disadvantage, and their involvement in social relationships may produce stress which we have found to be associated with contract cheating. Seeing stress in this way allows post-secondary institutions to address the structural conditions which lead to stress through the development of policy, procedure, and supports for students as they navigate academic integrity throughout their programs. (shrink)

As conceptual and theoretical discussions on environmental valuation approaches have advanced there is growing interest in the impact that valuation has on decision making. The perceived legitimacy of the outputs of valuation studies is seen as one factor influencing their impact on policy decisions. One element of this is ensuring that participants of valuation processes see the results as legitimate and would be willing to accept decisions based on these findings. Here, we test the perceived legitimacy to participants of two (...) approaches to deliberative monetary valuation, deliberated preferences and Deliberative Democratic Monetary Valuation, in the context of marine planning in the Clyde estuary in Scotland. We compare and contrast deliberated preference and deliberative democratic monetary valuation and track their emergence as responses to critiques of conventional stated preference approaches. We then present the results of our case study where we found that deliberative democratic monetary valuation produced valuations that were perceived as more legitimate that deliberated preference as the basis for decision making by those involved in the valuation process. (shrink)

Action video game (AVG) has attracted increasing attention from both the public and from researchers. More and more studies found video game training improved a variety of cognitive functions. However, it remains controversial whether healthy adults can benefit from AVG training, and whether young and older adults benefit similarly from AVG training. In the present study, we aimed to quantitatively assess the AVG training effect on the cognitive ability of adults and to compare the training effects on young and older (...) adults by conducting a meta-analysis on previous findings. We systematically searched video game training studies published between January 1986 and July 2015. Twenty studies were included in the present meta-analysis, for a total of 313 participants included in the training group and 323 participants in the control group. The results demonstrate that healthy adults achieve moderate benefit from AVG training in overall cognitive ability and moderate to small benefit in specific cognitive domains. In contrast, young adults gain more benefits from AVG training than older adults in both overall cognition and specific cognitive domains. Age, education, and some methodological factors, such as the session duration, session number, total training duration, and control group type, modulated the training effects. These meta-analytic findings provide evidence that AVG training may serve as an efficient way to improve the cognitive performance of healthy adults. We also discussed several directions for future AVG training studies. (shrink)

In our descriptive exploratory qualitative study, we investigated the issue of contract cheating in Iranian higher education contexts. Through our analysis, we provide insights into measures taken in Iran to prevent contract cheating and mitigate its effects. Our study analyses secondary data including scholarly articles, published media, and the country’s current policies. Results showed that more empirical primary data from which to draw definitive conclusions is needed, and as such, developing an evidence-based body of knowledge about the prevalence and characteristics (...) of contract cheating in Iran remains a persistent call to action. Our analysis of scholarly studies (_n_ = 102) and grey literature sources (_n_ = 195) showed an overarching lack of university accountability; students’ motives for engaging in contract cheating; and lack of appropriate legislation were enabling factors. We conclude that Iran lags behind other countries with regards to what is known about contract cheating and how to address it; as such, we conclude with a call to action for increased supports for education; policy and legislation; and scholarship. (shrink)

In this article we investigate the nature of problem presentation and responses on an online forum for young people who self-harm. Previous studies have raised concerns about the peer encouragement of self-harming behaviours in online forums, and this analysis considers the nature of peer interaction on a specific forum, ‘ SharpTalk’. This was a research forum which explored the potential of online communities to foster engagement and shared learning between NHS professionals and young people who self-harm. This analysis draws on (...) conversation analysis methods to study problem presentation and responses, and nature of advice given. Analysis highlighted both the tendency to offer advice where it was not asked for, and the mundane ‘safe’ nature of advice. This awareness of how young people interact and provide support online is important for those setting up online interventions to support young people who self-harm. (shrink)

China has a civil procedure for collective litigation, which is dubbed Chinese-style class action, as it differs from the U.S.-style class action in some important ways. Using securities class action as a case study, this Article empirically examines both the quantity and quality of reported cases in China. It shows that the number of cases is much lower than expected, but the percentage of recovery is significantly higher than that in the United States. Based on this, the Article casts doubt (...) on the popular belief that China should adopt the U.S.-style class action, and sheds light on the much-debated issue concerning the relationship between public and private enforcement of securities law. The Article also discusses the future prospects of securities class action in China in light of some recent developments which may provide its functional equivalents, including the regulator-brokered compensation fund and public interest group litigation. (shrink)

Studies on sports aesthetics are often marginalized in the philosophy of sport. In this publication, Jason Holt provides an in-depth insight into the aesthetics of sport by offering a moral, compre...

As more and more multi-national companies expand their operations globally, their responsibilities extend beyond not only the economic motive of profitability but also other social and environmental factors. The objective of this article is to examine the impact of national culture and geographic environment on firms’ corporate social performance (CSP). Empirical tests are based on a global CSP database of companies from 49 countries. Results show that the Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are significantly associated with CSP. In addition, European companies are (...) found to out-perform other regions and countries in CSP. (shrink)

From a largely Western phenomenon, the “animal turn” has, in recent years, gone global. Animals and Human Society in Asia: Historical, Cultural and Ethical Perspectives is just such a timely product that testifies to this trend.But why Asia? The editors, in their very helpful overview essay, have from the outset justified the volume's focus on Asia and ensured that this is not simply a matter of lacuna filling. The reasons they set out include: the fact that Asia is the cradle (...) of early human settlement and animal domestication; Asia encompasses an extreme diversity of closely connected ecosystems and human cultures; Asia is the place where the world's major religions originated; and, as in other parts of the world, Asia's use of animals for food and other utilitarian purposes constitutes a prominent feature of its culture. All of these factors, they argue, made Asia a unique lab for the exploration of major developments in human civilization and the complexities of human-animal interactions.Based on these premises, the book is divided into four parts, each concentrating on areas that the editors consider to have paramount significance in world history: Part I, “Hunting and Domestication”; Part II “Animals as Food”; Part III “Animals at War”; and Part IV “Animals in Culture and Religion.” As many good works on animal studies do, the volume adopts a truly cross-disciplinary approach, uniting scholars from disciplines as diverse as archaeology, history, anthropology, art, religion, literature, and cultural studies. It too takes an interregional approach and covers a vast geographical area, stretching from the western edge of Asia in the Levant to Central Asia, where once roamed the horses of the nomadic pastoral tribes, to the other end of Asia, including India, China, and Japan. Temporally impressive as well, the work takes us from the deep history of the Paleolithic period up to the contemporary world, exploring the diverse roles that a wide range of animals—horses, donkeys, camels, elephants, tigers, and so forth—have played in Asia's rich and unique past and present.Strong in archaeology, Part I, “Hunting and Domestication,” responds to the much-called for “deep” or “coevolutionary” history of human-animal relations in recent years. The three chapters discuss, respectively, the roles that proboscideans have played in the diet and culture of early societies in Paleolithic China and beyond; the ways in which animals of all sizes have been increasingly integrated into the diet, daily uses, trade, and warfare in Holocene Negev; and the diversifying roles played by donkeys in the early Bronze Age in Southern Levant as a food source, a means of transport and in ritual sacrifices. Together, they demonstrate, with reference to telling archaeological evidence how the early societies in this region have been highly dependent upon the increasingly sophisticated interactions with and uses of mega-herbivores in the protracted and by no means clear-cut transition from hunting and herding towards the agricultural way of life, affirming the co-existing and co-constituting relations between humans and other animals in the deep past of Asia.The chapters in the section on “Animals at War” equally reveal the crucial roles that animals have played in the military sphere, as either a practical war technology or a show of military power. “Elephants in Mongol History” revisits the thesis of elephant-mounted troops in South and Southeast Asia as a barrier to Mongol expansion. Through its lively account of the pivotal battles in Mongolian history, especially that against India and China, it illustrates with great success the complex interactions between animals (especially elephants, horses, and humans), technology, and the geographical environment, which jointly exercised their influence on the outcome of warfare and degree of success of political rule. Turning away from the dynamic of warfare, the following two chapters explore the biopolitical question of the management of the horse as a bio-resource in the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria (1250–1517) and early Ming Dynasty China, respectively. The first one places its focus on the breeding, procurement, and feeding of the horse subjects in question, while the latter concentrates on the human organization of various resources for the upkeep of government horses—a conventional area of study called “horse administration” in the institutional history of the government in China.The last section, “Animals in Culture and Religion,” examines the changing images of apex predators, such as lions and tigers, in Buddhist perceptions from South Asia to East Asia; the cult of the Horse King in late Imperial China; and the significance of animal signs in Mongolian historiography. They represent an established approach in animal studies that seeks to understand different aspects of human culture through symbolic or metaphorical animals. Instead of treating the animals discussed as mere abstractions, which has been a frequent criticism of works that adopt this approach, the relations between the symbolic animals and their prototype in the natural world were attentively explored. The essay on the cult of the Horse King, for example, closely links the wax and wane of the cult since late imperial China with the changing use and subsequent disuse of the actual horses in agriculture, transportation, commerce, and quotidian life. Yet, classic as these essays on symbolic animals are, one does feel slightly unsatiated when coming to the end of this section, which also marks the end of this volume. Having been reminded early in the introductory essay that Asia was “a major site for the emergence of moral teachings and ethical guidance on the treatment of animals” and how this legacy “still affects the lives of billions of humans to this very day,” one feels naturally rather let down that no article in this volume directly addresses this vital ethical dimension, especially since it belongs to a series on “animal ethics.”Indeed, regarding the task of placing either the nonhuman animals or the ethical relations between humans and other animals center stage, the essays in this volume achieve only varying levels of success. Some authors exhibit a more acute awareness of what “animal studies” or “animal ethics” might entail epistemically and methodically and experiment by paying closer attention to the species-specific characteristics, experience, and agency of nonhuman animals in order to cast off the deified anthropocentrism previously ruled in humanist scholarship. However, others have made no such attempt. For example, in Part II of “Animals as Food,” an essay on the production and consumption of milk in contemporary China, albeit alert to the issue of health hazards to consumers, omits any consideration of the subject from the dairy cows’ perspective under the modern intensive farming system. Moreover, otherwise superb research on the tuna-fishing industry in Japan, with its insightful discussion of the nexus between knowledge economies and imperial politics, too passes over any discussion of the fate of the tuna, whether collectively as a group of living organisms containing 15 species or individually as animals with an embodied experience. One does ponder whether these essays would fit better in a volume on the cultural history of food or on the entwining history of knowledge production, economics, and politics, which conventionally position human interests at the center of research.Taken as a whole, this is an impressive volume that directs our attention to the hitherto understudied world of Asia in animal studies. The long durée, with its interdisciplinary and interregional approach, also most powerfully presents a past in Asia that could not have been the same without the participation of animals at every level, from everyday life to the shaping of cultural values, the construction of belief systems, the building of a national identity, and even the rise and fall of regimes. Scholars and students interested in expanding the frontier of our understanding of the world with a more inclusive “we” should find a wealth of interesting subjects on which to build further research. Finally, the volume also presents a fitting occasion for all scholars committed to animal studies to consider the grave challenge confronting the field that arose alongside its growing respectability and rapid expansion: Should it be oriented toward the destabilization of our previously anthropocentric conception of the world? Or should no such perimeter be imposed, as in this volume? The overall breadth and limitations of this volume leave one pondering this issue. (shrink)

This study applies identity and social identity theories to develop and test a framework in which retail brand personality influences consumer outcomes [i.e., positive word-of-mouth about and patronage intention toward the retailer] through public and/or private self-congruity, strengthened by shopping conspicuousness situation, and retail brand identification. This is the first study to include social shopping situations to study brand personality and self-congruity. A questionnaire with a 2 × 2 between-subjects design was conducted on a sample of US consumers. Structural equation (...) modeling was used to test the hypotheses. The findings suggest a framework in which Genuine, the most influential dimension of retail brand personality, predicted outcome behaviors both directly and indirectly through self-congruities and RBI. The high shopping conspicuousness situation strengthened the relationship between public self-congruity and the overall RBI. The concept of RBI provides an additional theoretical perspective for guiding future research on shopper–brand relationships. In addition, this framework provides practical implications for retail environment design and customer-brand relationship management. (shrink)

Disasters and public health emergencies raise a variety of ethical dilemmas, often including those that require balancing the best interests of individuals against those of groups or communities. The on-going COVID-19 pandemic provides examples of these ethical conflicts, as do other recent outbreaks. Decisions and actions in this context must address different ethical issues, ranging from those directly related to autonomy, consent, privacy and confidentiality to those related to interventions and technologies, such as efficacy, effectiveness, safety and fair access. This (...) paper aims to identify ethical conflicts with complex resolutions involving aspects related to values, rights and needs of individuals and the collective, and to suggest how such challenges could lead to more positive experiences and outcomes when confronted in future emergencies. (shrink)

This study examines Nǐ yìsi shì X ‘Your Meaning is X’ as a practice of doing other-initiation in Mandarin conversations, focusing on how it addresses different sources of troubles systematically in informing sequences. It is found that while ‘Nǐ yìsi shì’ signals the speaker’s having trouble with the prior informing turn, ‘X’ is deployed to locate different aspects of the trouble source, being shaped by how an informing emerges in talk-in-interaction. Specifically, when following a volunteered informing, ‘X’ is usually built (...) to clarify specific words or phrases in preceding informing, thereby treating a certain element as underspecified or ambiguous. However, when following a question-solicited informing, ‘X’ is typically constructed to work out what the provided information exactly conveys, indicating the whole informing turn/action is in some way problematic, inappropriate, or inapposite. In both cases, ‘Nǐ yìsi shì X’ serves as an OI, working to target different kinds of the trouble source, and simultaneously proposes a potential solution to it. (shrink)

How should autonomous vehicles be programmed to behave in the event of an unavoidable accident in which the only choice open is one between causing different damages or losses to different objects or persons? This paper addresses this ethical question starting from the normative principles elaborated in the law to regulate difficult choices in other emergency scenarios. In particular, the paper offers a rational reconstruction of some major principles and norms embedded in the Anglo-American jurisprudence and case law on the (...) “doctrine of necessity”; and assesses which, if any, of these principles and norms can be utilized to find reasonable guidelines for solving the ethical issue of the regulation of the programming of autonomous vehicles in emergency situations. The paper covers the following topics: the distinction between “justification” and “excuse”, the legal prohibition of intentional killing outside self-defence, the incommensurability of goods, and the legal constrains to the use of lethal force set by normative positions: obligations, responsibility, rights, and authority. For each of these principles and constrains the possible application to the programming of autonomous vehicles is discussed. Based on the analysis, some practical suggestions are offered. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is predicted to have a deep impact on the future of work and employment. The paper outlines a normative framework to understand and protect human freedom and justice in this transition. The proposed framework is based on four main ideas: going beyond the idea of a Basic Income to compensate the losers in the transition towards AI-driven work, towards a Responsible Innovation approach, in which the development of AI technologies is governed by an inclusive and deliberate societal (...) judgment; going beyond a philosophical conceptualisation of social justice only focused on the distribution of ‘primary goods’, towards one focused on the different goals, values, and virtues of various social practices (Walzer’s ‘spheres of justice’) and the different individual capabilities of persons (Sen’s ‘capabilities’); going beyond a classical understanding of capital, towards one explicitly including mental capacities as a source of value for AI-driven activities. In an effort to promote an interdisciplinary approach, the paper combines political and economic theories of freedom, justice and capital with recent approaches in applied ethics of technology, and starts applying its normative framework to some concrete example of AI-based systems: healthcare robotics, ‘citizen science’, social media and platform economy. (shrink)

When should we use care robots? In this paper we endorse the shift from a simple normative approach to care robots ethics to a complex one: we think that one main task of a care robot ethics is that of analysing the different ways in which different care robots may affect the different values at stake in different care practices. We start filling a gap in the literature by showing how the philosophical analysis of the nature of healthcare activities can (...) contribute to robot ethics. We rely on the nature-of-activities approach recently proposed in the debate on human enhancement, and we apply it to the ethics of care robots. The nature-of-activities approach will help us to understand why certain practice-oriented activities in healthcare should arguably be left to humans, but certain goal-directed activities in healthcare can be fulfilled with the assistance of a robot. In relation to the latter, we aim to show that even though all healthcare activities can be considered as practice-oriented, when we understand the activity in terms of different legitimate ‘fine-grained’ descriptions, the same activities or at least certain components of them can be seen as clearly goal-directed. Insofar as it allows us to ethically assess specific functionalities of specific robots to be deployed in well-defined circumstances, we hold the nature-of-activities approach to be particularly helpful also from a design perspective, i.e. to realize the Value Sensitive Design approach. (shrink)

A focus group study using four groups of food shoppers provides insights into consumers’ knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors regarding organic foods. Two focus groups consisted of shoppers who regularly bought organic foods and two focus groups of shoppers who predominantly purchased conventional foods. Participants in one of the conventional groups were all Caucasian; in the other they were all African-American. While familiarity with organic foods was much lower in the African-American group, its members were more receptive and positive towards organic (...) foods. Likewise, the African-American shoppers were more accepting of price premiums for organics foods. In comparing the two organic shopper groups with the two conventional shopper groups, it was found that the former were generally more knowledgeable about organic foods. They were also more likely to follow a special diet than conventional Caucasian shoppers. However, the behavior of organic shoppers varied widely. The research supports examining social justice and access as motivations for changing policies to support organic agriculture. (shrink)

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it.Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, (...) and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to put into context the historical, foundational and philosophical significance of category theory. We use our historical investigation to inform the various category-theoretic foundational debates and to point to some common elements found among those who advocate adopting a foundational stance. We then use these elements to argue for the philosophical position that category theory provides a framework for an algebraic in re interpretation of mathematical structuralism. In each context, what we aim to show (...) is that, whatever the significance of category theory, it need not rely upon any set-theoretic underpinning. (shrink)

CHAPTER 1 Neurotransmitter networks Elaine Perry and Allan Young i. Introduction This first chapter sets the scene for subsequent exploration of potential ...