The return of genetic research results after death in the pediatric setting comes with unique complexities. Researchers must determine which results and through which processes results are returned. This paper discusses the experience over 15 years in pediatric cancer genetics research of returning research results after the death of a child and proposes a preventive ethics approach to protocol development in order to improve the quality of return of results in pediatric genomic settings.

Popper’s theory of learning is sometimes met with incredulity because Popper claims that there is no transference of knowledge or knowledge elements from outside the individual, neither from the physical environment nor from others. Instead, he claims that we can improve our present theories by discovering their inadequacies.The intent of this article is not to persuade educators to adopt Popper’s approach uncritically to build their professional knowledge. Rather, it presents a discussion on the need for teachers to adopt a critical (...) approach in eliminating what is inadequate and preserve what is adequate by modifying or abandoning whatever traditions or practices that are inadequate to improve their teaching practice. Popper claims that knowledge advances by searching for and eliminating error contained in our theory. In other words, we can improve our present theories by finding out their inadequacies. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how regulators, prosecutors, and courts might support and encourage the efforts of organizations to not only reintegrate after misconduct but also to improve their conduct in a way that reduces their likelihood of re-offense. We explore a novel experiment in creative sentencing in Alberta Canada that aimed to try to change the behaviour of an industry by publicly airing the root causes of a failure of one the industry’s leaders. Drawing on this case and prior (...) work, we articulate a model for a responsive and restorative approach to organizational misconduct that balances the punitive role of regulators and courts with new roles in supporting and overseeing rehabilitation. (shrink)

David Estlund has recently asked: how can structural injustice warrant resentment and indignation, given that it cannot fully be traced to culpable conduct? This article answers Estlund’s question. I propose that a social structure is an object that persists through time and is materially constituted by humans in relation. I use accounts of the point of blame to vindicate attitudes of resentment and indignation that target social structures themselves, without necessarily targeting their human constituents.

This essay proposes several guiding parameters for ecofeminism's development as a moral theory. I argue that these provide necessary directives and contexts for ecofeminist analyses and social/ecological projects. In the past these have been very diverse and occasionally contradictory. Most important to the core of ecofeminism's vitality are close links between theory and political activism. I show how these originated in ecofeminism's history and advocate a continued participatory and activist focus in the future.

While popular cultural representations portray the “new father” of the past two decades as more involved, more nurturing, and capable of coparenting, many argue that actual fathering conduct has not kept pace. Others, however, question the extent to which the culture of fatherhood does indeed support involved fathering and, if so, what this involvement entails. This study aims to contribute to the exploration of the culture of fatherhood through an analysis of a yearlong Canadian newspaper series dedicated to family issues. (...) Findings suggest that through representations of parental guilt, parental responsibility, work—family balance issues, and hegemonic masculinity, mothers continue to be positioned as primary parents. Support for father involvement, to the extent that it exists, occurs within the framework of fathers as part-time, secondary parents whose relationship with children remains less important than mothers'. (shrink)

The following pair of claims is standardly endorsed by philosophers working on group agency: (1) groups are capable of irreducible moral agency and, therefore, can be blameworthy; (2) groups are not capable of irreducible moral patiency, and, therefore, lack moral rights. This paper argues that the best case for (1) brings (2) into question. Section 2 paints the standard picture, on which groups’ blameworthiness derives from their functionalist or interpretivist moral agency, while their lack of moral rights derives from their (...) lack of sentience. In Section 3, I add support to a recent argument that this standard picture needs alteration: groups’ blameworthiness requires something akin to sentience, which groups acquire from members. Section 4 discusses rights: if groups acquire sentience from members, as Section 3 argues, then can groups have moral rights? I argue that they can, but that groups have only a limited range of moral rights, whose existence depends on (without being ontologically or justificatorily reducible to) the attitudes and actions of humans. (shrink)

Developments in neuroscience have raised the possibility that pharmaceuticals may be used to enhance memory, mood, and attention in people who do not have an illness or disorder, a practice known as “cognitive enhancement.” We describe historical experiences with two medicinal drugs for which similar enhancement claims were made, cocaine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and amphetamines in the mid 20th century. These drugs were initially introduced as medicinal agents in Europe and North America before becoming more (...) widely used for a variety of purposes, including what would nowadays be considered cognitive enhancement. Their trajectory of use conformed to the typical use cycle of psychotropic drugs. There was an initial steep rise in prescribing for medical use, followed by expanded nonmedical use that was fueled by enthusiasm for the drugs’ effects. As the number of regular users increased, problems related to use (such as addiction) became apparent, societal concern increased, and laws were passed banning nonmedical use and eventually, medical use. This historical experience draws attention to the adverse side effects of enhancement use that only become apparent with regular, wide-scale use of a drug. We highlight the similarities between the enthusiasms for cocaine and amphetamines and the current enthusiasms for using prescription stimulants for cognitive enhancement. We argue bioethicists should not encourage the cognitive enhancement use of drugs such as methylphenidate in the absence of evidence on the efficacy and safety of their use for cognitive enhancement purposes. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that care ethics offers useful resources for developing alternative models of responsibility for of structural injustice. I begin in Section 2 by providing an overview of what 'structural injustice' is and of the ‘forward-looking’ models of responsibility that have been developed for dealing with it. In Section 3, I give an overview of (my interpretation of) care ethics. This will reveal several points of resonance between care ethics and existing forward-looking theories of responsibility for structural (...) injustice. In Section 4, I weave these two threads together, explicitly enumerating several care ethical insights that can be brought to bear on forward-looking theories of responsibility for structural injustice. (shrink)

In these essays, we are concerned with virtue in journalism and the media but are mindful of the tension between the commercial foundations of publishing and broadcasting, on the one hand, and journalism's democratic obligations on the other. Adam outlines, first, a moral vision of journalism focusing on individualistic concepts of authorship and craft. Next, Craft attempts to bridge individual and organizational concerns by examining the obligations of organizations to the individuals working within them. Finally, Cohen discusses the importance of (...) resisting the powerful corporate logic that pervades the news media in the United States and calls on journalists to be courageous. (shrink)

La figura de Orfeo, el poeta mítico, ha trascendido a través de la tradición poética e influido en ella de diversas maneras: el personaje está ligado a géneros poéticos, y a tópicos, motivos y temas literarios. Además, es el prototipo del poeta y el origen de la idealización de sus facultades. Esto último es en sí un tópico, como se puede observar en dos poemas, “Introito” de Ramón López Velarde y “Arte poética” de Alfonso Reyes.

Are verbal reports of disgust in moral situations specific indicators of the concept of disgust, or are they used metaphorically to refer to anger? In this experiment, participants read scenarios describing a violation of a norm either about the use of the body (bodily moral) or about harm and rights (socio-moral). They then expressed disgust and anger on verbal scales, and through facial expression endorsement measures. The use of disgust words in the socio-moral condition was largely predicted by anger words (...) and only secondarily by disgust faces, whereas in the bodily moral condition the use of disgust words was predicted to a similar extent by disgust faces and anger words. Angry faces, however, never predicted disgust words independently of anger words. These results support a middle-ground position in which disgust words concerning socio-moral violations are not entirely a metaphor for anger, but bear some relationship to other representations of disgust. In the case of socio-moral violations, however, the use of disgust language is more strongly related to anger language, and less strongly to facial representations of disgust than in the case of bodily moral violations. (shrink)

Vices are often attributed to corporations. We hear that casinos are ‘greedy,’ mining companies are ‘ruthless,’ or tobacco companies are ‘dishonest.’ This chapter addresses two questions. First, are such corporate vices reducible to the vices of individual role-bearers? Second, which traits of corporations are properly labelled ‘vices’? The chapter argues that corporate vice is sometimes irreducible to the vices of role-bearers: corporations can be vicious ‘over and above’ the traits of role-bearers. It further argues that different corporations should be held (...) to different standards: what it means for a casino to be ‘vicious’ is different from what it means for a mining company to be ‘vicious,’ for example. (shrink)

In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel draws out the interdependency of unity and difference. In order to have a unity, there must be differences that compose it, as a unity unifies different elements. At the same time, in unifying these elements, they must not cease to be different from one another, as that would reduce the unity to a simple singularity.In this paper, I take up this interdependency of unity and difference, applying it to gender identities. I follow the psychoanalytically (...) oriented exchange between Judith Butler and Adam Phillips, in which they agree that gender identities are a farce, superimposed upon ungendered subjects, but disagree about the extent to which this artificial binary should be disassembled. Picking up their conversation at this point, I investigate how binary systems of identity can be both injurious and useful. Should they be cast off or does it make sense to keep them? Following this vein of thought, I end with a discussion of good and bad hate, arguing that there is an inescapable need for psychologically productive hate neutralized through empathy. (shrink)

Examining the language and paradigms of science as rhetorical, that is, arising from the sociocultural forces that shape ideology, reveals androcentric assumptions that tend to thwart democratic public policy as well as effective methodology. This paper applies some recent feminist critiques of the biological sciences to the current research on the possible hormonal and genetic factors contributing to homosexuality, clarifying how this research perpetuates hierarchical binaries and suggesting ways to reconceptualize human sexuality through revised research protocols.

Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 259-262, July-September.

Harsh blame can be socially destructive. This article examines how harsh blame can be “civilized.” A core construct here is the historicist narrative, which is a story-like account of how a person came to be the sort of person she is. We argue that historicist narratives regarding immoral actors can temper blame and that this happens via a novel mechanism. To illuminate that mechanism, we offer a novel theoretical perspective on lay beliefs about free will. We distinguish 2 senses of (...) free will: (a) Freedom of action, which portrays the will as a dynamic choice-making mechanism and concerns whether the actor can exert volitional control via that mechanism at the time of action, and (b) Control of self-formation, which portrays the will as an enduring disposition (e.g., persistent desire to humiliate) and refers to whether the actor is truly the source of that disposition. Six experiments show that historicist narratives have no effect on perceived freedom of action, but rather temper blame by reducing perceived self-formative control. We also provide evidence against several additional theoretically derived alternative mediators (e.g., intentionality, perceived suffering). Further underlining the need to distinguish free will concepts, we show that biological narratives—unlike historicist narratives—temper blame via reductions in perceived freedom of action. Finally, to illuminate the meaning of “civilized” blame,” we show that historicist narratives specifically reduce the urge to inflict spiteful punishments on offenders, but leave intact the urge to nonviolently guide the offender toward moral improvement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In this pathbreaking book, which includes a powerful new translation of Hesiod's Works and Days by esteemed translator David Grene, Stephanie Nelson argues that a society's vision of farming contains deep indications about its view of the human place within nature, and our relationship to the divine. She contends that both Hesiod in the Works and Days and Vergil in the Georgics saw farming in this way, and so wrote their poems not only about farming itself, but also about (...) its deeper ethical and religious implications. Hesiod, Nelson argues, saw farming as revealing that man must live by the sweat of his brow, and that good, for human beings, must always be accompanied by hardship. Within this vision justice, competition, cooperation, and the need for labor take their place alongside the uncertainties of the seasons and even of particular lucky and unlucky days to form a meaningful whole within which human life is an integral part. Vergil, Nelson argues, deliberately modeled his poem upon the Works and Days, and did so in order to reveal that his is a very different vision. Hesiod saw the hardship in farming; Vergil sees its violence as well. Farming is for him both our life within nature, and also our battle against her. Against the background of Hesiods poem, which found a single meaning for human life, Vergil thus creates a split vision and suggests that human beings may be radically alienated from both nature and the divine. Nelson argues that both the Georgics and the Works and Days have been misread because scholars have not seen the importance of the connection between the two poems, and because they have not seen that farming is the true concern of both, farming in its deepest and most profoundly unsettling sense. (shrink)

This article analyzes the sex and gender identity rhetoric of members of the Intersex Society of North America, which is a self-help and advocacy group whose main goals are to stop unnecessary genital surgery in ambiguously sexed infants and make medical histories available to adult intersexuals. By examining the organization's indebtedness to feminist and gay/lesbian/transperson theory and practice, the article shows how these political movements have progressively challenged the equation of sex with gender and how intersexuality exemplifies the theoretical and (...) practical problems of identity politics. (shrink)

From an early age, exposure to a spoken language has allowed us to implicitly capture the structure underlying the succession of speech sounds in that language and to segment it into meaningful units. Statistical learning, the ability to pick up patterns in the sensory environment without intention or reinforcement, is thus assumed to play a central role in the acquisition of the rule-governed aspects of language, including the discovery of word boundaries in the continuous acoustic stream. Although extensive evidence has (...) been gathered from artificial languages experiments showing that children and adults are able to track the regularities embedded in the auditory input, as the probability of one syllable to follow another syllable in the speech stream, the developmental trajectory of this ability remains controversial. In this work, we have collected Event-Related Potentials while 5-year-old children and young adults were exposed to a speech stream made of the repetition of eight three-syllable nonsense words presenting different levels of predictability to mimic closely what occurs in natural languages and to get new insights into the changes that the mechanisms underlying auditory statistical learning might undergo through the development. The participants performed the aSL task first under implicit and, subsequently, under explicit conditions to further analyze if children take advantage of previous knowledge of the to-be-learned regularities to enhance SL, as observed with the adult participants. These findings would also contribute to extend our knowledge of the mechanisms available to assist SL at each developmental stage. Although behavioral signs of learning, even under explicit conditions, were only observed for the adult participants, ERP data showed evidence of online segmentation in the brain in both groups, as indexed by modulations in the N100 and N400 components. A detailed analysis of the neural data suggests, however, that adults and children rely on different mechanisms to assist the extraction of word-like units from the continuous speech stream, hence supporting the view that SL with auditory linguistic materials changes through development. (shrink)

Paul’s Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia are more pertinent than ever forty years later. The chapters in this book reflect the lectures’ original intricacy as the authors not only insightfully analyze them but also creatively apply them.

This article presents the analysis of the characteristics of labor well-being in Colombian micro and small enterprises, this was developed through a documentary review from the model of Hoyos (2010), it is a qualitative research, where 42 investigations were collected, which were consulted in databases such as: Science Direct, Refseek, Redalyc, Scielo, Google Scholar and Dialnet, in addition to exploring the repositories of Colombian universities such as: UNAD, Uniminuto, ECCI, Usanbuenaventura, EAFIT, Unipiloto, UGranada, UTecnológica, UJavieriana, UAndes, UCatólica, UNIR, among others, (...) of which, 13 were adjusted with the categories: Practices of Labor Well-being, Theories of Labor Well-being, Needs in Collaborators and Sociodemographic Data, then descriptive synoptic sheets were constructed and then an analysis by category matrix was made, finally, a data analysis was carried out with the ATLAS.ti tool, which allows discerning the object of study through semantic networks. In this order, it is found that activities related to communication, incentives and motivation are part of the activities used as work welfare practices; as for the theoretical positions of well-being at work, the most supported is the one given by the WHO (2010), which is also defined from satisfaction and quality of life; Among the most outstanding needs to develop welfare programs is dissatisfaction in communication with colleagues and managers, ignorance of the responsibilities in their position, among others, on the other hand, there is evidence of a disregard to establish sociodemographic profiles, that is, companies do not consider it when planning or implementing workplace welfare actions. It concludes the need to build labor welfare policies and practices sensitive to the cultural and economic context for Colombian companies, this means recognizing the importance of adaptive and pragmatic approaches in microenterprises and the integration of more structured and theoretical approaches in small enterprises. (shrink)

Open Humanities Press, Living Books About Life Series.

The problem of identities and cultural differences constitute one of the global problems of our time. Identity and the differences in human beings are expressed in each individual, in each society and in humanity itself as a species. The differences of individual identities are solved by the integration of the latter inside society. The differences of the social or cultural identities are solved by humanity's integration. Is humanity's integration possible? If it was possible, what are the ontologic foundations for such (...) an integration?, why is humanity integration necessary? To understand the problem of the integration and confront mans imminent self-destruction as species becomes necessary not only to return to the study of nature and the essence human beings but, also of other entities of the universe. (shrink)

Dentro de toda la obra de Vico subyace -a pesar de su tensión con Descartes y de sus pretensiones jurídicas y filológicas- una vigorosa preocupación por lo humano. Esta preocupación recorre desde la tesis del conocer por causas de la ciencia hasta la afirmación de la comprensión como forma específica del conocimiento histórico.In the whole work of Vico can be found -despite his tension with Descartes and his juridical and philological intentions- a strong concern for humanity. This concern is visible (...) from the thesis of scientific knowledge by causes to the statement of comprehension as the specific method of historical knowledge. (shrink)