More so than in the past, the US is now embracing the logic of preventive force: using military force to counter potential threats around the globe before they have fully materialized. While popular with individuals who seek to avoid too many “boots on the ground,” preventive force is controversial because of its potential for unnecessary collateral damage. Who decides what threats are ‘imminent’? Is there an international legal basis to kill or harm individuals who have a connection to that threat? (...) Do the benefits of preventive force justify the costs? And, perhaps most importantly, is the US setting a dangerous international precedent? In Preventive Force, editors Kerstin Fisk and Jennifer Ramos bring together legal scholars, political scientists, international relations scholars, and prominent defense specialists to examine these questions, whether in the context of full-scale preventive war or preventive drone strikes. In particular, the volume highlights preventive drones strikes, as they mark a complete transformation of how the US understands international norms regarding the use of force, and could potentially lead to a ‘slippery slope’ for the US and other nations in terms of engaging in preventive warfare as a matter of course. A comprehensive resource that speaks to the contours of preventive force as a security strategy as well as to the practical, legal, and ethical considerations of its implementation, Preventive Force is a useful guide for political scientists, international relations scholars, and policymakers who seek a thorough and current overview of this essential topic. (shrink)

A strong record of human rights protections is an important factor for a state to maintain a positive international reputation. In this article, we suggest that states will use compliance with human rights treaties as a mechanism by which to improve their reputations to help achieve their foreign policy goals. We hypothesize that international human rights compliance is a means to improve a state’s reputation in three specific situations: when the state is facing regional pressures as the result of a (...) desire to join a regional organization; when the state is facing regional pressures not to run afoul of a court within a regional organization; or when a state seeks foreign assistance from an entity with human rights requirements for the receipt of such assistance. We examine our theory by analyzing human rights reports regarding state compliance with specific treaty obligations outlined in the Convention Against Torture (CAT). While the evidence for our hypotheses is mixed, we do find some support for our assertion that state compliance is linked to reputational concerns. In particular, states comply with the CAT when they are part of a regional organization that has a human rights court, and when they are receiving conditional aid from the European Union. (shrink)

o amor e 0 6dio, dois sentimentos fundamentais do ser humano, estao ligados as fases evolutivas do desenvolvimento sexual infantil, as quais, por sua vez, sao sobredeterminadas pelas relacees intersubjetivas que a crianc;:a experimenta. Tentando precisar 0 significado do amor como 0 sentimento de unidade entre dois seres diferentes, no qual 0 amado assume uma importancia vital para 0 amante, somos levados a definir 0 6dio como 0 sentimento de oposicao entre diferentes seres que estao afetivamente ligados, onde 0 ser (...) odiado representa aquilo que deve ser eliminado, expulso, destruido. Se 0 amor liga-se a fase oral, ao 6dio compulsivo parace ligar-se em determinadas pessoas a uma certa consfituicao da fase anal, onde 0 comportamento transgressor surge como uma forma<;ao de compromisso entre a repeticao de uma viol!ncia sofrida e a tentativa de libertar-se dela. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: amor, 6dio, libido. (shrink)

Background: Mismatch between the perception of one’s moral duty and one’s real social contribution may trigger moral distress, especially when no specific resistance strategies are used to counteract morally distressing situations. Considering a philosophical-ethical conception, individuals need to first reflect upon themselves to later turn to the world and confront their current situation in order to change it. Objectives: To understand moral distress experienced by nursing professors teaching in higher education institutions and the use of parrhesia as a coping strategy. (...) Method: This qualitative exploratory-descriptive study addressed 33 nursing professors working in Brazilian federal public universities using an open-ended question form. Data were collected between June and December 2018 and analyzed using discursive textual analysis. Ethical considerations: The Institutional Review Board at the Federal University of Rio Grande approved this study. Findings: Three categories emerged: performance of nursing professors and potentially distressing situations, the experience of moral distress, and parrhesia as a strategy to deal with moral distress. Nursing professors face situations that cause moral distress in the context of higher education, however, those who adopt parrhesia as a coping strategy find it easier to express their beliefs from the perspective of moral duty, even in the face of conflicts. Conclusion: When the nursing professors in this study acknowledge elements in the power structure that hinder their actions, they express parrhesia, as an essential virtue in an attempt to modify unsymmetrical power relations that can trigger moral distress. (shrink)

Ethics has assumed a dominant position in the current economic debate, and this study focuses on ethics as a legitimate underpinning to good business decision making. Using a self-response survey of marketing managers in Spain, the current theory on ethical decision making is extended. Results support the mediating influence of the PRESOR construct (an individual’s perception of the importance of ethics and social responsibility for the effectiveness of the organization) on relativistic and idealistic moral thinking when one is considering the (...) moral intensity of a situation. In addition, the study found support for the relationship between relativism (negative), idealism (positive), corporate ethical values, and job satisfaction, thereby providing additional support for the prior theory. Finally, a thorough review of the extant literature and suggestions for future ethics research in the marketing field are included. (shrink)

'This book not only revises the interpretation of Dewey's ethics but also has relevance to recent discussions about the possibility of naturalistic, ...

This discussion is about the moods characteristic of depressive and manic states. Moods are distinguished from the emotions they often accompany, and the relationship between these less and more cognitive, and seemingly less and more intentional, states is provided preliminary clarification. Epistemic deficiencies identified here, when combined with differences of quality and quantity in the moods and motivations that beset the depression and mania sufferer, seem likely to hinder self-knowledge and self-integration. These deficiencies, it is argued, may help explain why (...) the extreme moods found in states of depression and mania contribute to our inclination to regard these conditions as disorder. (shrink)

Psychiatric ethics spans several overlapping domains, including the guidelines for ethical research in psychiatry, the professional ethics required in the practice of psychiatry, and a broader set of moral and ethical problems and dilemmas distinctive to, or at least magnified by, the mental health care setting. Reviewed here are selected issues arising in the last two domains, some seemingly inevitable components of mental disorder and its cultural history and others resultant from recent changes and discoveries. Even as science explains and (...) demystifies mental disorder, it is concluded, new ethical problems will continue to arise in psychiatry and certain recalcitrant problems will likely persist. (shrink)

Most words in English are ambiguous between different interpretations; words can mean different things in different contexts. We investigate the implications of different types of semantic ambiguity for connectionist models of word recognition. We present a model in which there is competition to activate distributed semantic representations. The model performs well on the task of retrieving the different meanings of ambiguous words, and is able to simulate data reported by Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen‐Wilson [J. Mem. Lang. 46 (2002) 245] on (...) how semantic ambiguity affects lexical decision performance. In particular, the network shows a disadvantage forwords with multiple unrelated meanings (e.g., bark) that coexists with a benefit for words with multiple related word senses (e.g., twist). The ambiguity disadvantage arises because of interference between the different meanings, while the sense benefit arises because of differences in the structure of the attractor basins formed during learning. Words with few senses develop deep, narrow attractor basins, while words with many senses develop shallow, broad basins. We conclude that the mental representations of word meanings can be modelled as stable states within a high‐dimensional semantic space, and that variations in the meanings of words shape the landscape of this space. (shrink)

This article examines the assessment of mental capacity in the context of euthanasia, particularly when requested by patients with mental illnesses. It proposes a holistic alternative approach to the traditional functional model, arguing that the latter is insufficient to capture the complexity of these patients’ decisions. Using approaches based on narrative, hermeneutic, and dialogical ethics, it offers an evaluation that considers the patient’s life story, values, and context. Shared decision-making and empathy are identified as fundamental components to ensure informed and (...) consensual decisions, promoting an environment of respect and mutual understanding. The article reviews Spanish legislation on euthanasia, highlighting the need to include medical ethics experts in the Guarantee and Evaluation Commissions. These experts provide a comprehensive ethical perspective essential for addressing the ethical complexities in euthanasia requests and ensuring fair decisions that reflect the patient’s true will. It recommends reviewing and expanding current protocols, as well as including continuous ethics training to improve medical practice in this context. The conclusions suggest that an assessment of mental capacity based on ethical principles and an integrated narrative can significantly improve medical practice and decision-making in euthanasia, especially for these patients. Furthermore, the inclusion of ethics experts in the commissions can provide a more humane and just perspective, ensuring that decisions respect the patient’s dignity and autonomy. (shrink)

Resumen: La concepción del ser humano como animal tecnológico, junto con la idea del progreso como sustento de la civilización, plantea varias cuestiones que precisan ser consideradas con detenimiento, entre ellas qué se entiende por progreso y qué sentido y valor tiene la tecnología. El caso de la realidad virtual patentiza de hecho la habitual asunción de la tecnología como algo ajeno a la producción cultural, humana. Sin embargo, la tecnología comparte nuestros límites y está sometida a nuestro designio, por (...) más que se le quiera asumir independiente de nosotros y por más que se intente reemplazar nuestra interacción con el espacio natural por una relación enteramente controlada en un medio virtual.: The idea of the human being as a technological animal, coupled with the idea of progress as the very foundation of civilization, raises several issues that need to be carefully considered, including the meaning of progress and the meaning and value of technology. The case of virtual reality indeed makes explicit the common assumption of technology as something alien to cultural, human production. However, technology shares our limits and it is subject to our plans, regardless of whether someone insists on assuming it independent of ourselves or insists on replacing our interaction with natural space by an interaction in an entirely controlled virtual environment. (shrink)

Around the world, many schools were closed as one of the measures to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. School closure brought about important challenges to the students' learning process. This context requires strong self-regulatory competences and agency for autonomous learning. Moreover, online remote learning was the main alternative response to classroom learning, which increased the inequalities between students with and without access to technological resources or for those with low digital literacy. All considered, to level the playing field (...) for students without digital resources, there is an urgent need to promote self-regulatory competences through offline intervention solutions. The current paper describes a project with this purpose, using radio broadcasting and letters to reach elementary students without digital resources. Moreover, potential reach and participants' perspectives of the project implementation are presented and discussed. The project draws on a prior evidence-based story-tool intervention grounded on a self-regulated learning framework. The original intervention was set previous to the COVID-19 pandemic and was implemented in the classroom context (N= 1,103 students). Once the schools had been closed down, the mode of intervention was adapted with the collaboration of the community. Alternative solutions were developed as follows: (i) story chapters were read on the radio and students received to their homes a printed script, prompting reflection, and suggesting related activities; (ii) students were provided with the story-tool to read autonomously and received letters from the main characters of the story which included, for example, suggestions for activities and reflection. These two alternative modes of intervention delivery potentially reached 394 elementary students, including students with digital resources. Interviews conducted with a group of students were provided information about the positive aspects of these two modes of intervention delivery, perceived learning (e.g., planning), constraints, and suggestions to improve the project. The current work is likely to merit attention from researchers and educational practitioners, given the need to use offline alternatives to provide support for students without digital resources to engage in autonomous learning during the pandemic period. This project may also be used as an alternative or a complementary solution to online modality. (shrink)

Introduction -- Elucidating complexity theories -- Complexity in the natural sciences -- Complexity in social theory -- Towards transdisciplinarity -- Complexity in philosophy: complexification and the limits to knowledge -- Complexity in ethics -- Earth in the anthropocene -- Complexity and climate change -- American dreams, ecological nightmares and new visions -- Complexity and sustainability: wicked problems, gordian knots and synergistic solutions -- Conclusion.

Resumen: Las normas de propiedad intelectual y copyright prevén un periodo de protección otorgando unos derechos económicos exclusivos y temporales. Pasado un plazo determinado, las obras protegidas entran en lo que se denomina dominio público. Éste suele ser considerado como el momento en el que los bienes culturales pasan a estar bajo el dominio y control de la sociedad en conjunto. El presente trabajo pretende argumentar que, dado nuestro actual sistema económico, en realidad el dominio público funciona más como una (...) posibilidad de negocio para determinadas empresas que como una verdadera opción para que el público pueda acceder a las obras. Abstract: The legislation of continental intellectual property and copyright provide for a period of protection granting exclusive and temporary economic rights. After a certain period, protected works enter into what is called the public domain. This is often considered as the moment in which the cultural goods come under the control and domain of society as a whole. The present paper pretends to argue that, given our current economic system, the public domain actually functions more as a business opportunity for certain companies than as a real option for the public to access artistic and intellectual works. (shrink)

En el libro II de la Ética Nicomaquea (EN), Aristóteles menciona 6 casos para los cuales la fórmula según la cual la virtud es el término medio no aplica, esto es, 3 acciones y 3 pasiones donde no es posible pensar ocasión o modo correctos de realizarlas, acciones y pasiones que siempre estarán mal independientemente del contexto y del agente, lo que hoy día llamaríamos «absolutos morales». Dentro de la bibliografía secundaria tal afirmación no ha suscitado gran polémica, pero poco (...) o nada se ha reparado en el hecho de que (1) la cualidad por la cual esas 6 son siempre reprobables la comparten muchas otras acciones y pasiones y que, por tanto, (2) habría que aceptar que en Aristóteles hay un listado relativamente extenso de «absolutos morales». (shrink)

Fichte réserve à l’esthétique un lieu privilégié au sein de son système, non pas qu’il lui consacre un large développement, mais parce qu’il se sert d’elle pour éclairer la nature de l’activité philosophique, après l’instauration kantienne de l’idéalisme transcendantal. En accordant à l’art une place dans la genèse de la spéculation philosophique, Fichte nous offre en même temps l’ébauche d’une esthétique originale, se démarquant de celles de Kant et de Schiller.

Se trata de mostrar que los intentos por acceder a la experiencia psiquiátrica y determinarla a partir de posiciones naturalistas y psicologistas, que son las dominantes, conllevan inestabilidad y que esta caracteriza precisamente el campo de la psiquiatría históricamente. Asumiendo las implicaciones filosóficas que supone el abordaje de ese campo empírico abierto, se postula que sólo la psicopatología, en su ejercicio como procedimiento a la vez lógico e intelectivo, permite relacionar los distintos planos de realidad en que se desenvuelve y (...) tratar de cerrar su campo para dotar a la psiquiatría de la necesaria estabilidad requerida de cara a su praxis clínica. (shrink)

This special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values contains articles concerned with ethics in and around scientific practice. These articles ask how organizational routines both produce and diffuse concerns about the risks and benefits of scientific research and products, and why context remains elusive in formal ethical analysis. These cases are from diverse settings, with several touching on issues of economic inequality and participation in scientific research. Each article describes in some way how cultural and institutional configurations shape ethical (...) thinking and the distribution of goods and harms in science. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, 'false dilemma (FD)'. According to Andrea A. Lunsford, John J. Ruskiewicz, and Keith Walters, a FD tends to “reduce a complicated issue to excessively simple terms” or, when intentionally created, tends to “obscure legitimate alternatives”. FD reflects incorrect thinking because it presents a problem or issue as having only two possible solutions when in fact there are more. Liam Dempsey noted that shows such as The Daily Show and (...) The Colbert Report often employed FD in order to highlight the “theatrics” that are found in political events or the use of FD by politicians. Politics aside, an FD exists anytime an extreme dichotomy of choices appears as the only possible answers. Advertisers also create an FD when creating a situation with only two outcomes and the only correct or positive outcome leads to their brand. (shrink)

Drawing upon the concept of thirdspace (Soja 1996), this article extends sociocultural theorizations of space in relation to alternative educational programs: programs designed to re-engage youth who have been pushed out of mainstream schools. Snapshots of educational programs, provided by ethnographic research gathered in the United States, Australia, and Canada, foreground the contradictions inherent in these alternative spaces: on one hand, the possibilities obtained for youth through participation, and on the other, the production of these programs through displacement. Alternative educational (...) programs expose the tensions between a democratic ideal of engaging all young people in excellent and equitable public schools and a neo-liberal economic rationality that currently fuels the ?sorting machine? function of compulsory schooling. (shrink)

This essay argues that attention to Adam Smith’s ironic framing of his historical narratives in the Wealth of Nations shows his critique of modern commercial society to have been more radical than is generally recognized. These narratives traced the pathologies of European development and the complex chains of causation that linked Smith’s readers—with often destructive and even catastrophic results—to other human beings distant from themselves. While Smith gave reasons to doubt that sympathy for distant others could bring about reform, I (...) argue that he used irony and what he called ridicule to make the book’s British audience aware of the violence of the global commercial system and their place in it as both abettors and lesser victims of its abuses. (shrink)

Despite some recognition that Aboriginal women who have experienced breast cancer may have unique health needs, little research has documented the experiences of Aboriginal women from their perspective. Our main objective was to explore and to begin to make visible Aboriginal women's experiences with breast cancer using the qualitative research technique, photovoice. The research was based in Saskatchewan, Canada and participants were Aboriginal women who had completed breast cancer treatment. Although Aboriginal women cannot be viewed as a homogeneous group, participants (...) indicated two areas of priority for health‐care: (i) Aboriginal identity and traditional beliefs, although expressed in diverse ways, are an important dimension of breast cancer experiences and have relevance for health‐care; and (ii) there is a need for multidimensional support which addresses larger issues of racism, power and socioeconomic inequality. We draw upon a critical and feminist conception of visuality to interrogate and disrupt the dominant visual terrain (both real and metaphorical) where Aboriginal women are either invisible or visible in disempowering ways. Aboriginal women who have experienced breast cancer must be made visible within health‐care in a way that recognizes their experiences situated within the structural context of marginalization through colonial oppression. (shrink)

Facultative bacterial endosymbionts can transfer horizontally among lineages of their arthropod hosts, providing the recipient with a suite of traits that can lead to rapid evolutionary response, as has been recently demonstrated. But how common is symbiont‐driven evolution? Evidence suggests that successful symbiont transfers are most likely within a species or among closely related species, although more distant transfers have occurred over evolutionary history. Symbiont‐driven evolution need not be a function of a recent horizontal transfer, however. Many endosymbionts infect only (...) a small proportion of a host population, but could quickly increase in frequency under favorable selection regimes. Some host species appear to accumulate a diversity of facultative endosymbionts, and it is among these species that symbiont‐driven evolution should be most prevalent. It remains to be determined how frequently symbionts enable rapid evolutionary response by their hosts, but substantial ecological effects are a likely consequence whenever it does occur. (shrink)