In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Virtual GalleryJessica Evett-Miller (bio) Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 1. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 2. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 3. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 4. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 5. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 6. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 7. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage (...) 8. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 9. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 10. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 11. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 12. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 13. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 14. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 15. Click for larger view View full resolutionImage 16.Jessica Evett-Miller Jessica Evett-Miller took these photographs during a trip to Italy and Sicily and assembled them for her senior project at the Alternative Community School in Ithaca’ New York. Now a freshman at Cornell University, she is planning to design an independent major in visual studies. She would like to dedicate thesephotographs toherfather, John Miller, and to thank him for his inspiration.She paired the front and back cover images (the first and the last) to create an interplay between the two. They function together rather than separately.Copyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Given the long-standing controversy about whether the brain-dead should be considered alive in an irreversible coma or dead despite displaying apparent signs of life, the ethical and policy issues posed when family members insist on continued treatment are not as simple as commentators have claimed. In this article, we consider the kind of policy that should be adopted to manage a family's insistence that their brain-dead loved one continues to receive supportive care. We argue that while it would be ethically (...) inappropriate to continue to devote scarce acute care resources to such patients in a hospital setting, it may not be ethically inappropriate for patients to receive these resources in certain other settings. Thus, if a family insists on continuing to care for their brain-dead loved at their home, we should not, from a policy perspective, interfere with the family's wishes. We also argue that healthcare professionals should make some effort to facilitate the transfer of brain-dead patients to these other settings when families insist on continued treatment despite being informed about the lack of any potential for recovery of consciousness. Our arguments are strengthened by the fact that patients in a persistent vegetative state, who, when correctly diagnosed, also have no potential for recovery of consciousness, are routinely transferred from hospitals to nursing homes or long-term care facilities where they continue to be ventilated, tube fed and to receive other supportive care. We also briefly explore the question of who should be responsible for the costs of such treatment at the long-term care facility. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Defining a nonpaternalistic yet achievable form of trust in medicine in an era of simultaneous patient empowerment and institutional control has been and remains an important task of bioethics. The ‘crisis of trust’ in medicine has been viewed mainly as the problem of getting patients to trust their health care providers, especially physicians. However, since paradigmatic cases of trust are mutual, bioethicists must pay more attention to physician trust in patients. A physician’s view of the reasonableness of trust in (...) a particular patient is affected not just by his or her relationship with that patient, but also by what is going on institutionally, professionally, legally, and politically with regard to a given treatment or intervention. Since general moral principles are insufficient in determining the moral value and reasonableness of trust in particular instances, I discuss in detail the role of trust and distrust in the specific case of treating patients with medications implicated in drug abuse. I conclude that it is important to become aware, first, of the clinical significance of physician trust and distrust in patients, and second, of the many factors which inform both of these moral attitudes. These two claims together suggest that a central, but overlooked, virtue of medical practice is reflective, context‐responsive trust in patients. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe investigated the impact of emotions on learning vocabulary in an unfamiliar language to better understand affective influences in foreign language acquisition. Seventy native English speakers learned new vocabulary in either a negative or a neutral emotional state. Participants also completed two sets of working memory tasks to examine the potential mediating role of working memory. Results revealed that participants exposed to negative stimuli exhibited difficulty in retrieving and correctly pairing English words with Indonesian words, as reflected in a lower (...) performance on the prompted recall tests and the free recall measure. Emotional induction did not change working memory scores from pre to post manipulation. This suggests working memory could not explain the reduced vocabulary learning in the negative group. We argue that negative mood can adversely affect language learning by suppressing aspects of native-language processing and impeding form-meaning mapping with second language words. (shrink)

Given the long‐standing controversy about whether the brain‐dead should be considered alive in an irreversible coma or dead despite displaying apparent signs of life, the ethical and policy issues posed when family members insist on continued treatment are not as simple as commentators have claimed. In this article, we consider the kind of policy that should be adopted to manage a family's insistence that their brain‐dead loved one continues to receive supportive care. We argue that while it would be ethically (...) inappropriate to continue to devote scarce acute care resources to such patients in a hospital setting, it may not be ethically inappropriate for patients to receive these resources in certain other settings. Thus, if a family insists on continuing to care for their brain‐dead loved at their home, we should not, from a policy perspective, interfere with the family's wishes. We also argue that healthcare professionals should make some effort to facilitate the transfer of brain‐dead patients to these other settings when families insist on continued treatment despite being informed about the lack of any potential for recovery of consciousness. Our arguments are strengthened by the fact that patients in a persistent vegetative state, who, when correctly diagnosed, also have no potential for recovery of consciousness, are routinely transferred from hospitals to nursing homes or long‐term care facilities where they continue to be ventilated, tube fed and to receive other supportive care. We also briefly explore the question of who should be responsible for the costs of such treatment at the long‐term care facility. (shrink)

Robert Baker (2005) has urged that bioethicists develop a code of ethics on several related but distinct grounds: that, based on his analysis of the history of development of other professions, the...

Death and morality connect in interesting ways in Disney movies. In some Disney films, heroes are defined partly by their willingness to take risks that might result in death, as long as these risks are to protect or obtain good things that make human life worth living. A related ethical issue that Disney films address with regard to death is appropriate grief. Disney films, on balance, show an awareness and respect for the cycle of human life. Perhaps that is why (...) Disney reserves some of its worst deaths for evil characters who refuse to accept the fact of their own mortality. In all of the examples, Disney illustrates the connection many philosophers maintain between courage, cowardice, and death. Disney and Pixar films are so rich and popular that people should use them to engage in difficult conversations about death and other subjects. (shrink)

This paper explores the ways in which trust and distrust, especially among relative strangers, are connected to social identities and locations. It begins by sketching an account of interpersonal trust, emphasizing the role that socially salient identities, based in part upon cultural figurations, play in their development. It then contends that these cultural figurations both foster and result from distrust of specific social groups, including African Americans, the poor, and (some) women. Treating social roles and relations as central to moral (...) analysis enables an understanding of the injustice of some forms of social distrust which does not imply that one individual’s distrust of another is culpable in a straightforward way. The paper then develops the claim that one’s social location can affect the moral desirability of trust and distrust, concluding that social distrust can sometimes function as a kind of dissident attitude, a political stance with emancipatory potential. (shrink)

In the early 2000s, several states legalized marijuana for medicinal uses. Since then, more and more states have either decriminalized or legalized marijuana use for medical or recreational purposes. Federal law has remained unchanged. The state-level decriminalization of marijuana and the concomitant de-stigmatizing and mainstreaming is likely to lead to greater use among the general population, including among nursing mothers. Marijuana is already one of the most widely used illicit substances among lactating women. There exist few studies demonstrating the effects (...) of marijuana in breast milk on nursing babies. In the present context of a changing legal landscape, shifting cultural beliefs, and the absence of clear professional guidelines, healthcare professionals are faced with ethical questions around how best to support nursing mothers and their babies when marijuana use is a factor. This paper first presents an overview of the law, science, and professional guidelines as they relate to marijuana and breastfeeding. Then, I offer an assessment of the relevant ethical issues providers and their patients may need to navigate. (shrink)

Recent literature on trust commonly contains the claim that the trust which characterizes intimate relationships is a different phenomenon altogether from the trust that characterizes professional and other sorts of non-intimate relationships. In this paper I argue that while there are important differences among kinds of trust, an invidious distinction between trust in strangers and trust infriends is not only unwarranted but it obscures the fundamentally affective and relational base of all forms of interpersonal trust. In this essay I construct (...) an account of interpersonal trust, which recognizes the similarities that pervade its different forms. Without such a complex approach, we lose theoretical sight not only of key features of trust, but of the relationship of trust to significant dimensions of human existence. (shrink)

In this paper, we move toward offering psychological benchmarks to measure success in building increasingly humanlike robots. By psychological benchmarks we mean categories of interaction that capture conceptually fundamental aspects of human life, specified abstractly enough to resist their identity as a mere psychological instrument, but capable of being translated into testable empirical propositions. Nine possible benchmarks are considered: autonomy, imitation, intrinsic moral value, moral accountability, privacy, reciprocity, conventionality, creativity, and authenticity of relation. Finally, we discuss how getting the right (...) group of benchmarks in human–robot interaction will, in future years, help inform on the foundational question of what constitutes essential features of being human. (shrink)

In this paper, we move toward offering psychological benchmarks to measure success in building increasingly humanlike robots. By psychological benchmarks we mean categories of interaction that capture conceptually fundamental aspects of human life, specified abstractly enough to resist their identity as a mere psychological instrument, but capable of being translated into testable empirical propositions. Nine possible benchmarks are considered: autonomy, imitation, intrinsic moral value, moral accountability, privacy, reciprocity, conventionality, creativity, and authenticity of relation. Finally, we discuss how getting the right (...) group of benchmarks in human–robot interaction will, in future years, help inform on the foundational question of what constitutes essential features of being human. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotion knowledge, the ability to accurately perceive and label emotions, predicts higher quality peer relations, higher social competence, higher academic achievement, and fewer behaviour...

In 1959, Neal Miller made the bold claim that the Stimulus–Response, Behaviorist models of that era were describing the way in which stimuli lead to the entry of contents into consciousness (“entry,” for short). Today, researchers have begun to investigate the link between external stimuli and involuntary entry, using paradigms such as the reflexive imagery task (RIT), the focus of our review. The RIT has revealed that stimuli can elicit insuppressible entry of high-level cognitions. Knowledge of the boundary conditions (...) of the RIT effect illuminates the limitations of involuntary processes and the role of consciousness in the regulation of behavior. We review the boundary conditions of this paradigm as well as its systematic effects. Systematic effects are unlikely to be due to experimental demand. While reviewing each effect, we consider its theoretical implications. In addition, throughout our review, we discuss future directions for the study of insuppressible entry using the RIT. Last, we discuss a theoretical development (passive frame theory) that stems from the RIT and illuminates how involuntary entry and encapsulation, though at times disadvantageous for the actor, are essential for adaptiveaction selectionduring the course of ontogeny. (shrink)

To better understand the available publications addressing ethical issues in rural health care we sought to identify the ethics literature that specifically focuses on rural America. We wanted to determine the extent to which the rural ethics literature was distributed between general commentaries, descriptive summaries of research, and original research publications. We identified 55 publications that specifically and substantively addressed rural health care ethics, published between 1966 and 2004. Only 7 (13%) of these publications were original research articles while (12) (...) 22% were descriptive summaries of research and 36 (65%) were general commentaries. The majority of publications examined (55%) were clinically focused while 27% addressed organizational ethics and 18% addressed ethical ramifications of rural health care policy at a national or community level. Our findings indicate that there are a limited number of publications focusing on rural health care ethics, suggesting a need for scholars and researchers to more rigorously address rural ethics issues. (shrink)

A number of examples of studies from the field ‘The Philosophy of Mathematical Practice’ (PMP) are given. To characterise this new field, three different strands are identified: an agent-based, a historical, and an epistemological PMP. These differ in how they understand ‘practice’ and which assumptions lie at the core of their investigations. In the last part a general framework, capturing some overall structure of the field, is proposed.

It has become recently popular to suggest that knowledge is the epistemic norm of practical reasoning and that this provides an important constraint on the correct account of knowledge, one which favours subject-sensitive invariantism over contextualism and classic invariantism. I argue that there are putative counterexamples to both directions of the knowledge norm. Even if the knowledge norm can be defended against these counterexamples, I argue that it is a delicate issue whether it is true, one which relies on fine (...) distinctions among a variety of relevant notions of propriety which our intuitions may reflect. These notions variously apply to the agent herself, her character traits, her beliefs, her reasoning and any resultant action. Given the delicacy of these issues, I argue that the knowledge norm is not a fixed point from which to defend substantive and controversial views in epistemology. Rather, these views need to be defended on other grounds. (shrink)

What is the nature of the evidence provided by thought experiments in philosophy? For instance, what evidence is provided by the Gettier thought experiment against the JTB theory of knowledge? According to one view, it provides as evidence only a certain psychological proposition, e.g. that it seems to one that the subject in the Gettier case lacks knowledge. On an alternative, nonpsychological view, the Gettier thought experiment provides as evidence the nonpsychological proposition that the subject in the Gettier case lacks (...) knowledge (e.g., Williamson 2007). Given the centrality of thought experiments to philosophical enquiry, the correct account of thought experiment evidence is important for understanding the nature of philosophical methodology. Further, Williamson argues that a misguided adherence to the psychological view of thought experiment evidence encourages scepticism about philosophy since it opens a gap between our evidence and the nonpsychological subject matter of philosophy. The main aim of this paper is to defend the psychological view against recent objections. In particular, I argue that even if thought experiment evidence is psychological, it can still provide justification for non-psychological claims which are the subject matter of philosophy. (shrink)

This paper compares the statement ‘Mathematics is the study of structure’ with the actual practice of mathematics. We present two examples from contemporary mathematical practice where the notion of structure plays different roles. In the first case a structure is defined over a certain set. It is argued firstly that this set may not be regarded as a structure and secondly that what is important to mathematical practice is the relation that exists between the structure and the set. In the (...) second case, from algebraic topology, one point is that an object can be a place in different structures. Which structure one chooses to place the object in depends on what one wishes to do with it. Overall the paper argues that mathematics certainly deals with structures, but that structures may not be all there is to mathematics. (shrink)

Derek Parfit's “reductionist” account of personal identity (including the rejection of anything like a soul) is coupled with the rejection of a commonsensical intuition of essential self-unity, as in his defense of the counter-intuitive claim that “identity does not matter.” His argument for this claim is based on reflection on the possibility of personal fission. To the contrary, Simon Blackburn claims that the “unity reaction” to fission has an absolute grip on practical reasoning. Now David Lewis denied Parfit's claim that (...) reductionism contravenes common sense, so I revisit the debate between Parfit and Lewis, showing why Parfit wins it. Is reductionism about persons then inherently at odds with the unity reaction? Not necessarily; David Velleman presents a reductionist theory according to which fission does not conflict with the unity reaction. Nonetheless, relying on the distinction between person level descriptions of first-person states and the first-person perspective itself, I argue that Velleman's theory does not eliminate fission-based conflict with the unity reaction. Footnotesa * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the philosophy departments at Rutgers University and Bowling Green State University. I am indebted to many members of these audiences, and to the other contributors to this volume, for their comments—especially Frank Arntzenius, Michael Bradie, David Copp, John Finnis, Jerry Fodor, Brian Loar, Barry Loewer, Colin McGinn, Fred Miller, Mark Moyer, David Oderberg, Marya Schechtman, David Schmidtz, David Sobel, and Sara Worley. Special thanks to David Sanford. I am also grateful to graduate students in my seminar at Bowling Green during the spring of 2003, for urging me to take seriously the grip of the unity reaction; I am especially grateful for the comments of Nico Maloberti, Jonathan Miller, John Milliken, Robyn Peabody, Jennifer Sproul, Jessica Teaman, and Sherisse Webb. (shrink)

Cet article discute le rôle des représentations dans les preuves mathématiques. Il est suggéré ici que les représentations nous permettent de diviser une preuve en plusieurs parties plus faciles à traiter. Nous illustrerons cela avec un exemple de la pratique mathématique actuelle qui consiste à trouver la valeur d'une expression en la divisant graduellement en parties plus simples. Par ailleurs, j'explique le rôle que jouent les icônes et les indices dans cette procédure. Les icônes assurent la similarité entre l'expression et (...) les résultats obtenus. En revanche, les indices agissent comme des indicateurs qui permettent de réinsérer les résultats aux emplacements appropriés. (shrink)

Many research ethics guidelines now oblige researchers to offer research participants the results of research in which they participated. This practice is intended to uphold respect for persons and ensure that participants are not treated as mere means to an end. Yet some scholars have begun to question a generalised duty to disclose research results, highlighting the potential harms arising from disclosure and questioning the ethical justification for a duty to disclose, especially with respect to individual results. In support of (...) this view, we argue that current rationales for a duty of disclosure do not form an adequate basis for an ethical imperative. We review policy guidance and scholarly commentary regarding the duty to communicate the results of biomedical, epidemiological and genetic research to research participants and show that there is wide variation in opinion regarding what should be disclosed and under what circumstance. Moreover, we argue that there is fundamental confusion about the notion of “research results,” specifically regarding three core concepts: the distinction between aggregate and individual results, amongst different types of research, and across different degrees of result veracity. Even where policy guidance and scholarly commentary have been most forceful in support of an ethical imperative to disclose research results, ambiguity regarding what is to be disclosed confounds ethical action. (shrink)

In a well-known passage in chapter V of On Liberty, J. S. Mill notes that while economic competition is generally socially beneficial and should be permitted, this “Free Trade” doctrine does not follow from the liberty or harm principle because “trade is a social act.” In a largely overlooked passage in chapter IV of the same essay, however, Mill contends that for society to coercively prohibit the practice of piecework – paying workers by the unit rather than by the hour (...) or day – does violate this principle. In this short note, I demonstrate that Mill's reasoning in these two passages is contradictory. (shrink)

Debriefing is a standard ethical requirement for human research involving the use of deception. Little systematic attention, however, has been devoted to explaining the ethical significance of debriefing and the specific ethical functions that it serves. In this article, we develop an account of debriefing as a tool of moral accountability for the prima facie wrong of deception. Specifically, we contend that debriefing should include a responsibility to promote transparency by explaining the deception and its rationale, to provide an apology (...) to subjects for infringing the principle of respect for persons, and to offer subjects an opportunity to withdraw their data. We also present recommendations concerning the discussion of deception in scientific articles reporting the results of research using deception. (shrink)

According to contextualism, the truth-conditions of knowledge attributions depend on features of the attributor's context. Contextualists take their view to be supported by cases in which the intuitive correctness of knowledge attributions depends on the attributor's context. Williamson offers a complex invariantist account of such cases which appeals to two elements, psychological bias and a failure of luminosity. He provides independent reasons for thinking that contextualist cases are characterized by psychological bias and a failure of luminosity, and argues that some (...) of our intuitions about the cases are explained by the former factor and some by the latter. I argue that psychological bias is the more fundamental of these elements. I show how, by itself, psychological bias can explain all the intuitions concerning contextualist cases. Further, it gives the best account of why contextualist cases are characterized by a failure of luminosity. (shrink)

This chapter presents an overview of the contributions to the section on Experimental Mathematics by focusing in particular on how they characterize the phenomenon of “experimental mathematics” and its origins. The second part presents two case studies illustrating how experimental mathematics is understood in contemporary analysis. The third section offers a systematic presentation of the contributions to the section.

Researchers in the area of children and advertising have been working for decades to determine exactly how children process commercial messages. While a great deal of work has focused on cognitive advertising literacy, research regarding the development of children’s moral advertising literacy is lacking. Given the popularity of social media platforms among youth today, this study examined age differences in children’s moral evaluations of product placement in a YouTube video displaying various forms of disclosures. Results revealed that more prominent disclosures (...) are associated with greater judgments of the appropriateness of the advertising tactic, which in turn is associated with more positive evaluations of the promoted brand. While the former relationship was particularly strong among younger children, older children were more likely to consider how others and society broadly are impacted by covert advertising, resulting in more negative evaluations of the promoted brand. (shrink)