Deficits in recognition of facial expressions of emotions are considered to be an important factor explaining impairments in social functioning and affective reactions of schizophrenic patients. Many studies confirmed such deficits while controversies remained concerning the emotion valence and modality. The aim of the study was to explore the process of recognizing facial expressions of emotion in the group of schizophrenic patients by analyzing the role of emotion valence, modality and gender of the model. Results of the group of 35 (...) patients and 35 matched controls indicate that while schizophrenic patients show general impairment in recognizing facial expressions of both positive and the majority of negative emotions, there are differences in deficits for particular emotions. Expressions also appeared to be more ambiguous for the patients while variables connected with gender were found less significant. (shrink)

It is widely believed that environmental conservation has to be guided by respect for the ‘rights’ of future generations. But it is argued in this chapter that it may not be plausible to think in terms of the ‘rights’ of future generations in general or their rights to any specific environmental assets. Future generations may well have rights when they come into existence, but these will only be rights that can be satisfied at the time. But ‘rights’ do not exhaust (...) the whole of morality, and future generations will certainly have interests, which means that we are under moral obligation to take account of them and of the effect that our environmental policies may have on them. Thus, the problem is to predict what the main interests of future generations will be and how to weigh them up against the interests of people alive today. It is argued that this approach will lead to a very different ranking of priorities among our moral obligations to future generations. (shrink)

Social theory plays an important role in the nursing discipline and nursing inquiry as it helps conceptually embed nursing in the larger picture of the social world. For example, a broad category of critical theory provides a unique lens for uncovering social conditions of inequity and oppression. Among the sociological theories, actor‐network theory (ANT) is an approach to research and analysis that has recently gained interest among nurse philosophers and researchers. Studies guided by ANT seek to understand phenomena of interest (...) as constituted within the relationships between human and nonhuman actors to understand how care practices are co‐created/enacted and how they can be made more humane. In this paper, we describe the benefits of ANT for examining healthcare access for incarcerated individuals with life‐limiting illnesses accessing palliative care and for people using illicit drugs. We argue that attention to the materiality of care practices can contribute to efforts of advancing health equity for these groups. (shrink)

The paper discusses some of the criticisms of contingent valuation (CV) and allied techniques for estimating the intensity of peoples' preferences for the environment. The weakness of orthodox utilitarian assumptions in economics concerning the commensurability of all items entering into peoples' choices is discussed. The concept of commensurability is explored as is the problem of rational choice between incommensurate alternatives. While the frequent claim that the environment has some unique moral intrinsic value is unsustainable, its preservation often raises ethical and (...) other motivations that are not commensurate with the values that people place on ordinary marketable goods. Nevertheless, CV is also claimed to have some advantages and it is concluded that little progress will be made in this area until both sides in the debate recognise what is valid in their opponents' arguments. (shrink)

Most offenders, even persistent offenders, eventually desist from crime, and the fastest period of deceleration in the frequency of offending is in the early twenties. This article summarises results from a longitudinal study of desistance from or persistence in crime in this age range, illustrated by three case histories. A key finding is that, because of their deep prior engagement in crime, would-be desisters from repeat offending need to make many adjustments to their patterns of daily life. The authors explain (...) why virtue ethics has been found to be a valuable resource in theorising these results. (shrink)

A Professor of Medical Ethics and a theatre director, also mother and daughter, talk about health, illness, suffering, performance and practice. Using the lenses of ethical and performance theory, they explore what it means to be a patient, a spectator and a practitioner and cover many plays, texts and productions: Samuel Beckett’s Not I and All That Fall, Sarah Kane’s Crave, Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, Enda Walsh’s Ballyturk, Annie Ryan’s adaptation of Eimear McBride’s novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed (...) Thing, Duncan MacMillan’s People, Place and Things and Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. These were selected because first we have seen, studied or worked with each and they have continued to inspire us. Second, they offer rich and revealing insights into the ways in which meaning is/are both negotiated and contested in relation to health and illness. It is the iterative negotiation of meaning that, it is argued, is the essence of narrative practice, be it in medicine or in the theatre. The difference and divergence of perception, response and interpretation to dramatic performance can test relationships, be they professional, creative or familial. Yet, the capacity to understand, and embrace, disagreement and uncertainty is vital; fundamental to a flourishing life. For it is by recognising our part in creating narratives, broken and otherwise, that we can begin to recognise the necessary interactionism and humanity of both medicine and theatre. (shrink)

The paper draws a parallel between natural language symbols and the symbolic mode in living systems. The inextricability of symbols and the dynamics with which they are functionally related shows that much of their structuring is due to dynamics and self-organization. It is also stressed that important factors that determine the shape of language structure lie outside individual mind/brains and they draw on time-scales quite different from those of phenomenological experience. Analysis of language into units and subsystems is thus not (...) straightforward, since they show functionality on many levels and many time-scales. Finally it is recognized that, as a specific and specialized system of inter-individual coordination, natural language is many hierarchical levels away form simpler forms of information transmission in biological systems. (shrink)

This article investigates the new phenomenon of e-mailed questions to a radio phone-in programme, BBC Radio 4's `Election Call'. Our interest in this phenomenon arose for several reasons. First, as a new form, e-mails were singled out at the beginning of each broadcast for special instructions to listeners, although there was evidence that as the series progressed, dealing with e-mail became more of a routine event in each subsequent programme. Second, on listening to the Election Call broadcasts, the sequential introduction (...) of an e-mail question appeared to be problematic for the host. First mentions of e-mailed questions were often subject to a noticeable amount of disfluency and repair work, in contrast to the well-rehearsed and highly routine introduction of callers' questions. Third, we are interested in the function of e-mail questions in terms of how they are handled by the host and guest. Are they given the same status as a `call', and if not, where do the differences lie? In our analysis we show how the introduction of this new media form into a well-established context opens up new structural possibilities for both host as interviewer and politician as interviewee, in terms of how questions get framed, and how they get responded to. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine whether relational mobility on a country level related to individuals’ tendencies to restrict their movement following the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic and following the issuance of stay-at-home orders in their country. We use data on geographic mobility, composed of records of geolocation information provided via mobile phones, to examine changes in geographic mobility at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that individuals in countries with higher RM tended to decrease their geographic (...) mobility more than those in countries with lower RM following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Similar results were found for wealth gross domestic product, but were independent of RM. These results suggest that individuals in countries with higher RM were more responsive to calls to reduce geographic mobility. (shrink)

The subject of the current study is the process of implementing the social housing policy and its impact on increasing the quality of life of vulnerable people. The analysis is related to the Social Housing Program introduced by the city of Gdańsk. The study has been carried out using the case study method with the use of document analysis, analysis of existing data, and five in-depth interviews with program managers. The theoretical framework has been developed around three major explicatory perspectives: (...) multi-level governance, QOL, and social exclusion. Meeting the housing needs is one of the primary tasks of local governments. If such a policy is to be called positive, it should be combined with social policy tasks related to social inclusion, and it should be carried out through partnerships forming housing cooperation networks. A characteristic feature of the cooperation is the cross-sectoral nature of the actors. The results have revealed a significant positive relationship between the use of social housing tools and the quality of satisfying the living needs of the residents. This study contributes to the discussion by revealing the role of social work and social and professional activation in meeting housing needs. The results suggest that a combination of housing and social policy measures can help vulnerable people develop social competencies conducive to housing maintenance and increase the social cohesion of local environments. (shrink)

Even if future generations have no rights and intergenerational justice, intergenerational egalitarianism, and sustainable development are all flawed, this does relieve us of a moral obligation to take account of the impact of our policies on the interests of future generations. In this chapter we argue that whereas, in the very long run, it seems that widespread acute poverty will be eliminated and a decent environment will be preserved, there seems to be no prospect of ever eradicating the inherent weaknesses (...) of the human psyche that are responsible for some groups in society imposing intolerable suffering on others. Hence, it seems that the most valuable bequest we could make to future generations would be a more decent, tolerant, and ‘just’ society than the one in which most people live today. Furthermore, there is clear evidence that the greatest environmental damage has been done in countries where there has been the least respect for basic human rights. (shrink)

Another widely suggested principle governing our obligations to future generations is ‘sustainable development’. The first part of this chapter argues that the mainstream interpretations of the concept of sustainable development are open to serious objections on ethical grounds. The chapter also shows that even if intergenerational egalitarianism were a viable objective there is nothing intergenerationally egalitarian about sustainable development.

Generations are not homogeneous entities and are composed of individuals and nations that have conflicting interests in the way in which resources are allocated among competing uses. This chapter discusses whether ‘the environment’, or ‘nature’, should enjoy special status in any allocation; whether the economist's approach is too anthropocentric; the concept of ‘intrinsic’ values; and the application of these concepts to environmental valuation. It is argued that while many environmental assets are ‘public goods’, so that the free market is unlikely (...) to supply the socially optimal amount, the same applies to many other things, such as public health or education services or the arts, not to mention the fact that most people in the world are, anyway, in dire need of a simple increase in their ability to buy simple basic private goods. This means that the allocation of resources to environmental objectives ought to take into account some form of cost‐benefit analysis. (shrink)

The main focus of the paper is the role of listeners’ emotion-relevant characteristics and musical expertise in the granularity of affective responses to music. Another objective of the study is to test the consistency of the granularity of affect that is perceived in music and/or experienced in response to it. In Experiment 1, 91 musicians and nonmusicians listened to musical excerpts and grouped them according to the similarity of the affects they experienced while listening. Finer grouping granularity was found in (...) musicians and high rumination scorers. Male musicians with above-median scores in rumination produced a larger number of clusters than the other male participants. Experiment 2 that engaged 23 participants demonstrated moderate consistency with which listeners grouped affects that they perceived in music and affects they experienced while listening to music. The study suggests that affective responses to music are subject to individual differences in musical expertise and rumination. Affects perceived in music and felt in response to it seem to be categorized with reference to the common principles. However, the cues that are used in such instances of categorization seem to be different. The paper encourages further research on the importance of listeners’ personal characteristics for the affective responses to music. (shrink)

Experimental emotion inductions provide the strongest causal evidence of the effects of emotions on psychological and physiological outcomes. In the present qualitative review, we evaluated five common experimental emotion induction techniques: visual stimuli, music, autobiographical recall, situational procedures, and imagery. For each technique, we discuss the extent to which they induce six basic emotions: anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, fear, and sadness. For each emotion, we discuss the relative influences of the induction methods on subjective emotional experience and physiological responses. Based (...) on the literature reviewed, we make emotion-specific recommendations for induction methods to use in experiments. (shrink)

Rather than focus on effects, the isolatable and measureable outcomes of events and interventions, the papers assembled here offer different perspectives on the affective dimension of the meaning and politics of human/non-human relations. The authors begin by drawing attention to the constructed discontinuity between humans and non-humans, and to the kinds of knowledge and socialities that this discontinuity sustains, including those underpinned by nature-culture, subject-object, body-mind, individual-society polarities. The articles presented track human/non-human relations through different domains, including: humans/non-humans in history (...) and animal welfare science (Fudge and Buller); the relationship between the way we live, the effects on our natural environment and contested knowledges about ‘nature’ (Whatmore); choreographies of everyday life and everyday science practices with non-human animals such as horses, meerkats, mice, and wolves (Latimer, Candea, Davies, Despret). Each paper also goes on to offer different perspectives on the human/non-human not just as division, or even as an asymmetrical relation, but as relations that are mutually affective, however invisible and inexpressible in the domain of science. Thus the collection contributes to new epistemologies/ontologies that undercut the usual ordering of relations and their dichotomies, particularly in that dominant domain of contemporary culture that we call science. Indeed, in their impetus to capture ‘affect’, the collection goes beyond the usual turn towards a more inclusive ontology, and contributes to the radical shift in the epistemology and philosophy of science’s terms of engagement. (shrink)

Each year thousands of individuals enrol in clinical trials as healthy volunteers to earn money. Some of them pursue research participation as a full-time or at least a part-time job. They call themselves professional or semiprofessional guinea pigs. The practice of paying healthy volunteers raises numerous ethical concerns. Different payment models have been discussed in literature. Dickert and Grady argue for a wage-payment model. This model gives research subjects a standardised hourly wage, and it is based on an assumption that (...) research participation is morally indistinguishable from other forms of unskilled labour. In this paper, I will challenge this assumption. I will argue that human guinea pigging has particular characteristics which taken together make it significantly different from other forms of labour. Participation in research is skill-independent. Healthy volunteers are valuable not because they are skilful persons, but because they are human bodies. The role of research volunteers is mainly passive. They are not asked to produce goods or deliver services. They are paid for enduring unpleasant, painful and risky interventions performed by investigators. Research volunteering involves inherent risks and uncertainties, and subjects have little or no control over their minimisation and materialisation. I conclude that participation in clinical research is a specific kind of activity. It is more like renting out one’s body to strangers, than working. Thus, research participation should not be treated on par with other forms of employment. (shrink)

Everyone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has (...) changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and you wouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? (shrink)

Reigning regulatory frameworks for biomedical research impose on researchers and research ethics committees an obligation to protect research participants from risks that are unnecessary, disproportionate to potential research benefits, and non-minimized. Where the research has no potential to produce results of direct benefit to the subjects and the subjects are unable to give consent, these requirements are strengthened by an additional condition, that risks should not exceed a certain minimal threshold. In this article, I address the question of whether there (...) should be limits of permissible risks in non-therapeutic research involving competent and healthy subjects. Some commentators argue that competent and informed individuals should have a right to participate even in extremely risky research and that research ethics committees should never reject studies because they are too dangerous. To use David Shaw's expression, competent volunteers should have ‘a right to participate in high-risk research’. I argue that this idea is ill-founded, as it does not take into account the social mission and complex collaborative nature of research practice as well as the inequity of power between researchers and subjects. Imposition of limits on permissible risks for healthy volunteers is justified by the need to protect research enterprise and the need to protect the weaker party, namely the subjects. Also, I suggest that the best way to set boundaries on research risks is to leave the judgment of risk acceptability to research ethics committees. (shrink)

This issue profiles various attempts, both successful and fraught, to engage the divide between asceticism and opulence, between materialism and poverty.

Reading is an affective and reflective relationship with a text, whether it is a new, groundbreaking monograph or one of those books that keeps getting pulled off the shelf year after year. Unlike traditional reviews, the pieces in this section may veer off in new directions as critical reading becomes an extended occurrence of thinking, being, and creation. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, by Simon Reynolds. New York: Faber and Faber, 2011.

The author illustrates, with the aid of case studies, the content of a social and moral curriculum, the role of the teacher and the children.

Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound problems of the limits of ethics and the nature of value.

The David Lewis’s article concerns the issue of penal substitution in the dual context of the contemporary system of criminal law, in which punishment does not perform a compensatory function, and in the context of the Christian interpretation of Christ’s death as Atonement. It may seem that we do not believe in penal substitution, but in fact we do believe in it selectively. There are Christians who believe that Christ’s death is a payment of the debt of punishment owed by (...) the sinners, but do not believe that a murderer’s friend can serve on his behalf a death sentence. Most of us believe in penal substitution with reference to fines but not other kinds of punishment. In both cases the beliefs concerning penal substitution are clearly inconsistent. However, if selective acceptance of penal substitution is so common, perhaps it makes sense after all. (shrink)

Paying research subjects for their participation in biomedical studies is an increasingly common and acceptable practice. Nevertheless, it continues to raise numerous conceptual, ethical, and pract...

Hannah Arendt began her scholarly career with an exploration of Saint Augustine's concept of _caritas_, or neighborly love, written under the direction of Karl Jaspers and the influence of Martin Heidegger. After her German academic life came to a halt in 1933, Arendt carried her dissertation into exile in France, and years later took the same battered and stained copy to New York. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, as she was completing or reworking her most influential studies of (...) political life, Arendt was simultaneously annotating and revising her dissertation on Augustine, amplifying its argument with terms and concepts she was using in her political works of the same period. The disseration became a bridge over which Arendt traveled back and forth between 1929 Heidelberg and 1960s New York, carrying with her Augustine's question about the possibility of social life in an age of rapid political and moral change. In _Love and Saint Augustine_, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark make this important early work accessible for the first time. Here is a completely corrected and revised English translation that incorporates Arendt's own substantial revisions and provides additional notes based on letters, contracts, and other documents as well as the recollections of Arendt's friends and colleagues during her later years. (shrink)

Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. (...) Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life--understood as both a biological and social phenomenon--it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. "Anthropocene" names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe. Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink "life" and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist's method; it also includes a photographic project by the author."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

In the paper, the topic of teaching ethics in schools in Poland according to the Core Curriculum is analyzed. The authors refer to the historical background of introducing Ethics into schools and controversies accompanying it. They also refer to some fundamental problems affecting the teaching of Ethics in Polish schools. The main focus of the article is the idea that most of the problems result from setting Ethics in opposition to Religion, which appears invalid as far as the curriculum is (...) concerned. Ethics should be an obligatory subject for all levels of education. The aim of the authors is not to exhaustively present all the problems that are making the teaching of Ethics in Poland difficult, but to present to the foreign reader the curriculum and a broad outline of the difficulties that teaching Ethics faces in Polish schools. (shrink)

A blueprint for social change showing how we can reverse the destructive attitudes that threaten our world.

The article explores the rich and varied experiences of a collective writing project, unfolding through an anecdote involving Charlie, a young boy who creatively disrupted conventional photography methods. This incident, during an evening promenade by the sea in Ericeira (Portugal), epitomizes the project's embrace of playfulness and exploration of diverse perspectives–materialized through Charlie's playful insistence on experimenting with different angles. The event embodied the group’s approach to writing, leading to a collective inquiry into the interplay of ages, angles, and other (...) themes like waves, threads, shadows, and liminal spaces. The project, driven by the Between Ages Collective, began with informal gatherings in Plymouth, UK, and expanded into a year-long online reading group. Participants, spanning different generations and academic stages, shared various materials, including films, picture books, and scholarly texts, which inspired individual contributions. Influenced by the Collective's collaborative spirit, these contributions explore the concept of 'between ages' – a metaphorical and literal space of transition and fluidity. Contributors were invited to craft pieces that delve into the 'between ages' theme, often exploring serendipitous moments that transform interactions and experiences. The writing tries to capture a sense of openness and curiosity, embracing the uncertainties and ambiguities inherent in the process. The works do not strictly adhere to conventional academic or narrative forms but rather emerge from the collective's shared experiences, including cooking, eating, swimming and walking together. The article suggests that these writings are not meant to be definitive or conclusive but are explorations that invite readers to engage with the mundane and profound textures of everyday life. The stories and themes explored are marked by their diversity in style, rhythm, and imagery, ranging from reflections on the philosophy of shadows to the profound implications of intergenerational and interspecies relationships. The Collective’s work is presented as an ongoing experiment in thinking and writing together, with each piece offering unique insights into the fluid and often blurred boundaries between different states of being. This openness to the in-between spaces brings into question the notion of fixed identities and experiences, inviting a more nuanced understanding of the relational dynamics that shape existence. The article allows the readers to delve into these narratives and engage with the myriad ways they resonate with broader themes of being, storying, and connecting. (shrink)