This article explores post-cesarean shame to understand how normative birthing ideals are tied to neoliberal and popular feminist expectations of what it means to be a “good” mother. Drawing on narratives shared on motherhood blogs, we note that feelings of shame associated with cesareans are tied to social pressures for unmedicated, vaginal birth. Rather than critique nonmedical or “natural” birth, this article explores the affective implications of approaching birth as a curated and controllable process. We conclude with suggestions for practitioners, (...) moms, and their supporters on how to make room for births that are not good. (shrink)

An important application of cognitive architectures is to provide human performance models that capture psychological mechanisms in a form that can be “programmed” to predict task performance of human–machine system designs. Although many aspects of human performance have been successfully modeled in this approach, accounting for multitalker speech task performance is a novel problem. This article presents a model for performance in a two-talker task that incorporates concepts from psychoacoustics, in particular, masking effects and stream formation.

The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received encouragement at every step of the way. You on the o...

In the Politics of Black Joy, Lindsey Stewart develops Hurston's contributions to political theory and philosophy of race by introducing the politics of joy as a refusal of neoabolitionism, a political tradition that reduces southern Black life to tragedy or social death.

Visual Search without Selective Attention calls into question the necessity of a covert selective attention mechanism by implementing a formal model that includes basic visual mechanisms, saccades, and simple task strategies. Across three search tasks, the model accounts for response times as well as the proportion of errors observed in human participants, including effects of item crowding in the visual stimulus.

For Gianni Vattimo, the renunciation of violence is the starting point for constructing a post foundational politics. So far, criticism of Vattimo’s argument has focused on his larger commitment to metaphysical nihilism and whether the renunciation of violence is a thicker principle than his post foundational philosophy can support. I argue that Vattimo’s renunciation of violence can also be criticized for two other reasons. First, Vattimo attempts to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable uses of violence through an under developed idea (...) of self-defense. Second, despite his attention to the political and philosophical impact of mass communications technology, Vattimo ignores emerging technological challenges to our understanding of violence. Nonetheless, I argue that Vattimo’s renunciation can still serve as a useful starting point for contemporary political thinking. What Vattimo’s logic shows is that we can enhance the moral standing of democracy by decisively detaching its practices and institutions from historical artifacts of political violence. (shrink)

In “Post-Liberation Feminism,” Ladelle McWhorter raises the question of what practices will be helpful to further feminist goals if we are no longer in a state of domination, but are still oppressed. McWhorter finds resources in Michel Foucault's concept of “practices of freedom” to begin to answer this question. I build upon McWhorter's insight while recalling Angela Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: namely, that sexual love, as conceived in hoodoo and the blues, became a terrain upon which newly emancipated (...) blacks worked out what their newfound freedom meant. In this essay, I consider what practices of freedom would look like within a life-giving nexus of hoodoo, blues, and sexual love. Not only does the image of the hoodoo woman, prevalent within the blues, emerge through an interaction of race, class, region, gender, sexuality, and spiritualty, but analyzing sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling will help us track how sexual love was transformed into a practice of freedom. I will argue that sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling reveals an important dimension of emancipatory work that both defies categorization as resistance and is crucial to the development of capacities for resistance. (shrink)

We have never been so aware of masks. They were in short supply in the early days of COVID-19, resulting in significant risk to health care workers. Now they are highly politicized with battles about mask-wearing protocols breaking out in public. Although masks have obtained a new urgency and ubiquity in the context of COVID-19, people have thought about both the literal and metaphorical role of masks in medicine for generations. In this paper, we discuss three such metaphors—the masks of (...) objectivity, of infallibility, and of benevolence—and their powerful role in medicine. These masks can be viewed as inflexible barriers to communication, contributing to the traditional authoritarian relationship between doctor and patient and concealing the authenticity and vulnerability of physicians. COVID masks, by contrast, offer a more nuanced and morally complex metaphor for thinking about protecting people from harm, authentic and trustworthy communication, and attention to potential inequities both in and beyond medical settings. We highlight the morally relevant challenges and opportunities that masks evoke and suggest that there is much to be gained from rethinking the mask metaphor in medicine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christology and EthicsLindsey EsbensenChristology and Ethics Edited by F. Leron Shults and Brent Waters Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 231 pp. $28.00.This collection of essays is a welcome venture into the often-neglected relationship between Christology and ethics. The book stresses that the reciprocal relationship between Christology and Christian moral discernment needs greater attention as well as creative reformulation. The essays produce a variety of models of how other (...) disciplines provide the critical and constructive developments that can strengthen the bond between Christology and the Christian moral life. Rather than a definitive resolution to the “problem” of these Christian disciplines, the book is an invitation to further inquiry, an offer to join the conversation.Although the contributors to this anthology present disparate analyses, they share the goal of integrating interdisciplinary developments in the engagement of Christology and ethics. While each author shares similar departure points for these essays, the conclusions are vastly diverse for each contributor. This is in part because the essays draw from a broad range of sources, from the theological to the scientific. One chapter incorporates developments in the field of psychoanalysis in a discussion of the Christian emphasis on participation in the “new creation” through Jesus Christ, who is akin to the psychoanalytic “third” (121). Another chapter applies evolutionary epistemology and evolutionary ethics to a discussion of the ongoing social mediation and cultural reinterpretation of what it means to “do as Jesus did” (178). Underlying all the expositions is an affirmation that ethics and Christology mutually instruct and challenge each other (98). [End Page 211]Despite the integral connection among the essays, some underlying tensions remain. For instance, Brent Waters’s “The Incarnation and the Moral Life” strongly emphasizes the distinction between the civil community and the church, between the City of Man and the City of God (30). The church is the body of Christ that ministers to the world; therefore, “the singular ministry of the baptized engages, evangelizes, and orders the world in the name and under the authority of Jesus Christ” (21). All moral discernment outside of that with Christological foundations falls short of its goal. Conversely, Jan-Olav Henriksen’s “The Surprise of Judgment and Justice” suggests a much more inclusive view of non-Christian (and non-Christological) contributions to ethics in his interpretation of Matthew 25. Using the imago Dei as the springboard for his analysis, the world is envisioned as God’s gift, and the other (the neighbor) is the imago Dei who calls for recognition. Henriksen contends, “Because Christ is the true image of God, all of humanity is related to him, and is in some sense represented in him.... Christ is the face of every other human—as the one who calls us to mercy, compassion, and love” (142). Christian moral action, then, “is not only determined by you, it is determined by them and their calling of you” (141). In this sense, then, the church does not minister to the world, but the world ministers to the church in helping her to recognize the world as God’s gift and to see the image of God in the neighbor.While the emphases of the various proposals in this collection of essays may produce tensions, the strain is actually a positive contribution to the overall project. The anthology seeks to examine the most significant issues in the relationship between Christology and ethics without necessarily providing a conclusive resolution to how these disciplines mutually inform and reinforce each other. This collection of essays begins a conversation and invites further investigation of the various lines of inquiry.As with any anthology, each essay will have a greater or lesser appeal to the reader according to his interests. Nonetheless, this collection of essays is a unique contribution to systematic and moral theology, and it is an indispensable anthology for those pursuing Christology or ethics for their future endeavors. [End Page 212]Lindsey EsbensenUniversity of Notre DameCopyright © 2012 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Heyes asks whether cultural learning mechanisms are cognitive instincts or cognitive gadgets. I argue that imitation does not fall into either category. Instead, its acquisition is promoted by its value in social interactions, which is evident across phylogeny and ontogeny and does not depend on the role of imitation in cultural learning.

abstract It is standardly taken for granted in the literature on the morality of abortion that adoption is almost always an available and morally preferable alternative to abortion — one that does the same thing so far as parenthood is concerned. This assumption pushes proponents of a woman's right to choose into giving arguments that are based almost exclusively around the physicality of pregnancy and childbirth. On the other side of the debate, the assumption that adoption is a real alternative (...) seems to strengthen the contention that a woman who wishes to abort is morally deficient, whatever the status of the foetus: that she is selfish or short‐sighted in her refusal to bear the temporary physical burden of pregnancy. In this article, I will argue that adoption is not a genuine alternative to abortion. It does not ‘do the same thing’, even setting aside the physicality of pregnancy. I will show that on the most successful model of parental obligation — a causal account that formalises the distinction between parent: progenitor, and parent: carer — birth mothers and fathers remain obliged, life‐long, to their birth children even when the child is adopted out. (shrink)

Emerging research suggests that an organization’s ability to sustain a competitive advantage is increasingly linked to its successful pursuit of a business strategy that generates mutual benefit where the business is both profitable and functional for the common good. The question remains, however: What are the attributes of decision makers that enable them to realize mutually beneficial outcomes? This dissertation argues that one critical key to solving this question is a better understanding of moral imagination in organizational decision making. To (...) test this hypothesis, a new vignette-based cognitive measure for moral imagination in organizational decision making was created to explore empirically the relationship between moral imagination and mutually beneficial decision making. Overall, findings from 180 respondents supported the hypothesis that individuals, who exercise moral imagination, including the ability for discerning moral issues and developing a range of possible outcomes during the decision-making process, are indeed more likely to generate a mutually beneficial outcome for a situation compared to those who do not exercise moral imagination. Implications and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Many critics of the legalization of physician‐assisted death oppose it in part because they fear it will further disadvantage those who are already economically disadvantaged. This argument points to a serious problem of how economic considerations can influence medical decisions, but in the context of PAD, the concern is not borne out. We will provide empirical evidence suggesting that concerns about money influence medical decisions throughout the full course of illness, but at the end of life, financial pressure is much (...) more likely to influence a decision to pursue or reject aggressive life‐extending care than it is to influence a request for PAD. We will also address the question of whether financial pressure as a result of being poor—particularly in the context of an inadequate social safety net—robs people of their autonomy, rendering their informed request and consent invalid. We argue that it does not. We will emphasize the impracticality and injustice of rejecting the role of poverty as a legitimate factor in decision‐making, the irrational distinction between PAD and withdrawal of life‐sustaining care, and the more appropriate focus on the great flaws in the American health care system. (shrink)

Navigating conflict in healthcare settings can be challenging for all parties involved. Here, we analyse disputes about the provision of healthcare to patients, specifically exploring how mediation might be used to resolve disputes where healthcare professionals may disagree with the patient themselves or the patient's family about what healthcare is in the patient's best interests. Despite concerns about compromise over the patient's best interests, there is often room for the parties to come together and think about how the dispute might (...) be resolved in a way that is acceptable to all. It is in this space where mediation might step in. We set out the potential benefits and risks of mediation in this article, and argue that there is a need for clearer, empirically grounded evidence on the use of mediation in healthcare disputes. (shrink)

"Sustainability" is a popular term right now, but it needs considerable clarification, particularly as to whether growth itself is sustainable. Moreover, it is a meaningless abstraction unless ways are found of bringing it into political decisions. "Foresight" is the name of the process needed to bring lateral and long-term perspectives into those decisions and thus offer some hope of achieving sustainability. It has a long history but few successes. This article explores the obstacles to taking that step and ways in (...) which it might be accomplished. (shrink)

This paper exposes the relation between the different mathematical orientations, on the one hand, and the modes of documentary film on the other. When we take, with Badiou, mathematics as ontology, and mathematical orientations as orientations to Being, we find in the structural similarity of mathematics and documentary an equivalence: between modes of documentaryand mathematical-ontological decisions, regarding the inscription of 'what is'. From here we move to consider Badiou's notion of 'in-appearing' through a reading of Alain Resnais' documentary Night and (...) Fog. (shrink)

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has raised deserved concern regarding adverse impacts on parents’ and children’s mental health, regulations like “sheltering-in-place” may have afforded parents novel opportunities to foster positive family connections, thereby bolstering well-being. Using latent profile analysis, we distinguished family thriving during shelter-in-place from other patterns of family functioning, tested potential predictors of family functioning profiles, and examined if family thriving predicted subsequent child adjustment. 449 parents in two-parent U.S. families with children aged 2–18 years completed online surveys assessing (...) parent–child relationship quality, parents’ positive psychological adjustment, children’s emotional well-being, and parenting efficacy and satisfaction as family functioning indicators, financial, marital, parental psychosocial assets, and child predictors of family functioning, and child adjustment. LPA identified four family functioning profiles: Thriving, Managing, Struggling, and Distressed. Thriving families evinced higher scores on all functioning indicators. Logistic regressions revealed that parents in Thriving families reported significantly lower financial anxiety, less dissatisfaction with partner’s help, less child emotionality, and greater use of cognitive reappraisal, as well as more positive child adjustment in Fall 2020. These findings underscore the multidimensional nature of coping and well-being during COVID-19. Utilizing these levers to promote mental health in families languishing during comparable future crises could promote resilience, thereby protecting children’s well-being. (shrink)