This paper highlights the need to apply an equity lens when assessing the impact of preemption and related legal doctrines on community health. Community autonomy to set and pursue public health priorities is an essential part of achieving health equity. Unfortunately, the priorities of organized industry interest groups often conflict with health equity goals. These groups have a history of successfully using law to limit community autonomy to pursue public health measures, most notably through preemption and related legal doctrines. We (...) examine this phenomenon using two examples. First, we look at dental association efforts to block the spread of dental therapists in Indian Country. Native dental therapists have been improving the oral health of native people in Alaska for over a decade; yet the national and state dental associations have sought with mixed success to leverage state and federal laws to hinder other tribal governments from utilizing these providers. We compare these efforts with a restaurant association-led movement to limit what municipal governments can do to address food-based health inequities, focusing on a “model” ALEC bill that started in Ohio. Finally, we discuss how municipalities and Tribes are fighting back and continuing to pursue health equity for their communities. (shrink)

The Generalized Integration Challenge is the task of providing, for a given domain of discourse, a simultaneously acceptable metaphysics, epistemology and metasemantics and showing them to be so. In this paper, we focus on a metaethical position for which seems particularly acute: the brand of normative realism which takes normative properties to be mind-independent and causally inert. The problem is that these metaphysical commitments seem to make normative knowledge impossible. We suggest that bringing metasemantics into play can help to resolve (...) this puzzle. We propose an independently plausible metasemantic constraint on reference determination and show how it can provide a plausible response to for this brand of normative realism. (shrink)

In Constructing the World, Chalmers seeks to articulate and defend an important epistemic accessibility thesis, the Scrutability of Truth, which is crucial to Chalmers’ rationalist approach to meaning and modality. Chapters 3 and 4 of the book are devoted to persuading us that the move from weaker to stronger forms of Scrutability is intuitively plausible. In these comments, I want to question this move. The plausibility of strong forms of Scrutability hinges on controversial views about epistemic norms for answering ‘what (...) is x?’ questions that semantic externalists have good reason to reject. (shrink)

: Although "brain death" and the dead donor rule—i.e., patients must not be killed by organ retrieval—have been clinically and legally accepted in the U.S. as prerequisites to organ removal, there is little data about public attitudes and beliefs concerning these matters. To examine the public attitudes and beliefs about the determination of death and its relationship to organ transplantation, 1351 Ohio residents ≥18 years were randomly selected and surveyed using random digit dialing (RDD) sample frames. The RDD telephone survey (...) was conducted using computer-assisted telephone interviews. The survey instrument was developed from information provided by 12 focus groups and a pilot study of the questionnaire. Three scenarios based on hypothetical patients were presented: "brain dead," in a coma, or in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Respondents provided personal assessments of whether the patient in each scenario was dead and their willingness to donate that patient's organs in these circumstances. More than 98 percent of respondents had heard of the term "brain death," but only one-third (33.7%) believed that someone who was "brain dead" was legally dead. The majority of respondents (86.2%) identified the "brain-dead" patient in the first scenario as dead, 57.2 percent identified the patient in a coma as dead (Scenario 2), and 34.1 percent identified the patient in a PVS as dead (Scenario 3). Nearly one-third (33.5%) were willing to donate the organs of patients they classified as alive for at least one scenario, in seeming violation of the dead donor rule. Most respondents were not willing to violate the dead donor rule, although a substantial minority was. However, the majority of respondents were unaware, misinformed, or held beliefs that were not congruent with current definitions of "brain death." This study highlights the need for more public dialogue and education about "brain death" and organ donation. (shrink)

The aim of the chapter is to discuss and evaluate the epistemic role of emotions in participatory sense-making, assuming 4Ecognition as background. I first ask why could emotions be beneficial for the collective processes of knowledge, especially discussing Battaly and arguing for a conceptualisation of emotions as socially extended motivations in virtue epistemology; then, I discuss participatory sense-making, both conceptually and phenomenologically, arguing for a fundamental role played by emotions in boosting epistemic cooperation and determining the quality of social bonds. (...) I advocate their specific function in epistemic cooperation. Epistemic cooperation is what brings about the generation of a shared meaning in participatory sense-making and thus, since emotions function as socially extended motivations, they boost the relationships among the agents, bonding them to the aims of their epistemic community. (shrink)

This paper discusses the virtue epistemology literature on epistemic emotions and challenges the individualist, unworldly account of epistemic emotions. It argues that epistemic emotions can be truth-motivating if embedded in co-inquiry epistemic cultures, namely virtuous epistemic cultures that valorise participatory processes of inquiry as truth-conducive. Co-inquiry epistemic cultures are seen as playing a constitutive role in shaping, developing, and regulating epistemic emotions. Using key references to classical Pragmatism, the paper describes the bridge between epistemic emotions and co-inquiry culture in terms (...) of habits of co-inquiry that act as the scaffolding of epistemic emotions. The result is a context-sensitive and practice-oriented approach to epistemic emotions that conceives of those emotions as being shaped by co-inquiry epistemic cultures. (shrink)

This paper sets out to unpack the pragmatic structure of refusal—its illocutionary nature, success conditions, and normative effects. I argue that our ordinary concept of refusal captures a whole family of illocutions, comprising acts such as rejecting, declining, and the like, which share the property of being ‘negative second-turn illocutions’. Only _proper refusals_ (i.e. negative replies to permission requests), I submit, require speaker authority. I construe the ‘refusal family’ as a subclass of the directives-commissives intersection. After defending my view against (...) a number of potential objections, I highlight how a theoretically grounded analysis of refusal is not only of intrinsic value, but may also have significant moral and legal implications. (shrink)

In qualitative interviews with a diverse group of experts, the vast majority believed unregulated researchers should seek out independent oversight. Reasons included the need for objectivity, protecting app users from research risks, and consistency in standards for the ethical conduct of research. Concerns included burdening minimal risk research and limitations in current systems of oversight. Literature and analysis supports the use of IRBs even when not required by regulations, and the need for evidence-based improvements in IRB processes.

Moral disengagement is the process by which individuals mitigate the consequences of their own violations of moral standards. Although MD is understood to be co-determined by culture norms, no study has yet explored the extent to which MD applied to safety at work fosters safety violations, nor the role of organizational culture as a predictor of JS-MD. The current study seeks to address this gap in the literature by examining individual- and organizational-level factors that explain why employees fail to report (...) workplace accidents. We tested a latent variable structural model positing organizational culture typologies as predictors of JS-MD, which in turn is expected to mediate the relationship with accident underreporting. Using data from 1033 employees in 28 Italian organizations, findings suggest that bureaucratic safety culture was related to lower levels of JS-MD, whereas technocratic safety culture was related to greater JS-MD. In turn, JS-MD positively predicted employee accident underreporting and fully mediated the relationship between culture and underreporting. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in light of the increasing focus on underreporting as well as the adverse individual and organizational consequences of failing to report workplace accidents. (shrink)

This study explores corporate social responsibility (CSR) by conducting a cross-cultural analysis of communication of CSR activities in a total of 16 U.S. and European corporations. Drawing on previous research contrasting two major approaches to CSR initiatives, it was proposed that U.S. companies would tend to communicate about and justify CSR using economic or bottom-line terms and arguments whereas European companies would rely more heavily on language or theories of citizenship, corporate accountability, or moral commitment. Results supported this expectation of (...) difference, with some modification. Specifically, results indicated that EU companies do not value sustainability to the exclusion of financial elements, but instead project sustainability commitments in addition to financial commitments. Further, U.S.-based companies focused more heavily on financial justifications whereas EU-based companies incorporated both financial and sustainability elements in justifying their CSR activities. In addition, wide variance was found in both the prevalence and use of specific CSR-related terminology. Cross-cultural distinctions in this use create implications with regard to measurability and evidence of both strategic and bottom-line impact. Directions for further research are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThirty years ago, the subfields of emotion and cognition operated relatively independently and the associated science reflected the tacit view that they were distinct constructs. Today, questions about the integration of cognition and emotion are among the most interesting questions in the field. I offer a personal view of the key changes that fuelled this shift over time and describe research from my group that unfolded in parallel and led to the identification of the positivity effect.

Ecological restoration and native landscaping are increasing, particularly in the American Midwest, where they form part of the area's history and culture of conservation. But practitioners rarely pause to ask philosophical questions related to categories of native and invasive or human control and harmony with nature. This article brings philosophy into conversation with practice, using members of Wild Ones Native Landscaping, a non-profit headquartered in Neenah, WI, as a case study. Philosophers and ethicists who are studying Ecological Restoration and Native (...) Landscaping can learn valuable lessons – in practicality, aesthetics and flexibility – from practitioners such as the Wild Ones. (shrink)

Laura Berchielli - Color, Space and Figure in Locke: An Interpretation of the Molyneux Problem - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 47-65 Color, Space, and Figure in Locke: An Interpretation of the Molyneux Problem Laura Berchielli THIS IS HOW LOCKE, in the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding , introduces a question that had been suggested to him in a letter from William Molyneux: . . . I (...) shall here insert a Problem of that very Ingenious and Studious promoter of Knowledge, the Learned and Worthy Mr. Molineux, which he was pleased to send me in a Letter some Months since; and it is this: Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t'other, which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to see. Quaere, Whether by his Sight, before he touch'd them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube. In the standard interpretation of the Molyneux problem as presented in Locke, the question is always linked to the general issue of differences in the ideas of figure received by the various senses. This interpretation -- put forward by Berkeley --says that for Locke, the ideas of figure produced by sight are specifically different from.. (shrink)

Research ethics consultation is increasingly recognized as a potentially valuable mechanism for addressing the depth and breadth of ethical issues that arise in research related to human health and well-being. However, fundamental questions remain, including: What is “research ethics consultation”? And what is its justification beyond the purposes already served by existing entities? We examine how a research ethics consultation service may differ from or complement the role of an institutional review board by offering a definition of research ethics consultation (...) and by exploring the potential scope of a consultation service in terms of types of clients served, questions addressed, and advice provided at various stages of the research process. We then consider the relationship between research ethics consultation services and IRBs, as well as the issues that may arise between them, including possible conflicts of interest. (shrink)

En sus lecciones de los años treinta, Heidegger se centra en el pensamiento de Nietzsche dado que considera que en él se ha consumado el nihilismo de la metafísica a través de la inversión de sus principios en su doble inicio platónico y cartesiano. Pero el “nihilismo impropio” de la metafísica entendido como el “olvido del ser”, es motivado a su vez por el “nihilismo propio” o “abandono del ser”. Consecuentemente Heidegger propone la “superación-sobretorsión” de la metafísica en el sentido (...) de una “torsión” del olvido del ser, camino que lo llevará a la búsqueda de un pensamiento no metafísico entendido como el “recuerdo interiorizante en la metafísica” primeramente, y seguidamente en el sentido de un pensamiento rememorante. Seguidamente la presente propuesta se detiene en la temática del “último Dios” en el horizonte de la temporalidad, donde Heidegger lo anuncia como “el último” pero en el sentido del más originario, pensado desde la dimensión del “tiempo auténtico” tetradimensional, donde lo advenidero no es lo meramente futuro, sino lo predeterminado por “lo sido”. Así se comprende la humanidad de los advenideros, un pueblo de creadores que son “los vigías del silencio del pasaje del último Dios”. (shrink)

Messaging from U.S. authorities about COVID-19 has been widely divergent. This research aims to clarify popular perceptions of the COVID-19 threat and its effects on victims. In four studies with over 4,100 U.S. participants, we consistently found that people perceive the threat of COVID-19 to be substantially greater than that of several other causes of death to which it has recently been compared, including the seasonal flu and automobile accidents. Participants were less willing to help COVID-19 victims, who they considered (...) riskier to help, more contaminated, and more responsible for their condition. Additionally, politics and demographic factors predicted attitudes about victims of COVID-19 above and beyond moral values; whereas attitudes about the other kinds of victims were primarily predicted by moral values. The results indicate that people perceive COVID-19 as an exceptionally severe disease threat, and despite prosocial inclinations, do not feel safe offering assistance to COVID-19 sufferers. This research has urgent applied significance: the findings are relevant to public health efforts and related marketing campaigns working to address extended damage to society and the economy from the pandemic. In particular, efforts to educate the public about the health impacts of COVID-19, encourage compliance with testing protocols and contact tracing, and support safe, prosocial decision-making and risk assessment, will all benefit from awareness of these findings. The results also suggest approaches, such as engaging people's stable values rather than their politicized perspectives on COVID-19, that may reduce stigma and promote cooperation in response to pandemic threats. (shrink)

In this article, I shall analyze Schopenhauer's conception of Buddhism in the context of the Western reception of Buddhism from the seventeenth century onwards. I will focus on Schopenhauer's notion of the Buddhist palingenesis and provide an overview of the Buddhist sources Schopenhauer read before the publication of the second edition of his main work The World as Will and Representation in 1844.

Prior work has found that moral values that build and bind groups—that is, the binding values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and preservation of purity—are linked to blaming people who have been harmed. The present research investigated whether people's endorsement of binding values predicts their assignment of the causal locus of harmful events to the victims of the events. We used an implicit causality task from psycholinguistics in which participants read a sentence in the form “SUBJECT verbed OBJECT because…” (...) where male and female proper names occupy the SUBJECT and OBJECT position. The participants were asked to predict the pronoun that follows “because”—the referent to the subject or object—which indicates their intuition about the likely cause of the event. We also collected explicit judgments of causal contributions and measured participants' moral values to investigate the relationship between moral values and the causal interpretation of events. Using two verb sets and two independent replications (N = 459, 249, 788), we found that greater endorsement of binding values was associated with a higher likelihood of selecting the object as the cause for harmful events in the implicit causality task, a result consistent with, and supportive of, previous moral psychological work on victim blaming. Endorsement of binding values also predicted explicit causal attributions to victims. Overall, these findings indicate that moral values that support the group rather than the individual reliably predict that people shift the causal locus of harmful events to those affected by the harms. (shrink)

Psychiatric electroceutical interventions (PEIs) use electrical or magnetic stimulation to treat psychiatric conditions. For depression therapy, PEIs include both approved treatment modalities, such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), and experimental neurotechnologies, such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) and adaptive brain implants (ABIs). We present results from a survey-based experiment in which members of four relevant stakeholder groups (psychiatrists, patients with depression, caregivers of adults with depression, and the general public) assessed whether treatment with one of (...) four PEIs (ECT, rTMS, DBS, or ABIs) was better or worse than living with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and then provided a narrative explanation for their assessment. Overall, the prevalence of many narrative themes differed substantially by stakeholder group—with psychiatrists typically offering different reasons for their assessment than non-clinicians—but much less so by PEI modality. A large majority of all participants viewed their assigned PEI as better than living with TRD, with their reasons being a mix of positive views about the treatment and negative views about TRD. The minority of all participants who viewed their assigned PEI as worse than living with TRD tended to express negative affect toward it as well as emphasize its riskiness, negative side effects, and, to a lesser extent, its invasiveness. The richness of these narrative explanations enabled us to put in context and add depth to key patterns seen in recent survey-based research on PEIs. (shrink)

To examine whether anticipatory attention or expectancy is a cognitive process that is automatic or requires conscious control, we employed a paired-stimulus event-related potential paradigm during the transition to sleep. The slow negative ERP wave observed between two successive stimuli, the Contingent Negative Variation , reflects attention and expectancy to the second stimulus. Thirteen good sleepers were instructed to respond to the second stimulus in a pair during waking sessions. In a non-response paradigm modified for sleep, participants then fell asleep (...) while tones played. As expected, N1 decreased and P2 increased in amplitude systematically with the loss of consciousness at sleep onset; the CNV was increasingly more positive. Sleep onset latency was correlated with the amplitude of the CNV. The systematic attenuation of the CNV waveform at sleep onset and its absence in sleep indicates that anticipatory attention requires endogenous conscious control. (shrink)

Many of the decisions mothers face are morally intense. They're experienced as highly morally significant, and they are also often very morally complex, meaning that there aren't black-and-white, obvious answers to questions about what one morally may or must do. For example, I suggest that breastfeeding is complex in this way, despite a good deal of cultural pressure in favour of trying to do it. Acknowledging many of the decisions of motherhood as complex or as ‘grey areas’ is accurate, and (...) also good for mums. But it also burdens mums with the responsibility of researching, discussing, thinking through, and ultimately making significant, complex moral decisions for themselves. I call this the moral load, taking inspiration from Emma's ‘mental load’. In the last section I consider what we could or should do to try to lessen the moral load as a burden on mums. (shrink)

This article reports the results of an experiment involving 108 college students with varying backgrounds in biology. Subjects answered questions about the evolutionary history of sets of hominid and equine taxa. Each set of taxa was presented in one of three diagrammatic formats: a noncladogenic diagram found in a contemporary biology textbook or a cladogram in either the ladder or tree format. As predicted, the textbook diagrams, which contained linear components, were more likely than the cladogram formats to yield explanations (...) of speciation as an anagenic process, a common misconception among students. In contrast, the branching cladogram formats yielded more appropriate explanations concerning levels of ancestry than did the textbook diagrams. Although students with stronger backgrounds in biology did better than those with weaker biology backgrounds, they generally showed the same effects of diagrammatic format. Implications of these results for evolution education and for diagram design more generally are discussed. (shrink)

Based on the notion of time translation, we develop a formalism to deal with the logic of quantum properties at different times. In our formalism it is possible to enlarge the usual notion of context to include composed properties involving properties at different times. We compare our results with the theory of consistent histories.

What is the relation between science and philosophy of science? Specifically, does it matter whether a philosopher of science knows much about science or is actually engaged in scientific research? William Whewell is an obvious person to consider in relation to this question. Whewell was actively engaged in science in several important ways, some of which have not been previously noted. He conducted research in a number of scientific fields, he devised new terminology for the new discoveries made by other (...) scientists, and he frequently attempted to guide the experimental work of other scientists. Moreover, he was a philosopher of science who explicitly claimed to be inferring his methodological injunctions from an extensive study of the history of scientific work . My recent study of his unpublished letters and notebooks indicates that the intimate relation between science and philosophy was always foremost in Whewell’s mind; it was not a theoretical stance adopted after his philosophy was well-developed, as some have suggested. In this paper I will present an examination of the relation between Whewell’s involvement in science and the writing of his philosophy of science as a springboard to consider the more general question . Further insight into the relation between science and philosophy of science will be gained by contrasting Whewell’s strong involvement in science with the lack of such involvement in the case of his philosophical antagonist, J.S. Mill. (shrink)

Our technologies have enabled us to change both the world and our perceptions of the world, as well as to change ourselves and to find new ways to fulfil the human desire for improvement and for having new capacities. The debate around using technology for human enhancement has already raised many ethical concerns, however little research has been done in how human enhancement can affect human communication. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether some human enhancements could change (...) our shared lifeworld so radically that human communication as we know it would not be possible any longer. After exploring the kinds of communication problems we are concerned with as well as mentioning some possible enhancement interventions that could bring about such problems, we will address some of the ethical implications that follow from these potential communication problems. We argue that because of the role that communication plays in human society, this issue deserves attention. (shrink)

Este informe se enmarca en el proyecto que desde hace dos años venimos desarrollando dentro del Departamento de Investigación de la Universidad Siglo 21, en Córdoba, Argentina. Hemos abordado a través de metodología cualitativa las representaciones que los jóvenes ingresantes a la Universidad tienen acerca de la misma y del estudio universitario. En el presente reporte exponemos una serie de ejes que, de acuerdo a nuestro análisis de los discursos relevados, dan cuenta de valoraciones emergentes al momento de evaluar la (...) universidad pública en relación a la privada y viceversa. Nuestra intención es comprender y describir cuáles son las nociones entramadas en el análisis que los ingresantes realizan de una y otra institución, las cuales se ponen en juego al momento de optar y evaluar aquéllas. (shrink)

Following press disclosures in 1993 that U.S. government agencies had been using human subjects in tests and trials involving radioactive isotopes since the mid-1940s, a major national initiative to locate and declassify records concerning these tests was initiated. The U.S. Department of Energy, which led the declassification effort, pledged that a new “culture of openness” would attend the management of classified documents in the future. Following the attacks on the United States in September 2001, this momentum was reversed. Declassification initiatives (...) were delayed or terminated, and a significant portion of the many thousands of records about “human radiation experiments” during the 1940s and 1950s were removed from both online access, which had been in place since the mid-1990s, and from the public domain altogether. (shrink)

This contribution presents a corpus of spatial descriptions and describes the development of a human-driven spatial language robot system for their comprehension. The domain of application is an eldercare setting in which an assistive robot is asked to “fetch” an object for an elderly resident based on a natural language spatial description given by the resident. In Part One, we describe a corpus of naturally occurring descriptions elicited from a group of older adults within a virtual 3D home that simulates (...) the eldercare setting. We contrast descriptions elicited when participants offered descriptions to a human versus robot avatar, and under instructions to tell the addressee how to find the target versus where the target is. We summarize the key features of the spatial descriptions, including their dynamic versus static nature and the perspective adopted by the speaker. In Part Two, we discuss critical cognitive and perceptual processing capabilities necessary for the robot to establish a common ground with the human user and perform the “fetch” task. Based on the collected corpus, we focus here on resolving the perspective ambiguity and recognizing furniture items used as landmarks in the descriptions. Taken together, the work presented here offers the key building blocks of a robust system that takes as input natural spatial language descriptions and produces commands that drive the robot to successfully fetch objects within our eldercare scenario. (shrink)