In “patchwork” families, full siblings, maternal and paternal half-siblings, and non-related children are raised together, and sometimes, genetically related children are separated. As their number is steadily growing, the investigation of the factors that influence within-family relations is becoming more important. Our aim was to explore whether people differentiate between half- and full-siblings in their social relations as implied by the theory of inclusive fitness, and to test whether co-residence or genetic relatedness improves sibling relations to a larger extent. We (...) administered the Sibling Relationship Questionnaire to 196 individuals who were in contact with full-, half-, or step-siblings in their childhood. We built Generalized Linear Mixed Models models to test for the effects of relatedness and co-residence on sibling relations. In general, a higher degree of relatedness was associated with better sibling relations, but only among those who did not live together during childhood. Co-resident siblings’ overall pattern of relation quality was not influenced by the actual level of genetic relatedness. In contrast to this, full siblings reported having experienced more conflicts during childhood than half-siblings, possibly resulting from enhanced competition for the same parental resources. The results suggest that inclusive fitness drives siblings’ relations even in recent industrial societies. However, among individuals who live together, the effect of relatedness might be obscured by fitness interdependence and the subjective feeling of kinship. (shrink)

Religion can have an important influence in moral decision-making, and religious reminders may deter people from unethical behavior. Previous research indicated that religious contexts may increase prosocial behavior and reduce cheating. However, the perceptual-behavioral link between religious contexts and decision-making lacks thorough scientific understanding. This study adds to the current literature by testing the effects of purely audial religious symbols (instrumental music) on moral behavior across three different sites: Mauritius, the Czech Republic, and the USA. Participants were exposed to one (...) of three kinds of auditory stimuli (religious, secular, or white noise), and subsequently were given a chance to dishonestly report on solved mathematical equations in order to increase their monetary reward. The results showed cross-cultural differences in the effects of religious music on moral behavior, as well as a significant interaction between condition and religiosity across all sites, suggesting that religious participants were more influenced by the auditory religious stimuli than non-religious participants. We propose that religious music can function as a subtle cue associated with moral standards via cultural socialization and ritual participation. Such associative learning can charge music with specific meanings and create sacred cues that influence normative behavior. Our findings provide preliminary support for this view, which we hope further research will investigate more closely. (shrink)

At the very end of Plato's Philebus Socrates and Protarchus place the goods of a human life in a hierarchy (66a-67b). Previous interpretations of this passage have concentrated upon its relevance to the good human life, including the allowance of (true and pure) pleasures. This view picks up Plato's metaphor of a mixture of reason and pleasure, but the ranking of the goods is emphatically a vertical stratification and not a mixture in which all elements are equally fundamental. In this (...) article I argue that each and all of the higher ranked goods are necessary conditions for the goods of the level immediately below. The ranking represents an attempt to identify as far as possible what is responsible for the characteristics of the good in human life, and therefore to narrow down the definition of the good itself. (shrink)

In their article, ‘Responsibility, Second Opinions, and Peer-Disagreement—Ethical and Epistemological Challenges of Using AI in Clinical Diagnostic Contexts,’ Kempt and Nagel argue for a ‘rule of disagreement’ for the integration of diagnostic AI in healthcare contexts. The type of AI in question is a ‘decision support system’, the purpose of which is to augment human judgement and decision-making in the clinical context by automating or supplementing parts of the cognitive labor. Under the authors’ proposal, artificial decision support systems which produce (...) automated diagnoses should serve chiefly as confirmatory tools; so long as the physician and AI agree, the matter is settled, and the physician’s initial judgement is considered epistemically justified. If, however, the AI-DSS and physician disagree, then a second physician’s opinion is called on to resolve the dispute. While the cognitive labour of the decision is shared between the physicians and AI, the final decision remains at the discretion of the first physician, and with it the moral and legal culpability. The putative benefits of this approach are twofold: healthcare administration can improve diagnostic performance by introducing AI-DSS without the unintended byproduct of a responsibility gap, and assuming the physician and AI disagree less than the general rate of requested second opinions, and the AI’s diagnostic accuracy supersedes or at least …. (shrink)

As given, the case presents at least two questions for the ethics consultant to explore: to what extent should Declan’s parent, Karesha, be involved in his health care decisions, and why is...

Emerging forms of empowered participatory governance have generated considerable scholarly excitement, but critics continue to ask if such initiatives are “for real”: Are participatory governance processes sufficiently independent? Do citizen participants make good policy choices? An in-depth look at the case of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform suggests that real citizen empowerment depends on both the institutional constraints of the participa-tory setting and how citizen interests and arguments for policy outcomes crystallize over the course of a participatory (...) process. (shrink)

Grady and colleagues (2008) have provided a major contribution to the field of bioethics, and their research should lend a significant hand to the oft-neglected ethics needs of professional nurses....

The development of the notion of continuous physical quantity is traced from Aristotle to Aquinas to Suarez. It is concluded that Aristotle’s divisibility definition fails to excavate the ontological core of material quantification. Although the basic germ of the solution to the problem is discovered in Aquinas, it is Suarez who fully articulates the essence of continuous physical quantity with his explicit concept of aptitudinal extension — which has crucial theological implications. Résumé Nous considérons ici le développement de la notion (...) de quantité physique continue, d’Aristote à Thomas d’Aquin à Suarez. Nous concluons que la définition d’Aristote en termes de divisibilité ne parvient pas à dégager le noyau ontologique de la quantification matérielle. Encore que le germe fondamental de la solution au problème soit découvert par Thomas d’Aquin, c’est Suarez qui articule pleinement l’essence de la quantité physique continue, grâce à son concept explicite d’extension « aptitudinale » — dont les implications théologiques sont cruciales. (shrink)

ARISTOTLE IS UNIVERSALLY credited with inventing the concept of teleology: "nature is among the causes which act for the sake of something." "That for the sake of which" is a thing's purpose, its end, the goal at which it aims. Taking Aristotle's physics as a focal point for his philosophy of nature, I shall argue that teleology functions within his theory of nature not only substantively, but also procedurally. First, then, I shall explain what I mean by teleology as procedure (...) and then show how this procedure relates both to problems within physics and to Aristotle's conception of physics as a science. (shrink)

Nature did not equip any of its creatures with wheels, but that means of locomotion was discovered anyway; an even swifter vehicle for the mind has been found in the atom—that irreducible unit which by virtue of its ubiquity provides reason with immediate access to alien objects, naturalizes nature, and urges an essential likeness beneath appearances so diverse that only an improbable imagination would even have placed them in a single world. The goal of atomism is to find one entity, (...) a building block which then in multiples constitutes the structures of reality and appearance. All that is needed, given this once and future One, is a set of transformational rules—and everything comes to life that has been dreamed of in the topologies of geometry, physics, history, even of metaphysics: a full representation of the world as it has been, is, will be. The ideology of atomism includes the assumption that, for structures distinguishable into parts and wholes, the parts precede the whole, temporally and logically. For the atomist, all structures can be analyzed in this way; that, in fact, turns out to be his definition of structure. This premise is already evident in the building-block universe first depicted by Democritus and Leucippus; it is no less present in the heady days of twentieth-century physics . It is slightly more pliable in latter-day atomists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky and their descendent structuralists; but here, too, atomic units of linguistic or social discourse are claimed as blind first causes of the sighted and complex structures allegedly derived from them. And if the followers of even these contemporary advocates find themselves still waiting for the promises of atomism to be kept, the imaginative turns of those promises—the binary code, the rules of an innate grammar—keep old expectations alive. In contrast to this general ideological assertion, the search for artistic atoms by poetics and aesthetic theory has lagged noticeably. We can see this disparity in the characteristic resistance to fragmentation by works of art; for many writers, the will of artistic appearance to exhibit itself as a whole, to insist on an undivided surface rather than on the elements within or beneath it, is precisely what distinguishes the structures of art from others. Even where a craftsmanlike impulse breaks into the surface of artistic unity , the pieces are usually counted teleologically: they matter as contributions to an effect, retrospectively. The artist himself, it is implied, deployed them in the first place to anticipate the unified surface; we , in turn, then understand them only in terms of that whole, not—with the atomist—by conjuring a unity from the earlier accidental joining of what then become accidental parts. (shrink)

IN Physics VIII, Aristotle asks if motion is eternal or if it began only to end someday. He concludes in the first chapter that motion must be eternal; the remainder of Physics VIII resolves three objections to this conclusion. Consequently, the arguments of Physics VIII, 2-10 indirectly substantiate the eternity of motion in things. However, these arguments have often been associated with rather different questions, for example how does this mover produce motion--is it a moving cause or a final cause?--and (...) is this mover God or some other mover? (shrink)

Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in healthcare raise pressing questions about how much users should trust AI/ML systems, particularly for high stakes clinical decision-making. Ensuring that user trust is properly calibrated to a tool’s computational capacities and limitations has both practical and ethical implications, given that overtrust or undertrust can influence over-reliance or under-reliance on algorithmic tools, with significant implications for patient safety and health outcomes. It is, thus, important to better understand how variability in trust (...) criteria across stakeholders, settings, tools and use cases may influence approaches to using AI/ML tools in real settings. As part of a 5-year, multi-institutional Agency for Health Care Research and Quality-funded study, we identify trust criteria for a survival prediction algorithm intended to support clinical decision-making for left ventricular assist device therapy, using semistructured interviews (n=40) with patients and physicians, analysed via thematic analysis. Findings suggest that physicians and patients share similar empirical considerations for trust, which were primarilyepistemicin nature, focused on accuracy and validity of AI/ML estimates. Trust evaluations considered the nature, integrity and relevance of training data rather than the computational nature of algorithms themselves, suggesting a need to distinguish ‘source’ from ‘functional’ explainability. To a lesser extent, trust criteria were also relational (endorsement from others) and sometimes based on personal beliefs and experience. We discuss implications for promoting appropriate and responsible trust calibration for clinical decision-making use AI/ML. (shrink)

An unaltered reprint of the K. Paul, French and Co. edition of 1882, translated, introduced and annotated by W. Ogle.

ILLUSTRATIONS Chapter 2 1. Roy Lichtenstein, Little Big Painting 83 2. Luis Buriuel, Viridiana (Last Supper scene) 86 3. ...

The application of semiotics in trade mark law is an interdisciplinary endeavour in its infancy. The author traces its genesis in recent years and situates it within the context of general theoretical approaches, in particular of an interdisciplinary kind, appearing in the trade mark law literature in the past. The purposes for which such theories are applied, and questions of methodology arising from this, are examined. In particular, it is observed that semiotic theory has, by and large, been used for (...) the purpose of debating legal policy in trade mark law (especially in the United States), and that this has given rise to argument about the extent to which semiotic theory can exert any normative force of its own upon the law. This article offers a different perspective. It is sought to demonstrate the usefulness of theoretical semiotics in solving trade mark law questions in practice. The author emphasises that this involves no threat to orthodox legal problem-solving methodology (whatever one may think of the orthodoxy), and in particular does not require the normative use of semiotic theory. Taking as a starting point the concept of ‹trade mark use’, and having regard to trade mark law and literature in Europe, the United States and Australia, the author proceeds to demonstrate the proposed approach by reference to some current problems in trade mark infringement. (shrink)

This article begins with a review of studies in perception and depth psychology concerning the experience of exposure to sacred artworks in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox contexts. This follows with the results of a qualitative inquiry involving 45 Roman Catholic, Eastern and Coptic Orthodox, and Protestant Christians in Canada. First, participants composed narratives detailing memories of spiritual experiences involving iconography. Then, in the context of a darkened room evocative of a sacred space, they viewed artworks depicting Biblical themes and (...) interpreted their meanings. Stimuli included “Western” paintings from the Roman tradition—a selection from the Gothic, Northern Renaissance, and Renaissance canon—and matched “Eastern” icons in the Byzantine style. Spiritual experience narratives were analyzed in terms of word frequencies, and interpretations of sacred artworks were analyzed thematically. Catholics tended to utilize emotional language when recalling their spiritual experiences, while religious activity was most often the concern of Protestants, and Orthodox Christians wrote most about spiritual figures and their signifiers. A taxonomy of response styles was developed to account for participants’ interpretations of Western and Eastern artworks, with content ranging from detached descriptions to projective engagement with the art-objects. Our approach allows for representation of diverse Christians’ interpretations of sacred art, taking into consideration personal, collective, and cultural-religious sources of meaning. Our paradigm also offers to enrich our understanding of the numinous or emotional dimension of mystical contact. (shrink)