The Bible has influenced contemporary culture both positively and negatively. The present volume is a collection of papers that were discussed at an international colloquium on the use of the Bible in Ethics in the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield in April 1995. Participants came from many parts of the world and from different backgrounds, and the papers reflect their varied interests and the contexts in which they work. The contributors, in addition to the three editors, (...) are John Barton, Bruce Birch, Mark Brett, Mark Chapman, David Clines, Philip Davies, Cheryl Exum, Stephen Fowl, Norman Gottwald, John Haldane, Walter Houston, Sharon Ringe, Chrisopher Rowland, Lisa Sowle Cahill and Gerald West. (shrink)

Throughout the Old Testament, the stories, laws, and songs not only teach a way of life that requires individuals to be moral, but they demonstrate how. In biblical studies, character ethics has been one of the fastest-growing areas of interest. Whereas ethics usually studies rules of behavior, character ethics focuses on how people are formed to be moral agents in the world. This book presents the most up-to-date academic work in Old Testament character ethics, covering topics throughout the Torah, the (...) Prophets, and the Writings, in addition to the use of the Bible in the modern world. In addition to Carroll and Lapsley, contributors are Denise M. Ackermann, Cheryl B. Anderson, Samuel E. Balentine, William P. Brown, Walter Brueggemann, Thomas B. Dozeman, Bob Ekblad, Jose Rafael Escobar R., Theodore Hiebert, Kathleen O'Connor, Dennis T. Olson, J. David Pleins, Luis R. Rivera Rodriguez, J. J. M. Roberts, and Daniel L. Smith-Christopher. (shrink)

Although social contracts theory has been applied to organizations (Donaldson & Dunfee, 1994), rarely has the theory been tested empirically. This article uses the traditions of communitarianism and individualism to instantiate an ideal-type economic social contract. We asked 269 subjects to complete the Ideological Orientation Scale and to make judgments on eight downsizing scenarios. Using social judgment theory, we assess the direct and indirect influences of ideology on judgments of fairness. Our findings suggest that ideology indeed shapes individual’s conceptions of (...) organizational fairness. (shrink)

Evolutionary approaches to the emotions have traditionally focused on a subset of emotions that are shared with other species, characterized by distinct signals, and designed to solve a few key adaptive problems. By contrast, an evolutionary psychological approach (a) broadens the range of adaptive problems emotions have evolved to solve, (b) includes emotions that lack distinctive signals and are unique to humans, and (c) synthesizes an evolutionary approach with an information-processing perspective. On this view, emotions are superordinate mechanisms that evolved (...) to coordinate the activity of other programs in the solution of adaptive problems. We illustrate the heuristic value of this approach by furnishing novel hypotheses for disgust and sexual arousal and highlighting unexplored areas of research. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a host of ethical challenges, but key among these has been the possibility that health care systems might need to ration scarce critical care resources. Rationing p...

By combining normative philosophy and empirical social science, we craft a research framework for assessing differential expectations embodied in normative conceptions of the economic social contract in the United States. We argue that there are distinctviews of such a contract grounded in individualist and communitarian philosophical ideologies. We apply this framework to organizational downsizing, postulating that certain human resource practices, in combination with the respective ideological orientations, will affect perceptions of the justice of downsizing policies.Living up to one’s word is (...) a decisive measure of moral character. Within the microsocial realm of the family, promises and commitments derive their social force and cultural meaning from the idea that love or biology binds people together in an absolute way. But outside of this world, in the larger society, the only thing binding people together is a sense that there is a social contract, a set of common obligations held collectively by society as a whole. But today’s workers say no one seems to care whether these promises are kept. (shrink)

Since its founding in 1943, Medievalia et Humanistica has won worldwide recognition as the first scholarly publication in America to devote itself entirely to medieval and Renaissance studies. Since 1970, a new series, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America and edited by an international board of distinguished scholars and critics, has published interdisciplinary articles. In yearly hardbound volumes, the new series publishes significant scholarship, criticism, and reviews treating all facets of medieval and Renaissance culture: history, art, literature, music, (...) science, law, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

Public health agencies regularly survey randomly selected anonymous students to track drug use, sexual activities, and other risk behaviors. Students are unidentifiable, but a recent project that i...

Social norms – rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community – are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is (...) little agreement among these researchers about what these psychological prerequisites are. This makes empirical study of animal social norms difficult, since it is not clear what we are looking for and thus what should count as behavioural evidence for the presence (or absence) of social norms in animals. To break this impasse, we offer an approach that moves beyond contested psychological criteria for social norms. This approach is inspired by the animal culture research program, which has made a similar shift away from heavily psychological definitions of ‘culture’ and to become organized around a cluster of more empirically tractable concepts of culture. Here, we propose an analogous set of constructs built around the core notion of a normative regularity, which we define as a socially maintained pattern of behavioural conformity within a community. We suggest methods for studying potential normative regularities in wild and captive primates. We also discuss the broader scientific and philosophical implications of this research program with respect to questions of human uniqueness, animal welfare and conservation. (shrink)

The conscious awareness of voluntary action is associated with systematic changes in time perception: The interval between actions and outcomes is experienced as compressed in time. Although this temporal binding is thought to result from voluntary movement and provides a window to the sense of agency, recent studies challenge this idea by demonstrating binding in involuntary movement. We offer a potential account for these findings by proposing that binding between involuntary actions and effects can occur when self-causation is implied. Participants (...) made temporal judgements concerning a key press and a tone, while they learned to consider themselves as the cause of the effect or not. Results showed that implied self-causation increased temporal binding. Since intrinsic motor cues of movement were absent, these results suggest that sensory evidence about the key press caused binding in retrospect and in line with the participant’s sense of being an agent. (shrink)

Abstract:By combining normative philosophy and empirical social science, we craft a research framework for assessing differential expectations embodied in normative conceptions of the economic social contract in the United States. We argue that there are distinct views of such a contract grounded in individualist and communitarian philosophical ideologies. We apply this framework to organizational downsizing, postulating that certain human resource practices, in combination with the respective ideological orientations, will affect perceptions of the justice of downsizing policies.

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization, Pinker proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is compatible with the passive. However, a number of comprehension and production priming studies have cast doubt upon this claim, finding no difference between highly affecting agent-patient/theme-experiencer passives and non-actional experiencer theme passives. (...) The present study provides evidence that a semantic constraint is psychologically real, and is readily observed when more fine-grained independent and dependent measures are used. We conclude that a semantic constraint on the passive must be incorporated into accounts of the adult grammar. (shrink)

The concept of truth is at the core of science, journalism, law, and many other pillars of modern society. Yet, given the imprecision of natural language, deciding what information should count as true is no easy task, even with access to the ground truth. How do people decide whether a given claim of fact qualifies as true or false? Across two studies (N = 1181; 16,248 observations), participants saw claims of fact alongside the ground truth about those claims. Participants classified (...) each claim as true or false. Although participants knew precisely how accurate the claims were, participants classified claims as false more often when they judged the information source to be intending to deceive (versus inform) their audience, and classified claims as true more often when they judged the information source to be intending to provide an approximate (versus precise) account. These results suggest that, even if people have access to the same set of facts, they might disagree about the truth of claims if they attribute discrepant intentions to information sources. Such findings may shed light on the robust and persistent disagreements over claims of fact that have arisen in the “post-truth era”. (shrink)

A comparison of the literatures on how infants represent generic object classes, gender and race information in faces, and emotional expressions reveals both common and distinctive developments in the three domains. In addition, the review indicates that some very basic questions remain to be answered regarding how infants represent facial displays of emotion, including (a) whether infants form category representations for discrete classes of emotion, (b) when and how such representations come to incorporate affective meaning, (c) the developmental trajectory for (...) representation of emotional expression at different levels of inclusiveness (i.e., from broad to narrow or narrow to broad?), and (d) whether there is superior discrimination ability operating within more frequently experienced emotion categories. (shrink)

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into critical domains such as healthcare holds immense promise. Nevertheless, significant challenges must be addressed to avoid harm, promote the well-being of individuals and societies, and ensure ethically sound and socially just technology development. Innovative approaches like Embedded Ethics, which refers to integrating ethics and social science into technology development based on interdisciplinary collaboration, are emerging to address issues of bias, transparency, misrepresentation, and more. This paper aims to develop this approach further to enable future projects (...) to effectively deploy it. Based on the practical experience of using ethics and social science methodology in interdisciplinary AI-related healthcare consortia, this paper presents several methods that have proven helpful for embedding ethical and social science analysis and inquiry. They include (1) stakeholder analyses, (2) literature reviews, (3) ethnographic approaches, (4) peer-to-peer interviews, (5) focus groups, (6) interviews with affected groups and external stakeholders, (7) bias analyses, (8) workshops, and (9) interdisciplinary results dissemination. We believe that applying Embedded Ethics offers a pathway to stimulate reflexivity, proactively anticipate social and ethical concerns, and foster interdisciplinary inquiry into such concerns at every stage of technology development. This approach can help shape responsible, inclusive, and ethically aware technology innovation in healthcare and beyond. (shrink)

Comparing mortuary rituals across 57 representative cultures extracted from the Human Relations Area Files, this paper demonstrates that kin of the deceased engage in behaviours to prepare the deceased for disposal that entail close and often prolonged contact with the contaminating corpse. At first glance, such practices are costly and lack obvious payoffs. Building on prior functionalist approaches, we present an explanation of corpse treatment that takes account of the unique adaptive challenges entailed by the death of a loved one. (...) We propose that intimate contact with the corpse provides the bereaved with extensive veridical cues of death, thereby facilitating acceleration of a grieving process that serves to recategorize the deceased as no longer a relationship partner, opening the door to relationship replacement and a return to social functioning. The benefits of exposure to such cues are tempered by the costs of exposure to cues of disease risk, a balance that in part explains the relative rarity of highly invasive mortuary practices that exacerbate the latter factor. We conclude by discussing implications of our model for contemporary mortuary practices in the developed world. (shrink)

Open‐ended tasks can be decomposed into the three levels of Newell's Cognitive Band: the Unit‐Task level, the Operation level, and the Deliberate‐Act level. We analyzed the video game Co‐op Space Fortress at these levels, reporting both the match of a cognitive model to subject behavior and the use of electroencephalogram (EEG) to track subject cognition. The Unit Task level in this game involves coordinating with a partner to kill a fortress. At this highest level of the Cognitive Band, there is (...) a good match between subject behavior and the model. The EEG signals were also strong enough to track when Unit Tasks succeeded or failed. The intermediate Operation level in this task involves legs of flight to achieve a kill. The EEG signals associated with these operations are much weaker than the signals associated with the Unit Tasks. Still, it was possible to reconstruct subject play with much better than chance success. There were significant differences in the leg behavior of subjects and models. Model behavior did not provide a good basis for interpreting a subject's behavior at this level. At the lowest Deliberate‐Act level, we observed overlapping key actions, which the model did not display. Such overlapping key actions also frustrated efforts to identify EEG signals of motor actions. We conclude that the Unit‐task level is the appropriate level both for understanding open‐ended tasks and for using EEG to track the performance of open‐ended tasks. (shrink)

During the set-up phase of an international study of genetic influences on outcomes from sepsis, we aimed to characterise potential differences in ethics approval processes and outcomes in participating European countries. Between 2005 and 2007 of the FP6-funded international Genetics Of Sepsis and Septic Shock project, we asked national coordinators to complete a structured survey of research ethic committee approval structures and processes in their countries, and linked these data to outcomes. Survey findings were reconfirmed or modified in 2017. Eighteen (...) countries participated in the study, recruiting 2257 patients from 160 ICUs. National practices differed widely in terms of composition of RECs, procedures and duration of the ethics approval process. Eight countries used a single centralised process for approval, seven required approval by an ethics committee in each participating hospital, and three required both. Outcomes of the application process differed widely between countries because of differences in national legislation, and differed within countries because of interpretation of the ethics of conducting research in patients lacking capacity. The RECs in four countries had no lay representation. The median time from submission to final decision was 1.5 months; in nine approval was received within 1 month; six took over 6 months, and in one 24 months; had all countries been able to match the most efficient approvals processes, an additional 74 months of country or institution-level recruitment would have been available. In three countries, rejection of the application by some local RECs resulted in loss of centres; and one country rejected the application outright. The potential benefits of the single application portal offered by the European Clinical Trials Regulation will not be realised without harmonisation of research ethics committee practices as well as national legislation. (shrink)

The COVID‐19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented health crisis that impacted healthcare systems worldwide. This study explores how Spanish healthcare workers learned, internalised and integrated values and work behaviours during the COVID‐19 pandemic and their impact on the personal sphere. This documentary research, using images, narratives and audiovisual content, was framed within the interpretative hermeneutic paradigm. Categories and subcategories emerged after a final theoretical sampling that focused on the analysis. Data triangulation between researchers favoured theoretical saturation. A total of 117 images (...) and 27 texts were selected. The analysis identified three stages: bewilderment, seeking functionality in the chaos and integrating chaos into care. The data reflects how the need for security and knowledge, and the exhaustion and frustration caused by the initial working conditions, prompted adaptive responses. These responses involved focusing on problem‐solving and strengthening group sentiments and solidarity. Subsequently, the data indicates the acceptance of new structural, organisational and communication aspects. The findings of the analysis will contribute towards finding a framework that can help understand community health crisis events. (shrink)

La mort de Michel Foucault en 1984 a coïncidé avec l'évanouissement des espoirs de transformation sociale qui avaient caractérisé l'après-guerre. Dans les décennies qui ont suivi sa mort, le néolibéralisme a triomphé et les attaques contre la sphère publique se sont amplifiées. Si Foucault n'a pas été un témoin direct de ces années, ses travaux sur le néolibéralisme n'en sont pas moins prémonitoires : la question du libéralisme occupe une place importante dans ses dernières œuvres. Depuis sa mort, l'appareil conceptuel (...) de Foucault a acquis une position centrale, voire dominante, pour une partie importante de la gauche intellectuelle mondiale. Cependant, comme le montrent les contributions à ce volume, l'attitude de Foucault à l'égard du néolibéralisme était pour le moins équivoque. Loin de mener une lutte intellectuelle contre l'orthodoxie du marché libre, Foucault a semblé y voir une opportunité pour inventer de nouvelles subjectivités. Un espace libéré du pouvoir pastoral de l'Etat social. Comment comprendre sa critique radicale de ce dernier, comprise comme un instrument du biopouvoir? Ou son soutien à l'anti-marxisme des nouveaux philosophes? Est-il possible que Foucault ait été séduit par le néolibéralisme? Cette question n'a pas qu'un intérêt biographique : elle nous oblige à nous confronter plus généralement aux mutations de la gauche depuis mai 1968, aux désillusions des années qui ont suivi et aux transformations profondes du champ intellectuel français depuis trente ans. Comprendre les années 1980 et le triomphe néolibéral, c'est explorer les recoins les plus ambigus de la gauche intellectuelle à travers l'une de ses figures les plus importantes. Ce livre est édité par Daniel Zamora et M.0 Behrent Daniel Zamora est professeur de sociologie à l'Université Libre de Bruxelles. Il travaille sur les conceptualisations de la pauvreté au XXe siècle, sur les inégalités et sur l'histoire moderne des idées. Il a écrit pour Le Monde Diplomatique, Jacobin, la Los Angeles Review of Books, Dissent, et ses textes ont été traduits dans une quinzaine de langues."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Caring for children with life-shortening illnesses is a humbling task. While some decisions are simple and safe, the emotionally-charged choices regarding how to best care for these children often...

This paper is one of the four interrelated action agenda papers resulting from the National Summit on Public Health Legal Preparedness convened in June 2007 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and multi-disciplinary partners. Each of the action agenda papers deals with one of the four core elements of public health legal preparedness: laws and legal authorities; competency in using those laws; coordination of law-based public health actions; and information. Options presented in this paper are for consideration by (...) policy makers and practitioners — in all jurisdictions and all relevant sectors and disciplines — with responsibilities for all-hazards emergency preparedness.Advancing and protecting the public's health depends upon the coordination of actions by many, diverse partners. For effective public health preparedness, there must be effective coordination of legal tools and law-based strategies across local, state, tribal, and federal jurisdictions, and also across sectors such as public health, health care, emergency management, education, law enforcement, community design, and academia. (shrink)

Over 40 years of research have shown that traumatic brain injury affects brain volume. However, technical and practical limitations made it difficult to detect brain volume abnormalities in patients suffering from chronic effects of mild or moderate traumatic brain injury. This situation improved in 2006 with the FDA clearance of NeuroQuant®, a commercially available, computer-automated software program for measuring MRI brain volume in human subjects. More recent strides were made with the introduction of NeuroGage®, commercially available software that is based (...) on NeuroQuant® and extends its utility in several ways. Studies using these and similar methods have found that most patients with chronic mild or moderate traumatic brain injury have brain volume abnormalities, and several of these studies found—surprisingly—more abnormal enlargement than atrophy. More generally, 102 peer-reviewed studies have supported the reliability and validity of NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage®. Furthermore, this updated version of a previous review addresses whether NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage® meet the Daubert standard for admissibility in court. It concludes that NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage® meet the Daubert standard based on their reliability, validity, and objectivity. Due to the improvements in technology over the years, these brain volumetric techniques are practical and readily available for clinical or forensic use, and thus they are important tools for detecting signs of brain injury. (shrink)

Shared decision-making has become a new focus of health policy. Though its core elements are largely agreed upon, there is little consensus regarding which outcomes to prioritize for policy-mandated shared decision-making.

This article describes the spiritual formation training program for counseling students at Richmont Graduate University, an evangelical institution providing Master’s-level instruction for counselors and ministers. This model of spiritual formation has a dual foundation which includes the centrality of love to the Christian life and the importance of attachment to the development of persons. The training is intentionally designed to invite students to pursue a more secure attachment to God, healthier relationships with others, and a more grace-based self-awareness. Integrative and (...) clinical instruction, and experiences that foster establishment of secure attachment are described. Co-curricular efforts in research and student advisement focus on grace and wellness, as well as opportunities for service, and these serve to further contribute to a supportive environment for spiritual formation. (shrink)

Previous work suggests that threat-related stimuli are stored to a greater degree in working memory compared to neutral stimuli. However, most of this research has focused on stimuli with physically salient threat attributes, failing to account for how a “neutral” stimulus that has acquired threat-related associations through differential aversive conditioning influences working memory. The current study examined how differentially conditioned safe and threat stimuli are stored in working memory relative to a novel, non-associated stimuli. Participants completed a differential fear conditioning (...) task followed by a change detection task consisting of three conditions across two loads. Results revealed individuals successfully learned to distinguishing CS+ from CS– conditions during the differential aversive conditioning task. Our working memory outcomes indicated successful load manipulation effects, but no statistically significant differences in accuracy, response time, or Pashler’s K measures of working memory capacity between CS+, CS–, or N conditions. However, we observed significantly reduced RT difference scores for the CS+ compared to CS– condition, indicating greater RT differences between the CS+ and N condition vs. the CS– and N condition. These findings suggest that differentially conditioned stimuli have little impact on behavioral outcomes of working memory compared to novel stimuli that had not been associated with previous safe of aversive outcomes, at least in healthy populations. (shrink)