Drawing on constructionist theory, this study examines how the media portrayed five public reporting events initiated by the Fair Labor Association (FLA), considering whether the coverage encourages or discourages companies from undertaking a reporting initiative as part of their ethical management. Media coverage was limited but generally favorable across all five events. Coverage frequently included claims made by FLA spokespersons and provided basic facts about the organization and its activities. Extensive detail about labor violations found by monitors was often included. (...) Additional media coverage centered around themes of public reporting and transparency, an assessment of the FLA’s work, brand accountability and responsibility of corporations with regard to working conditions and labor standards, and specifics about the factory monitoring and partnering with factories and NGOs that is necessary to achieve change. Counter-claims brought question to the FLA’s efforts. Explanations about why the social condition exists were fairly limited, and thus, provided little insight into how the problems might be resolved. We discuss managerial implications regarding public reporting initiatives and media coverage, particularly regarding the countering effects of positive coverage and diminishing news stories. (shrink)

Inequality in the family is the most damaging of all forces in women’s lives. It is overtly preserved by religious, customary, and state laws that formally enshrine discrimination against women and is perpetuated by de facto lack of access to nominally protective systems and remedies. International law and its implementation mechanisms provide an arena for confronting resistance to gender equality in the family, calling states to account at the highest level as well as providing a platform for domestic advocacy. CEDAW (...) and the jurisprudence of its monitoring body, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, clearly state the paramount value of protecting the individual human rights of family members rather than maintaining family “protection” and privacy at the expense of the women within it. By ratifying, States theoretically commit themselves to this progressive position. However, the politics of state and community identity make for a more complex picture that includes multiple, sometimes overlapping, levels of acceptance and rejection. Taking as a case study the current initiative to adopt a new General Recommendation to address the economic consequences of family relations and their dissolution, this Article draws on the CEDAW Convention and the CEDAW Committee’s work to suggest a practical application of international standards to address the tangle of legal systems and identity that have disadvantaged women for centuries. Placing this initiative within the context of multiple family law regimes and the multicultural debate, the right to exit and the concept of freedom to associate and to disassociate are emphasized as crucial in confronting the phenomenon of discriminatory identitybased family legal regimes. The Article concludes with an illustration of the harmonization process required by the CEDAW Convention, taking the new General Recommendation as a model approach for meeting the international equality norms while preserving community or State identity. (shrink)

In this narrative, we explore the story of Ananias and Sapphira from the book of Acts in the Christian scriptures. We examine the story in the light of a recent book by Dominic Johnson, God Is Watching You, and other related research. The idea of a punitive God and/or the belief in a punitive God may have significant effects on group functioning. The troubling story of Ananias and Sapphira may be seen as a central cog in the cooperative coming together (...) of what became the Christian Church. In our modern world, a punitive God is an idea we seek to avoid but it may be the one that is essential for a peaceful cooperative world. (shrink)

Background Potential clinical interventions to mitigate or eliminate symptoms of Down syndrome (DS) continue to be an active area of pre-clinical and clinical research. However, views of members of the DS community have yet to be fully explored.Methods We conducted a survey with parents/caregivers of people with DS (n = 532) to explore interest in potential therapeutic approaches during fetal development or childhood that may improve neurocognition and modulate the DS phenotype. We qualitatively analyzed open-ended responses.Results Some respondents rejected the (...) development of therapies for DS categorically as being fundamentally ableist and promoting the erasure of diverse individuals. Many reflected tensions between the desire to improve quality of life and an aversion to erasure of a child’s personality.Conclusion Findings suggest that views on identity, personality, and disability may influence the acceptance of new interventions, especially if they are thought to mitigate positive attributes of the phenotype or negatively influence social acceptance of people with DS. (shrink)

Most accounts of the Stroop effect (Stroop, 1935) emphasize its negative aspect, namely, that in particular situations, processing of an irrelevant stimulus dimension interferes with participants' performance of the instructed task. In contrast, this paper emphasizes the fact that, even with that interference, participants actually can (and usually do) exert enough control to perform the instructed task. An Adaptive Control of Thought–Rational (ACT–R) model of the Stroop task interprets this as a kind of learned strategic control. Specifically, the concept of (...) utility is applied to the two processes that compete in the Stroop task, and a utility‐learning mechanism serves to update the corresponding utility values according to experience and hence influence the competition. This model both accounts for various extant Stroop results and makes novel predictions about when people can reduce their susceptibility to Stroop interference. These predictions are tested in three experiments that involve a double‐response variant of the Stroop task. (shrink)

We were interested to read the current target article, given our admiration for the senior author’s comprehensive coverage of these same topics a decade ago (Donley, Hul...

This book brings together an international collection of experts in reproductive ethics, law, disability studies, and medicine to explore the challenging future of reproduction and children. From the medical to the social and from the financial to the legal, the authors explore the expanding impact of reproductive genetics on our society. New advances in genetic technologies are revolutionizing the practice of reproductive medicine. We have expanded our ability to detect genetic changes in embryos and fetuses in ways that potentially allow (...) to identify, treat, or prevent a growing range of diseases. The development of gene-editing technologies raises questions about the possibility of removing disease-causing variants from embryos before pregnancy implantation. The growing sophistication of prenatal genomic sequencing offers us glimpses into the whole genome of the developing fetus. And, the increasingly sophisticated science of 'gene matching' allows us greater and greater foreknowledge of how the genomes of two individuals will combine in a future child. This is an indispensable book on the newest developments in bioethics caused by the sciences. Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. (shrink)

In their target article, Conley et al. (2023) appropriately highlight the ongoing conceptual and practical opacity of public engagement (PE) in the translation of human gene editing (HGE) (Conley e...

An oversize volume celebrates the National Ranching Heritage Center, a museum and historical park located on the northern edge of the Texas Tech University campus in Lubbock, established to preserve the history of ranching, pioneer life, and the development of the livestock industry in North America.

Modern American nursing has an extensive ethical heritage literature that extends from the 1870s to 1965 when the American Nurses Association issued a policy paper that called for moving nursing education out of hospital diploma programs and into colleges and universities. One consequence of this move was the dispersion of nursing libraries and the loss of nursing ethics textbooks, as they were largely not brought over into the college libraries. In addition to approximately 100 nursing ethics textbooks, the nursing ethics (...) heritage literature also includes hundreds of journal articles that are often made less accessible in modern databases that concentrate on the past 20 or 30 years. A second consequence of nursing’s movement into colleges and universities is that ethics was no longer taught by nursing faculty, but becomes separated and placed as a discrete ethics (later bioethics) course in departments of philosophy or theology. These courses were medically identified and rarely incorporated authentic nursing content. This shift in nursing education occurs contemporaneously with the rise of the field of bioethics. Bioethics is rapidly embraced by nursing, and as it develops within nursing, it fails to incorporate the rich ethical heritage, history, and literature of nursing prior to the development of the field of bioethics. This creates a radical disjunction in nursing’s ethics; a failure to more adequately explore the moral identity of nursing; the development of an ethics with a lack of fit with nursing’s ethical history, literature, and theory; a neglect of nursing’s ideal of service; a diminution of the scope and richness of nursing ethics as social ethics; and a loss of nursing ethical heritage of social justice activism and education. We must reclaim nursing’s rich and capacious ethics heritage literature; the history of nursing ethics matters profoundly. (shrink)

Due to a widespread belief in mechano-reductionism, most intellectuals reject the idea that nonconscious living beings act toward goals. Proposing otherwise is mostly rejected as unscientific anthropomorphizing or necessitating appeals to a supernatural power. This false dichotomy has stymied biology and its related sciences. Herein, I present a new naturalistic gestalt on the nature of life—one based on facts and evidence. It incorporates Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s and Arthur Koestler’s theories of systems and hierarchies with the ideas of Aristotle, Hans Jonas, (...) and Ayn Rand, to identify fundamental formulations on the nature of life, consciousness, free will, and meaning. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the key ethical questions of performing gene editing research on military service members. The recent technological advance in gene editing capabilities provided by CRISPR/Cas9 and their path towards first-in-human trials has reinvigorated the debate on human enhancement for non-medical purposes. Human performance optimization has long been a priority of military research in order to close the gap between the advancement of warfare and the limitations of human actors. In spite of this focus on temporary (...) performance improvement, biomedical enhancement is an extension of these endeavours and the ethical issues of such research should be considered. In this paper, we explore possible applications of CRISPR to military human gene editing research and how it could be specifically applied towards protection of service members against biological or chemical weapons. We analyse three normative areas including risk–benefit analysis, informed consent, and inequality of access as it relates to CRISPR applications for military research to help inform and provide considerations for military institutional review boards and policymakers. (shrink)

Muriel Wheldale, a distinguished graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, was a member of William Bateson's school of genetics at Cambridge University from 1903. Her investigation of flower color inheritance in snapdragons (Antirrhinum), a topic of particular interest to botanists, contributed to establishing Mendelism as a powerful new tool in studying heredity. Her understanding of the genetics of pigment formation led her to do cutting-edge work in biochemistry, culminating in the publication of her landmark work, The Anthocyanin Pigments of Plants (1916). (...) In 1915, she joined Frederick Gowland Hopkin's Department of Biochemistry as assistant and in 1926 became one of the first women to be appointed university lecturer. In 1919 she married the biochemist Huia Onslow, with whom she collaborated until his death in 1922. This paper examines Wheldale's work in genetics and especially focuses on the early linkage of Mendelian methdology with new techniques in biochemistry that eventually led to the founding of biochemical genetics. It highlights significant issues in the early history of women in genetics, including the critical role of mentors, funding opportunities, and career strategies. (shrink)

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery (in painting, photography, prints, film, and design) of race construction primarily in Scandinavia and the empires of Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Russia at a time when the disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and publications on race were debating competing theories of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. These regions, while on the periphery of continental Europe, largely marginalized in the scholarship of nineteenth-century art history, and ignored by Edward (...) Said (Orientalism 1978), have been central locations for theorizing white identity and for containing diverse ethnic populations that have generated substantive ethnographic study and regional conflicts since the eighteenth century. This anthology explores art that engaged with ethnography and anthropology to shape visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures, both indigenous (Roma, Sámi, Inuit, and Celts) and migrant or colonial (Muslims and Blacks), chiefly between 1850 and 1930, but extending into the early twenty-first century. The essays in this book contribute to postcolonial research by documenting colonial-style treatment of minority groups and by seeking to qualify binary systems through explorations of anomalies, complexities, and contradictions that emerge when seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts. This book presents a range of different artistic voices that responded to ethnographic and anthropological information by producing images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued that information. The authors seek to uncover instances of connections and variability, to establish the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and to challenge the certainties of racial categorization. (shrink)

Business people repeatedly asked Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) to recommend a policy to deal with email and voicemail. After many such requests to our organization, we attempted to construct guidelines that we could endorse. This paper outlines the guidelines that we proposed and the public reaction to them. The paper discusses the tensions inherent in a business environment, and the means of identifying ethical behavior for both companies and their employees.

Access to clear and concise medication information is essential to support safe and effective use of prescription drugs. Patient misunderstanding of medication information is a common reason for non-adherence to medication regimens and a leading cause of outpatient medication errors and adverse drug events in the U.S. Medication errors are the most common source of risk to patient safety, leading to poor health outcomes, hospitalizations, and deaths. Over half a million adverse drug events occur in the outpatient setting each year (...) at a cost of approximately $1 billion annually.Nearly half of adults in the U.S. experience difficulty understanding and acting upon health information. Even individuals with high levels of general literacy may find medication information difficult to understand or use. The risk of misunderstanding medication information is compounded for patients with limited English proficiency who may not have access to this information in their own language. (shrink)

The contributors explore the life, thought, and works of Aelred, 12th-century Cistercian abbot of Rievaulx Abbey, his sermons, spirituality, and histories and highlight their principal themes.

The marriage of Sally Peris Hughes (1895–1984) and Franz Schrader (1891–1962) in November 1920 launched a highly successful scientific collaboration that lasted over four decades. The Schraders were avid naturalists, adroit experimentalists, and keen theoreticians, and both had long, productive, and fruitful careers in zoology. They offer an extraordinarily rich case study that provides an insightful view of the work carried out in several areas of the life sciences from the 1920s to the 1960s—fieldwork, cytology, cytogenetics, and entomology—as well as (...) critical aspects of the social world of contemporary science. By focusing on the fieldwork the couple carried out in Mexico and Central America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, this paper seeks to illuminate how this collaborative scientific marriage embodies a collective, complex, and integrated personal and social arrangement that served to enhance both knowledge production and disciplinary development in several areas of science. It also reveals ways in which marriage could serve as a means to help both parties navigate and negotiate restrictive sociocultural norms and institutional arrangements in science involving gender, power, and authority in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

In the early years of Mendelism, 1900-1910, William Bateson established a productive research group consisting of women and men studying biology at Cambridge. The empirical evidence they provided through investigating the patterns of hereditary in many different species helped confirm the validity of the Mendelian laws of heredity. What has not previously been well recognized is that owing to the lack of sufficient institutional support, the group primarily relied on domestic resources to carry out their work. Members of the group (...) formed a kind of extended family unit, centered on the Batesons' home in Grantchester and the grounds of Newnham College. This case illustrates the continuing role that domestic environments played in supporting scientific research in the early 20th century. (shrink)

Working memory resources are needed for processing and maintenance of information during cognitive tasks. Many models have been developed to capture the effects of limited working memory resources on performance. However, most of these models do not account for the finding that different individuals show different sensitivities to working memory demands, and none of the models predicts individual subjects' patterns of performance. We propose a computational model that accounts for differences in working memory capacity in terms of a quantity called (...) source activation, which is used to maintain goal‐relevant information in an available state. We apply this model to capture the working memory effects of individual subjects at a fine level of detail across two experiments. This, we argue, strengthens the interpretation of source activation as working memory capacity. (shrink)

Several standard conditions of adequacy for confirmation are considered and a conclusion of B. Skyrms regarding the converse-consequence condition is shown to be mistaken. Widely accepted conditions such as the entailment condition and the special consequence condition are shown to be open to counterexample, and confusion about these conditions is traced to confusion about the difference between two kinds of confirmation concepts--concepts of firmness and concepts of increase in firmness. The importance of concepts of the latter sort is stressed. Finally, (...) some suggestions are offered relating to the notion of selective confirmation. (shrink)

In June 1909, scientists and dignitaries from 167 different countries gathered in Cambridge to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species. The event was one of the most magnificent commemorations in the annals of science. Delegates gathered within the cloisters of Cambridge University not only to honor the “hero” of evolution but also to reassess the underpinnings of Darwinism at a critical juncture. With the mechanism of natural selection (...) increasingly under attack, evolutionary theory was in disarray. Against this backdrop, biologists weighed the impact of several new developments—the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of heredity, de Vriesian mutation theory, and the linkage of sex‐cell division to the mechanism of heredity. The 1909 Darwin celebration thus represents a significant watershed in the history of modern biology that allows historians to assess the status of evolution prior to the advent of the chromosome theory of genetics. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis article uses the history of early sound recording technology in the united States between 1878 and 1915 to show how published discourse contributed to the way the talking machine was defined and situated as a commercially viable product. Comparing the published accounts of Edison's phonograph and Berliners gramophone in popular scientific articles between 1878 and 1896 illustrates that technological advances in sound recording technology take on important cultural meanings. Critical to these meanings is the way in which the (...) technological “fidelity” is linguistically transformed into an aesthetic quality, projected and interpreted within demonstrable values of musical culture. Beginning in 1902, the Victor Talking Machine Company, formed to market the gramophone, took advantage of these cultural meanings to claim a technological advantage over Edison's cylinder recorder. Whose voice was recorded became part of the claim to technological superiority. The Victor Company succeeded in capitalizing “Culture” by promoting their recordings of opera stars like Enrico Caruso as technologically and culturally faithful to live musical performance and as a democratically available access to a privileged lifestyle. Thus did the Victor Company use a terrier and a tenor to legitimate their talking machine as an American musical instrument. (shrink)

This book advocates for schools to empower people to be creators of their preferred future. Learning is more focused and compelling for students of all ages when it is oriented toward future requirements. Anticipate the World You Want sets out a framework for bringing a future focus to education.

Volume 24, Issue 8, August 2024, Page 43-45.

The central ideas of early object relations theory are heavily inflected with Christian anti-Judaism, particularly as found in the work of Ian Dishart Suttie, now credited as the founder of this tradition. The critique of Freud launched by Suttie repudiates Freudian theory as a “disease” inextricably connected to Freud being a Jew. Suttie’s portrayal of Judaism both conforms to and replicates those theological commitments that privilege a triumphalist, supersessionist Christianity that breaks with Judaism, understood as devoid of love, ethics, and (...) social justice interests. The paper argues that the elements organizing the central concepts that structure Suttie’s Christian prejudice constitute distorting ideological interests that circulate and shape important strands of contemporary object relations theory. Central to the authors discussed is a repudiation of Freud’s theory of unconscious drives on the basis of privileging love and intersubjectivity as the motivators of human psychological development made possible by Jesus and Christianity. The paper demonstrates that contemporary object relations theory remains heavily indebted to Suttie while remaining oblivious to his explicit anti-Judaism. (shrink)

At least 177 scales are available to researchers who want to measure religiosity, but questions exist as to exactly what these scales are measuring and in whom they are measuring it. A review of these scales found a lack items designed to measure ethical action in society or the world as a prophetic response to the experience of the divine. Instead, the vast majority of scales focus on internal experiences and beliefs or institutional relationships. A review of scale norm groups (...) found that norm groups often are not fully described, particularly in the area of race/ethnicity, and when they are described, they reveal an over-reliance on convenience samples of college students and an under-representation of racial/ethnic minority groups. Examples of scales with more fully described and more representative norm groups are given, and recommendations are offered for researchers using and developing religiosity scales. (shrink)

The large body of literature labeled “ethics in nursing education” is entirely devoted to curricular matters of ethics education in nursing schools, that is, to what ought to be the ethics content that is taught and what theory or issues ought to be included in all nursing curricula. Where the nursing literature actually focuses on particular ethical issues, it addresses only single topics. Absent from the literature, however, is any systematic analysis and explication of ethical issues or dilemmas that occur (...) within the context of nursing education. The objective of this article is to identify the spectrum of ethical issues in nursing education to the end of prompting a systematic and thorough study of such issues, and to lay the groundwork for research by identifying and provisionally typologizing the ethical issues that occur within the context of academic nursing. (shrink)

Sigmund Freud argued that religions originate in the unconscious needs, longings and fantasies of human minds. His work has served to highlight how any analysis of religion must explore mental life, both the cognitive and the unconscious. _Freud on Religion_ examines Freud's complex understanding of religious belief and practice. The book brings together contemporary psychoanalytic theory and case material from Freud's clinical practice to illustrate how the operations of the unconscious mind support various forms of religious belief, from mainstream to (...) occult. _Freud on Religion_ offers a new way of understanding Freud's thinking and demonstrates how valuable psychoanalysis is for the study of religion. (shrink)

The paper makes a strong plea for the health care system itself to strive for better health. It argues that a growing weakness of the health care system is high level psychological stress. This, in turn, is caused by the overuse of memory-linked analytical process thinking in managing the affairs of health care organizations. The author strongly recommends a shift towards a greater use of natural flow thinking which is more supple, spontaneous, creative and stress free. She argues for this (...) shift on the basis of several years of personal engagement with and learning of flow thinking practices in different parts of the world, including India. (shrink)

This important text draws on decades of research, arguing that modern nursing germinated and grew an ethics from its own native soil, that is a rich, fulsome and philosophically informed; grounded in the tradition, and practice of nursing. This systematic and comprehensive book is an essential contribution for students and scholars of nursing ethics.

Ayn Rand argued that “selfish” is the correct designation for a person living according to the Objectivist ethics and that selfishness is a virtue. The accuracy of this claim is examined along with the meaning of “selfish,” the wider implications for the Objectivist ethics, and ethics in general. Alternatives to the term are suggested.

The key to understanding the moral identity of modern nursing and the distinctiveness of nursing ethics resides in a deeper examination of the extensive nursing ethics literature and history from the late 1800s to the mid 1960s, that is, prior to the “bioethics revolution”. There is a distinctive nursing ethics, but one that falls outside both biomedical and bioethics and is larger than either. Were, there a greater corpus of research on nursing’s heritage ethics it would decidedly recondition the entire (...) argument about a distinctive nursing ethics. It would also provide a thicker account of nursing ethics than has been afforded thus far. Such research is dependent upon identifying, locating, accessing and, more importantly, sharing these resources. A number of important heritage ethics sources are identified so that researchers might better locate them. In addition, a bibliography of heritage ethics textbooks and a transcript of the earliest known journal article on nursing ethics in the US are provided. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic critical theory explores the dynamics of individual identity formation within specific cultural contexts. Freud understood that psychoanalysis is a critical social theory as well as a therapeutic practice. His studies on religion illustrate the depths of society and culture within the mind. Freud was thus able to respond to Romain Rolland's experience of an “oceanic” or mystical feeling in thoroughly explanatory psychoanalytic terms that led him to speculate about pre-Oedipal memories of maternal care. Freud made an important contribution to (...) the psychoanalytic study of religion that remains relevant to contemporary academic studies of religion. (shrink)