Is todayâ??s thinking conditioned by body-mind dualism? A rebellion against the biological order seems to have silently infiltrated our world view. Suicide bombers appear to share a fascination with destruction with writers such as Mishima, Pasolini and Foucault. A liberation from the body to re-establish a possibly mystical union of soul and cosmos and an assertion of the mindâ??s omnipotence appear to be common features of forms of behavior that seem to be taken for granted in contemporary thought. Is the (...) new misogyny, which rejects motherhood in the name of feminism, contributing in any way to these trends? This review of our society by a woman psychoanalyst â?? a non-medic and graduate of the Institut d'Ã?tudes Politiques in Paris â?? presents a sharp and rigorous analysis of the strange and violent mechanisms that are erupting in the world today. (shrink)

In Max Black’s Objection to Mind–Body Identity, Ned Block seeks to offer a definitive treatment of property dualism arguments that exploit modes of presentation. I will argue that Block’s central response to property dualism is confused. The property dualist can happily grant that mental modes of presentation have a hidden physical nature. What matters for the property dualist is not the hidden physical side of the property, but the apparent mental side. Once that ‘thin’ side is granted, the property (...) dualist has won. I conclude that although Block is wrong to think that the property dualist must argue for so-called thin mental properties, Block, and the physicalist, are able to resist property dualism. But any attempt to bolster this resistance and do more than dogmatically assert the crucial identity runs a serious risk of undermining the physicalism it is meant to save. (shrink)

The validity and utility of the proximate-ultimate distinction in biology have recently been under debate. Opponents of the distinction argue that it rules out individual-level organismic processes from evolutionary explanations, thereby leading to an unfounded separation between organismic causation and evolutionary causation. Proponents of the proximate-ultimate distinction, on the other hand, argue that it serves an important epistemological role in forming different kinds of explanation-seeking questions in biology. In this paper we offer an interpretation the proximate-ultimate distinction not only as (...) a means of forming explanation-seeking questions, but also as a distinction that can help highlight the way in which individual-level organismic processes can be evolutionary causes. We do this by interpreting the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes as a distinction between structuring and triggering causes. (shrink)

The particular design of any technology may have profound social implications. Computing technologies are deeply intermeshed with the activities of daily life, playing an ever more central role in how we work, learn, communicate, socialize, and participate in government. Despite the many ways they have improved life, they cannot be regarded as unambiguously beneficial or even value-neutral. Recent experience shows they can lead to unintended but harmful consequences. Some technologies are thought to threaten democracy through the spread of propaganda on (...) online social networks, or to threaten privacy through the aggregation of datasets that include increasingly personal information, or to threaten justice when machine learning is used in such high-stakes, decision-making contexts as loan application reviews, employment procedures, or parole hearings. It is insufficient to ethically assess technology after it has produced negative social impacts, as has happened, for example, with facial recognition software that discriminates against people of color and with self-driving cars that are unable to cope with pedestrians who jay-walk. Developers of new technologies should aim to identify potential harmful consequences early in the design process and take steps to eliminate or mitigate them. This task is not easy. Designers will often have to negotiate among competing values—for instance, between efficiency and accessibility for a diverse user population, or between maximizing benefits and avoiding harm. There is no simple recipe for identifying and solving ethical problems. -/- Computer science education can help meet these challenges by making ethical reasoning about computing technologies a central element in the curriculum. Students can learn to think not only about what technology they could create, but also whether they should create that technology. Learning to reason this way requires courses unlike those currently standard in computer science curricula. A range of university courses on topics in areas of computing, ethics, society and public policy are emerging to meet this need. Some cover computer science broadly, while others focus on specific problems like privacy and security; typically, these classes exist as stand-alone courses in the computer science curriculum. Others have integrated ethics into the teaching of introductory courses on programming, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. (shrink)

Little attention has been paid to the importance of social media in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. This deficit is redressed in the present paper through utilizing the notion of ‘citizenship arenas’ to identify three dynamics in social media-augmented corporate–society relations. First, we note that social media-augmented ‘corporate arenas of citizenship’ are constructed by individual corporations in an effort to address CSR issues of specific importance thereto, and are populated by individual citizens as well as (functional/formally organized) stakeholders. Second, (...) we highlight that, within social media-augmented ‘public arenas of citizenship’, individual citizens are empowered, relative to corporations and their (functional/formally organized) stakeholders, when it comes to creating, debating, and publicizing, CSR-relevant issues. Third, we posit that information and communication technology corporations possess specific, and potentially very important, capacities, when it comes to creating, or helping construct, public arenas of citizenship from within which individual citizens can influence their broader political–economic environment. Following this, we discuss how social media can contribute to ‘dysfunctions’ as well as ‘progressions’ in corporate–society relations, and conclude with a number of suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Delusions, a key feature of psychosis, are usually thought of as a type of belief, as in the definition of the American Psychiatric Association: A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (e.g. it is not an article of religious (...) faith). This characterization is often criticized, but other definitions typically comprise similar elements. For some, delusions are only loosely considered as beliefs (Jaspers 1963; Moor and Tucker .. (shrink)

Are hierarchical arrangements in the workplace, including the employer-employee relationship, consistent with the ideal of relating to one another as moral equals? With this question at its core, this volume of essays by leading moral and political philosophers explores ideas about justice in the workplace, contributing to both political philosophy and business ethics. Relational egalitarians propose that the ideal of equality is primarily an ideal of social relationships and view the equality of social relationships as having priority over the distributive (...) arrangements. Yet contemporary workplaces are characterized by hierarchical employer-employee relationships. The essays push discussions of the relational egalitarian tradition in new directions, helping to show its promise and its limits. They address pressing concerns at a time of widening inequality and rapid changes in the nature of work. (shrink)

Background Medical research so flawed as to be retracted may put patients at risk by influencing treatments. Objective To explore hypotheses that more patients are put at risk if a retracted paper appears in a journal with a high impact factor (IF) so that the paper is widely read; is written by a ‘repeat offender’ author who has produced other retracted research; or is a clinical trial. Methods English language papers (n=788) retracted from the PubMed database between 2000 and 2010 (...) were evaluated. Only those papers retracting research with humans or freshly derived human material were included; 180 retracted primary papers (22.8%) met inclusion criteria. Subjects enrolled and patients treated were tallied, both in the retracted primary studies and in 851 secondary studies that cited a retracted primary paper. Results Retracted papers published in high-IF journals were cited more often (p=0.0004) than those in low-IF journals, but there was no difference between high- and low-IF papers in subjects enrolled or patients treated. Retracted papers published by ‘repeat offender’ authors did not enrol more subjects or treat more patients than papers by one-time offenders, nor was there a difference in number of citations. However, retracted clinical trials treated more patients (p=0.0002) and inspired secondary studies that put more patients at risk (p=0.0019) than did other kinds of medical research. Conclusions If the goal is to minimise risk to patients, the appropriate focus is on clinical trials. Clinical trials form the foundation of evidence-based medicine; hence, the integrity of clinical trials must be protected. (shrink)

Recent evolutionary perspectives on guilt tend to focus on how guilt functions as a means for the individual to self-regulate behavior and as a mechanism for reinforcing cooperative tendencies. While these accounts highlight important dimensions of guilt and provide important insights into its evolutionary emergence, they pay scant attention to the large empirical literature on its maladaptive effects on individuals. This paper considers the nature of guilt, explores its biological function, and provides an evolutionary perspective on whether it is an (...) individual-level or group selected trait. After surveying philosophical and psychological analyses of guilt, we consider which psychological mechanisms underlie the capacity to experience and act from guilt and whether they point to an emergence of guilt in early humans or to guilt having a longer phylogenetic history. Because guilt is a characteristically social emotion, we then examine its contemporary role in social and legal contexts, which may p... (shrink)

In multicellular organisms, cells are frequently programmed to die. This makes good sense: cells that fail to, or are no longer playing important roles are eliminated. From the cell’s perspective, this also makes sense, since somatic cells in multicellular organisms require the cooperation of clonal relatives. In unicellular organisms, however, programmed cell death poses a difficult and unresolved evolutionary problem. The empirical evidence for PCD in diverse microbial taxa has spurred debates about what precisely PCD means in the case of (...) unicellular organisms. In this article, we survey the concepts of PCD in the literature and the selective pressures associated with its evolution. We show that definitions of PCD have been almost entirely mechanistic and fail to separate questions concerning what PCD fundamentally is from questions about the kinds of mechanisms that realize PCD. We conclude that an evolutionary definition is best able to distinguish PCD from closely related phenomena. Specifically, we define “true” PCD as an adaptation for death triggered by abiotic or biotic environmental stresses. True PCD is thus not only an evolutionary product but must also have been a target of selection. Apparent PCD resulting from pleiotropy, genetic drift, or trade-offs is not true PCD. We call this “ersatz PCD.”. (shrink)

The embodied human subject is dynamically connected to his or her historico-sociocultural context, the soil from which a person’s psyche is nourished as multiplex meanings are absorbed and enable personal development. In each culture certain towering artistic works embody this perspective. The Dream of the Red Chamber introduces Jia Bao-yu—a scion of the prestigious Jia family—and his relationships with a large cast of characters. Bao-yu is controversial but, at the time of the family’s tragic collapse, he can be seen as (...) embodying a spiritual struggle in which his instinct, nature, sensitivity, and creativity are grounded in his transcendent relationship with a fragment of the world stone, an eternal source of energy and creativity. We are invited to draw on a metaphysical level of thought to consider his struggles with man-made hierarchies and a situated historico-sociocultural order in such a way as to live out his spiritual being. As such, the novel is closely relevant to questions of spirituality in bioethics. Through personal experiences, passions, creativity, and relationships with others, the body is inscribed, forming the soul, which may be misconstrued (for instance, through a medical or Cartesian reformulation of events) but which can be seen as the site of ethical and spiritual thought. (shrink)

Bioethical debates such as those surrounding the manipulation of human embryos are often based on metaphysical assumptions that lack a foundation in the natural sciences. In this paper we support a gradualist position whereby the embryo progressively takes on the form and associated ethical significance of a human being. We support this position by introducing a concept of biological structure or form to show how the gradualist position has its metaphysical foundations in modern biology. The conceptual basis for form and (...) structure are outlined and their compatibility with and basis in current empirical biology is demonstrated by some recent advances in our understanding of the processes of development from single cell to organism. We then briefly explore the ethical significance of accepting a form or structure based conception of biology for the status of the early embryo. (shrink)

Grammatical Evolution (GE) has a long history in evolutionary computation. Central to the behaviour of GE is the use of a linear representation and grammar to map individuals from search spaces into problem spaces. This genotype to phenotype mapping is often argued as a distinguishing property of GE relative to other techniques, such as context-free grammar genetic programming (CFG-GP). Since its initial description, GE research has attempted to incorporate information from the grammar into crossover, mutation, and individual initialisation, blurring the (...) distinction between genotype and phenotype and creating GE variants closer to CFG-GP. This is argued to provide GE with the "best of both worlds", allowing degrees of grammatical bias to be introduced into operators to best suit the given problem. This paper examines the behaviour of three grammar-based search methods on several problems from previous GE research. It is shown that, unlike CFG-GP, the performance of "pure" GE on the examined problems closely resembles that of random search. The results suggest that further work is required to determine the cases where the "best of both worlds" of GE are required over a straight CFG-GP approach. (shrink)

In all fields of clinical medicine, there is an increasing awareness that outcome must be assessed in terms of quality of life and cost effectiveness, rather than merely length of survival. This is especially the case when considering decompressive craniectomy for severe traumatic brain injury. The procedure itself is technically straightforward and involves temporarily removing a large section of the skull vault in order to provide extra space into which the injured brain can expand. A number of studies have demonstrated (...) many patients going on to make a good long-term functional recovery, however, this is not always the case and a significant number survive but are left with severe neurocognitive impairment. Unfortunately, many of these patients are young adults who were previously fit and well and are, therefore, likely to spend many years in a condition that they may feel to be unacceptable, and this raises a number of ethical issues regarding consent and resource allocation. In an attempt to address these issues, we have used the analytical framework proposed by Jonsen, that requires systematic consideration of medical indications, patient preferences, quality of life and contextual features. (shrink)

BackgroundUniversal standards for bioethics, including the tenet of informed consent, should be upheld in the setting of humanitarian medical missions. The obstacles to obtaining informed consent in the global health setting have been thoroughly discussed in the literature, but no studies have investigated these issues from the patient’s perspective. We sought to understand the patient’s experience of the consent process during a four-week surgical mission to Haiti.MethodsAll patients selected for surgery during a mission to Hinche, Haiti, were invited to participate (...) in a survey assessing communication between them and their physicians, their understanding of the surgical procedure, and their desire for information during the consent process. Complete data were collected from 55 patients.ResultsUnderstanding a basic explanation of surgery and the associated risks was important to 98% of Haitian surgical patients, and 96% reported the desire for extensive risk communication. All patients felt that they sho... (shrink)

The evolution of religious traditions may be partially explained by out-group avoidance due to pathogen stress. However, many religious rituals may increase rather than decrease performers' susceptibility to infection. Moreover, religions often spread through proselytizing, which requires out-group interaction; and in other cases, the benefits of economic exchange increase religious pluralism and social interactions with out-groups.

This study investigates how hope moderates the relationship between students’ sense of belonging and their academic misconduct intentions and behaviours. A sample of 234 university students (57% female) aged between 16 and 64 (Mage = 25.56, SDage = 8.18) responded to an online survey. The survey included demographic questions, measures of student’s sense of belonging at university, dispositional hope, motivation to reach their goals (Agency), perceived ability to implement a plan to attain their goal (Pathways), future intentions to engage in (...) academic misconduct intentions (AM Intentions) and previous engagement in academic misconduct behaviours (AM Behaviours). Our findings suggest that a student’s sense of belonging to their university and their levels of hope are negatively associated with academic misconduct intentions. We also observed a significant Hope × Belongingness, Agency × Belongingness, and Pathways × Belongingness interaction for students’ AM intentions and their AM behaviours. Our findings identified that students who have a strong sense of belonging, but low levels of hope are more likely to engage in academic misconduct behaviours. We also confirm that high levels of hope are protective against students engaging in academic misconduct. Universities can use these findings to identify students at an increased risk of engaging in academic misconduct and protect at-risk students from engaging in academic misconduct by improving their goal motivation and perceived capacity to implement a plan to reach their education goals. (shrink)

This book examines key twentieth-century philosophers, theologians, and social scientists who began their careers with commitments to the political left only later to reappraise or reject those commitments due to changes in the culture, economics, and politics.

Previous research has found that funding disparities are driven by applications’ final impact scores and that only a portion of the black/white funding gap can be explained by bibliometrics and topic choice. Using National Institutes of Health R01 applications for council years 2014–2016, we examine assigned reviewers’ preliminary overall impact and criterion scores to evaluate whether racial disparities in impact scores can be explained by application and applicant characteristics. We hypothesize that differences in commensuration—the process of combining criterion scores into (...) overall impact scores—disadvantage black applicants. Using multilevel models and matching on key variables including career stage, gender, and area of science, we find little evidence for racial disparities emerging in the process of combining preliminary criterion scores into preliminary overall impact scores. Instead, preliminary criterion scores fully account for racial disparities—yet do not explain all of the variability—in preliminary overall impact scores. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Traditional corporate finance endorses the principle of stockholder wealth maximization as the purpose of business. In light of recent scandals and legislation, businesses are increasingly expected to use financial resources in a manner which benefits society and not just the owners of the firm. This imputation of a corporate soul will necessarily reduce investor returns, which has at least two major financial implications for the firm and the economy. The first is that it may cause investors to change their required (...) rates of return and thereby change the amount of capital available to firms, and the economy. The second is that it may implicitly replace equity with debt in the capital structure of firms, with all that implies for financing and corporate governance. The purpose of this article is to examine these implications and evaluate their sometimes counterintuitive consequences. (shrink)

The White Coats for Black Lives and #ShutDownSTEM movements have galvanised biomedical practitioners and researchers to eliminate institutional and systematic racism, including barriers faced by Black researchers in biomedicine and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In our study on Black–White funding gaps for National Institutes of Health Research Project grants, we found that the overall award rate for Black applicants is 55% of that for white applicants. How can systems for allocating research grant funding be made more fair while (...) improving their efficiency? (shrink)

Research has shown that processing dynamics on the perceiver's end determine aesthetic pleasure. Specifically, typical objects, which are processed more fluently, are perceived as more attractive. We extend this notion of perceptual fluency to judgments of vocal aesthetics. Vocal attractiveness has traditionally been examined with respect to sexual dimorphism and the apparent size of a talker, as reconstructed from the acoustic signal, despite evidence that gender-specific speech patterns are learned social behaviors. In this study, we report on a series of (...) three experiments using 60 voices to compare the relationship between judgments of vocal attractiveness, stereotypicality, and gender categorization fluency. Our results indicate that attractiveness and stereotypicality are highly correlated for female and male voices. Stereotypicality and categorization fluency were also correlated for male voices, but not female voices. Crucially, stereotypicality and categorization fluency interacted to predict attractiveness, suggesting the role of perceptual fluency is present, but nuanced, in judgments of human voices. (shrink)

Both similarities and differences were observed when comparing scenic beauty evaluations of rural landscapes made by persons from different cultures. Differences seem due to the westernized tourists' misinterpretation or ignorance of the meaning associated with certain landscape features by the Balinese. This implies scenic beauty is dependent upon meanings assigned to landscape features, which in turn implies that scenic beauty is, to some extent, learned. Similarities between tourists' and Balinese' scenic evaluations are significant and correspond to consistencies found in other (...) landscape preference studies. Multiple methods were used, including participant photography, rating scales, and a variety of statistical analyses. A review of the literature reveals evidence and theory which suggests both similarities and differences are to be expected when comparing scenic evaluations made by persons of different cultures. This review also suggests three methodological concerns which should be addressed in landscape studies: a concern for the participant's purpose for evaluating a landscape; a concern for the participant's familiarity with a landscape; and a concern for the criterion's appropriateness to all participants. Research designs which ignore these concerns may mask true cultural differences. (shrink)

Reforms associated with New Public Management have led to changes in the management of work and organization that challenge the stability, durability and linearity of the managerial hierarchy in contemporary public sector workplaces. Against this background, this article considers the ways in which two clinician-managers who work in a large metropolitan teaching hospital speak about their organizational roles. Reflecting the complexity of their part of the organization, the emergency department, the interviewees position themselves as operating at the interstice between the (...) competing and contradictory spatial logics of locality and mobility. With their identities strongly anchored in emergency as locality, the clinician-managers intervene in the flows of meanings and resources that affect its processes in ways that require intra- and inter-organizational mobility and which are incommensurate with traditional perceptions of middle managers. In regarding the interviews as `practical authoring', we note our own spatial ambiguity as academic researchers interested in organizations other than our own and suggest that our insider-outsider positionings are reflected in the interviews' complex spatialities. We conclude that the interviewees' boundary-spanning and cross-spatial self-positionings are indicative of the hybrid roles that workers under NPM increasingly embody and are in contrast to traditional perceptions of how the provision and management of public service work is carried out. (shrink)

Using the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the authors compare the gender pay gap at predominantly white institutions with the gap at historically Black colleges and universities. Also, within the HBCU milieu, they examine how class of the institution has an impact on pay gaps. First, they find that HBCUs do seem to have a smaller gap but that pay for all faculty at HBCUs is lower than in PWIs. Second, the gap is only significantly smaller in the rank of (...) associates. Third, the gap is smaller at the associate rank because men make less money in HBCUs than they do in PWIs. Fourth, elite HBCUs are more similar to PWIs than to HBCUs in terms of their gender pay gap. Race, class, and gender effects must be taken into account to understand patterns of wage equity across these institutions. The greater gender equity at HBCUs is apparent because of the absence of the “men's bonus, ” which is prevalent in PWIs and elite HBCUs. (shrink)

Background and Aims Progress towards validating amyloid beta as an early indicator of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) heightens the need for evaluation of stakeholders’ perspectives of the benefits and harms of preclinical testing in asymptomatic individuals. Methods Investigators conducted and analyzed 14 semi-structured interviews with family members of patients diagnosed with AD. Results Participants reported benefits, including the potential to seek treatment, make lifestyle changes, and prepare for cognitive impairment. Participants identified harms, including social harms, adverse life decisions, and psychological harms. (...) Nine participants reported either a “positive global perspective” or a “positive global perspective (qualified).” Conclusion Results from this study characterized stakeholders’ perspectives on the potential benefits and harms of clinical use of preclinical testing for AD. Investigators used data from this study to develop a framework that contributes to ongoing discussions that will evaluate widespread adoption of preclinical testing and will inform future research. (shrink)