More than 5 billion people in the world own a smartphone. More than half of these have been used to collect and process health-related data. As such, the existing volume of potentially exploitable health data is unprecedentedly large and growing rapidly. Mobile health applications (apps) on smartphones are some of the worst offenders and are increasingly being used for gathering and exchanging significant amounts of personal health data from the public. This data is often utilized for health research purposes and (...) for algorithm training. While there are advantages to utilizing this data for expanding health knowledge, there are associated risks for the users of these apps, such as privacy concerns and the protection of their data. Consequently, gaining a deeper comprehension of how apps collect and crowdsource data is crucial. To explore how apps are crowdsourcing data and to identify potential ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI), we conducted an examination of the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store in North America and Europe to identify apps that could potentially gather health data through crowdsourcing. Subsequently, we analyzed their privacy policies, terms of use, and other related documentation to gain insights into the utilization of users’ data and the possibility of repurposing it for research or algorithm training purposes. More specifically, we reviewed privacy policies to identify clauses pertaining to the following key categories: research, data sharing, privacy/confidentiality, commercialization, and return of findings. Based on the results of these app search, we developed an App Atlas that presents apps which crowdsource data for research or algorithm training. We identified 46 apps available in the European and Canadian markets that either openly crowdsource health data for research or algorithm training or retain the legal or technical capability to do so. This app search showed an overall lack of consistency and transparency in privacy policies that poses challenges to user comprehensibility, trust, and informed consent. A significant proportion of applications presented contradictions or exhibited considerable ambiguity. For instance, the vast majority of privacy policies in the App Atlas contain ambiguous or contradictory language regarding the sharing of users’ data with third parties. This raises a number of ethico-legal concerns which will require further academic and policy attention to ensure a balance between protecting individual interests and maximizing the scientific utility of crowdsourced data. This article represents a key first step in better understanding these concerns and bringing attention to this important issue. (shrink)

Although there is substantial literature examining the flow of foreign investments into various regions of the world, there is still a lack of research about joint ventures and foreign investment activities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). One objective of this paper is to remedy this neglect and extend previous empirical work by focusing on foreign investments in the MENA region. The second objective is to focus on non-traditional determinants that have tended to be overlooked or underestimated in (...) previous research. The increasing globalization has led to a reconfiguration of the ways in which multinationals pursue various types of foreign investments,and changed the motives for and the determinants of FDI. This has prompted some to suggest that non traditional determinants have become more important. In view of that, the paper will focus on factors such as governance, legal environment, and economic freedom and examine their impact on foreign investment activities in the MENA region. (shrink)

This paper reinvents Freire’s concepts of ‘banking education’ and ‘literacy’ within the context of the exponential growth of digital instruction in the 21st century. We argue that digital learning (i.e. online or technology enhanced) undoubtedly increases access to education globally, but also can intensify some of the worst problems described in Freire’s banking model. Accordingly, we draw from postdigital theory to scrutinize the specific structures and functions of common digital Learning Management Systems (LMSs) used by schools (i.e. Blackboard and Google (...) Classroom) to reveal a type of learning that further exacerbates the teacher-student dichotomy without liberating either party in a Freirean sense. We then use a Foucauldian lens to bring an awareness to how the accelerated use of these systems at scale, in part caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, can further entrench a data-driven, dehumanized educational experience which increases corporate profitability perhaps over the needs of students. Finally, we use these insights to modernize Freire’s concept of ‘literacy’ by building on Critical Medial Literacy (CML) in order to help educators address LMSs, (mis)information facilitated by digital content, and schooling in a (post)pandemic and postdigital world. (shrink)

Chinese listed companies have a two-tier governance structure that comprises a supervisory board/committee and the board of directors. However, as there is no hierarchical relationship between them, the two boards are independent. This is different from the governance mechanism in Continental Europe in which the SB appoints the directors of the management board; in this sense, the Chinese two-tier governance structure is unique. We investigate the impact of governance characteristics and ownership structure on gender diversity of both the BoD and (...) the SB for a sample of 892 Chinese Initial Public Offerings floated in both the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. We find that the average proportion of female directors and female SB members on the BoD and the SB are 10 and 22 %, respectively. Using both static and dynamic panel data methods, we find that there is no significant impact of board structure on gender diversity in China. However, we find a positive and significant relationship between SB size and gender diversity. We also find that the higher the state ownership, the lower the female representation on both boards. Finally, our findings show that there is a bi-directional relationship between financial performance and the proportion of female directors sitting on the BoD. (shrink)

Because of its uncompromising categoricalness, death is a subject that often causes an anxiety in a person and thus burdens his entire life on the earth. Christianity is a religion that preaches a marry annunciation – euangelion – which is God’s redeeming intervention that saves man from being enslaved by sin and death. Even though the Christian eschatology is essentially directed towards the reappearance of the Christ at the end of days and thereby related last judgement, there are some differences (...) in the thought of individual Christian churches. These differences mostly appear in the concept of individual issues, related to the state of the deceased or his soul immediately after his death and in the interpretation of events, a person is subjected to until the last judgement. The protestant eschatology, significantly defined by the Luther’s doctrine of justification, categorically refuses the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, prayers for the dead (practiced by the Catholic and the Orthodox church) and any possibility of change in the state of the deceased. Since the Protestant church is pretty diverse, this paper shall focus on the Luther’s eschatological doctrine and thereby on the teaching of the Lutheran or Evangelical Church, which directly origins from the reformation and is most true to its founder’s teaching. (shrink)

Ovaj članak specificira mjesto Hipokratove zakletve u programu bioetičkog obrazovanja na profesionalnim fakultetima gdje se obrazuju budući medicinski i zdravstveni radnici. Predstavljena konceptualizacija sadržaja i opisana metodologija rada pokazuje kako se sadržaji curriculuma, kojima dominiraju povijesne činjenice, aktualiziraju uporabom znanja što su ih studenti usvojili ranije, te problematiziraju aktivnim uključenjem studenata u prikupljanju nove informacije relevantne za sadržaj, a onda koriste usvojeno znanje kako bi riješili konkretni bioetički predmet ili problem. Ponuđena aktivnost studenata i nastavnika ima svrhu pokazati suradnički odnos (...) između njih, te komunikaciju u kojoj studenti i nastavnici međusobno preuzimaju zadatke u realizaciji sadržaja curriculuma. (shrink)

Work purpose: to present and analyze pedagogical strategies and the communicational approach to definitions of bioethics, a mutual part of the bioethics contents being realized on the university studies of Dentistry, Organization, Planning and Management in Healthcare, and professional studies of Medical Radiology at the Medical School in Rijeka. Methods: the method of content analysis was used to research and present encyclopaedic and some authorial definitions of bioethics, with special emphasis on definitions of bioethics by authors – bioethicists from Croatia; (...) the method of pattern 1: included the curriculum of Medical Ethics and Bioethics and the Ethics of Healthcare, and researched standpoints of forty-five students educated in studies where bioethics courses are being realized. The pattern is specifically stratified because it: a) included students whose curriculum is being realized in shifts – intensive lectures in a duration of two weeks, and those whose lectures are being realized each week during one semester; b) different year of education . 2. The scale of assessment was used to research and obtain standpoints of students on the contents of the curriculum, methods of its performance, and the achieved level of communication among students and communication with the professor. Expected results: the presented method of work and results obtained by the scale of assessment should display the acceptability and successfulness of the presented pedagogicalmethodological means of work and point out to weaknesses and deficiencies, and finally conclude the extent to which the presented concept, and approaches to the actualization of the definitions of bioethics contribute to the realization of dialogue and communication in which students simultaneously experience the curriculum as necessary, useful, interesting, and one that may motivate them to think, exchange ideas and offer possible solutions. The scale of assessment should point out to different standpoints of students depending on the length of their study and commitment to a method of class realization. (shrink)

On the fundamentals of Hindu philosophy and doctrines.

Neoliberal restructuring and the feminization of export-led industries are often associated with the disempowerment of women in the workplace. Surprisingly, this disempowerment was not the case with a public textile company in Mahalla, an industrial city north of Cairo. Between 2006 and 2008, workers organized wildcat strikes involving around 24,000 workers. In contrast to the strike waves of the 1980s, women were integral to organizing the strikes and assumed leadership roles in them. This article argues that even as Egypt adopted (...) structural adjustments in the 1990s that led to the decline of the historically leading sectors of textiles and yarn, exports of clothing increased. By the 2000s, the clothing sector was completely feminized and women in Mahalla were positioned in the most productive departments. This change empowered women by elevating their role and induced skeptical male colleagues to support women’s activism in the company and to build cross-gender solidarity. (shrink)

There are currently two legally established criteria for death: the irreversible cessation of circulation and respiration and the irreversible cessation of neurologic function. Recently, there have been technological developments that could undermine the irreversibility requirement. In this paper, I focus both on whether death should be identified as an irreversible state and on the proper scope of irreversibility in the biological definition of death. In this paper, I tackle the distinction between the commonsense definition of death and the biological definition (...) of death to show that even the commonsense concept of death is specified by biological facts. Resting on this argument, I argue that any definition of death is a posteriori. Thus, irreversibility is part of any definition of death because the actual phenomenon of death is irreversible. In addition, I show that the proper domain of irreversibility in a definition of death is circumscribed by physical possibilities and that irreversibility in the definition of death refers to current possibilities for the reversal of relevant biological processes. I conclude that, despite recent technological advancements, death is still irreversible. (shrink)

Health care providers are expected both to relieve pain and to provide anticipatory guidance regarding how much a procedure is going to hurt. Fulfilling those expectations is complicated by the cognitive modulation of pain perception. Warning people to expect pain or setting expectations for pain relief not only influences their subjective experience, but it also alters how nociceptive stimuli are processed throughout the sensory and discriminative pathways in the brain. In light of this, I reconsider the characterization of placebo analgesia (...) as pharmacologically inert and the use of it as deceptive. I show that placebo analgesia exploits the same physical mechanisms as proven analgesics and argue that it should be utilized to relieve pain. Additionally, I describe factors to help identify situations in which clinicians have the obligation to disclose the potential for pain coupled with ways of mitigating the risk of high-intensity pain by setting positive expectations. (shrink)

The human microbiome is the bacteria, viruses, and fungi that cover our skin, line our intestines, and flourish in our body cavities. Work on the human microbiome is new, but it is quickly becoming a leading area of biomedical research. What scientists are learning about humans and our microbiomes could change medical practice by introducing new treatment modalities. This new knowledge redefines us as superorganisms comprised of the human body and the collection of microbes that inhabit it and reveals how (...) much we are a part of our environment. The understanding that microbes are not only beneficial but sometimes necessary for survival recasts our interaction with microbes from adversarial to neighborly. This volume explores some of the science that makes human microbiome research possible. It then considers ethical, legal, and social concerns raised by microbiome research. Chapters explore issues related to personal identity, property rights, and privacy. The authors reflect on how human microbiome research challenges reigning views on public health and research ethics. They also address the need for thoughtful policies and procedures to guide the use of the biobanked human samples required for advancing this new domain of research. In the course of these explorations, they introduce examples from the history of biomedical science and recent legal cases that shed light on the issues and inform the policy recommendations they offer at the end of each topic's discussion.This volume is the product of an NIH Human Microbiome Project grant. It represents three years of conversations focused on consensus formation by the twenty-seven members of the interdisciplinary Microbiome Working Group. (shrink)

To cause pain, it is not enough to deliver a dose of noxious stimulation. Pain requires the interaction of sensory processing, emotion, and cognition. In this paper, I focus on the role of cognition in the felt intensity of pain. I provide evidence for the cognitive modulation of pain. In particular, I show that attention and expectation can influence the experience of pain intensity. I also consider the mechanisms that underlie the cognitive effects on pain. I show that all the (...) proposed mechanisms of pain modulation affirm the view that cognition impacts the sensory and discriminative aspects of pain. I conclude that pain perception is a cognitively penetrated phenomenon. (shrink)

Neuroethics is an emerging interdisciplinary field with unsettled boundaries. Many of the ethical issues within the purview of neuroethics could be described as resulting from the clash between the scientific perspective on concepts such as free will, personal identity, consciousness, etc., and the putatively commonsense conceptions of those terms. The assumption that undergirds the framing of the conflict between these two approaches is that advances in neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology can be used to explain phenomena covered by commonsense concepts and (...) in some cases undermine them entirely. This book is focused on the examination of the particular relationship between developments in neuroscience and commonsense moral concepts. Common sense, I argue, has been misinterpreted as a static, either foundational or degenerative, basis of our morality, when it is an ever shifting repository of theories from many domains. Within this discussion, I focus on the application of neuroscience to human beings, i.e., the ethics of neuroscience. But I also cover issues within the purview of the neuroscience of ethics, and attempt to address the infiltration of neuroscientific knowledge into everyday parlance and the impact of that on our commonsense morality and psychology. (shrink)

In explaining human psychology and behavior, a dichotomy is often established between scientific explanations in neuroscience or neurology, and explanations that rely on psychological or social fac...

Scientific inquiry has revealed that pain is a complex and heterogonous phenomenon that is neither localized to a circumscribed region in the brain nor realized by a unique neurological mechanism. This discovery has inspired the application of a new version of eliminativism–scientific eliminativism–to pain. Based on this view, pain is not a natural kind and should be eliminated from scientific theorizing. Scientific eliminativism applied to pain is purportedly distinct from eliminative materialism because the former does not require elimination of the (...) term ‘pain’ from its quotidian uses in folk psychology. In this paper, I challenge the distinction between scientific eliminativism and eliminative materialism and argue that the two versions of eliminativism make the same claims. I argue further that endorsement of scientific eliminativism for pain leads to elimination of the category of pain from folk psychology. To avoid this outcome, I formulate a proposal that obviates the need for eliminativism in any domain. (shrink)

Introduction Nursing shortages and turnover pose significant challenges for health organizations worldwide, driven by various organizational and individual factors. Ethical climate has emerged as a critical aspect influencing nurses' well-being and retention within healthcare settings, reflecting organizational practices with moral implications. Understanding the relationship between ethical climate and turnover intention among nurses is paramount for practitioners, managers, and policymakers. Aim This review aimed to examine evidence and synthesize findings from prior studies on the association between ethical climate and turnover intention (...) among nurses and identify key variables influencing its dynamics. Methods A scoping review methodology was employed, encompassing studies retrieved up to February 2024 from major scientific databases, including PUBMED/MEDLINE, WEB OF SCIENCE, SCOPUS, and SCIENCE DIRECT. This study was conducted following ethical considerations and sound scientific guidelines. Results Sixteen articles meeting the inclusion criteria were identified. Overall, a significant association between ethical climate and turnover intention was observed, with theoretical underpinnings demonstrated. Key variables frequently linked to both ethical climate and turnover intention included organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and moral distress, while organizational commitment, organizational cynicism, and organizational trust emerged as mediators. Conclusion Despite demonstrating a clear association, results underscore the necessity for replication studies, qualitative and longitudinal approaches, and standardized measurement. Enhancing the ethical climate through regular assessments, education, and interprofessional collaboration can improve retention. Future research should focus on theory building, ethical management and leadership, associated factors analysis, and intervention studies to develop comprehensive models and effective strategies for improving the ethical climate and reducing nurse turnover. (shrink)

An illustrated study of the early twentieth-century transformation from Expressionism to Constructivism and beyond in the Central European arts. Central European Avant-Gardes presents the first interpretive overview of the complex webs of interaction among the artists and intellectuals of early twentieth-century Central Europe. The key stylistic transformation of the period was from Expressionism to Constructivism, as artists and writers, against a volatile background of war and revolution, saw the opportunity literally to construct a new world through their work. The borders (...) between the visual arts, photography, film, architecture, poetry, and typography were obliterated, as artists sought to transcend the forces of traditionalism to forge an elemental visual language that would overcome national and linguistic boundaries. Yet at the same time that these artists advocated pluralism and unity, their work engaged issues such as nationalism and tradition that still resonate in artistic circles today. The book, which accompanies a major exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and curated by Timothy Benson, assisted by Monika Krol, is arranged around events and situations rather than by linear, art historical categories. It features hundreds of color plates and reproductions of documents; discussions of movements from Artificialism to Zenitism; essays on figures, publications, and exhibitions; and shorter "city views" of Belgrade, Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Cracow, Dessau, Ljubljana, £ódz, Poznañ, Prague, Vienna, Warsaw, Weimar, and Zagreb. (shrink)

Education (good teachers and good schools) is crucial for the successful integration of vulnerable groups in the society. Multicultural diversity presents an opportunity to make schools more inclusive, creative and open-minded. Although there are different projects and activities for Roma inclusion in schools, the number of Roma children attending formal education is still very low. Without having attended formal education, the chances for social exclusion are high and minimal for leading a self-defined life. To increase the rate of school registration (...) and the rate for completion, long-term policy interventions and financial support from international donations are needed. This paper aims to analyze the general situation of Roma children and youth the age of pre-school education, primary and secondary education, as well as the engagement of youth in volunteering activities as a significant role in the inclusion of Roma children in schools. Engagement in volunteering activities can help young people to be more integrated into society, as through volunteering they gain valuable experiences, new skills, and competencies that can improve their employability possibilities and enhance their attitudes towards citizenship. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo examine body image perception and the associations of body dissatisfaction with socio-demographic and lifestyle factors among Saudi women attending fitness centers in Riyadh.MethodsSaudi females aged 16 years and older were recruited from 12 randomly selected fitness centers in Riyadh, using stratified clustered sampling technique. Height and weight were measured to calculate actual body mass index. A previously validated instrument was used to collect socio-demographic and lifestyle variables including physical activity, sedentary behaviors, sleep and dietary habits. Stunkard Figure Rating Scale (...) silhouettes were used to assess perceived and desired body shape.ResultsThe participants had a mean age of 29.2. The majority were not married, with no children and had college degrees. While 63% were overweight or obese, nearly 40% of women underestimated their perceived body shape. The majority of respondents were dissatisfied with their body shape including 68% of normal weight women. Females who had BD were significantly older, had higher BMI, reported more weight loss attempt and had expended less time in vigorous and total PA than those who were satisfied with their body shape. However, when adjusting for socio-demographic variables, logistic regression analysis revealed significant associations of BD with higher BMI, shorter membership duration of fitness club, and reduced dairy products and energy drinks consumption.ConclusionExcept for BMI and decreased dairy products and energy drinks consumption, many lifestyle behaviors did not associate with BD among Saudi females attending fitness centers. The findings can inform healthcare providers when intervention strategy is implicated for females with BD. Future studies should compare the associations of BD with lifestyle behaviors between males and females attending fitness centers and seeking weight loss. (shrink)

In 1959 two French neurologists, Pierre Mollaret and Maurice Goullon, coined the term coma dépassé to designate a state beyond coma. In this state, patients are not only permanently unconscious; they lack the endogenous drive to breathe, as well as brainstem reflexes, indicating that most of their brain has ceased to function. Although legally recognized in many countries as a criterion for death, brain death has not been universally accepted by bioethicists, by the medical community, or by the public. I (...) this paper, I defend brain death as a biological concept. I challenge two assumptions in the brain death literature that have shaped the debate and have stood in the way of an argument for brain death as biological. First, I challenge the dualism established in the debate between the body and the brain. Second, I contest the emphasis on consciousness, which prevents the inclusion of psychological phenomena into a biological criterion of death. I propose that the term organism should apply both to the functioning of the body and the brain. I argue that the cessation of the organism as a whole should take into account three elements of integrated function. Those three elements are: 1) the loss of integrated bodily function; 2) the loss of psychophysical integration required for processing of external stimuli and those required for behavior; and, 3) the loss of integrated psychological function, such as memory, learning, attention, and so forth. The loss of those three elements of integrated function is death. (shrink)

This chapter will address the axiological objection to cognitive enhancement, which is that the use of cognitive enhancers reduces the value of cognitive achievement. In a recent defense of cognitive enhancement, Carter and Pritchard (2019) utilize the extended mind hypothesis to argue that cognitive enhancers do not compromise knowledge acquisition. In this chapter, it will be demonstrated that the reliance on the extended mind hypothesis leaves some cognitive enhancers vulnerable to the axiological objection. To expand the scope of the argument, (...) it will be shown that criteria for cognitive integration are applicable even to enhancers that cause changes to cognition internal to the human organism. This chapter will begin with a description of several cognitive enhancers and with the identification of the type of cognitive process they purportedly improve. It will then be demonstrated that even when those improvements are internal, they need not affect cognitive character and do not compromise cognitive agency. (shrink)

The web is being loaded daily with a huge volume of data, mainly unstructured textual data, which increases the need for information extraction and NLP systems significantly. Named-entity recognition task is a key step towards efficiently understanding text data and saving time and effort. Being a widely used language globally, English is taking over most of the research conducted in this field, especially in the biomedical domain. Unlike other languages, Arabic suffers from lack of resources. This work presents a BERT-based (...) model to identify biomedical named entities in the Arabic text data that investigates the effectiveness of pretraining a monolingual BERT model with a small-scale biomedical dataset on enhancing the model understanding of Arabic biomedical text. The model performance was compared with two state-of-the-art models, and it outperformed both models with 85% F1-score. (shrink)

This paper aims at investigating the perceived difference between ethics and IT ethics in college students. The study mainly investigates whether university students in the Middle East and their counterpart in the USA hold the same ethical values both in a traditional context and in an IT context. The study also investigates possible differences in students’ ethics considering their level of study and whether they have prior business ethics knowledge or not. Furthermore, the study controls for possible self-others bias in (...) students’ responses to ethical issues by addressing some ethical issues where the respondent is the subject of the issue and other ethical issues where someone other than the respondent is the subject of the issue. Questionnaires were administered to university students in the USA and in several Middle East countries. A total of 401 usable questionnaires were returned. The study found that both the USA and the Middle East students have statistically significant lower ethical intention scores when addressing ethical issues in an IT context compared to traditional non-IT context. This pattern was consistent regardless of the students’ level of study and their prior knowledge of business ethics, and taking into consideration self-others bias. Additionally, it was found that graduate students have higher IT as well as non-IT ethical intentions compared to undergraduate students, however, it was found that the students’ prior business ethics knowledge did not affect the students’ ethical intention scores. Self-other bias was found to act in opposite directions for ethical issues in an IT context compared to ethical issues in a traditional context. For ethical issues within IT-context, students were less strict with themselves while they were stricter with others. For ethical issues within traditional non-IT context, students were stricter with themselves, while they were less strict with others. Finally, the study found that while students both in the USA and in the Middle East disagree with unethical IT as well as non-IT conducts, the degree to which they disagree with the unethical behavior significantly differ, where USA students were found to be significantly stricter with their disagreement. (shrink)

The Myners Review of the pension fund industry has started a debate on pension fund governance and the fund industry itself. This paper provides a review of pension fund trusteeship in the UK, its role, operating models and impact. It argues that deficiencies in the systems uncovered by the Myners Review stem from a tension between conflicting philosophies - that of trusteeship built on stakeholder principles but operating in shareholder markets.

The entering of poetics into the field of anthropology, intimated by Nietzsche, introduced by Bachelard and Bataille and continued in the framework of poststructuralism has influenced the scope and the models of knowledge traditionally related to anthropology, by reexamining and changing them. This influence is researched through the analysis of several authors, discussing the political aspects of their writings at the same time. Their notions of polarity, discontinuity, suspension, transgression and dissemination make visible possible directions of transformation of anthropology. Uvodjenje (...) poetike u polje antropologije, koje se najavljuje kod Nietzschea, a ostvaruje kroz radove Bachelarda i Bataillea i nastavlja unutar post-strukturalizma, vodilo je preispitivanju granica te discipline, kao i primerenosti samih modela znanja koji se unutar nje podrazumevaju i na kojima je konstituisana. U tekstu je kroz pristupe vise autora pokazano kako se moze uspostaviti ili porusiti most izmedju racionalnog i iracionalnog u antropologiji i sa kakvim teorijskim i politickim implikacijama. (shrink)

Loss of personal identity in dementia can raise a number of ethical considerations, including the applicability of advance directives and the validity of patient preferences that seem incongruous with a previous history of values. In this chapter, we first endorse the self-concept view as the most appropriate approach to personal continuity in healthcare. We briefly describe two different types of dementia, Alzheimer’s dementia (AD) and behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bv-FTD). We identify elements considered important for the continuation of a self-concept, including (...) continuation of memories, consistency in personality traits and personal preferences, and continued endorsement of certain moral tenets. We show that, depending on which element is considered most important for personal identity, continuity of a self-concept for individuals with distinct types of dementia will be affected and assessed differently. Utilizing a variety of empirical evidence, we argue that persistence of memory, personality traits, and preferences are not the most important for the maintenance of personal identity. Instead, as studies aimed to capture the folk-psychological view of personal continuity demonstrate, judgements about continuity depend primarily on the persistent commitment to widely shared moral beliefs. Because of that, we argue that individuals with bv-FTD are more likely to lose their sense of self than individuals whose dementia primarily affects memory, such as Alzheimer’s disease. We end the chapter by showing how the importance of moral beliefs for continuity of self can be used to provide guidance to health-care professionals when considering changes in preference by individuals with dementia. (shrink)

The established two tracks of neuroenhancement, moral and cognitive enhancements, rest on the characterization of commonsense morality as a set of static psychological dispositions. In this paper, I challenge this way of describing commonsense morality. I draw a parallel between commonsense psychology and commonsense morality, and I propose that the right way to characterize commonsense morality is as an empirically evaluable theory, with a structure similar to a scientific theory. I argue further that psychological dispositions to react in certain ways (...) require the tacit endorsement of a commonsense moral theory. By adopting this view, I argue that the way to change our psychological dispositions is by changing the background theory that produces them. I conclude that when commonsense morality is construed as an empirically evaluable theory, the cleft between the abilities that support scientific progress and the abilities that promote moral progress closes and it becomes evident that the way to promote both types of advancements is through cognitive enhancement. (shrink)