When ethical decisions have to be taken in critical, complex medical situations, they often involve decisions that set the course for or against life-sustaining treatments. Therefore the decisions have far-reaching consequences for the patients, their relatives, and often for the clinical staff. Although the rich psychology literature provides evidence that reasoning may be affected by undesired influences that may undermine the quality of the decision outcome, not much attention has been given to this phenomenon in health care or ethics consultation. (...) In this paper, we aim to contribute to the sensitization of the problem of systematic reasoning biases by showing how exemplary individual and group biases can affect the quality of decision-making on an individual and group level. We are addressing clinical ethicists as well as clinicians who guide complex decision-making processes of ethical significance. Knowledge regarding exemplary group psychological biases (e.g. conformity bias), and individual biases (e.g. stereotypes), will be taken from the disciplines of social psychology and cognitive decision science and considered in the field of ethical decision-making. Finally we discuss the influence of intuitive versus analytical (systematical) reasoning on the validity of ethical decision-making. (shrink)

Dans un monde aussi chaotique que celui où chacun essaie de trouver sa place en ce début de XXIe siècle, la notion de civilisation peine à s'inscrire dans la réalité et, à plus forte raison, à véhiculer la connotation de progrès. Faut-il pour autant perdre espoir? Après avoir recensé les turpitudes de la société néolibérale mondialisée, l'auteur explore quelques pistes simples vers un monde meilleur, dans lequel, entre autres, la devise de notre République, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, trouverait enfin son véritable (...) sens, et chaque vie son rôle à jouer, l'économie et l'argent seraient mis au service de l'homme et non l'inverse, et promues les véritables valeurs humanistes et les anciennes sagesses. L'auteur insiste notamment sur les formes d'influence et de pouvoir à la portée des femmes, d'où viendra peut-être, grâce à la féminisation des moeurs, une humanité enfin digne de ce nom. (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson argued that abortion is permissible because no one must sacrifice their rights to bodily autonomy. However, assuming a fetus has full moral personhood, and focusing on when abortion is unjust in particular, we argue that Thomson's view of what we ought to sacrifice to aid others is too impoverished. Instead, we argue that abortion is permissible when pregnancy threatens the ability of the mother, or the child, to live minimally well. After explaining the minimally good life account (...) and its application to abortion, we explain its advantages over alternative views. Finally, we examine arguments concluding that abortion is permissible because fetuses are not persons. We argue that personhood is probably a matter of degree rather than a binary property. Thus, abortion is generally permissible early in pregnancy, but as the fetus gets closer to full personhood, adopting the minimally good life standard is appropriate. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 163-188, January 2022.

For many peoples the fall of the Soviet regime saw the disappearance of a structure that had ensured their membership of entities with which they had in fact been only partially able to identify. This is true of the Buryats and Russians living in Buryatia, a former autonomous republic on the shores of Lake Baikal in southern central Siberia.

Mientras Carole Pateman (1988) afirma que «para las feministas la democracia no ha existido jamás», Julieta Kirkwood (1986) sostiene que «no hay democracia sin feminismo». Ambas aluden a la deuda del ideal democrático con la emancipación de las mujeres, e incluso a la función estructural de la exclusión de las mujeres en la democracia liberal. A partir de los encuentros y desencuentros entre democracia y feminismo, el presente artículo pretende ofrecer una definición de la democracia feminista que vaya más allá (...) de la inclusión a través de la acción afirmativa, abordando las tensiones que esta genera en el debate feminista de las últimas décadas y los nuevos desafíos en torno a las políticas de redistribución y de reconocimiento. ¿Es posible superar la opresión y la dominación a partir de políticas centradas en el interés de grupo? ¿Cómo se define ese interés sin esencializar la diferencia? Responder a estas preguntas resulta clave para plantear un concepto eficaz de democracia feminista. (shrink)

This unique volume introduces and discusses the methods of validating computer simulations in scientific research. The core concepts, strategies, and techniques of validation are explained by an international team of pre-eminent authorities, drawing on expertise from various fields ranging from engineering and the physical sciences to the social sciences and history. The work also offers new and original philosophical perspectives on the validation of simulations. Topics and features: introduces the fundamental concepts and principles related to the validation of computer simulations, (...) and examines philosophical frameworks for thinking about validation; provides an overview of the various strategies and techniques available for validating simulations, as well as the preparatory steps that have to be taken prior to validation; describes commonly used reference points and mathematical frameworks applicable to simulation validation; reviews the legal prescriptions, and the administrative and procedural activities related to simulation validation; presents examples of best practice that demonstrate how methods of validation are applied in various disciplines and with different types of simulation models; covers important practical challenges faced by simulation scientists when applying validation methods and techniques; offers a selection of general philosophical reflections that explore the significance of validation from a broader perspective. This truly interdisciplinary handbook will appeal to a broad audience, from professional scientists spanning all natural and social sciences, to young scholars new to research with computer simulations. Philosophers of science, and methodologists seeking to increase their understanding of simulation validation, will also find much to benefit from in the text. (shrink)

First, to what level of quality can medical ethics a spire, if it ignores callous discrimination in medrcal practice against large populations of the innocent poor? Second, how effective can such theories be in addressing the critical issues of medical and clinical ethics if they are unable to contribute to the closing of the gap of sociomedical disparity?Marcio Fabri dos Anjos, Medical Ethics in the Developing World: A Liberation Theology Perspective.

Being-at-home in a particular, determined, world is dangerous for thinking. For thinking to be thinking/becoming, one should not get too comfortable. For thinking is to not arrive back home, in the same place one begins. But how to escape the world that has created who you are, gave you purpose and a past? How to make sure the future is not a repetition of the Same? How to break away from something that you need? In this article, my aim is (...) not to give one more solution to this fundamental problem that is in essence an ethical problem. For providing a refuge, a new theory, a new methodology, would be providing a new island for those who realise that a flood is endangering their own island. My aim is to exercise the craft of exilic thinking as a way to deal with the contradiction already pointed out by Heraclitus and Parmenides – “We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.” Exilic thinking as a craft of fragilising the self establishes a matrixial borderspace through which the impossible becomes possible. (shrink)

Digital contact tracing, in combination with widespread testing, has been a focal point for many plans to “reopen” economies while containing the spread of Covid‐19. Most digital contact tracing projects in the United States and Europe have prioritized privacy protections in the form of local storage of data on smartphones and the deidentification of information. However, in the prioritization of privacy in this narrow form, there is not sufficient attention given to weighing ethical trade‐offs within the context of a public (...) health pandemic or to the need to evaluate safety and effectiveness of software‐based technology applied to public health. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Unregulated patient treatments and approved clinical trials have been conducted with haematopoietic stem cells and mesenchymal stem cells for children with autism spectrum disorder. While the former direct-to-consumer practice is usually considered rogue and should be legally constrained, regulated clinical trials could also be ethically questionable. Here, we outline principal objections against these trials as they are currently conducted. Notably, these often lack a clear rationale for how transplanted cells may confer a therapeutic benefit in ASD, and thus, have ill-defined (...) therapeutic outcomes. We posit that ambiguous and unsubstantiated descriptions of outcome from such clinical trials may nonetheless appeal to the lay public as being based on authentic scientific findings. These may further fuel caregivers of patients with ASD to pursue unregulated direct-to-consumer treatments, thus exposing them to unnecessary risks. There is, therefore, a moral obligation on the part of those regulating and conducting clinical trials of stem cell-based therapeutic for ASD minors to incorporate clear therapeutic targets, scientific rigour and reporting accuracy in their work. Any further stem cell-based trials for ASD unsupported by significant preclinical advances and particularly sound scientific hypothesis and aims would be ethically indefensible. (shrink)

The consequences of foreign direct investment (FDI) for human rights protection are poorly understood. We propose that the impact of FDI varies across industries. In particular, extractive firms in the oil and mining industries go where the resources are located and are bound to such investment, which creates a status quo bias among them when it comes to supporting repressive rulers (“location-bound effect”). The same is not true for nonextractive multinational corporations (MNCs) in manufacturing or services, which can, in comparison, (...) exit problematic countries more easily. We also propose that strong democratic institutions can alleviate negative impacts of extractive FDI on human rights (“democratic safeguard effect”). Using U.S. FDI broken up into extractive and nonextractive industries in 157 host countries (1999–2015), we find support for these propositions.1 Extractive FDI is associated with more human rights abuse, but nonextractive FDI is associated with less abuse, after controlling for other factors, including concerns about endogeneity. We find also that the negative human rights impact of extractive FDI vanishes in countries where democratic institutions are stronger. Our results are robust to a range of alternative estimation techniques. (shrink)

Editors' introduction to Puncta's February 2022 Special Issue, "Pandemic Politics and Phenomenology.".

Ethical decision theory may not be sufficiently well developed to furnish reliable guidelines to people involved in complex decision making that involves conflict between ethical considerations and business imperatives such as making a profit. In conditions of ethical uncertainty hindsight bias may occur, and this study reports on an exploration of hindsight bias effects among participants in continuing education in business programmes. Perceptions of business ethics were found to differ among groups within the sample depending on what they thought had (...) been the outcome of the ethical decision concerned. (shrink)

Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on meta-linguistic judgment tasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task and contextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both a production and a comprehension side and a precise conversational goal. The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicative setting, both when the quantifier occurs in unembedded and embedded positions. Our new paradigm involves an action-based task (...) from which participants’ interpretation of utterances can be inferred. It incorporates a game-theoretic design, thereby including a precise model to predict participants’ behaviour in the experimental context. Our study shows that embedded and unembedded implicatures are reliably communicated by some. We propose two cognitive principles that describe what can be left unsaid. In our experimental context, a production strategy based on these principles is more efficient than a strategy based on literal descriptions. (shrink)

Previous discussions of the evolution of the self have diverged greatly in their estimates of the date at which the capacity for self-thought emerged, the factors that led self-reflection to evolve, and the nature of the evidence offered to support these disparate conclusions. Beginning with the assumption that human self-awareness involves a set of distinct cognitive abilities that evolved at different times to solve different adaptive problems, we trace the evolution of self-awareness from the common ancestor of humans and apes (...) to the beginnings of culture, drawing upon paleontological, anthropological, biological, and psychological evidence. These data converge to suggest that that modern self-thought appeared just prior to the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition, approximately 60,000 years ago.Recto running head: Evolution of the Self. (shrink)

Background Over the last decade, the return of results (ROR) in precision medicine research (PMR) has become increasingly routine. Calls for individual rights to research results have extended the “duty to report” from clinically useful genetic information to traits and ancestry results. ROR has thus been reframed as inherently beneficial to research participants, without a needed focus on who benefits and how. This paper addresses this gap, particularly in the context of PMR aimed at increasing participant diversity, by providing investigator (...) and researcher perspectives on and questions about the assumed value of ROR in PMR.Methods Semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of investigators and researchers across federally funded PMR studies in three national consortia, as well as observations of study activities, focused on how PM researchers conceptualize diversity and implement inclusive practices across research stages, including navigating ROR.Results Interviewees (1) validated the value of ROR as a benefit of PMR, while others (2) questioned the benefit of clinically actionable results to individuals in the absence of sufficient resources for translating findings into health care for diverse and disadvantaged populations; (3) expressed uncertainties in applying the presumed value of ROR as a benefit for non-clinical results; and (4) and debated when the promise of the value of ROR may undermine trust in PMR, and divert efforts to return value beyond ROR.Conclusions Conceptualizations of diversity and inclusion among PM researchers and investigators raise unique ethical questions where unexamined assumptions of the value of ROR inform study recruitment efforts to enroll minoritized and under-represented populations. A lack of consideration for resources and infrastructure necessary to translate ROR into actionable information may hinder trustworthy community-research relationships. Thus, we argue for a more intentional interrogation of ROR practices as an offer of benefit and for whom. (shrink)

Medicine and its allied health sciences have for too long been peripherally involved in work on human rights. Fifty years ago, the door to greater involvement was opened by Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which underlined social and economic rights: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in (...) the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”. (shrink)

Le projet de mondialisation néolibérale, qui consiste à étendre et à maintenir le capitalisme à l’échelle mondiale, nécessite la création d’États-nations néolibéraux qui intégreront son idéologie, ses pratiques et ses structures politiques. En ce sens, l’État-nation néolibéral constitue un site conceptuel approprié pour examiner le lien entre le local et le global dans la dynamique du capitalisme mondial. En prenant les Philippines comme exemple, l’article examine les différents facteurs ou dimensions qui ont fait des Philippines un État-nation néolibéral, depuis l’époque (...) coloniale jusqu’aux structures supranationales qui exercent un contrôle externe sur l’économie politique philippine : le pouvoir mondial des sociétés transnationales, le FMI, l’impérialisme américain et chinois, y compris l’aide militaire américaine qui soutient la militarisation et la contre-insurrection contre les mouvements remettant en question le programme néolibéral des régimes passés et actuels. Enfin, l’article considère les répercussions que les mouvements antimondialisation peuvent avoir sur le changement d’orientation politique et sur les stratégies de résistance mondiale. (shrink)

Geoffrey Hill’s prose has prompted longstanding critical controversy, much of which turns on the perceived difficulty, intransigence and anachronism of his œuvre as a whole. This paper proposes that new ways to navigate this controversy can be found in Hill’s preoccupation with the exemplary dimensions of writing – that is, in his interest in the poet’s capacity to offer examples (positive and negative) to a community of readers. The discussion pays particular attention to the connections Hill’s reviews establish between style (...) and ethical choice and between literary difficulty and democracy ; connections which are intertwined with his ethics of exemplarity in fundamental ways. The paper also engages with those dimensions of literary exemple-use which emerge in new or unusual ways in his prose : his presentation of “models” or ideals for the organisation of civil society ; his treatment of certain literary works as exemplars or embodiments of philosophical ideas ; and his procedural tic of “sampling” regularly for the purpose of chastisement the “bad example” set by some of the works he criticises. (shrink)

Little consensus exists about the effectiveness of transnational private governance in domains such as labor, the environment, or human rights. The paper builds on recent scholarship on labor standards to emphasize the role of labor agency in transnational private governance. It argues that the relationship between transnational private regulatory initiatives and labor agency depends on three competences: first, the ability of workers’ organizations to gain access to processes of employment regulation, implementation, and monitoring; second, their ability to insist on the (...) inclusion of employers and state agencies within such processes; and third, the ability of workers to effectively exercise leverage in pursuit of particular goals. The paper develops a framework, called hybrid production regime, for examining how workers’ capacity to act at the local level depends on how these three collective competences are addressed in the institutionalization of capital–labor relations between the transnational and national levels. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss how phenomenology might cogently express the way painful experiences are layered with complex intersubjective meaning. In particular, we propose a critical conception of pain as an intricate multi-levelled phenomenon, deeply ingrained in the constitution of one’s sense of bodily self and emerging from a web of intercorporeal, social, cultural, and political relations. In the first section, we review and critique some conceptual accounts of pain. Then, we explore how pain is involved in complex ways with (...) modalities of pleasure and displeasure, enacted personal meaning, and contexts of empathy or shame. We aim to show why a phenomenology of pain must acknowledge the richness and diversity of peculiar painful experiences. The second section then weaves these critical insights into Husserlian phenomenology of embodiment, sensation, and localisation. We introduce the distinction between Body-Object and Lived-Body to show how pain presents intersubjectively. Furthermore, we stress that, while pain seems to take a marginal position in Husserl’s whole corpus, its role is central in the transcendental constitution of the Lived-Body, interacting with the personal, interpersonal, and intersubjective levels of experiential constitution. Taking a critical-phenomenological perspective, we then concretely explore how some people may experience structural conditions which may make their experiences more or less painful. (shrink)

Like other key terms in the medical and health humanities—empathy, creativity, and reflection, to name just a few—wellness has become a weasel word, rife the language of optimization, duty, and self-perception. While alternative vocabularies exist—well-being and quality of life among them—these options usually privilege the objectives of academic (often psychological) research, health institutions, and the economic state apparatus, rather than people themselves. In mind of these concerns, why attempt to make a case for wellness at all? We present a historically (...) informed, theoretically driven, praxis-guided framework for a renewed vision of social wellness (a concept first defined in the late 1950s). While definitions since Bill Hettler’s “hexagonal” model (1980) have included mutual respect for others and the assumption of cooperative behaviors, conspicuously absent from contemporary definitions and usage is any mention of the aesthetic realm, which we—alongside philosophers like Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum—take as a central human capability. How can the relational possibilities of arts engagement be understood as not just a means of promoting individual wellness, but also as a method and outcome of social wellness? We propose that social wellness is ultimately premised on the interplay between wellness of the collective and the strength of the relational encounters it engenders. We turn to a key practice paradigm—community arts engagement—as both a vehicle for and site of social wellness. With brief reference to a Canadian exemplar, we conclude with concrete recommendations for addressing critical opportunities for advancing arts-led social wellness initiatives involving academic and community partners. (shrink)

Ethical attitudes and behaviour are complex. This complexity extends to the influencers operating at different levels both outside and within the organisation, and in different combinations for different individuals. There is hence a growing need to understand the proximal and distal influencers of ethical attitudes, and how these operate in concert at the individual, organisational, and societal levels. Few studies have attempted to combine these main research streams and systematically examine their combined impact. The minority of studies that have taken (...) a combined approach have often done so using conventional statistical and analytical techniques which imply linearity between variables—a situation that rarely exists in business settings and is likely to lead to simplistic or even erroneous conclusions. Applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis approach, this paper reports on the mutual and simultaneous influence of individual demographic factors, as well as proximal and distal factors stemming from within and outside the work environment to understand individuals’ ethical views within the workplace. The multiple configurations that emerged reveal the complex nature of influencers of ethical attitudes, and reinforce the view that “one size does not fit all”. We discuss these implications together with managerial recommendations and future research directions. (shrink)