Background: Clinical genomic implementation studies pose challenges for informed consent. Consent forms often include complex language and concepts, which can be a barrier to diverse enrollment, and these studies often blur traditional research-clinical boundaries. There is a move toward self-directed, web-based research enrollment, but more evidence is needed about how these enrollment approaches work in practice. In this study, we developed and evaluated a literacy-focused, web-based consent approach to support enrollment of diverse participants in an ongoing clinical genomic implementation study. (...) Methods: As part of the Cancer Health Assessments Reaching Many (CHARM) study, we developed a web-based consent approach that featured plain language, multimedia, and separate descriptions of clinical care and research activities. CHARM offered clinical exome sequencing to individuals at high risk of hereditary cancer. We interviewed CHARM participants about their reactions to the consent approach. We audio recorded, transcribed, and coded interviews using a deductively and inductively derived codebook. We reviewed coded excerpts as a team to identify overarching themes. Results: We conducted 32 interviews, including 12 (38%) in Spanish. Most (69%) enrolled without assistance from study staff, usually on a mobile phone. Those who completed enrollment in one day spent an average of 12 minutes on the consent portion. Interviewees found the information simple to read but comprehensive, were neutral to positive about the multimedia support, and identified increased access to testing in the study as the key difference from clinical care. Conclusions: This study showed that interviewees found our literacy-focused, web-based consent approach acceptable; did not distinguish the consent materials from other online study processes; and valued getting access to testing in the study. Overall, conducting empirical bioethics research in an ongoing clinical trial was useful to demonstrate the acceptability of our novel consent approach but posed practical challenges. (shrink)

This is a fascinating book. It uses tuberculosis to look at the balance between individual liberty and the public good: the tensions created between personal liberty and social responsibility, a strong theme in all work in public health. The context is New York in the 1990s, but as Coker states, “This book uses the lens of tuberculosis control, and in particular the detention of non-infectious individuals, to examine America's response to its most vulnerable and marginalised citizens, and asks the question: (...) `is detention of non-infectious, non-compliant individuals right from ethical, legal, and public health perspectives'”. The book is divided into nine chapters. It …. (shrink)

We provide a justification for political liberalism’s Reciprocity Principle, which states that political decisions must be justified exclusively on the basis of considerations that all reasonable citizens can reasonably be expected to accept. The standard argument for the Reciprocity Principle grounds it in a requirement of respect for persons. We argue for a different, but compatible, justification: the Reciprocity Principle is justified because it makes possible a desirable kind of political community. The general endorsement of the Reciprocity Principle, we will (...) argue, helps realize joint political rule and relationships of civic friendship. The main obstacle to the realization of these values is the presence of reasonable disagreement about religious, moral, and philosophical issues characteristic of liberal societies. We show the Reciprocity Principle helps to overcome this obstacle. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 72-103, Winter 2019.

Political liberals ask citizens not to appeal to certain considerations, including religious and philosophical convictions, in political deliberation. We argue that political liberals must include a demanding requirement of intellectual modesty in their ideal of citizenship in order to motivate this deliberative restraint. The requirement calls on each citizen to believe that the best reasoners disagree about the considerations that she is barred from appealing to. Along the way, we clarify how requirements of intellectual modesty relate to moral reasons for (...) deliberative restraint. And we argue against attempts to weaken our requirement of intellectual modesty by emphasizing those moral reasons. (shrink)

Psychopaths continue to be demonised by the media and estimates suggest that a disturbing percentage of the population has psychopathic tendencies. This timely and controversial new book summarises what we already know about psychopathy and antisocial behavior and puts forward a new case for its cause - with far-reaching implications. Presents the scientific facts of psychopathy and antisocial behavior. Addresses key questions, such as: What is psychopathy? Are there psychopaths amongst us? What is wrong with psychopaths? Is psychopathy due to (...) nature or nurture? And can we treat psychopaths? Reveals the authors' ground-breaking research into whether an underlying abnormality in brain development leaves psychopaths with an inability to feel emotion or fear. The resulting theory could lead to early diagnosis and revolutionize the way society, the media and the state both views and contends with the psychopaths in our midst. (shrink)

_The Sceptics_ is the first comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of Greek scepticism, from the beginnings of epistemology with Xenophanes, to the final full development of Pyrrhonism as presented in the work of Sextus Empiricus. Tracing the evolution of scepticism from 500 B.C to A.D 200, this clear and rigorous analysis presents the arguments of the Greek sceptics in their historical context and provides an in-depth study of the various strands of the sceptical tradition.

Empathy is a lay term that is becoming increasingly viewed as a unitary function within the field of cognitive neuroscience. In this paper, a selective review of the empathy literature is provided. It is argued from this literature that empathy is not a unitary system but rather a loose collection of partially dissociable neurocognitive systems. In particular, three main divisions can be made: cognitive empathy , motor empathy, and emotional empathy. The two main psychiatric disorders associated with empathic dysfunction are (...) considered: autism and psychopathy. It is argued that individuals with autism show difficulties with cognitive and motor empathy but less clear difficulties with respect to emotional empathy. In contrast, individuals with psychopathy show clear difficulties with a specific form of emotional empathy but no indications of impairment with cognitive and motor empathy. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Aetiological poetry tends to be mature poetry in both a literary and a political sense. Interest in antiquarian lore belongs in general to a poet's middle and later years when youthful and audacious quests for what is avant-garde and anti-establishment have yielded to conservatism and a desire to preserve the past. Propertius and Ovid both turned to aetiological poetry after a long apprenticeship in amatory ‘nugae’ which enabled them, like their predecessor, Callimachus, to embellish their work with a diversity of (...) artistic devices founded on considerable poetic skill and literary experience. With this, a vital ploy to engage the sympathy of a sophisticated audience, went the poise and urbanity with which the aetiological poet found humour in the pose of earnest researcher, in the naivety of primitive cult and in clever literary adaptations. Moreover, dedication to a form of writing essentially nationalist and conservative encouraged a tone of patriotic pride and allusions, even compliments, to the ruling powers. In the light of such considerations we may examine Ovid's account of the ‘Ludi Megalenses’. The ‘Megalensia’ furnished Ovid with a goddess who had enjoyed fame and even notoriety in the pages of Roman literature. In addition to showing a poetic and neoteric interest in the orgiastic elements of her cult and the alien music of her retinue Roman poetry could reflect too the awe and reverence inspired of old by the Great Mother and expressed in the Greek poets, whom Lucretius claimed as his sources in his powerfully beautiful excursus on Cybele worship. Again, Cybele's importance in Rome had been augmented by her Trojan origins, concerning which a canonical Augustan theology had been established by Vergil in the Aeneid. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Emotional Responding Is to Blame It Might Not Be to ResponsibilityR. J. R. Blair (bio)Keywordsblame, responsibility, emotional responses, psychopathyIn this interesting paper, Levy argues that by failing the moral/conventional distinction task (Blair 1995), individuals with psychopathy show a fundamental inability to categorize moral harms and as such their moral responsibility for their actions is reduced. He argues that, although we might still wish to incarcerate such individuals to (...) prevent them inflicting further harm on others, we should be less enthusiastic to blame them for their actions.In many respects, I agree with much of Levy's treatise. I certainly do not regard ascriptions of blame as useful in my own work with this population. I believe that our goal should be to fully understand the nature of their emotional deficit to be able to treat it similarly to other researchers who work to treat other emotional disorders. To me, Levy's argument appears sound.However, I offer three considerations and raise questions within these considerations that might further the debate. First, not all rules involve care-based emotional responses to victims. As Levy notes, this is the origin of the moral/conventional distinction. The problem here is that we do consider someone responsible if they break a conventional transgression. The student talking in class is generally considered blameworthy for this action as long as they knew that the rule of not talking during the lesson applied to that classroom. Yet, there is no victim and no care-based emotional response. Here, the only thing necessary to ascribe blame and responsibility is that the individual knew that a rule exists. Given this holds for conventional transgressions, why must we necessarily make a special case, with respect to responsibility, for moral transgressions?I believe that Levy is fully aware of this concern. He specifically makes reference to moral responsibility and writes that:the kind and degree of wrongness, and therefore blame, which attaches to infringements of the rules [against double parking or line-jumping] is very different, and usually much less significant, than the kind and degree attaching to moral wrongs. For psychopaths, all offences are merely conventional, and therefore—from their point of view—none of them are all that serious.(2007, p. 132)But the danger here is that issues of blame and responsibility may become highly relativistic and hinge on the strength of the emotional reaction. This is a problem because, although we might judge someone as more blameworthy if he intentionally [End Page 149] runs over five people rather than one, do we really consider that there is a distinction in moral responsibility between these two cases? If not, might not responsibility relate to factual knowledge of the existence of the rule against the transgression rather than the emotional response to the transgression?Second, there is considerable debate regarding whether psychopathy represents a taxon or a continuum (e.g., Vasey et al. 2005; Edens et al. 2006). Assuming it does represent a continuum, then we have an additional concern. How little of an emotional response to the transgression reduces one's moral responsibility and blame? Is it only the very reduced (although usually not absent) levels of emotional response that are shown by individuals with psychopathy? Or should we consider moral responsibility and blame proportional to the level of the emotional response? If this latter option is adopted, then what should we do about individuals who show heightened emotional responses, for example, patients with specific anxiety disorders (Rauch, Shin, and Wright 2003)? There are already some data that inhibited children (a developmental precursor to some anxiety disorders; Kagan and Snidman 1999) show heightened conscience development (Asendorpf and Nunner-Winkler 1992). If such children commit moral transgressions, should we regard them as more morally responsible and more blameworthy than regular folks?Third, the issue of intention received little attention in this paper. I have been considered to show a similar lack of attention to intention in the past (Nichols 2002) and, moreover, in some respects the issue was of limited concern given Levy's main goals. However, I mention it because so much of whether we consider someone responsible for their actions and... (shrink)

I Foundations i Every account of Nietzsche is an interpretation. Perhaps students of him are inclined to forget the extent to which this is also true of ...

Recent interest in emotion as the basis for moral development began with work involving individuals with psychopathic tendencies, and a recent paper with this population has allowed fresh insights (Glenn, Iyer, Graham, Koleva, & Haidt, 2009). Two main conclusions suggested by this paper are: (i) that systems involved in different forms of morality can be differentiated; and (ii) that systems involved in justice reasoning likely include amygdala and/or ventromedial prefrontal cortex, even if the specifics of their functional contribution to justice (...) development remain unidentified. (shrink)

This article treats of whether scepticism, in particular Pyrrhonian scepticism, can be said to deploy a method of any kind. I begin by distinguishing various different notions of method, and their relations to the concept of expertise. I then consider Sextus’s account, in the prologue to Outlines of Pyrrhonism, of the Pyrrhonist approach, and how it supposedly differs from those of other groups, sceptical and otherwise. In particular, I consider the central claim that the Pyrrhonist is a continuing investigator, who (...) in spite of refusing to be satisfied with any answer, none the less still achieves tranquillity, and whether this can avoid being presented as a method for so doing, and hence as compromising the purity of sceptical suspension of commitment. In doing so, I relate—and contrast—the Pyrrhonists’ account of their practice to the ‘Socratic Method’, as well as to the argumentative practice of various Academics, and assess their claim in so doing to be offering a way of instruction. I conclude that there is a consistent and interesting sense in which Pyrrhonian scepticism can be absolved of the charge that it incoherently, and crypto-dogmatically, presents itself as offering a method for achieving an intrinsically desirable goal. (shrink)

It is argued that donald davidson has not succeeded in showing that we need a constructive theory of meaning--A theory for a natural language which davidson considers to have as its base a finite number of semantic primitives--In order to explain language learning and, In particular, Linguistic productivity. This linguistic productivity is the ability of a speaker who has mastered the meaning of a finite stock of words and a finite number of grammatical rules, To produce and understand sentences which (...) he has not constructed or encountered before. (shrink)

Decety (2011) considers the cognitive neuroscience of empathy and, in particular, his three-component model of empathic responding. His position is highly influential with its emotional awareness/understanding and emotional regulation components representing clear extensions of previous theorizing on empathy. In this brief commentary, I will critically consider the third of his components: affective arousal. In particular, I will consider the implications of the literature to the proposed computations, based on perception—action coupling, that underlie this component of his model. I will suggest (...) that perception—action coupling does not underlie affective arousal but rather that this is mediated by far more simple mechanisms of emotional arousal based on conditioning. (shrink)

In his Encomium of Helen and On Not Being, Gorgias of Leontinoi discusses the nature and function of speech more extensively than any other surviving author before Plato. His discussions are not only surprising in the way they characterize the power of logos and its effects on a listener but also in how the two descriptions of speech seem to contradict one another. In the Helen, Gorgias claims that logos is a very powerful entity, capable of affecting a listener in (...) whatever way it wants. In On Not-Being, he makes the very different (but no less exaggerated) claim that logos is a non-entity, incapable of referring to anything other than itself. In this essay I show how these apparently contradictory accounts might be brought into harmony with one another.2 In the first part I address some of the interpretive difficulties with the text of Gorgias’s On Not Being (henceforth ONB) and the role that irony plays in the work. In particular I argue (as others have before) that Gorgias’s remarks about the impotency of speech are not meant to be taken seriously. Instead, they are aimed more squarely at raising questions about how exactly speech is thought to function and, more specifically, how linguistic reference works—i.e., how words somehow correspond to things, on one level, and to our ideas about things, on another. In the second and third parts of this paper, I illustrate how Gorgias’s concern with linguistic reference in ONB goes on to inform his notion of logos in the Encomium of Helen. I point specifically to evidence found in an important and often overlooked exit clause at the close of ONB regarding the difference between words and things. There, Gorgias insists that if words manifest meaning at all, they must appeal to their own sort of sense organ. In the Helen, he draws on the concepts of soul (psychē) and opinion (doxa) in order to construct this alternative, psychagogic account in which utterances are actually apprehended in ways akin to sense perception. Whether or not one is convinced by Gorgias’s alternative account of how speech works, the description he gives of logos does notionally circumvent the problem of linguistic reference and, in doing so, pushes one to think beyond the potentially constrictive framework of nomen et nominatum. I argue that, when read in this way, these two early discussions of logos represent a unified progression of serious thought about how speech works. (shrink)

Miracles are signs of God's power. Confusion about them comes from misunderstanding or doubting the relationship between God and creation rather than from science properly understood.

Forbidden areas, i.e. areas (sites, cities, countries) that are inaccessible for topographical reasons or especially because of decisions based on political, religious, or other motivations are usually surrounded by an aura of mystery and almost necessarily arouse curiosity. The dream of generations of explorers was to reach Lhasa. An area can be closed not only to outsiders but also to “insiders:” nobody is allowed to leave for the “outside.” The isolation imposed on Japan by the Tokugawa regime was such a (...) two-way seclusion aided, of course, by geographical conditions and hence easily enforceable. It has been suggested, perhaps not quite seriously, that the famous Chinese wall was meant not only to keep out barbarian invaders, but also to prevent Chinese from leaving. That there was some kind of border control is also suggested by the leger, according to which Lao-tse, before disappearing into the west, committed his teaching, the Tao-te-kinq, to writing at the request of the “gatekeeper.” One may well wonder whether there exists another equally influential text written at the behest of a border policeman! (shrink)