The traditional puzzles about belief reports puzzles rest on a certain seemingly innocuous assumption, that 'that'-clauses specify belief contents. The main theories of belief reports also rest on this "Specification Assumption", that for a belief report of the form 'A believes that p' to be true,' the proposition that p must be among the things A believes. I use Kripke's Paderewski case to call the Specification Assumption into question. Giving up that assumption offers prospects for an intuitively more plausible (...) approach to the semantics of belief reports. But this approach must confront a puzzle of its own: it turns out that every case is a Paderewski case, at least potentially. (shrink)

We contrast two theoretical positions on the relation between phenomenal and access consciousness. First, we discuss previous data supporting a mild Overflow position, according to which transient visual awareness can overflow report. These data are open to two interpretations: (i) observers transiently experience specific visual elements outside attentional focus without encoding them into working memory; (ii) no specific visual elements but only statistical summaries are experienced in such conditions. We present new data showing that under data-limited conditions observers cannot (...) discriminate a simple relation (same versus different) without discriminating the elements themselves and, based on additional computational considerations, we argue that this supports the first interpretation: summary statistics (same/different) are grounded on the transient experience of elements. Second, we examine recent data from a variant of ‘inattention blindness’ and argue that contrary to widespread assumptions, it provides further support for Overflow by highlighting another factor, ‘task relevance’, which affects the ability to conceptualize and report (but not experience) visual element. (shrink)

Background‘The Clinical Ethics Advisory Group’ (CEAG) is the clinical ethics support body for Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals National Health Service Foundation Trust. A significant change in CEAG’s way of working occurred over the past 5 years as a result of Court decisions, increasing public expectations and an increase in CEAG’s paediatric case flow.PurposeReview historical data: (a) as a useful benchmark to look for the early impact of significant service changes and (b) to seek possible reference (‘sentinel’) cases for use with (...) a posited practical (casuistic) case-based reasoning model.MethodsAudit of the minutes of the first 22 years’ meetings was undertaken by the two chairs of CEAG over that period of time.Results223 matters discussed: 86 Trust policy issues; 117 clinical cases (84 adult (32 urgent), 33 child (8 urgent)); 12 CEAG procedural issues and 8 UK Clinical Ethics Network ‘round robin’ cases. The range of topic areas was wide. A broad range of ethical structures were deployed, principlism predominated. Quality was subjectively assessed by each reviewer, but different methods were used. This proved highly concordant between the two reviewers. 47% (105/223) of discussions were ‘excellent’ (*A4C4–A4C4) and 70% (156.5/223) ‘good’ or better (*A4C4–A3C3). By meeting the criteria of ‘excellent’ and ‘prospective’, 92/223 (41%) of matters were deemed potentially suitable as sentinel cases.ConclusionsThe audit provides a rich vein of information. There is demand for CEAG’s services, workload is becoming more complex. Formal funding for such services seems justified. (shrink)

Academic Placement Data and Analysis (APDA) has released its complete 2017 Final Report, an 81-page document that collects data on PhD-granting philosophy programs (including ratings by former students, placement rates, and diversity) and the discipline as a whole (including hiring networks, placement maps, cluster analyses of programs, job descriptions, non-academic hiring). The report was created by Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Patrice Cobb, Pablo Contreras Kallens, and Angelo Kyrilov, all of University of California, Merced. (from Daily Nous).

Successful surgical treatment of patients with focal drug-resistant epilepsy remains challenging, especially in cases for which it is difficult to define the area of cortex from which seizures originate, the seizure onset zone. Various diagnostic methods are needed to select surgical candidates and determine the extent of resection. Interictal magnetoencephalography with source imaging has proven to be useful for presurgical evaluation, but the use of ictal MEG data remains limited. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether pre-ictal (...) variations of spectral properties of neural activity from ictal MEG recordings are predictive of SOZ location.We performed a 4 h overnight MEG recording in an 8-year-old child with drug-resistant focal epilepsy of suspected right fronto-temporal origin and captured one ~45-s seizure. The patient underwent a right temporal resection from the anterior temporal neocortex and amygdala to the mid-posterior temporal neocortex, sparing the hippocampus proper. She remains seizure-free 21 months postoperatively. The histopathological assessment confirmed frank focal cortical dysplasia type IIa in the MEG-defined SOZ, which was based on source imaging of averaged ictal spikes at seizure onset. We investigated temporal changes together with spatial differences in spectral parameters of background brain activity, namely the aperiodic broadband offset and slope, and assessed how they confounded the interpretation of apparent variations of signal power in typical electrophysiological bands. Our data show that the SOZ was associated with a higher aperiodic offset and exponent during the seizure compared to control regions. Both parameters increased in all regions from 2 min before the seizure onwards. Regions anatomically closer to the SOZ also expressed higher values compared to contralateral regions, potentially indicating ictal spread. We also show that narrow-band power changes were caused by these fluctuations in the aperiodic component of ongoing brain activity. Our results indicate that the broadband aperiodic component of ongoing brain activity cannot be reduced to background noise of no physiological interest, and rather may be indicative of the neuropathophysiology of the SOZ. We believe these findings will inspire future studies of ictal MEG cases and confirm their significance. (shrink)

This brief introduction explains the historical background of the Hoffman Report, the 2015 independent counsel's investigation into the American Psychological Association's role in aiding ‘enhanced interrogations’ of detainees in the Bush Administration's Global War on Terror. It also outlines the articles in this special section of History of the Human Sciences on the Hoffman Report in Historical Context.

• Ongoing concerns about time to acceptance/rejection and time to publication. o NB: Schemas kick in when people are rushed. How does this affect the refereeing process? Does it matter for desk rejections, which may be quick and based on nonanonymized papers? Does it also affect referees? How?

Clinical ethics support, including ethics consultation, has become established in the field of medical practice throughout the world. This practice has been regarded as useful, most notably in the UK and the USA, in solving ethical problems encountered by both medical practitioners and those who receive medical treatment. In Japan, however, few services are available to respond to everyday clinical ethical issues, although a variety of difficult ethical problems arise daily in the medical field: termination of life support, euthanasia and (...) questions about patient autonomy. In light of these conditions, a group of 17 volunteer educators and researchers from the area of biomedical ethics, including the authors, have formed the Clinical Ethics Support and Education Project, and began providing Japan’s first small team clinical ethics consultation service in October, 2006. Members include scholars of biomedical ethics, scholars of philosophy and ethics, legal professionals and legal scholars, nurses and doctors, consisting of five women and 12 men. Consultation teams, made up of a small number of members, were organised each time a request for consultation was received. Over approximately 15 months (October 2006–December 2007), the programme received 22 consultation requests from medical practitioners and medical institutions, and three from the families of patients. In this paper, we will discuss the status of our consultation service and examples of consultation cases we have handled. In addition, we will examine the process of evaluating small team clinical ethics consultation services, as well as the strengths and weakness of such programmes. (shrink)

Block proposes that phenomenal experience overflows conscious access. In contrast, we propose that conscious access overflows overt report. We argue that a theory of phenomenal experience cannot discard subjective report and that Block's examples of phenomenal relate to two different types of perception. We propose that conscious access is more than simply readout of a pre-existing phenomenal experience.

This report aims to offer insights into cutting-edge research on digital well-being. Many of these insights come from a 2-day academic-impact event, The Future of Digital Well-Being, hosted by a team of researchers working with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in February 2024. Today, achieving and maintaining well-being in the face of online technologies is a multifaceted challenge that we believe requires using theoretical resources of different research disciplines. This report explores diverse perspectives on (...) how digital well-being can be actively cultivated, while also emphasising the importance of considering individual differences, societal contexts, and nuanced cultural factors. We aim to offer a holistic view of the future of digital well-being, one that will inspire the next generation of designers of online tools, as well as policymakers who will regulate these tools. We start by asking what digital well-being is – how we can best define a concept that is used by diverse stakeholders and researchers from many disciplines in various ways. To do this, we explore the classic ethical theories of well-being, showing how they can give us insights into how the term digital well-being is currently deployed. We then move to look at the existing strategies that have been proposed to actively cultivate digital well-being, exploring the business models that threaten digital well-being and the relative advantages of the digital and non-digital solutions that are currently proposed. On the one hand, digital tools – such as Apple’s Screen Time and app blockers such as Opal and Forest – integrate seamlessly with the digital lifestyles of users. They also create precise metrics for digital well-being, which facilitates their solutions to reduce screen time. On the other hand, non-digital solutions, including mindfulness practices, digital detoxes, and digital well-being coaching, offer a new set of tools to reconnect individuals to their natural rhythms and help to actively promote offline activities. We then move to discuss diversity and how various groups of users have strikingly different digital well-being needs. Embracing neurodiversity in digital well-being is crucial as it strongly impacts the users’ experience of online technologies. When designing for diversity, organisations and designers alike need to prioritise customization for people with physical disabilities, mitigate harmful content for users with mental well-being conditions, address gender stereotypes and online harassment, and be designed in ways that recognize the very real risks of online technologies. This report closes by examining cultural differences. We believe that non-Western conceptions of well-being offer rich sources for enhancing digital well-being insofar as these traditions can inform and inspire the designers of future online technologies. We focus on East-Asian and South-Asian traditions, although in further work we recognise it would be useful to investigate conceptions of well-being that are influential in the Gulf region, Africa, and South America. Each of these areas have ethical frameworks that discuss well-being in depth as well as a rich cultural heritage. In conclusion, this report’s insights underscore the imperative of recognizing diversity in digital well-being, both in terms of cultural contexts and disciplinary perspectives. It emphasises the need for culturally responsive design methodologies and the integration of non-Western philosophical perspectives into current digital well-being research. Embracing this diversity, we believe, offers the best chance to create digital environments that prioritise well-being for users and the societies they live in across the world. Ultimately, we believe that it is not only about designing better online products; it’s about shaping a digital landscape that promotes well-being and flourishing for everyone. (shrink)

Our hardware is an electric vehicle, remotely controlled over a citizens band radio link by a PDP-KL10. It carries a black and white television camera whose picture is broadcast over a UHF channel, and received and occasionally digitized by the computer. The vehicle has drive motors for the rear wheels, a steering motor coupled to a steering bar arrangement on the front wheels, and a motor controlling the camera pan angle. Each can be commanded to run forward or backward. There (...) is a potentiometer on the steering and pan linkages which enables them to be commanded to point straight ahead. The mechanical arrangements are crude, the motor speeds are unregulated, and there is no feedback to the computer other than the video from the camera. Overall dead reckoning errors are on the order of 30%. Most of the computer controlled runs so far have been with the camera pointed straight ahead and the vehicle moving forward in two foot increments, punctuated by long pauses, during which the images are processed. (shrink)

The paper has two goals. The first is presenting the main results of the recent report Ethics of Connected and Automated Vehicles: recommendations on road safety, privacy, fairness, explainability and responsibility written by the Horizon 2020 European Commission Expert Group to advise on specific ethical issues raised by driverless mobility, of which the author of this paper has been member and rapporteur. The second is presenting some broader ethical and philosophical implications of these recommendations, and using these to contribute (...) to the establishment of Ethics of Transportation as an independent branch of applied ethics. The recent debate on the ethics of Connected and Automated Vehicles presents a paradox and an opportunity. The paradox is the presence of a flourishing debate on the ethics of one very specific transportation technology without ethics of transportation being in itself a well-established academic discipline. The opportunity is that now that a spotlight has been switched on the ethical dimensions of CAVs it may be easier to establish a broader debate on ethics of transportation. While the 20 recommendations of the EU report are grouped in three macro-areas: road safety, data ethics, and responsibility, in this paper they will be grouped according to eight philosophical themes: Responsible Innovation, road justice, road safety, freedom, human control, privacy, data fairness, responsibility. These are proposed as the first topics for a new ethics of transportation. (shrink)

This paper argues that the development of ethical education in law schools ought not to be restricted to the use of textual resources. In the first part of the paper, the continuing dominance of text as the object of analysis in legal theory, legal scholarship and legal practice is illustrated. The dangerous implications of this continuing dominance on the capacity to see and recognise the great variety and depth of suffering and vulnerability is also discussed. It is argued that recourse (...) ought to be had to those traditions of moral philosophy that emphasise the importance of cultivating vision as a form of moral discipline - a discipline, in turn, that can benefit a great deal from the use of non-textual resources, and in particular, from both the appreciation of and involvement in the visual and movement-based arts. In the second part of the paper the treatment of ethical education in the recent Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Report on Educating Lawyers is discussed. It is argued that we ought not to subsume the development of ethical education under the canopy of professionalism - a canopy already saturated with text, both in the form of the substantive and procedural law that is expected to be applied, and in the form of the evaluation of professional conduct in accordance with the relevant professional code. Finally, in the third part of the paper, a number of policy recommendations are made. Ultimately, the paper calls for an ethical education that combines both textual and non-textual resources. It is only via such a combination that law schools can provide sufficient opportunities for the range of ethical experiences that are required in order to enhance the effective development of the ethical imagination in law students. (shrink)

Although many challenges remain, business ethics is flourishing in North America. Prominent organizations give annual business ethics awards, investments in socially screened mutual funds are increasing, ethics officers and corporate ombudspersons are more common and more influential, and new ideas are being tested in practice. On the academic side, two major journals specializing in business ethics are well-established and other major journals often include articles on business ethics and new organizations emphasizing ethics have been initiated. Within business schools, the number (...) of endowed chairs is growing and the ethics curriculum is expanding. Canada is a major player in the business ethics discipline while business ethics in Mexico is just beginning to emerge as a focus of interest in both the business and academic communities. (shrink)

The research project described in this report represents one of the most extensive studies of character education ever undertaken, including over 10,000 students and 255 teachers in schools across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Research techniques consisted of a mixture of surveys, moral dilemmas and semi-structured interviews. This report explores: - The current situation in character education, both in the UK and internationally - How developed British students are with respect to moral character and the extent to (...) which they are able to understand and apply moral virtues, especially those aged 14 and 15 - How teachers in the UK understand their role in terms of students’ moral and character development - What helps or hinders the development of children’s characters according to teachers in UK schools. (shrink)

Building on attribution theory, this study investigates the antecedents of corporate annual report text manipulation from the perspective of managerial performance pressure. Using a data set comprising 15,076 samples from companies listed on China's Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets between 2009 and 2021, we reveal that as management faces performance pressure, they tend to increase content about external environmental risk and policy uncertainty in annual reports due to actor–observer bias. When incorporating Confucian cultural factors into the research framework, the (...) study found that the strength of Confucian culture mitigates the correlation between the pressure of management performance and annual report manipulation. However, the level of marketization where a corporation is located can undermine the ethical norms upheld by Confucian culture. In additional analysis, we also discovered that the longer the duration of performance pressure, the greater the extent of manipulation within the annual reports initiated by the management. Interestingly, the social performance pressure generated from ESG performance also positively influences annual report textual manipulation, compared to operational performance pressure. This study explores the impact of management performance pressure on information disclosure decisions from the perspective of performance attribution, not only extending the boundaries of attribution theory but also providing guidance for policymakers to enhance the supervision of annual report disclosures and for capital market investors to optimize investment decisions. (shrink)

The Weatherall report on the use of non-human primates in research was published in 2006. Its main conclusion was that there is a strong scientific case for the use of non-human primates in some cases, but the report stressed the importance of evaluating each case in the light of the availability of alternatives. In addition to arguing for the scientific necessity of using non-human primates in research, the report also provided an ethical justification. As could be expected, (...) the report was harshly criticised by animal rights groups, but in the academic literature, only two critical replies appeared. In what follows, I will describe the ethical justification for non-human primate research as it is laid out in the Weatherall report and then consider the criticism in the academic literature. I conclude that the report’s ethical justification for the use of non-human primates in research, in particular in basic neuroscientific research, has not been convincingly challenged by its critics. Since the criticism of the report is limited and represents only a small part of the academic discussion about the use of non-human primates in research, and a still smaller part of the ethical discussion about animal research, it is important that the discussion continue both at the academic and social level. (shrink)