Currently one of the main goals of editors is to attain a higher visibility for their journals. On the other hand, authors strive to publish their research in journals indexed in eminent databases such as Scopus, Thompson Reuters’ Web of Science, Medline, etc. Therefore, clarifying the standards of indexing is of great importance. One of the most important issues in publication is the ethical considerations, which are mainly described by organizations, such as the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and (...) the Committee on Publication Ethics. In this study, we examined the ethical requirements of high impact databases for indexing journals to investigate whether they mention or mandate journals to adhere to publication ethics. We found that only Scopus mandated journals to state clear ethical policies on their website as a criterion for being indexed while Medline and Directory of Open Access Journals advised journals to adhere to ethics, not mandated, and Web of Science and PubMed Central made no mention of ethics as a required criterion for indexing. Based on this short review, there seems to be a gap between the requirements of indexing systems and international guidelines for publication ethics. Currently, most indexing systems have only partially recommended journals to consider ethical issues. In such an atmosphere, we cannot expect journals or as a result, authors to professionally, completely, and whole heartedly implement ethical guidelines as a mandatory rule in their journals and research, when the indexing systems that most editors want to be indexed in and most authors want to be cited in do not mandate such guidelines. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that an adequate meta-semantic framework capable of accommodating the range of projects currently identified as projects in conceptual engineering must be sensitive to the fact that concepts (and hence projects relating to them) fall into distinct kinds. Concepts can vary, I will argue, with respect to their direction of determination, their modal range, and their temporal range. Acknowledging such variations yields a preliminary taxonomy of concepts and generates a meta-semantic framework that allows us both to (...) accommodate the full range of cases and to identify a proper subset of concepts for special ameliorative consideration. Ignoring such variations, in contrast, leads to a restricted meta-semantic framework that accommodates only a subset of the particular projects while generating implausible accounts of others. (shrink)

According to some authors, emotions can be unconscious when they are unfelt or unnoticed. According to others, emotions are always conscious because they always have a phenomenology. The aim of this paper is to resolve the ongoing debate about the possibility for emotions to be unfelt. To do so, I focus on the notion of “unconscious emotions”. While this notion appears paradoxical, by way of a distinction between two meanings of emotional consciousness I show that it is not so. These (...) meanings are both compatible with the leading views of consciousness and they do not require one to distinguish different senses of “emotions” or “consciousness”. This distinction is helpful to define how emotions can be unconscious. (shrink)

These meditations, which begin with Stephan Schwartz and Mark Schroll's contested and contesting histories of the lineage and founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (below), contribute to the imagining of what Bethe Hagens calls "the relatively new interdisciplinary field of anthropology of consciousness.” Ethnographic vignettes from fieldwork of anthropologists, as well as fieldwork of students studying that fieldwork, highlight the paradox of anthropology's secularism and invite the reader, through the reading and writing of the text itself, to (...) participate in the practices of consciousness described. Using Schwartz's metaphor of "boulders in the stream,” these practices, and the modes of consciousness they invoke, serve as boulders that readers must swim around, or hop from, secularist anthropology through cyborg anthropology to an anthropology of consciousness itself. (shrink)

This paper uses some modest claims about knowledge to identify a significant problem for contemporary American trial procedure. First, suppose that legal proof requires knowledge. In particular, suppose that the defendant in a jury trial is proven guilty only if the jury knows that the defendant is guilty. Second, suppose that knowledge is subject to pragmatic encroachment. In particular, whether the jury knows the defendant is guilty depends on what’s at stake in their decision to convict, including the consequences that (...) the defendant may face if convicted. Then in order to know whether a defendant has been proven guilty, jurors may need to know something about the potential consequences of conviction. But in nearly every American criminal trial, this information is withheld from jurors. -/- In §1, I lay out the philosophical premises of my argument. In §2, I say more about why these premises present a problem for American trial procedure, and I identify social and political structures that exacerbate the problem. I describe the reasoning that has led courts to withhold sentencing information from jurors, and I diagnose the flaw in this reasoning. In §3, I expand my initial argument, strengthening its conclusions and offering alternative sets of premises that still entail them. I argue that the legal ramifications of pragmatic encroachment depend on highly controversial questions in epistemology, questions about the precise nature of practical stakes. In §4, I propose strategies for legal reform. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that content externalism and privileged access are compatible, but that one can, in a sense, have privileged access to the world. The supposedly absurd conclusion should be embraced.

If we adopt a virtue approach to epistemology, what form should the intellectual virtues take? In this paper, I argue that the proper structure of the intellectual virtues should be one that follows the tradition of internalism in epistemology. I begin by giving a general characterization of virtue epistemology and then define internalism within that framework. Arguing for internalism, I first consider the thought experiment of the new evil demon and show how externalist accounts of intellectual virtue, though constructed to (...) accommodate our intuitions in such cases, cannot fully do so. I further argue that only adopting an internalist structure of the virtues will provide intellectual virtues that appropriately mirror the structure of the classical moral virtues. Finally, I argue that only an internalist structure of the virtues can explain why the intellectual virtues are valuable in themselves. (shrink)

Identifying the referent of novel words is a complex process that young children do with relative ease. When given multiple objects along with a novel word, children select the most novel item, sometimes retaining the word‐referent link. Prior work is inconsistent, however, on the role of object novelty. Two experiments examine 18‐month‐old children's performance on referent selection and retention with novel and known words. The results reveal a pervasive novelty bias on referent selection with both known and novel names and, (...) across individual children, a negative correlation between attention to novelty and retention of new word‐referent links. A computational model examines possible sources of the bias, suggesting novelty supports in‐the‐moment behavior but not retention. Together, results suggest that when lexical knowledge is weak, attention to novelty drives behavior, but alone does not sustain learning. Importantly, the results demonstrate that word learning may be driven, in part, by low‐level perceptual processes. (shrink)

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the innocent Tess is the object of Alec d’Urberville’s dishonorable intentions. Alec uses every wile he can think of to seduce the poor and ignorant Tess, who works keeping hens in his mother’s house: he flatters her, he impresses her with a show of wealth, he gives help to her family to win her gratitude, and he reacts with irritation and indignation when she nonetheless continues to repulse his advances, causing her to feel shame at (...) her own ingratitude and confusion as to what is right. Tess, anchored both by her own sense of virtue and her distrust of Alec’s character, continues to hold out until one fatal night when, through Alec’s machinations, they are lost together in a wood. At Tess’s insistence Alec leaves her to scout out the path home. When he returns, he finds her asleep under a tree. Hardy does not go into detail at this critical juncture. Rather, he reflects “why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.”. (shrink)

The performance of 93 children aged 3 and 4 years on a battery of different counterfactual tasks was assessed. Three measures: short causal chains, location change counterfactual conditionals, and false syllogisms—but not a fourth, long causal chains—were correlated, even after controlling for age and receptive vocabulary. Children's performance on our counterfactual thinking measure was predicted by receptive vocabulary ability and inhibitory control. The role that domain general executive functions may play in 3- to 4-year olds' counterfactual thinking development is discussed.

The multiplicity of deubiquitinating enzymes (DUBs) encoded by vertebrate genomes is partly attributable to whole genome duplication events that occurred early in chordate evolution. By surveying the literature for the largest family of DUBs (the ubiquitin-specific proteases), extensive functional redundancy for duplicated genes has been confirmed as opposed to singletons. Dramatically conflicting results have been reported for loss of function studies conducted through RNA interference as opposed to inactivating mutations, but the contradictory findings can be reconciled by a recently proposed (...) compensatory mechanism involving nonsense-mediated RNA degradation. Duplicated genes are often inactivated to become pseudogenes, and it is proposed that such is the fate of the USP15 gene of zebrafish, a commonly used model system. As it is reviewed here, these observations have implications not only for the interpretation of model system phenotypes but also for therapeutic interventions designed to target DUBs. (shrink)

This article surveys the latest research on risky-choice framing effects, focusing on the implications for rational decision-making. An influential program of psychological research suggests that people's judgements and decisions depend on the way in which information is presented, or ‘framed’. In a central choice paradigm, decision-makers seem to adopt different preferences, and different attitudes to risk, depending on whether the options specify the number of people who will be saved or the corresponding number who will die. It is standardly assumed (...) that such responses violate a foundational tenet of rational decision-making, known as the principle of description invariance. We discuss recent theoretical and empirical research that challenges the dominant ‘irrationalist’ narrative. These approaches typically pay close attention to how decision-makers represent decision problems (including their interpretation of numerical quantifiers or predicate choice) and they highlight the need for a more robust characterization of the description invariance principle. We conclude by indicating avenues for future research that could bring us closer to a complete—and potentially rationalizing—explanation of framing effects. (shrink)

This book examines sustainability learning with children, art and water in the new material, posthuman turn. A query into how we might sustain (our) childhood natures, the spaces between bodies and places are examined ontologically in daily conversations. Regarding philosophy, art, water and her children, the author asks, how can I sustain waterways if I am not sustaining myself? Theoretically disruptive and playful, the book introduces a new philosophy that combines existing philosophies of the new material and posthuman kind. The (...) ecological sciences, and the arts, are drawn together / apart to help recognize sustainability in its emergent, relational form. All the while this book, as art, engages and flows over the reader - as such, reading it becomes a transformative, meditative experience. Daily rhythms of 'being-with' art, water and children take the reader beyond orientations of environmental education that focus on notions of lack and reduction. New possibilities for sustaining childhood natures - for what is becoming, and unbecoming - emerge here in the making processes of an academic, everyday life in early motherhood. (shrink)

Morale et mysogynie. L'auteur démontre que la subjectivité masculine s'active à l'intérieur du discours prétendument universel des philosophes (Kant et Rousseau), spécialement lorsqu'ils traitent de la problématique des sexes qui traverse toute culture.

This article responds to two ethical conundrums associated with the practice of disability passing. One of these problems is the question of whether or not passing as abled is morally wrong in that it constitutes deception. The other, related difficulty arises from the tendency of the able-bodied in contemporary society to reinforce the activity of passing despite its frequent condemnation as a form of pretense or fraud. We draw upon recent scholarship on transgender and disability passing to criticize and explore (...) some alternatives to the problematic theory of personal identity that is presupposed by the claim that passing as abled always amounts to deceit. We additionally demonstrate the moral indefensibility of society’s reinforcement of disability passing by showing that it may derive, at least in part, from ablest assumptions concerning distributive justice as it relates to disabled individuals. (shrink)

Any evolved disposition for fairness and cooperation would not replace but merely compete with selfish and other antisocial impulses. Therefore, we propose that human cooperation and fairness depend on self-regulation. Evidence shows reductions in fairness and other prosocial tendencies when self-regulation fails.

Ralph Cudworth’s theory of mind was the most fully developed philosophical psychology among the Cambridge Platonists. Like his seventeenth-century contemporaries, Cudworth discussed mental powers in terms of soul rather than mind and considered the function of the soul to be not merely intellectual, but vital and moral. Cudworth conceived the soul as a single self-determining unit which combined many powers. He developed this against a philosophical agenda set by Descartes and Hobbes. But he turned to ancient philosophy, especially the philosophy (...) of Plotinus, to develop a psychology which is distinguished by the attention he gives to both conscious and unconscious states, and to the powers which enable it to reflect on itself, to co-ordinate its activities and direct them to good ends. I argue that in so doing, Cudworth sought to elaborate a theory of mind which accounted for observable experience of mental operations. My paper outlines the complexities of Cudworth’s taxonomy of mental powers, focusing on three key powers which Cudworth developed through his reading of Plotinus: energy, self-power, and sympathy. (shrink)

Most ethics committees which review research protocols insist that potential research participants reserve unconditional or absolute ‘right’ of withdrawal at any time and without giving any reason. In this paper, I examine what consent means for research participation and a sense of commitment in relation to this right to withdraw. I suggest that, once consent has been given (and here I am excluding incompetent minors and adults), participants should not necessarily have unconditional or absolute rights to withdraw.This does not imply (...) that that there should be a complete absence of rights, or, indeed, an abandonment of the right to withdraw. The point of this paper is to show that the supposed unconditional or absolute nature of these rights may be self‐defeating and so fail to respect the autonomy of participants. In addition, and on a more positive note, I suggest that, attaching certain conditions on the right to withdraw, may better respect the autonomy of these participants by underlining the idea that autonomy is more than mere whim or indifference to the fate of others. On the contrary, research staff are currently unable to ‘push’ participants, who may merely have logistical difficulties unrelated to the research itself, but who really want to stay the course, for fear of coercing them. Furthermore, researchers now try to ‘screen out’ people they think may be unreliable to protect the science of the study and so groups at risk of dropping out may be unfairly denied access to research treatments. I conclude that on‐going negotiation between the relevant parties could be on balance the only truly acceptable way forward but concede certain important limitations to take into account. (shrink)

Åsa Maria Wikforss has proposed a response to Burge's thought-experiments in favour of social externalism, one which allows the individualist to maintain that narrow content is truth-conditional without being idiosyncratic. The narrow aim of this paper is to show that Wikforss' argument against social externalism fails, and hence that the individualist position she endorses is inadequate. The more general aim is to attain clarity on the social externalist thesis. Social externalism need not rest, as is typically thought, on the possibility (...) of incomplete linguistic understanding or conceptual error. I identify the unifying principle that underlies the various externalist thought-experiments. (shrink)

Mastery imagery (i.e., images of being in control and coping in difficult situations) is used to regulate anxiety. The ability to image this content is associated with trait confidence and anxiety, but research examining mastery imagery ability's association with confidence and anxiety in response to a stressful event is scant. The present study examined whether trait mastery imagery ability mediated the relationship between confidence and anxiety, and the subsequent associations on performance in response to an acute psychological stress. Participants (N= (...) 130; 55% male;Mage= 19.94 years;SD= 1.07 years) completed assessments of mastery imagery ability and engaged in a standardized acute psychological stress task. Immediately prior to the task, confidence, cognitive and somatic anxiety intensity, and interpretation of anxiety symptoms regarding the task were assessed. Path analyses supported a model whereby mastery imagery ability mediated the relationship between confidence and cognitive and somatic anxiety interpretation. Greater mastery imagery ability and confidence were both directly associated with better performance on the stress task. Mastery imagery ability may help individuals experience more facilitative anxiety and perform better during stressful tasks. Improving mastery imagery ability by enhancing self-confidence may help individuals successfully cope with anxiety elicited during stressful situations. (shrink)

Using qualitative data, this article investigates women’s experiences in fantasy sports, a context that offers the potential for transformations in the gendered order of traditionally masculinized athletic environments by blurring the distinctions between real and virtual, combining active production and passive consumption, and allowing men and women to play side-by-side. We find, however, women often describe fantasy sports as a male/masculine space in which they are highly visible and have their ability to compete like men questioned, largely because of gendered (...) assumptions regarding sports knowledge. Women’s attitudes and behaviors frequently reproduce traditional gender dynamics, although women also engage in behaviors and assert definitions of themselves that are potentially transformative—implicitly and explicitly pushing the boundaries of what females are expected to be and accomplish in sport. Often, however, they simultaneously reproduce and resist men’s dominance and women’s marginalization, exercising “mediated agency” by using men to improve their fantasy sports experience and play or “conflicted agency” by reinforcing or accepting gender stereotypes about women while using those stereotypes to their advantage or positioning themselves as atypical women to whom the stereotypes do not apply. (shrink)

Face-to-face meetings are often preferred over other forms of communication because meeting in person provides the “richest” way to communicate. Face-to-face meetings are so rich because many ways of communicating are available to support mutual understanding. With the progress of digitization and driven by the need to reduce personal contact during the global pandemic, many face-to-face work meetings have been shifted to videoconferences. With webcams turned on, video calls come closest to the richness of face-to-face meetings. However, webcam use often (...) remains voluntary, and some participants choose not to turn their cameras on. In order to find ways to support webcam use—when desired—we analyzed how social norms in groups affect the decision to activate a webcam in a specific meeting. Based on an online survey with N = 333 participants, we found that social norms are related to an individual’s decision to turn on the webcam, even when controlling for group size. If the number of participants with activated webcams in a university meeting increased by 25%, it was 5.92 times more likely that an individual decided to turn their webcam on, too. Furthermore, 81.84% of respondents indicated they would turn on their webcam if participants in a meeting were explicitly asked to do so. The results demonstrate a strong relation between social norms and the decision to activate a webcam in online meetings. They build a basis for enhancing webcam use and enable a greater richness of communication in online meetings. (shrink)

This extended editorial takes stock of the first volume of the journal Ethics and Social Welfare, offering an overview of the types of contributions in the first four issues and suggesting future themes. A critical summary is given of the contributions so far, which have included: moral philosophical theorizing; analysis of key ethical concepts; exploration of contested areas of policy and practice; empirical studies of living conditions, perceptions, attitudes and professional interventions; accounts of ethical issues in practice; ethical issues in (...) research; and models of professional ethical decision making. Themes identified for future consideration include: service user perspectives on aspects of social welfare practice; development of practice-based ethical theories for the social welfare professions; ideas about teaching professional and practical ethics; ethical issues in managing and distributing resources; critical analysis of the ethical implications of public policies; further contributions offering moral, political and social philosophical perspectives on issues of social justice, cultural diversity, global and local policies for tackling environmental and humanitarian crises. (shrink)

Farm to institution programs represent alternative supply chains that aim to organize the activities of local producers with institutions that feed the local community. The current study demonstrates the value of structuration theory :75–80, 1983; The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984) for conceptualizing how FTI agents create, maintain, and change organizational structures associated with FTI and traditional supply chains. Based on interviews with supply chain agents participating in FTI programs, we (...) found that infrastructure, relationships, and pricing were seen as important factors that enabled and constrained FTI organizing. Additionally, we describe how FTI organizing serves to simultaneously reinforce and challenge the practices associated with traditional supply chains. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed as well as directions for future research. (shrink)

New health technologies are rapidly emerging from various areas of bioscience research, such as gene editing, regenerative medicine and synthetic biology. These technologies raise promising medical possibilities but also a range of ethical considerations. Apart from the issues involved in considering whether novel health technologies can or should become part of mainstream medical treatment once established, the process of research translation to develop such therapies itself entails particular ethical concerns. In this paper I use synthetic biology as an example of (...) a new and largely unexplored area of health technology to consider the ways in which novel health technologies are likely to emerge and the ethical challenges these will present. I argue that such developments require us to rethink conventional attitudes towards clinical research, the roles of doctors/researchers and patients/participants with respect to research, and the relationship between science and society; and that a broader framework is required to address the plurality of stakeholder roles and interests involved in the development of treatments based on novel technologies. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 86-88.

Pratt et al. (2020) tackle a seeming lack of consensus about the ethical goals of community engagement (CE) in global health research. Their paper “identifies an additional or complementary role fo...

This paper takes issue with Tyler Burge's claim that intentional states are nonindividualistically individuated in cognitive psychology. A discussion of current models of children's acquisition of semantic knowledge is used to motivate a thought-experiment which shows that psychologists working in this area are not committed to describing the concepts children attach to words in terms of the concepts standardly attached to those words in the child's community. The content of the child's representational states are thus not individuated with reference to (...) linguistic environment in the manner that Burge's nonindividualistic view requires. The paper concludes that the explanatory states of cognitive psychology are sometimes individualistically individuated. (shrink)

This piece comprises short presentations given by contributors to a symposium organized by the journal Ethics & Social Welfare on the theme of global ethics for social work. The contributors offer their reflections on the extent to which universally accepted international statements of ethical principles in social work are possible or useful, engaging with debates about cultural diversity, relativism and the relevance of human rights in non-Western countries.

After reading Savulescu and colleagues,1 one ought to be in no doubt that human heritable genome editing is a ‘moral imperative’: to cure disease, reduce inequalities, improve public health and protect future generations. They make this argument repeatedly and in no uncertain terms. Yet are they right to do so? I am certainly not against developing HGE or exploring its possibilities. Instead, I aim to sound a cautionary note in relation to claims about its technological potential and how we frame (...) arguments on this basis. The ‘moral imperative’ argument has been made many times, since well before the advent of genome editing, by the present authors and others. It generally rests on a number of preconditions, implicit or explicit: that HGE will be safe, effective, cost-efficient and equitably available. Now, many bioethicists would take no issue with, indeed have supported,5 the proposition that, once all of these conditions are satisfied, HGE is something we have good moral reasons to pursue. At this pivotal moment for global science, ethics and governance, however, we need equally to be concerned with the technology’s immediate future trajectory: whether and how we can reach the point of satisfying these conditions. In this context, the MIA is something of a distraction; at worst, it may even be corrosive and damaging. Consider first the argument from evolutionary fitness, that HGE is morally required to counteract the supposed ‘genetic deterioration’ produced by medically enabled ‘survival of the weak’, that makes …. (shrink)

Dans L’Antre des Nymphes, Porphyre répartit en trois groupes les dieux et les lieux des sacrifices qui leur sont offerts. Une telle division est connue des chercheurs qui s’intéressent à la manière dont les Grecs pourraient avoir organisé le monde divin et ses interventions. Mais on a méconnu d’autres affirmations que Porphyre produit à ce sujet dans le traité Sur la philosophie tirée des oracles. Dans les fr. 314 et 315, Porphyre cite de longs extraits d’oracles dans lesquels Apollon répartit (...) les dieux et leurs sacrifices en trois groupes. Il restructure lui-même et justifie ces divisions. Même si Apollon propose plus de catégories que celles auxquelles nous sommes habitués, son approche suggère que la tendance à la catégorisation était plus commune dans la pensée des Anciens que ne l’a prétendu la recherche récente. On voit aussi que Porphyre fait en sorte de ramener les catégories d’Apollon à trois seulement. En conclusion, de telles observations peuvent nous aider à mieux saisir nos pratiques en tant qu’historiens des religions. (shrink)

This commentary explores a few of the common threads in a symposium of obesity narratives in light of the American Medical Association’s classification of obesity as a disease. While the narratives illustrate the breadth of experiences, they each highlight the absence of a clear approach for the treatment of obesity, as well as the lack of conversation and compassion in the most basic of interactions with medical professionals. This could be cause for despair, yet we learn through these shared experiences (...) that we can take control of our care and plot a course for real and lasting assistance with this condition. (shrink)

"Charles Marville is widely acknowledged as one of the most talented photographers of the nineteenth century. Accompanying a major retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in honor of Marville's bicentennial, Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris surveys the artist's entire career. This beautiful book, which begins with the city scenes and architectural views Marville made throughout France and Germany in the 1850s, also explores his portraits and landscapes s before turning to his photographs of Paris made both before and (...) after the city's dramatic modernization in the 1850s and 1860s. Commissioned to record the city in transition, Marville created one of the earliest and most powerful photographic series documenting urban transformation on a grand scale. Despite the importance of his work, Marville has long been an enigma in the history of photography, in part because many of the documents about his life were thought to have been lost in a fire that destroyed Paris's city hall in 1871. Based on meticulous research, this volume reveals many new insights into Marville's personal and professional biography, including the central fact that he was born Charles-Franðcois Bossu. He shed this name and adoptedthe pseudonym Marville when he began his career as an illustrator in the 1830s. With five essays by respected scholars, this book offers the first comprehensive examination of Marville's life and career and delivers the much-awaited public recognition his photographs so richly deserve"--. (shrink)