Donald Trump’s victory depended on the defection of hundreds of longstanding Democratic communities. Trump appealed to these communities partly because he behaves like some of their most beloved politicians. Like the president, these politicians are brazen, thin skinned, nepotistic, and offer an older, boss-centered vision of politics. Trump—the anti-establishment outsider—appealed to voters in these communities because he resembles the local insiders. This appeal widens an old fault line inside the Democratic Party.

The COVID-19 pandemic will likely recede only through development and distribution of an effective vaccine. Although there are many unknowns surrounding COVID-19 vaccine development, vaccine demand will likely outstrip early supply, making prospective planning for vaccine allocation critical for ensuring the ethical distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Here, we propose three central goals for COVID-19 vaccination campaigns: to reduce morbidity and mortality, to minimise additional economic and societal burdens related to the pandemic and to narrow unjust health inequalities. We evaluate five (...) prioritisation approaches, assess their likely impact on advancing the three goals of vaccine allocation and identify open scientific questions that may alter their outcomes. We argue that no single prioritisation approach will advance all three goals. Instead, we propose a multipronged approach that considers the risk of serious COVID-19 illness, instrumental value and the risk of transmission, and is guided by future research on COVID-19-specific clinical and vaccine characteristics. While we focus this assessment on the USA, our analysis can inform allocation in other contexts. (shrink)

This examination of gardens--particulary English gardens of the eighteenth century--offers possible links between garden design and the arts.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) reportedly struggle with the comprehension of aspect. However, since aspect and tense are closely entangled in the languages spoken by the children with DLD in previous studies, it is unclear whether the difficulty stems from aspect, tense, or both. Mandarin Chinese, a language without morphological manifestations of tense, is ideal to investigate whether the comprehension of aspect is specifically affected in children with DLD, yet to date work on this is scarce and presents methodological (...) limitations. In this study, we examined whether preschool Mandarin-speaking children with DLD have difficulty in comprehending perfective aspect (represented with the aspect marker -le) compared to imperfective aspect (represented with the aspect markerszai-and -zhe), whether performance can be explained in terms of the pre- vs. post-verbal realization of the aspect markers, and the potential role played by lexical aspect in the comprehension of grammatical aspect. Fourteen preschool children with DLD (mean age: 61.11 months old) and 14 TD children (mean age: 63.4 months old) matched for age and nonverbal intelligence participated in a sentence-picture matching task. Global results showed that, similar to their TD peers, children with DLD performed better on imperfective aspect than perfective aspect. Concerning specific aspect markers, while children with DLD indeed performed similarly to TD children on imperfective-zhe, they obtained significantly lower accuracy than TD children on perfective-leand imperfectivezai-. However, considering verb types combined with these aspect markers, results revealed that children with DLD scored significantly higher on the prototypical combination(s) (e.g.,zai- + Activity verbs) than on the non-prototypical combination(s) (e.g.,zai- + Accomplishment verbs). The performance pattern suggests that the comprehension of aspect markers by children with DLD is particularly affected by lexical aspect. As this also affects younger TD children, children with DLD are arguably at an earlier stage of aspectual development than their age and nonverbal intelligence matched TD peers. Therefore, the aspectual development of children with DLD appears to be delayed rather than deviant. Given this, language programs addressing difficulties in DLD may need to incorporate training on the use of aspect markers, especially targeting their combination with non-prototypical verbs. (shrink)

This study explored the challenges of informed consent and understanding of the research process among Black and Latino men under community supervision. Between February and October 2012, we conducted cognitive face-to-face interviews using open-ended questions on the significant areas of research participation among 259 men aged 35 to 67 under community supervision in Bronx, New York. Content analysis of the open-ended questions revealed limited knowledge concerning the understanding of research participation. The study participants appeared to generally understand concepts such as (...) compensation after research participation and confidentiality. Participants demonstrated a lack of understanding of certain aspects of the research process—informed consent, human subject, Institutional Review Board, and clinical trials. These findings are informative to researchers conducting studies with criminal justice populations and Institutional Review Boards reviewing research studies. (shrink)

This article demonstrates how researchers from both the sciences and the humanities can learn from Charles Darwin’s mixed methodology. We identify two basic challenges that face emotion research in the sciences, namely a mismatch between experiment design and the complexity of life that we aim to explain, and problematic efforts to bridge the gap, including invalid inferences from constrained study designs, and equivocal use of terms like “sympathy” and “empathy” that poorly reflect such methodological constraints. We argue that Darwin’s mixed (...) methodology is a model for addressing these challenges even in laboratory work on emotion, because it shows how close observation of emotional phenomena makes sense only within broader historical contexts. The article concludes with 5 practical research recommendations. (shrink)

During the 1970s and 1980s, a team of Automated Theorem Proving researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago developed the Automated Reasoning Assistant, or AURA, to assist human users in the search for mathematical proofs. The resulting hybrid humans+AURA system developed the capacity to make novel contributions to pure mathematics by very untraditional means. This essay traces how these unconventional contributions were made and made possible through negotiations between the humans and the AURA at Argonne and the transformation in (...) mathematical intuition they produced. At play in these negotiations were experimental practices, nonhumans, and nonmathematical modes of knowing. This story invites an earnest engagement between historians of mathematics and scholars in the history of science and science studies interested in experimental practice, material culture, and the roles of nonhumans in knowledge making. (shrink)

Multinational enterprises dominate the governance of global value chains, such that according to the concept of political corporate social responsibility, they are responsible to address governance gaps throughout the chains, even at the level of their independent suppliers. In practice, MNEs often struggle to cope with the complexity of these governance gaps, and PCSR does not provide a clear definition nor offer guidance for how to analyze and address them. By adopting the notion of governance mechanisms from GVC literature, this (...) study proposes a more nuanced view, in which governance gaps result from inactive, ineffective, or inequitable governance mechanisms adopted by relevant actors, rather than a complete absence of governance. MNEs, through their governance mechanisms, commonly create governance gaps. This study distinguishes different types of governance mechanisms to create a typology of governance gaps, such that it contributes to the literature on PCSR by offering a more refined understanding of governance gaps, along with a means to identify mechanisms to address them. Furthermore, it contributes to the literature on GVCs by defining governance-related terms and adding an ethical perspective on MNEs’ global business conduct. To illustrate the typology, this article presents the case of low wages for workers in the textile industry and efforts by H&M to deal with this governance gap. (shrink)

"The world of perception, that is to say that which is revealed to us by our senses and by the use of life, seems at first sight the best known to us, since there is no need for instruments or calculations to access it, and it suffices, apparently, to open our eyes and let ourselves live to enter it. Yet this is only a false appearance. I would like to show in these talks that it is largely ignored by us (...) as long as we remain in the practical or utilitarian attitude, that it has taken a great deal of time, effort and culture to bring it to fruition, naked, and that it is one of the merits of modern art and thought (by that I mean art and thought for 50 or 70 years) to make us rediscover this world where we live but which we are always tempted to forget. ” Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

The fashion industry needs to become more circular, given the unsustainable levels of waste it produces. Our research empirically explores and theoretically develops how adopting a virtue ethics approach can encourage and support second-hand clothing consumption as a form of reuse and a way of practicing sustainability. Based on ethnographic interviews with consumers who shop in UK charity shops, our grounded theory study focuses on how consumers experience second-hand clothing consumption as constitutive of sources of (in)action that encourage or inhibit (...) virtuous, sustainable behaviour. We find that pleasure and/or shame or guilt (pain) are key to enabling virtuous moral decision-making towards reuse and sustainability. We furthermore argue that seduction and conversion, hand in hand with pleasure, act as levers supporting such moral decision-making, mitigating aversions and wayward desires that obstruct good moral intentions to consume second-hand clothing. By engaging empirically with moral decision-making, our research theoretically advances scholarship on virtue ethics and second-hand clothing consumption, whilst contributing to an ethically informed vision of the circular economy. We conclude with implications for charity retail practices in support of circularity and sustainability informed by a virtue ethics perspective, as well as suggestions for future research. (shrink)

La nature exacte du rapport de Foucault aux Lumières n’est pas aisée à déterminer. Cet article part de l’hypothèse selon laquelle Foucault lit l’héritage des Lumières au prisme de la tradition socialiste ultérieure, c’est-à-dire au prisme des différentes variantes du projet d’émancipation né dans le sillage de la critique socio-politique des Lumières et de la Révolution française. Foucault est hostile à l’idée même d’un idéal de libération globale et universellement valable, c’est pourquoi il s’emploie à déconstruire les fondements philosophiques d’une (...) telle idée : le rationalisme, le progressisme et l’humanisme modernes, qui trouvent leur source au xviii e siècle. Cet objectif est un fil rouge qui donne une cohérence à sa trajectoire intellectuelle malgré les évolutions qui s’y font jour. (shrink)

Dans cet article, l’auteur émet ses réflexions sur la précarité des liens d’attachement parent-enfant et homme-femme que semblent procurer les nouveaux modes de vie des sociétés modernes. Pour situer ses propos, l’auteur expose comment les comportements d’attachement auraient été façonnés par la sélection naturelle, pour ensuite être minimisés par la sélection culturelle, ainsi que les conséquences que cela pourrait avoir sur les individus et sur ces sociétés.

Cet article porte sur les enjeux de l’émergence de la Révolution française comme moment de rupture fondatrice dans l’œuvre du second Lukács, à partir des années 1930. Ce prisme permet de reconsidérer ce qui est généralement présenté comme le tournant stalinien de l’auteur. Lukács voit dans les prises de position à l’égard de la Révolution française le révélateur de lignes de fracture philosophiques, esthétiques et idéologiques majeures du monde moderne. Sur cette base, il élabore une lecture marxiste hétérodoxe du champ (...) intellectuel comme lieu d’affrontement entre irrationalisme et rationalisme, romantisme et réalisme. Cette réinterprétation n’est pas sans conséquences politiques : elle justifie une ligne qu’on peut qualifier de marxiste humaniste, qui implique une critique des travers du stalinisme. (shrink)

The comments on the French Revolution by the young Marx and Engels are well-known and have been abundantly discussed. However, what is less known is that they belonged to a generation of German intellectual activists who, in the 1830s and 1840s, constantly used the French Enlightenment as a key reference to assess contemporary German philosophy and political life. This article provides an analysis of the two diverging positions on such questions articulated by two representatives of this generation: Ludwig Börne who (...) elaborated a German version of Jacobinism, and Bruno Bauer, a young Hegelian who promoted a German philosophical revolution whose radicalism and spiritual depth was capable of surpassing that of the French Revolution. Thus, as underlined by Lucien Calvié, the relationship of German intellectuals to the French Revolution during the Vormärz (pre-March) appears as an ambiguous one: just as the fox with the grapes in La Fontaine’s fable, left-wing Germans viewed revolutionary France with a mixture of envy and frustration. (shrink)

Awareness of science encouraged through events in 2017.

This paper explores the gendered discourses of the – seemingly favourable – media coverage that certain Heads of State received for their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking at media reports published in different English-speaking outlets in the US, the UK, India, Bangladesh, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland, and using multimodal feminist critical discourse analysis, we identify and describe strategies that on the surface appear to challenge hegemonic – and largely masculine – discourses of leadership. Upon closer scrutiny, these (...) superficially complimentary reports rather reinforce and naturalise discriminatory gender ideologies, and, as we demonstrate, they do so to different degrees along a continuum of essentialising, contextualising, and problematising. We critically discuss the discursive and visual processes involved and show that complimenting these leaders on their performance compares them against a masculine norm to construct their leadership as ‘alternative’, exceptional, and hence marked. This gendered portrayal of political leadership in times of crisis illustrates how the discursive construction of identities, responsibilities, and relationships during COVID-19 largely hinges on power relations and political ideologies that systematically disadvantage and undermine women. The purportedly positive form in which this occurs makes it particularly difficult to challenge and subvert these discriminatory discourses and their underlying gendered ideologies. (shrink)

Objectives To understand the ethical principles guiding college students’ abstention from pharmacological cognitive enhancement, and to determine the correlates associated with endorsing different principles. Design One-stage cluster sampling was used to implement a paper-based survey among undergraduate students attending one university in the U.S. Thematic analysis was used to explore the ethical principles guiding PCE abstention. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to examine sociodemographic correlates associated with endorsed ethical principles. Participants Of the 499 eligible students who completed the survey, (...) 259 students had a negative attitude towards PCE, did not engage in PCE, and provided reasons for abstention. Results The thematic analysis resulted in the identification of eight themes, with respondents often endorsing more than one theme per response. The three themes most endorsed were non-malfeasance, disapproval of drugs and dosage beneficence. The sociodemographic correlates associated with endorsing each theme varied across themes. Conclusions Students abstain from PCE for a multitude of reasons, many of which are guided by ethical principles. These findings may be incorporated into future prevention programming messages. (shrink)

Most current modeling for evolution of communication still underplays or ignores the role of local action in spatialized environments: the fact that it is immediate neighbors with which one tends to communicate, and from whom one learns strategies or conventions of communication. Only now are the lessons of spatialization being learned in a related field: game-theoretic models for cooperation. In work on altruism, on the other hand, the role of spatial organization has long been recognized under the term ‘viscosity’. Here (...) we offer some simple simulations that dramatize the importance of spatialization for studies of both cooperation and communication, in each case contrasting a model dynamics in which strategy change proceeds globally, and a spatialized model dynamics in which interaction and strategy change both operate purely locally. Local action in a spatialized model clearly favors the emergence of cooperation. In the case of communication, spatialized models allow communication to arise and flourish where the global dynamics more typical in the literature make it impossible. Simulations make a dramatic case for spatialized modeling, but analysis proves difficult. In a final section we outline some of the surprises of spatial dynamics but also some of the complexity facing attempts at deeper analysis. (shrink)

Email archives are important historical resources, but access to such data poses a unique archival challenge and many born-digital collections remain dark, while questions of how they should be effectively made available remain. This paper contributes to the growing interest in preserving access to email by addressing the needs of users, in readiness for when such collections become more widely available. We argue that for the content of email to be meaningfully accessed, the context of email must form part of (...) this access. In exploring this idea, we focus on discovery within large, multi-custodian archives of organisational email, where emails’ network features are particularly apparent. We introduce our prototype search tool, which uses AI-based methods to support user-driven exploration of email. Specifically, we integrate two distinct AI models that generate systematically different types of results, one based upon simple, phrase-matching and the other upon more complex, BERT embeddings. Together, these provide a new pathway to contextual discovery that accounts for the diversity of future archival users, their interests and level of experience. (shrink)

Growing interest in embedded research approaches—where research is incorporated into clinical care—has spurred numerous studies to generate knowledge relevant to the real-world needs of patients and other stakeholders. However, it also has presented ethical challenges. An emerging challenge is how to understand the nature and extent of investigators’ obligations to patient-subjects. Prior scholarship on investigator duties has generally been grounded upon the premise that research and clinical care are distinct activities, bearing distinct duties. Yet this premise—and its corresponding implications—are challenged (...) when research and clinical care are deliberately integrated. After presenting three case studies from recent pragmatic clinical trials, we identify six differences between explanatory trials and embedded research that limit the application of existing scholarship for ascertaining investigator duties. We suggest that these limitations indicate a need to account for the implications of usual care and to move beyond a narrow focus on the investigator-subject dyad, one that better reflects the team- and institution-based nature of contemporary health systems. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals.

Organizations do moral wrong. States pursue unjust wars, businesses avoid tax, charities misdirect funds. Our social, political, and legal responses require guidance. We need to know what we’re responding to and how we should respond to it. We need a metaphysical and moral theory of wrongful organizations. This book provides a new such theory, paying particular attention to questions that have been underexplored in existing debates. These questions include: where are organizations located as material objects in the natural world? What’s (...) the metaphysical relation between organizations and their members? Can organizations be blameworthy for attitudes and character traits, as well as for actions? What about feelings of guilt, remorse, and shame—can organizations feel these emotions and why does this matter? How and why are members implicated in organizations’ wrongs? How should organizations’ reparative costs be apportioned among members? The book answers these questions. It argues that organizations are material objects with humans as material parts—much like how a pizza is a material object with slices as material parts. This picture helps us make sense of organizations’ blameworthiness, including blame for organization-level actions, attitudes, and character traits. The book argues that organizations can experience moral self-awareness—a crucial component of guilt, remorse, and shame. Members can be implicated in organizations’ actions in numerous ways—and, it is argued, members’ level of implication should determine their share of organizations’ reparative burdens. (shrink)

There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cognitive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mechanism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors that are crucial for the reproductive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model, (...) together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature. It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empathy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of development, and situations. Key Words: altruism; cognitive empathy ; comparative; emotion; emotional contagion; empathy ; evolution; human; perception-action; perspective taking. (shrink)

"For never are the ways of music moved without the greatest political laws being moved."Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Ginsberg's "Howl" both contain the description of a voluntary self-sacrifice, symbolically committed by the poets themselves. In this article, we propose to study these sacrificial representations, and the mechanism underlying them, in the light of René Girard's scapegoat theory, in order to show the function that these sacrifices play in society. The analysis is also based on formal considerations, especially the use (...) these two poets make of the long free verse, also called "verset."1The theme of sacrifice and the identification of the poets with Christ have already been analyzed, but never... (shrink)

Smart city discourses often invoke the Panopticon, a disciplinary architecture designed by Jeremy Bentham and popularly theorized by Michel Foucault, as a model for understanding the social impact of AI technologies. This framing focuses attention almost exclusively on the negative ramifications of Urban AI, correlating ubiquitous surveillance, centralization, and data consolidation with AI development, and positioning technologies themselves as the driving factor shaping privacy, sociality, equity, access, and autonomy in the city. This paper describes an alternative diagram for Urban AI—the (...) Polyopticon: a distributed, polyvalent, multi-modal network of synthetic intelligences. It posits that fourth industrial revolution technologies change the political, social, and psychodynamic relationships of sentience and witness in the city, shifting the effects of watching and watched beyond the exclusive domain of top-down surveillance and discipline. The Polyopticon poses a more expansive and ambivalent spectrum of possibilities for Urban AI scenarios, one that undermines the totalizing, singular, and cerebral notion of intelligence that so often characterizes Urban AI and smart city critiques. (shrink)

This article analyzes the sex and gender identity rhetoric of members of the Intersex Society of North America, which is a self-help and advocacy group whose main goals are to stop unnecessary genital surgery in ambiguously sexed infants and make medical histories available to adult intersexuals. By examining the organization's indebtedness to feminist and gay/lesbian/transperson theory and practice, the article shows how these political movements have progressively challenged the equation of sex with gender and how intersexuality exemplifies the theoretical and (...) practical problems of identity politics. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 9-17, May–June 2022.