This article explores three dimensions of the current state of gender equality in Serbia: public policy on gender equality, public opinion on gender equality and the context of Serbia’s accession to the EU. Using data from the recent public opinion survey of citizens’ attitudes towards gender equality, the authors address the following issues: harmonization of public policy on gender equality in Serbia with EU policies; differences between public policy on gender equality in Serbia and citizens’ preferences; convergences/divergences between citizens (...) of Serbia and EU citizens regarding gender equality. As Serbia’s policy of promoting gender equality in the last decade has been dominated by the political goal of accession to the EU, it shows where the opinions converge, and where there are certain differences. The authors show the complexity of ideological positions among average Serbian citizens, while highlighting different paradigms in the official public policy on gender equality. While Serbian citizens still do not place gender equality high on their political agenda, they are convinced that it has a certain value, which does provide some important pointers for the future. (shrink)

Les auteurs posent la question des retentissements du deuil d’une figure parentale dans l’enfance sur les remaniements liés à la construction psychique de la paternité. Elles formulent cette problématique théorique en s’étayant sur l’analyse du cas de Marc, futur primipère ayant vécu le deuil de son propre père dans son enfance. Les auteurs soulignent que devenir père nécessite, pour le sujet, de parvenir à s’identifier à ses imagos parentales et de s’étayer sur ses représentations de la fonction parentale, et discutent (...) du destin de l’objet interne lorsque le parent réel est décédé. En particulier, la nouvelle paternité implique le renoncement aux objets parentaux idéalisés, question à mettre en lien avec l’idéalisation du défunt qui intervient toujours dans le deuil, au moins dans les premiers temps. En outre, l’accession à la paternité réactive des angoisses de mort et de castration, processus entrant en synergie avec le réveil de ces mêmes angoisses dans le deuil. Cette étude clinique ouvre aux questions de la parentification du garçon orphelin et de l’impact de cette dernière sur la construction ultérieure de la paternité. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to provide a description, an analysis and an explanation of Mitteleuropa and of other closely related concepts, such as East-Central Europe. The first section briefly addresses the broad historiographical issues. The second addresses the more strictly political and intellectual history of the concept in the period between 1975 and 1989 while the third section will describe the evolution of the concept after the end of the Cold War. The final part outlines the future directions (...) in which the concept will change. (shrink)

The establishment of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights was a pivotal moment for the African human rights system. To date, 30 of the African Union’s 55 member states have accepted the Court’s jurisdiction by ratifying the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Establishment of an African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. This article uses statistical analysis of state action on the Protocol to shed light upon the factors that have led (...) some states to accept the Court’s jurisdiction and other states to thus far decline to do so. The results provide strong support for accounts of the origins of international human rights regimes that emphasize transitional states’ desire to “lock in” new commitments to democracy and human rights. Potential compliance costs, regimes’ ideological orientations, domestic legal traditions, and regional dynamics have also exerted significant effects upon the likelihood of ratification. (shrink)

This paper argues that abortion access is an important subject for bioethics scholarship and reflects on the relationship between legal frameworks and access to care. The author uses the example of the United Kingdom to examine the benefits and limitations of abortion-permissive legal frameworks in terms of access. These are legal frameworks that enable the provision of abortion but subject to restrictions. An abortion-permissive regime—first in Great Britain and then in Northern Ireland—has gone some way to improving access to care (...) over time. However, aspects of the regime (that lead to its description as permissive rather than supportive of abortion) have the potential to endanger abortion access in the future and so legal reform is necessary. (shrink)

Political liberals assume an accessibility requirement, which means that, for ensuring civic respect and non-manipulation, public officials should offer accessible reasons during political advocacy. Recently, critics have offered two arguments to show that the accessibility requirement is unnecessary. The first is the pluralism argument: Given the pluralism in evaluative standards, when officials offer non-accessible reasons, they are not disrespectful because they may merely try to reveal their strongest reason. The second is the honesty argument: As long as officials honestly confess (...) their beliefs after offering non-accessible reasons, disrespect and non-manipulation do not occur. This paper defends the accessibility requirement and asserts that these two arguments overlook a unique feature of the political domain. While all citizens collectively own political power as a corporate body, an official does not privately own her political power. Instead, she is a trustee who has a duty to act on behalf of the corporate body, that is, she has to make decisions on grounds that are accessible to others. This duty explains why, despite pluralism, the accessibility requirement is necessary. Moreover, given that political decisions are profoundly influential to each person, requiring people to be honest is ineffective in discouraging disrespectful and manipulative acts. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the debate on the accessibility of religious reasons, as it exists within the public reason literature, has insufficiently identified what it is that makes a religious reason for political action accessible. I thus explore a new route of analysis, one that takes seriously how religious reasons can be accessed via emotion. Emotions, I claim, are not only a source of justification for believers, but they allow non-religious citizens to feel the force of religious reasons (...) more than they otherwise would. (shrink)

Clinical ethics support services are developing in Europe. They will be most useful if they are designed to match the ethical concerns of clinicians. We conducted a cross-sectional mailed survey on random samples of general physicians in Norway, Switzerland, Italy, and the UK, to assess their access to different types of ethics support services, and to describe what makes them more likely to have used available ethics support. Respondents reported access to formal ethics support services such as clinical ethics committees (...) (23%), consultation in individual cases (17.6%), and individual ethicists (8.8%), but also to other kinds of less formal ethics support (23.6%). Access to formal ethics support services was associated with work in urban hospitals. Informal ethics resources were more evenly distributed. Although most respondents (81%) reported that they would find help useful in facing ethical difficulties, they reported having used the available services infrequently (14%). Physicians with greater confidence in their knowledge of ethics (P = 0.001), or who had had ethics courses in medical school (P = 0.006), were more likely to have used available services. Access to help in facing ethical difficulties among general physicians in the surveyed countries is provided by a mix of official ethics support services and other resources. Developing ethics support services may benefit from integration of informal services. Development of ethics education in medical school curricula could lead to improved physicians sensititity to ethical difficulties and greater use of ethics support services. Such support services may also need to be more proactive in making their help available. (shrink)

We investigate the order in which speakers produce the proper names of couples they know personally in English and Japanese, two languages with markedly different constituent word orders. Results demonstrate that speakers of both languages tend to produce the name of the person they feel closer to before the name of the other member of the couple (N = 180). In this way, speakers’ unique personal histories give rise to a remarkably systematic linguistic generalization in both English and Japanese. Insofar (...) as closeness serves as an index of cognitive accessibility, the current work demonstrates that systematicity emerges from a domain-general property of memory. (shrink)

As nursing professionals, we believe access to healthcare is fundamental to health and that it is a determinant of health. Therefore, evidence suggesting access to healthcare is problematic for many Indigenous peoples is concerning. While biomedical perspectives underlie our current understanding of access, considering alternate perspectives could expand our awareness of and ability to address this issue. In this paper, we critique how access to healthcare is understood through a biomedical lens, how a postcolonial theoretical lens can extend that understanding, (...) and the subsequent implications this alternative view raises for the nursing profession. Drawing on peer‐reviewed published and gray literature concerning healthcare access and Indigenous peoples to inform this critique, we focus on the underlying theoretical lens shaping our current understanding of access. A postcolonial analysis provides a way of understanding healthcare as a social space and social relationship, presenting a unique perspective on access to healthcare. The novelty of this finding is of particular importance for the profession of nursing, as we are well situated to influence these social aspects, improving access to healthcare services broadly, and among Indigenous peoples specifically. (shrink)

The development of new effective but expensive medical treatments leads to discussions about whether and how such treatments should be funded in solidarity-based healthcare systems. Solidarity is often seen as an elusive concept; it appears to be used to refer to different sets of concerns, and its interrelations with the concept of justice are not well understood. This paper provides a conceptual analysis of the concept of solidarity as it is used in discussions on the allocation of healthcare resources and (...) the funding of expensive treatments. It contributes to the clarification of the concept of solidarity by identifying in the literature and discussing four uses of the concept: (1) assisting patients in need, (2) upholding the solidarity-based healthcare system, (3) willingness to contribute and (4) promoting equality. It distinguishes normative and descriptive uses of the concept and outlines the overlap and differences between solidarity and justice. Our analysis shows that the various uses of the concept of solidarity point to different, even conflicting, ethical stances on whether and how access to effective, expensive treatments should be provided. We conclude that the concept of solidarity has a role to play in discussions on the accessibility and funding of newly approved medical treatments. It requires, for instance, that healthcare policies promote and maintain both societal willingness to contribute to the care of others and the value of providing care to vulnerable patients through public funding. (shrink)

Access internalism about epistemic justification is the thesis that a person’s justification for a belief is directly accessible to that person, in the sense that the person can have direct awareness of whatever is functioning as the actual justification for the belief. This thesis is distinguished into a weak and a strong version, and a number of arguments in favor of the access internalist position are assessed. It is concluded that none of the arguments in support of access internalism is (...) satisfactory. (shrink)

Securing equitable antibiotic access as an essential component for health system resilience and pandemic preparedness requires a systems perspective. This article discusses key components that need to be coordinated and paired with adequate financing and resources to ensure antibiotic effectiveness as a global public good, which should be central while discussing a new global agreement.

In their comprehensive article, Bayefsky and Berkman outline a framework for limiting access to certain types of fetal genetic information through professional self-regulation. Given the rap...

As assisted reproductive technologies become increasingly popular, debate has intensified over the ethical justification for restricting access to ART based on various medical and non-medical factors. In 2010, the Australian state of Victoria enacted world-first legislation that denies access to ART for all patients with certain criminal or child protection histories. Patients and their partners are identified via a compulsory police and child protection check prior to commencing ART and, if found to have a previous relevant conviction or child protection (...) order, are given a “presumption against treatment.” This article reviews the legislation and identifies arguments that may be used to justify restricting access to ART for various reasons. The arguments reviewed include limitations of reproductive rights, inheriting undesirable genetic traits, distributive justice, and the welfare of the future child. We show that none of these arguments justifies restricting access to ART in the context of past criminal history. We show that a “presumption against treatment” is an unjustified infringement on reproductive freedom and that it creates various inconsistencies in current social, medical, and legal policy. We argue that a state-enforced policy of restricting access to ART based on the non-medical factor of past criminal history is an example of unjust discrimination and cannot be ethically justified, with one important exception: in cases where ART treatment may be considered futile on the basis that the parents are not expected to raise the resulting child. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays reporting the successes, failures, and barriers contributing to a lack of educational access in developing countries. The international contributors to this volume work in communities that are in the front lines of the battle to achieve universal access to education for everyone.

In his "Access Denied to Zombies", Gualtiero Piccinini argues that the possibility of zombies does not entail the falsity of physicalism, since the accessibility relation can be understood so that even in S5 system for modal logic worlds inaccessible from our world are allowed (in the case in which the accessibility relation is understood as an equivalence rather than as universal accessibility). According to Piccinini, whether the zombie world is accessible from our world depends on whether physicalism is true in (...) our world, which is something that cannot be answered in a non-question-begging way. In order to show this, he recalls a well known strategy of making a parody of the zombie argument. After pointing out that Piccinini's strategy of parodying the zombie argument renders his former strategy, based on the distinguishing between the two notions of accessibility, redundant, I recall the two ways of handling parodies of the zombie argument. In addition, I argue that persisting on the distinction between accessibility understood as an equivalence and universal accessibility in dealing with the zombie argument relies upon accepting modal dualism (a view that there are two spaces of possibilities rather than one), which is something usually dismissed for methodological reasons (simplicity in particular). Given that Piccinini has not provided new arguments neither in favour of modal dualism nor in favour of parodying the zombie argument, the conclusion he infers remains unsupported by the premises he uses. (shrink)

The motivation of the study is to gauge the effects of access to finance, technical know-how, and financial literacy on women’s empowerment through establishing women’s entrepreneurial development. A sample of 950 women-owned SMEs was considered, and structured questionnaires were sent from getting target responses. After careful assessment through the data cleansing procedure, it was found that only 795 responses are suitable for further investigation, implying the sample response rate for the study is 74.71%. The study implemented structural equation modeling and (...) multivariate regression analysis for gauging the causal association that is direct and indirect effects of target variables. According to findings, a positive statistically significant linkage was revealed with women’s entrepreneurship sustainability and women empowerment. Furthermore, the mediating effects were also established for women’s empowerment. According to the study findings, it is suggested that for women entrepreneurship sustainability, effective policies surrounding financing accessibility, technical knowledge expansion, and financial understating have to be promulgated in the economy, which allows bringing women empowerment at large. (shrink)

Self-control is that which is enacted to align our behaviour with intentions, motives, or better judgment in the face of conflicting impulses of motives. In this paper, I ask, what explains interpersonal differences in self-control? After defending a functionalist conception of self-control, I argue that differences in self-control are analogous to differences in mobility: they are modulated by inherent traits and environmental supports and constraints in interaction. This joint effect of individual (neuro)biology and environmental factors is best understood in terms (...) of access to self-control behaviours. I sketch an account of access as including the three criteria of means, awareness, and non-excessive effort. I further demonstrate that people with disorders such as ADHD have limited access to self-control behaviours and stand therefore at a disadvantage with regard to self-control. (shrink)

This paper examines older people’s access to care experiences in rural China by integrating anthropological investigation with ethical inquiry. Six months of fieldwork in a post-reform primary hospital show how rural residents struggle to access gerontological and nursing care under socially disadvantageous conditions. This anthropological investigation highlights the unmet needs in medical and nursing care for older people, as well as some social, institutional and structural elements that impede access to care. Centring on protecting the vulnerable as informed by feminist (...) ethics scholarship, this paper argues that the failure to meet older people’s dependency needs is unjust, on the premise that it suggests a denial of the inherent value, rights and dignity of older people. This paper appeals for the provision of greater care and support by the state through putting in place social arrangements that better advance older people’s access to care. Some policy recommendations concerning health and social care reform for older people in rural China are also proposed. (shrink)

“Intervention” is not synonymous with “care.” For an intervention to constitute care—which patients should have a right to access—it must be technically feasible and licit. Now these criteria do not prove sufficient; numerous archaic interventions remain feasible and legally permissible, yet are now bywords for spurious care. Therefore, we propound another necessary condition for an intervention to become care: the physician must rationally judge the intervention to be conducive to the patient’s good. Consequently, the right of access-to-care relies on physicians (...) being free to practice medicine in accord with their consciences, conscience being the rational faculty with which they judge the reasonableness of even mundane medical decisions. Since physicians operate as part of a community, it is further necessary to consider when central bodies may reasonably compel physicians to engage in interventions that the physician believes are not consistent with the patient’s good and/or are not congruent with the purposes of medicine. (shrink)

Laurie Zoloth; Limiting Access to Medical Treatment in an Age of Medical Progress: Developing a Catholic Consensus: A Response from Jewish Tradition, Christian.

In the present paper we argue that besides four traditional methods of property acquisition – that is, homesteading, production, voluntary transfer and rectification of injustice – libertarianism also recognizes a fifth method, namely the method of accession. We contend that not only have some libertarian scholars implicitly embraced the accession principle, but also that if libertarianism wants to distribute exclusive ownership to indivisible things produced from inputs supplied by two or more parties without running into conflict with its (...) own principles of justice, it has to recognize accession as the fifth mode of appropriation. As the main thesis of the paper goes against the received view concerning the very core of libertarianism, that is, its methods of property acquisition, the text indicates some new developments within the libertarian theory of justice. (shrink)

"Accessibility" is a crucial concept of possible worlds semantics. The simplest approach to accessibility is the "magical theory" that construes this relation as analogous to spatial or temporal relations. In this paper I give a nonmagical structural account of the accessibility relation that can be used to give a necessitarian account of kinds and laws. Laws are characterized in a structural way as stable invariants of the world's gestalt. Finally, I point out how the structural approach can be embedded in (...) a general representational theory of modality. (shrink)

The present paper examines the arguments and data presented by Nisbett and Wilson relevant to their thesis that subjects do not have access to their own cognitive processes. It is concluded that their review of previous research is selective and incomplete and that the data they present in behalf of their thesis does not withstand a demand characteristics analysis. Furthermore, their use of observer-subject similarity as evidence of subjects' inability to access cognitive processes makes tests of their hypothesis confounded and, (...) at the same time, reveals limitations in the application of the pre-inquiry quasi-control to research on social behavior. Problems with postexperiment questionnaires, such as the demand characteristics of the inquiry procedure are also considered. Although there are difficulties in assessing subjects' cognitive processes, many of these may be overcome through the application of novel techniques and research conducted on more traditional methods. In contrast to the view that subjects have limited access to cognitive processes and that their verbal reports are not valid, it is concluded that subjects' verbalizations are a rich source of psychological data which must be pursued if we are to tap their cognitive processes and are to gain an adequate understanding of human behavior. (shrink)

Conversations between healthcare workers and patients are of ethical import and ought to be regarded as a significant healthcare practice in their own right. Yet patients’ ability to voice concerns about their care to a healthcare worker should not be taken for granted. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s embodied and interpersonal conception of human agency, I argue that phenomenology as a critical practice enables us to recognize that conversations with others, much like physical spaces, are places whose accessibility is not guaranteed. I (...) then examine how issues of conversational accessibility are at play in the larger context of public health research and how we might rethink existing practices in light of community-based participatory research. (shrink)

By exploiting a concept called ways of believing, I offer a plausible reformulation of the doctrine of privileged access. This reformulation will provide us with a defense of compatibilism, the view that content externalism and privileged access are compatible.

Public access television has been one of the most interesting and controversial developments in the intersection between media and democracy within the past several decades. Beginning in the 1970s, cable systems began to offer access channels to the public, so that groups and individuals could make programs for other individuals in their own communities. Access systems began to proliferate and access programming has been cablecast regularly in such places as New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Madison, Urbana, Austin, and (...) perhaps as many as 4,000 other towns or regions (Linder.. (shrink)

Consider the conscious states of a single subject at a time. Arguably, split-brain cases show that such states need not be jointly accessible. It is less clear that these cases also show that such states need not be jointly experienced. Michael Tye (2004) argues split-brain cases do have that implication, and Timothy Bayne and David Chalmers (2003) argue that they do not. I will develop two objections to Tye’s arguments. First, an analogy to blindsight on which he relies is questionable. (...) Second, even if his analogy succeeds, it shows only that a single person can simultaneously have two separate sets of phenomenally conscious mental states. That result fails to undermine the phenomenalunity thesis that Bayne and Chalmers defend, on which phenomenal consciousness is necessarily unified. (shrink)

The scientific modern Western pronouncement that everything has to be treated with objective impartiality requires the positing of our own culture as one among others, having no value claim to be privileged in its various pronouncements. The claim to scientific objectivity is an aspect of Western modern culture and belongs only to its interpretive context. Hence, the very claim to Western scientific superiority as having methods to access all phenomena objectively is a culture bound position that cannot be universal. After (...) all, “objectively speaking” other cultures, as equal, have very different understandings that do not include such tandems as “objectivity” or for that matter “subjectivity.” Culturally objectively speaking, we cannot deny them their different reading of cultural, and indeed all other, phenomena. To say that the others are wrong would be tantamount to saying that we have a criterion of the “right culture” which belongs only to our culture. But in this sense, one abolishes the treatment of other cultures as given objectively and equivalently. We then would posit our scientific culture as universal and require that all others interpret themselves in terms of our own requirements. If social theory is part of modern western culture, then it is limited by that culture and cannot claim universality. (shrink)

La Convention sur les droits des personnes handicapées (ONU, 2006) a déclaré que la participation à la vie sociale est un droit fondamental de l’homme, soulignant l’importance de repenser le concept d’accessibilité dans les espaces culturels. Les sites du patrimoine culturel, ainsi que les musées et les galeries, expriment un intérêt majeur pour l’adoption de stratégies visant à améliorer l’accessibilité et la participation de tous. Nous avons utilisé un paradigme de recherche inclusive, impliquant activement un groupe d’individus souffrant de handicaps (...) intellectuels (DI) dans le but d’étudier les perceptions et les idées des participants sur les obstacles/facilitateurs de l’accessibilité des connaissances. Une attention particulière a été accordée à la lisibilité et à la compréhension des ressources textuelles existantes dans un site du patrimoine culturel. L’inclusion de personnes souffrant d’une DI comme informateurs tout au long du processus de recherche a permis non seulement d’évaluer leur point de vue, mais aussi de réaliser un questionnaire en utilisant des critères faciles à lire. Les principales variables évaluées par le biais du questionnaire sont les suivantes: (a) Perception et interaction physique avec les ressources de contenu, (b) Langage et symboles, (c) Compréhension du contenu, (d) Engagement avec les connaissances. Nous soutenons que le questionnaire proposé peut être utile pour informer le processus de création et de transformation des environnements d’apprentissage en adoptant un dialogue centré sur le public. Renforcer la contribution de la pédagogie spéciale dans ce domaine de recherche innovant signifie améliorer notre compréhension des besoins des personnes et de la complexité des résultats potentiels, dans une perspective d’inclusion. (shrink)

Fairness of access to assistive technology is important for its allocation on an equitable basis and for broader social justice and rights issues. Although the use of Daniels’s notion of “justice as fair opportunity” is helpful to the context of assistive technology, other aspects of Daniels’s broader conceptualisation of “just health” are not appropriate in this context. It is argued that fairness of access to assistive technology is crucial for the equitable attainment of the sustainable development goals; however, such access (...) will be achieved only by the sector developing a much stronger systems thinking and market shaping perspective. (shrink)

According to the zombie conceivability argument, phenomenal zombies are conceivable, and hence possible, and hence physicalism is false. Critics of the conceivability argument have responded by denying either that zombies are conceivable or that they are possible. Much of the controversy hinges on how to establish and understand what is conceivable, what is possible, and the link between the two—matters that are at least as obscure and controversial as whether consciousness is physical. Because of this, the debate over physicalism is (...) unlikely to be resolved by thinking about zombies—or at least, zombies as discussed by philosophers to date.



In this paper, I explore an alternative strategy against the zombie conceivability argument. I accept the possibility of zombies and ask whether that possibility is accessible (in the sense of ‘accessible’ used in possible world semantics) to our world. It turns out that the question of whether zombie worlds are accessible to our world is equivalent to the question of whether physicalism is true. By assuming that zombie worlds are accessible to our world, supporters of the zombie conceivability argument beg the question against physicalists. I will then consider what happens if a supporter of the zombie conceivability argument should insist that zombie worlds are accessible to our world. I will argue that the same ingredients used in the zombie conceivability argument—whatever they might be—can be used to construct an argument to the opposite conclusion. If that is correct, we reach a stalemate between physicalism and property dualism: while the possibility of some zombies entails property dualism, the possibility of other creatures entails physicalism. Since these two possibilities are inconsistent, one of them is not genuine. To resolve this stalemate, we need more than thought experiments. (shrink)