IntroductionTranscranial magnetic stimulation is a consolidated procedure for the treatment of depression, with several meta-analyses demonstrating its efficacy. Theta-burst stimulation is a modification of TMS with similar efficacy and shorter session duration. The geriatric population has many comorbidities and a high prevalence of depression, but few clinical trials are conducted specifically for this age group. TBS could be an option in this population, offering the advantages of few side effects and no pharmacological interactions. Therefore, our aim is to investigate the (...) efficacy of TBS in geriatric depression.Clinical trial registration[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/], identifier [NCT04842929]. (shrink)

In this article, we shed light on the debate about the financial performance of socially responsible investment (SRI) mutual funds by separately analyzing the contributions of before-fee performance and fees to SRI funds' performance, and by investigating the role played by fund management companies in the determination of those variables. We apply the matching estimator methodology to obtain our results and find that in the period 1997–2005, US SRI funds had better beforeand after-fee performance than conventional funds with similar characteristics. (...) The differences, however, are driven exclusively by SRI funds run by management companies specialized in SRI. While these funds significantly outperform similar conventional funds, funds run by companies not specialized in SRI underperform their matched conventional funds. We find no significant differences in fees between SRI and conventional funds except in one case: SRI funds are cheaper than conventional funds run by the same management company. (shrink)

Synthetic biologists design and engineer organisms for a better and more sustainable future. While the manifold prospects are encouraging, concerns about the uncertain risks of genome editing affect public opinion as well as local regulations. As a consequence, biosafety and associated concepts, such as the Safe-by-design framework and genetic safeguard technologies, have gained notoriety and occupy a central position in the conversation about genetically modified organisms. Yet, as regulatory interest and academic research in genetic safeguard technologies advance, the implementation in (...) industrial biotechnology, a sector that is already employing engineered microorganisms, lags behind. The main goal of this work is to explore the utilization of genetic safeguard technologies for designing biosafety in industrial biotechnology. Based on our results, we posit that biosafety is a case of a changing value, by means of further specification of how to realize biosafety. Our investigation is inspired by the Value Sensitive Design framework, to investigate scientific and technological choices in their appropriate social context. Our findings discuss stakeholder norms for biosafety, reasonings about genetic safeguards, and how these impact the practice of designing for biosafety. We show that tensions between stakeholders occur at the level of norms, and that prior stakeholder alignment is crucial for value specification to happen in practice. Finally, we elaborate in different reasonings about genetic safeguards for biosafety and conclude that, in absence of a common multi-stakeholder effort, the differences in informal biosafety norms and the disparity in biosafety thinking could end up leading to design requirements for compliance instead of for safety. (shrink)

El objetivo de este pequeño trabajo es ayudar a comprender la necesidad de la composición real en el ser participado. Lo hacemos sirviéndonos de una parte de la magnífica obra del p. Fabro, La noción metafísica de participación. En la primera parte de nuestro trabajo nos serviremos de algunos de los textos de Santo Tomás que reportaba el p. Fabro, los que más nos ayuden a comprender la demostración. En la segunda, y al mismo efecto, estudiaremos el silogismo del p. (...) Fabro, con el cual dicho autor trataba de condensar la demostración de la composición real en todo ser participado. (shrink)

The article discusses how Judith Butler's theory of gender, mainly based on what the author called metaphysics of substance, operates a desontologization of sex-gender experiences. For this, it exposes how Butler operates the desontologization of the gendered subject, through her feminist critique of the idea of ​​subject conceived from the mark of sexual difference. Later, it dedicates to what Butler called the “metaphysics of substance”, seen as what sustains, within the framework of the binary sex-gender system, the idea of ​​natural (...) difference of bodies, a moment in which the author resorts to the genealogy of morals developed by Nietzsche to justify her genealogy of gender and bodies, seeing these as inseparable, which is why she concludes that, in the manner of gender, the production of bodies occurs in a performative way through contextualized recitations that establish the boundaries of human intelligibility and that, therefore, it is subject to transformation. (shrink)

This article proposes, with a focus on discussions around norms and bodies, to expose the conceptions of power, as well as the application of its concept, in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. It begins by exposing the conception of power found in Foucault. After that, the connection between Foucault's thought and Butler's thought begins, explaining how Foucault's conception of power is inserted in the North American philosopher's theory of gender. Finally, the appropriations made by Butler of Foucault's thought regarding the (...) productive aspects of power in the fabrication of intelligible genres are exposed. (shrink)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

Lifestyle refers to a set of personal and group behaviours related to normative and semantic aspects of social life. Any coherent set of behavioural patterns derived from religious teachings that exist in life can be considered a religious lifestyle. Considering that the dominant religion in Jordan is Islam, the present study focused on the Islamic lifestyle. In addition, given that the correct relationship between couples has been compared to life-giving blood in marriage, and since the quality of marital role plays (...) a determining role, the existence of communication skills in any of the couples can generate satisfaction and compatibility, whereas lack of awareness of these skills could cause misunderstandings and tension. Therefore, the current study aims to study the role of the Islamic lifestyle in communication skills of 250 Muslim couples of Jordan (Amman, Zarqa and Irbid) in 2022. Data were collected using questionnaires during four months, and the validity and reliability was confirmed. In addition, data analysis was performed in Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Linear Structural Relations (LISREL) using mean tests and structural equation modelling. According to the results, Islamic lifestyle had a positive, significant effect on the improvement of communication skills in Muslim couples in Jordan (P-value: 0.76; T-value: 7.92). Therefore, it is recommended that more attention should be paid to this issue by families, researchers and cultural authorities in the country.Contribution: Our findings revealed that Islamic lifestyle improved communication skills in Muslim couples, which demands special attention. By adhering to the Islamic lifestyle, couples can influence each other’s knowledge, emotions, education and growth, and try to have a realistic understanding of each other’s desires, needs, living environment and perceptions that each has in life issues. Furthermore, they can organise their role in the common life in appropriate ways to prevent problems and solve them in the event of problems. (shrink)

The book forms a balanced structure in which the three conceptual pillars of Spinoza's natural law theory (individuality, natural laws, and power) are first analyzed from the viewpoint of his ontology and then from the viewpoint of his ...

Epistemic impairment has been the decisive yardstick when excluding infants from political agency. One of the suggestions to bypass the epistemic requirement of political agency and to encourage the inclusion of infants in representative democracies is to resort to proxies or surrogates who share or advocate interests which may be coincidental with their interests. However, this solution is far from desirable, given that it privileges the political agency of parents, guardians and trustees over other adult citizens. This article offers an (...) alternative to this conceptual frame of reference by making a case for the political agency of infants. Firstly, it maintains that political agency can be understood in terms of the several facets involved in political representation. Secondly, it claims that the all-affected principle can be reformulated as an ‘infant-affected-interests principle’ in light of which infants are members of the class of the represented. Thirdly, it explores the ways through which this political agency can occur without having to resort to alternative conceptions of representation. The conclusion ascertains that infant enfranchisement is highly undesirable and that there are more viable forms to promote infant political agency, such as virtual representation, infant-beneficial principles of political action and ombudspersons for infants. (shrink)

RESUMO Neste artigo, partindo de discussões da ironia como estratégia discursiva, propomo-nos a analisar se, e como, a ironia serve de zona de diálogo e de tensão entre diferentes vozes/dizeres, evidenciando-se como um discurso de resistência da mulher. Para tanto, partimos do entendimento de linguagem do chamado Círculo de Bakhtin e das discussões sobre ironia como estratégia discursiva, além de considerações sobre a chamada cultura do estupro e os mitos a ela relacionados. Tomamos como corpus comentários de mulheres nos quais (...) a ironia se faz presente, surgidos a partir de postagem anônima no Facebook, em páginas do tipo spotted1. A partir da análise dos dados, foi possível perceber que, por meio da apropriação dos discursos-mitos relacionados à cultura do estupro, as mulheres instauraram em seus enunciados zonas de tensão entre dizeres, caracterizando a ironia como discurso de resistência da mulher contra discursos machistas. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 368-389, April 2022. Epistemic impairment has been the decisive yardstick when excluding infants from political agency. One of the suggestions to bypass the epistemic requirement of political agency and to encourage the inclusion of infants in representative democracies is to resort to proxies or surrogates who share or advocate interests which may be coincidental with their interests. However, this solution is far from desirable, given that it privileges the political agency (...) of parents, guardians and trustees over other adult citizens. This article offers an alternative to this conceptual frame of reference by making a case for the political agency of infants. Firstly, it maintains that political agency can be understood in terms of the several facets involved in political representation. Secondly, it claims that the all-affected principle can be reformulated as an ‘infant-affected-interests principle’ in light of which infants are members of the class of the represented. Thirdly, it explores the ways through which this political agency can occur without having to resort to alternative conceptions of representation. The conclusion ascertains that infant enfranchisement is highly undesirable and that there are more viable forms to promote infant political agency, such as virtual representation, infant-beneficial principles of political action and ombudspersons for infants. (shrink)

Moral reasoning typically informs environmental decision-making by measuring the possible outcomes of policies or actions in light of a preferred ethical theory. This method is subject to many problems. Environmental pragmatism tries to overcome them, but it suffers also from some pitfalls. This paper proposes a new method of environmental pragmatism that avoids the problems of both the traditional method of environmental moral reasoning and of the general versions of environmental pragmatism. We call it 'justificatory moral pluralism' - it develops (...) the intuition that normative ethical theories need not be mutually exclusive. This leaves room for important forms of pluralist environmental ethics that do not require a once-and-for-all prior commitment to an ethical theory when deciding about policies or courses of action related to the protection of the environment. Justificatory moral pluralism offers a viable solution to the recurrent conflicts between efficient environmental decisions and the need for moral reasoning. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 368-389, April 2022. Epistemic impairment has been the decisive yardstick when excluding infants from political agency. One of the suggestions to bypass the epistemic requirement of political agency and to encourage the inclusion of infants in representative democracies is to resort to proxies or surrogates who share or advocate interests which may be coincidental with their interests. However, this solution is far from desirable, given that it privileges the political agency (...) of parents, guardians and trustees over other adult citizens. This article offers an alternative to this conceptual frame of reference by making a case for the political agency of infants. Firstly, it maintains that political agency can be understood in terms of the several facets involved in political representation. Secondly, it claims that the all-affected principle can be reformulated as an ‘infant-affected-interests principle’ in light of which infants are members of the class of the represented. Thirdly, it explores the ways through which this political agency can occur without having to resort to alternative conceptions of representation. The conclusion ascertains that infant enfranchisement is highly undesirable and that there are more viable forms to promote infant political agency, such as virtual representation, infant-beneficial principles of political action and ombudspersons for infants. (shrink)

A theory of intergenerational justice consists in the study of the moral and political status of the relations between present and past or future people, more specifically, of the obligations and entitlements they can potentially generate. The challenges that justify talking about responsibilities between generations are myriad. And the disputes they prompt can focus on the past just as much as on the present, even though the fact that the human species has reached a state of technological progress that enables (...) it to have an irredeemable impact on the planet and perhaps even endanger future human existence tends to make concerns about the future more pressing. Debates on intergenerational justice are twofold. The first revolves around the issue of whether claims of justice across generations whose members' lifetimes do not necessarily overlap could be justified. And the second revolves around the specific conception of justice in play, that is, around the nature of the standard that must be applied as well as around the identification of the contents of the duties that present generations supposedly have vis-à-vis past or future generations. This survey article depicts the conceptual and argumentative framework in which these debates are set. It aims to outline certain of the main features shared by the most influential contemporary theories of intergenerational justice, and the problems inherent in them. It concludes by suggesting that, even though the idea of succeeding generations is merely an abstraction, there are specific empirical states of affairs that require different theoretical responses to intergenerational justice. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOne of the recurrent motifs in political thought is the idea of the social contract, according to which a society, a government, or moral principles depend for their existence on agreements...

This paper develops a future-oriented and person-centred normative argument based on expectancies that is immune to most of the problems identified in the rights of future persons. The argument unfolds in four parts. The first draws on the notion of expectancies present in inheritance law and maintains that it is possible to formulate a rule of prospective beneficiaries that correlates with entitlements and legitimate claims without necessarily acquiring the status of rights. The second extends expectancies to future persons and concludes (...) that the latter can be considered present holders of such currently binding entitlements. The third section raises the question of whether democracies are bound to a principle of fidelity towards expectancies in such a way that outweighs current people’s rights in cases of conflicts. The response does not prove particularly future-beneficial in such cases. However, section four clarifies why expectancies still carry a crucial moral weight in democracies, one that is not sufficiently established by depersonalised forms of future-oriented ethics. (shrink)

The place of the State in Spinoza's ontology has emerged in scholarly literature as one of the most complex issues involving Spinoza's political thought. At issue is whether Spinoza's State is an actual individual with its own conatus . Some consider it a completely real individual, others say that its individuality can only be metaphoric, whilst others point out the conceptual insufficiency of this polarity for explaining the ontological status of political aggregates and try to overcome it through new concepts, (...) such as the multitude, transindividuality, and figuration. In this paper, each of these interpretations is analyzed and dismissed in favour of a new one stating that Spinoza's State is actually a dynamic network of political concepts operating in resemblance of individuality and reflecting the main characteristics of the modern Nation-State. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

This paper aims at answering some of the objections to the NIP’s criticism of the idea of rights of future persons. Those objections usually adopt different perspectives depending on how they understand differently the nature of the correlativity between rights and duties – some adopt a present-rights-of-future-persons view, others a future-rights-of-future-persons view, others a transitive present-rights-of-present-persons view, and others still an eternalist view of rights and persons. The paper will try to show that only a non-transitive present-rights-of-present-persons view can survive (...) the challenges posed by the notion of correlativity inherent in the NIP, and thus preserve rights language when discussing the future. This view is proved also more suitable for the legal and political realms, where policies and law-making are usually more concerned with present addressees and short term effects. (shrink)

In representative democracies, the absence of responsiveness by elected officials to the interests of the represented often generates problems of legitimacy, accountability and effectiveness. However, responsiveness also tends to narrow the time horizons of democratic decision-making and promote short-termism. This paper advances the notion that responsiveness to interests involving distant time horizons is possible by reconfiguring the franchise in a time-sensitive and future-oriented way. It is divided into two parts. The first pinpoints a few inconsistencies in the available proposals for (...) making responsiveness and the long term compatible (e.g., promoting youth turnout, narrowing the franchise to robust epistemic fitness, establishing future-oriented institutions). The second advances the creation of temporal electoral circles operating alongside territorial electoral circles in order to prompt responsiveness to multitemporal interests. The conclusion asserts that this kind of franchise design is the best available option for introducing temporal aspects into the character of democratic representation. (shrink)

O presente texto versa sobre as utilizações políticas que a conversão dos grupos indígenas suscitou na fronteira amazônica. A fronteira a que aludimos aqui diz respeito aos rios Marañon, Solimões e Negro, onde os limites das colônias europeias se encontravam. Se por um lado havia o caráter espiritual, em reduzir os indígenas a fé católica, por outro, as conversões foram amplamente utilizadas pelos estados ibéricos para garantir sua zona de influência, além de garantir a supremacia econômica no vale amazônico. E (...) além dos ibéricos, a conversão foi uma política na qual os indígenas se aproveitaram para tirar vantagens da condição de “vassalo do rei”, que o fato de se tornar católico expressava. Desse modo, o presente trabalho dialoga com os estudos de fronteira, sobretudo, com a noção de Missão como instituição de fronteira, além do Protagonismo Indígena, em demonstrar a perspectiva dos grupos nativos, frente ao processo de conversão. (shrink)

The political conception makes sense of human rights strictly in light of their role in international human rights practice, more specifically by describing how they justify interventions against states that engage in or fail to prevent human rights violations. This conception is, therefore, normative and fact-dependent. Beyond this, it does not seem to have much to say about the actual nature of international human rights practice. The argument sustained here reinterprets the political conception by resorting to a heuristic device that (...) explains how normativity can be fact-dependent: the Hartian model. The characteristics of H.L.A. Hart’s rule of recognition are useful to determine the characteristics of human rights practice from the viewpoint of the political conception. Also, they help to overcome some of the problems typically faced by the political conception, such as whether there is only one practice or many, whether the notion of human rights becomes too contingent on the way the world is currently organised, how agents can violate content-changing practices, or how reliance on current states of affairs leaves room for criticism of those states of affairs. (shrink)

In the debate between the Historische Rechtschule (Hugo and Savigny) and Hegel about who is legitimately entitled to develop legal theory, the former considered philosophy of law to be inherent to systematic science of law, whereas the latter considered the concept of Law in a necessary transdisciplinary dialectic – there would then be a difference between ‘the jurists’ philosophy of law’ and ‘the philosophers’ philosophy of law’. I will demonstrate that such distinction cannot stand. A ‘jurists’ philosophy of law’ does (...) not exist precisely because legal norms and their application are merely one of the law’s moments. The law’s attitude is one of inclusion: philosophy of law’s disciplinary autonomy occurs in the law’s interdisciplinary immanence. (shrink)

This selection of some of the best writings on Spinoza's philosophy of law shows how Spinoza was able to deliver a revolutionary idea of natural law that breaks away from the traditions of natural law and of legal positivism. The collection includes several essays that have never been published in the English language before, and features an introduction which places Spinoza's writing in the context of modern jurisprudence, as well as an extensive bibliography.

Through fourteen original essays, the book seeks to understand the viability of the notion of sovereignty in a globalized world, thus taking into account the inclusion of a language of rights, limitation and legitimacy. It examines sovereignty using a normative approach.

Embasado em pesquisa bibliográfica, no presente artigo, busca-se compreender a definição de desespero presente, de maneira original e pungente, na filosofia de André Comte-Sponville, e relacioná-la com a construção da felicidade. Segundo Sponville, o desespero é condição necessária e indispensável para compreender a natureza e ou matéria como fundamento de si mesma. Todos os males da humanidade são debitados, segundo o pensador em estudo, da virtude teologal da esperança. Sponville se apressa em apresentar sua própria virtude pessoal: o desespero, (...) remédio contra o veneno da esperança. A felicidade, por sua vez, é o resultado de todo desespero. Quem nada espera, realiza mais facilmente todos os seus desejos e se rejubila com a vida tal como ela é. Nesse sentido, a felicidade é verdadeira e possível. Se verá, portanto, que a sabedoria do desespero abri caminhos para a construção de uma felicidade desesperada. (shrink)

Legal positivism understands natural law as performing classifying connections between morality and law as tests of legal validity: if a norm with some pretence to legality contradicts a moral good, it cannot be called a legal norm. The new natural law school, however, claims that natural law develops qualifying connections between morality and law: tests of legal validity are performed by non-moral criteria such as due enactment or efficacy, and morality determines not what the law is, but rather which law (...) is legally binding and which is legally defective. This article will demonstrate that Aquinas’s endorsement of the lexeme lex iniusta non est lex cannot be interpreted in any of these senses. Rather, Aquinas’s strong version of natural law indicates clearly that it can indeed be a classifying criterion of positive law, and that it cannot be the only and exclusive criterion of legal validity. (shrink)

Legal positivism understands natural law as performing classifying connections between morality and law as tests of legal validity: if a norm with some pretence to legality contradicts a moral good, it cannot be called a legal norm. The new natural law school, however, claims that natural law develops qualifying connections between morality and law: tests of legal validity are performed by non-moral criteria such as due enactment or efficacy, and morality determines not what the law is, but rather which law (...) is legally binding and which is legally defective. This article will demonstrate that Aquinas's endorsement of the lexeme lex iniusta non est lex cannot be interpreted in any of these senses. Rather, Aquinas's strong version of natural law indicates clearly that it can indeed be a classifying criterion of positive law, and that it cannot be the only and exclusive criterion of legal validity. (shrink)

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societal-level analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self-transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective (...) autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s α statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and within-society agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research. (shrink)

This paper adopts justificatory moral pluralism – a multilevel framework for justifying the choice by different agents of the most appropriate norms and values to guide their decisions and actions – to climate change. Its main objective is to investigate how ethics may effectively help achieve a better result in deciding how to mitigate, adapt, or compensate by enhancing the moral acceptability of the available policies or actions that are most likely to counter the effects of climate change. JMP presents (...) agents – individuals, nonstate, and state – with a thorough yet flexible process of matching policies and actions with ethical theories, raising the robustness of moral reasons for politically efficient and individually motivating courses of action against climate change. JMP triggers climate responsibility and sensibility in agents, engaging them in discussing and finding out individually and collectively the most acceptable paths for the decarbonisation transition that is fast approaching. (shrink)