There is an expectation that all researchers will act ethically and responsibly in the conduct of research involving humans and animals. While research ethics is mentioned in quality indicators and codes of responsible researcher conduct, it appears to have little profile in doctoral assessment. There seems to be an implicit assumption that ethical competence has been achieved by the end of doctoral candidacy and that there is no need for candidates to report on the ethical dimensions of their study nor (...) for examiners to assess this integral aspect of researcher development. In the context of ensuring that institutions are fulfilling their responsibility of producing ethically sensitive and competent researchers, it is salient to investigate whether doctoral thesis examiners make comment about ethical issues in their reports. This study analysed an archive of examiner reports to identify the frequency, magnitude and nature of examiner comment about ethics. Although comment was rare examiners provided: prescriptive instruction on ethical review processes; formative instruction on the design, conduct, and reporting of research projects; and positive or negative judgments about a candidate's ethical competence, the latter often aligned with meeting, or not meeting, 'doctoral standards'. The scarcity of ethics in examination criteria and examiner reports implies a silence that needs to be addressed to ensure graduating candidates are prepared to conduct ethical and responsible research. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has had profound effects on global health, healthcare, and public health policy. It has also impacted education. Within undergraduate healthcare education of doctors, nurses, and allied professions, rapid shifts to distance learning and pedagogic content creation within new realities, demands of healthcare practice settings, shortened curricula, and/or earlier graduation have also challenged ethics teaching in terms of curriculum allotments or content specification. We propose expanding the notion of resilience to the field of ethics education under the (...) conditions of remote learning. Educational resilience starts in the virtual classroom of ethics teaching, initially constituted as an “unpurposed space” of exchange about the pandemic’s challenging impact on students and educators. This continuously transforms into “purposed space” of reflection, discovering ethics as a repertory of orientative knowledge for addressing the pandemic’s challenges on personal, professional, societal, and global levels and for discovering (and then addressing) that the health of individuals and populations also has moral determinants. As such, an educational resilience framework with inherent adaptability rises to the challenge of supporting the moral agency of students acting both as professionals and as global citizens. Educational resilience is key in supporting and sustaining professional identify formation and facilitating the development of students’ moral resilience and leadership amid moral complexity and potential moral transgression—not only but especially in times of pandemic. (shrink)

According to Pylyshyn, depictive representations can be explanatory only if a certain kind of first-order isomorphism exists between the mental representations and real-world displays. What about a system with second-order isomorphism (similarities between different mental representations corresponding with similarities between different real-world displays)? Such a system may help to address whether “depictive” representations contribute to the visual nature of imagery.

Este artigo tem por objetivo descrever a Brigada Anti Publicidade em Paris, que opera semanalmente no âmbito da capital metropolitana. A pesquisa participante foi realizada em 2006 e 2007, e hoje conta a especificidade do ativismo pós-moderno. Novas perspectivas são elaboradas na seqüência dos trabalhos de Luc Boltansky e Eve Chiapello, relativos ao novo espírito do capitalismo. Uma abordagem em antropologia urbana no presente trabalho tem como objetivo destacar a performatividade desse Novo Movimento Social (NMS).

Le Prophète - que la bénédiction et le salut de Dieu soient sur lui - a dit : " La recherche du licite est une obligation pour tout musulman ". C'est là une obligation d'entre les obligations, la plus difficile à comprendre et à mettre en pratique. C'est ce qui explique la quasi-disparition de la science du licite et de sa mise en application. La difficulté à la saisir est la cause de sa disparition car les ignorants pensent que le (...) licite est perdu et qu'il ne reste de sain que l'eau douce et l'herbe qui pousse dans les terres en friche tout le reste ayant été souillé par des mains malignes et corrompu par de mauvaises pratiques. Ce prétexte de l'herbe justifierait le recours à l'illicite. Ils ont totalement rejeté ce principe de la religion et ne peuvent différencier les choses. Hélas! Le licite est clair et l'illicite aussi, et, entre les deux, se situe l'ambigu. Ces trois cas demeurent liés, quelle que soit la situation. Et puisque cette hérésie s'est répandue dans la religion et que ses méfaits se sont propagés parmi les gens, il est un devoir d'en dévoiler la corruption en amenant, par une argumentation rigoureuse, à la faculté de distinguer entre le licite et l'illicite pour atteindre une clarté que nul obstacle ne pourra voiler. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In his book The End of Life James Rachels argues that in a situation of forced choice if we must choose between a more and a less complex human being we have good reason to choose in favour of the normal human. He argues also that since some humans have less complex mental abilities than some animals it will sometimes be right to choose a non‐human animal in preference to a human being. I do not consider Rachels’belief that sometimes (...) non‐human animals are to be preferred to retarded humans; I focus rather on the seemingly less contentious belief that in situations of forced choice, we should choose human beings with more rather than less complex lives. I reject this contention both because Rachels does not seem to have offered a worthwhile argument in its favour and also because I find his cavalier approach to the lives of people with intellectual disabilities morally offensive. En route I argue against his simplistic separation of human lives into the categories ‘simple’and ‘complex’on the basis of whether the individuals in question fall into what he seems to take as given—the clear cut categories ‘mentally retarded’and ‘normal’[1] [2]. (shrink)

A história da ética filosófica é, em grande parte, uma tentativa de elucidar a maneira na qual os seres humanos podem fomentar um êthos, para atingir a própria plenitude. Fosse Peirce convidado a mostrar, primeiro, o que ele entendia pelo êthos do filósofo ou do cientista, ele responderia facilmente que é a busca por um ideal e verdades eternas, isto é, a própria razoabilidade que rege o universo. Fosse ele questionado, logo após, o que o êthos dos seres humanos é, (...) em geral, quer dizer, o que guia e dá sentido à vida de cada pessoa, sua resposta não diferiria muito da anterior: todos os seres humanos, por meio de suas ações concretas, devem encarnar a razoabilidade, o ideal admirável ou o summum bonum em suas próprias vidas. A resposta bem conhecida de Peirce contém uma visão criativa muito profunda da vida ética: esta é a construção progressiva e contínua de diversas possibilidades de ação, por meio da qual cada pessoa configura seu próprio êthos, segundo esse fim admirável, que é uma representação daquilo que seria uma vida boa, desejável e próspera. Isto pode não parecer original no contexto da história da ética filosófica – Aristóteles já tinha dito algo semelhante. Entretanto, há duas noções muito ricas e sugestivas no pensamento de Peirce, as quais podem sem dúvida ser recuperadas, visto que elas podem contribuir de maneira significativa para essa reflexão, a saber: a razoabilidade e a abdução. Como tentarei mostrar, para Peirce viver eticamente é viver criativamente. (shrink)

Disaster response is a highly collaborative and critical process that requires the involvement of multiple emergency responders (ERs), ideally working together under a unified command, to enable a rapid and effective operational response. Following the 9/11 and 11/13 terrorist attacks and the devastation of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it is apparent that inadequate communication and a lack of interoperability among the ERs engaged on-site can adversely affect disaster response efforts. Within this context, we present a scenario-based terrorism case study to (...) highlight the challenges of operational disaster command and response. In this article, which is based on the French emergency response doctrine, we outline a semantics-based common operational command system that is designed to guarantee an efficient information flow among ERs. Our focus is on offering to all ERs, a real-time operational picture of the situation in order to enable multilevel coordination among firefighters, police, healthcare units, public authorities, and other stakeholders. Our approach consolidates information to promote timely sharing of data among ERs. The proposed system is based on an ontology that has been developed to represent the different types of knowledge on the part of ERs, providing a shared vocabulary that covers a variety of interoperability concerns. (shrink)

Back in print are Hatch's classic Hibbert Lectures in which he calls into question the influence that Greek ideas had on the historical development of Christian theology. The earliest forms of Christianity were not only outside the sphere of Greek philosophy, but they also appealed, on the one hand, mainly to the classes which philosophy did not reach, and, on the other hand, to a standard which philosophy did not recognize. Edwin Hatch.

Abstract In light of the complexity of unfolding disasters, the diversity of rapidly evolving events, the enormous amount of generated information, and the huge pool of casualties, emergency responders (ERs) may be overwhelmed and in consequence poor decisions may be made. In fact, the possibility of transporting the wounded victims to one of several hospitals and the dynamic changes in healthcare resource availability make the decision process more complex. To tackle this problem, we propose a multicriteria decision support service, based (...) on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, that aims to avoid overcrowding and outpacing the capacity of a hospital to effectively provide the best care to victims by finding out the most appropriate hospital that meets the victims’ needs. The proposed approach searches for the most appropriate healthcare institution that can effectively deal with the victims’ needs by considering the availability of the needed resources in the hospital, the victim’s wait time to receive the healthcare, and the transfer time that represents the hospital proximity to the disaster site. The evaluation and validation results showed that the assignment of hospitals was done successfully considering the needs of each victim and without overwhelming any single hospital. (shrink)

I argue that epistemic injustice manifests not only in the content of our concepts, but in the spaces between them. Others have shown that epistemic injustice arises in the form of “testimonial injustice,” where an agent is harmed because her credibility is undervalued, and “hermeneutical injustice,” where an agent is harmed because some community lacks the conceptual resources that would allow her to render her experience intelligible. I think that epistemic injustice also arises as a result of prejudiced and harmful (...) defects in the inferential architecture of both scientific practice and everyday thinking. Drawing on lessons from the philosophy of science, I argue that the inferential architecture of our epistemic practices can be prejudiced and wrongful, leading to a variety of epistemic injustice that I am calling “inferential injustice.” This type of injustice is fully structural; it inheres in our epistemic practices themselves rather than as a direct result of an individual’s action. For this reason, cases of inferential injustice are importantly different from extant cases of epistemic injustice and are especially hard to track. We need a better understanding of inferential injustice so that we can avoid and ameliorate cases such as the ones I present here. (shrink)

Suicide is devastating. It is an assault on our ideas of what living is about. In Contemplating Suicide Gavin Fairbairn takes fresh look at suicidal self harm. His view is distinctive in not emphasising external facts: the presence or absence of a corpse, along with evidence that the person who has become a corpse, intended to do so. It emphasises the intentions that the person had in acting, rather than the consequences that follow from those actions. Much of the (...) book is devoted to an attempt to construct a natural history of suicidal self harm and to examine some of the ethical issues that it raises. Fairbairn sets his philosophical reflections against a background of practical experience in the caring professions and uses a storytelling approach in offering a critique of the current language of self harm along with some new ways of thinking. Among other things he offers cogent reasons for abandoning the mindless use of terms such as attempted suicide and parasuicide , and introduces a number of new terms including cosmic roulette , which he uses to describe a family of human acts in which people gamble with their lives. By elaborating a richer model of suicidal self harm than most philosophers and most practitioners of caring professions currently inhabit, Fairbairn has contributed to the development of understanding in this area. Among other things a richer model and vocabulary may reduce the likelihood that those who come into contact with suicidal self harm, will believe that familiarity with the physical facts of the matter - the actions of the suicider and the presence or absence of a corpse - is always sufficient to justify a definite conclusion about the nature of the self harming act. (shrink)

Suicide is devastating. It is an assault on our ideas of what living is about. In Contemplating Suicide Gavin Fairbairn takes fresh look at suicidal self harm. His view is distinctive in not emphasising external facts: the presence or absence of a corpse, along with evidence that the person who has become a corpse, intended to do so. It emphasises the intentions that the person had in acting, rather than the consequences that follow from those actions. Much of the (...) book is devoted to an attempt to construct a natural history of suicidal self harm and to examine some of the ethical issues that it raises. Fairbairn sets his philosophical reflections against a background of practical experience in the caring professions and uses a storytelling approach in offering a critique of the current language of self harm along with some new ways of thinking. Among other things he offers cogent reasons for abandoning the mindless use of terms such as attempted suicide and parasuicide , and introduces a number of new terms including cosmic roulette , which he uses to describe a family of human acts in which people gamble with their lives. By elaborating a richer model of suicidal self harm than most philosophers and most practitioners of caring professions currently inhabit, Fairbairn has contributed to the development of understanding in this area. Among other things a richer model and vocabulary may reduce the likelihood that those who come into contact with suicidal self harm, will believe that familiarity with the physical facts of the matter - the actions of the suicider and the presence or absence of a corpse - is always sufficient to justify a definite conclusion about the nature of the self harming act. (shrink)

Reflective capacity is integral to core healthcare professional practice competencies. Reflection plays a central role in teacher education as reflecting on teaching behaviours with critical analysis can potentially improve teaching practice. The humanities including narrative and the visual arts can serve as a valuable tool for fostering reflection. We conducted a multinational faculty development workshop aiming to enhance reflective capacity in medical educators by using a combination of abstract paintings and narratives. Twenty-three family physicians or physicians-in-training from 10 countries participated (...) in the workshop. Qualitative assessment of the workshop showed that the combined use of art and narrative was well received and perceived as contributing to the reflective exercise. Participants generally felt that viewing abstract paintings had facilitated a valuable mood transformation and prepared them emotionally for the reflective writing. Our analysis found that the following themes emerged from participants’ responses: narratives from different countries are similar; the use of art helped access feelings; viewing abstract paintings facilitated next steps; writing reflective narratives promoted examination of educational challenges, compassion for self and other, and building an action plan; and sharing of narrative was helpful for fostering active listening and appreciating multiple perspectives. Future research might include comparing outcomes for a group participating in arts–narrative-based workshops with those of a control group using only reflective narrative or in combination with figurative art, and implementing a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of assessment. (shrink)

Given the interest in analytic theology circles about following “conciliar Christology,” this article describes three different patterns by which patristics scholars have interpreted the relations between the Ecumenical Councils in the past 150 years, patterns that I label as “pendulum swing,” “synthesis of emphases,” and “Cyrillian/traditional.” The article argues that whereas much analytic theology work on Christology belongs in the “synthesis of emphases” pattern, the ascendant paradigm in patristics scholarship is Cyrillian/traditional. It makes a case that the councils understood themselves (...) as moving in a straight line of development from one to another and as proclaiming a broadly Cyrillian Christology, in which the person of the Incarnate Logos is the subject of all actions and experiences of the incarnate Christ. Given the significance of this issue for analytic theology discussions of Christ’s human freedom (is it the freedom of the human nature to act independently of the Logos, or the human freedom of the Logos to accomplish his earthly mission?), analytic theologians would do well to be aware of these currents in patristics scholarship on the Ecumenical Councils. (shrink)

Managing complex disaster situations is a challenging task because of the large number of actors involved and the critical nature of the events themselves. In particular, the different terminologies and technical vocabularies that are being exchanged among Emergency Responders may lead to misunderstandings. Maintaining a shared semantics for exchanged data is a major challenge. To help to overcome these issues, we elaborate a modular suite of ontologies called POLARISCO that formalizes the complex knowledge of the ERs. Such a shared vocabulary (...) resolves inconsistent terminologies and promotes semantic interoperability among ERs. In this work, we discuss developing POLARISCO as an extension of Basic Formal Ontology and the Common Core Ontologies. We conclude by presenting a real use-case to check the efficiency and applicability of the proposed ontology. (shrink)

Researchers have wondered how the brain creates emotions since the early days of psychological science. With a surge of studies in affective neuroscience in recent decades, scientists are poised to answer this question. In this target article, we present a meta-analytic summary of the neuroimaging literature on human emotion. We compare the locationist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories consistently and specifically correspond to distinct brain regions) with the psychological constructionist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories (...) are constructed of more general brain networks not specific to those categories) to better understand the brain basis of emotion. We review both locationist and psychological constructionist hypotheses of brain–emotion correspondence and report meta-analytic findings bearing on these hypotheses. Overall, we found little evidence that discrete emotion categories can be consistently and specifically localized to distinct brain regions. Instead, we found evidence that is consistent with a psychological constructionist approach to the mind: A set of interacting brain regions commonly involved in basic psychological operations of both an emotional and non-emotional nature are active during emotion experience and perception across a range of discrete emotion categories. (shrink)

Disaster response requires the cooperation of multiple emergency responder organizations (EROs). However, after‐action reports relating to large‐scale disasters identity communication difficulties among EROs as a major hindrance to collaboration. On the one hand, the use of two‐radio communication, based on multiple orthogonal frequencies and uneven coverage, has been shown to degrade inter‐organization communication. On the other hand, because they reflect different areas of expertise, EROs use differing terminologies, which are difficult to reconcile. These issues lead to ambiguities, misunderstandings, and inefficient (...) exchange of data and information among those involved, which can impede the response process and slow decision making. We, therefore, hypothesize that promoting semantic interoperability across ERO information systems might improve information exchange among stakeholders and thereby allow a more coherent response to the disaster. We propose an ontology‐based messaging service on the basis of the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) standards. The parties involved will continue to use the terminologies to which they are accustomed, but the system will resolve inconsistencies and thereby enhance mutual understanding among EROs by ensuring semantic translation of the exchanged information. The evaluation of the semantic translation demonstrated the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed service. (shrink)

B2B online reverse auctions technology (ORAs) emerged as a popular tool for large buying firms in the late 1990s. However, its growing use has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in unethical behaviors to a point that it has been described as the technology that has triggered more ethical concerns in the e-commerce arena than in any other segment of activity. Our findings first indicate that the establishment of formal ethical criteria based on the restrictive interpretation of ethics as honesty (...) is not enough to resolve the ethical issues that surround the introduction of a technology because it ignores the ethical values shared by most acton in the sector in terms of fairness. We show the extent to which lobbying, rumor, technical problems, and public discourse can impact on the interpretations of the technology regarding ethics. Highlighting the importance of incorporating ORAs into the broader context of relationship management that integrates ethics as fairness and not only ethics as honesty serves to illustrate why the future of ORAs might not be as bright as predicted by a theoretical interpretation of the technology that is sometimes disconnected from the realities of the field. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between farmland investment and environmental uncertainty. It examines how farmland investors seek to “render land investible” in spite of drought, groundwater depletion, and changing regulations. To do so, we analyze a single case study: the purchase of 8000 acres of dry rangeland in California’s Cuyama Valley by the Harvard University endowment for use in creating an irrigated vineyard. Drawing from interviews with Cuyama Valley farmers and community members, participant observation at community meetings, and public document (...) analysis, we make two primary contributions to understandings of uncertain resource materiality in farmland investment. First, this case reveals that investors can turn environmental uncertainty into an advantage, exploiting both the temporal uncertainties associated with resource management under climate change and the spatial uncertainties inherent to all subsurface resources. We argue that the material and legal uncertainties of groundwater access provide investors with a potentially lucrative opening to assert their preferred land imaginaries and improve their property values. In the Cuyama Valley they did so through both participation in groundwater governance and the establishment of water-related infrastructure on their property. Second, this case highlights that the asset-making processes involved in farmland investment may be as much vertical as they are horizontal. The need to map and measure the uncertain vertical dimension of land creates an outsized role for scientific expertise in farmland assetization. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that epistemic injustice can result from transformative learning. Transformative learning causes a radical change in the structure of a student’s personal epistemic resources to bring them in line with the structure of a discipline’s shared epistemic resources. When those shared epistemic resources are biased, this transformation prevents students from retaining aspects of their personal epistemic resources which it is strongly in their interests (as well as in the interests of the broader epistemic community) to retain. (...) In these cases, transformative learning causes epistemic injustice in the form of inferential injustice. (shrink)

The notion of 'quality of life' frequently features in discussions about how it is appropriate to treat folk at the beginning and at the end of life. It is argued that there is a disjunction between its use in these two areas (1). In the case of disabled babies at the very beginning of life, 'quality of life' considerations are frequently used to justify enforced death on the basis that the babies in question would be better off dead. At times, (...) babies with severe disabilities are thus allowed to die or even killed. In the case of terminally ill people 'quality of life' is also important in guiding the actions of doctors. However, in the case of individuals who do not wish to live any longer because their quality of life is so poor that they would rather be dead, quality of life is likely to be dropped as a guiding principle. Thus patients who wish to die and ask to be killed, will most often be forced to endure enforced life. (shrink)