The use of Ritalin and other stimulant drug treatments for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) raises distinctive moral dilemmas for parents; these moral dilemmas have not been adequately addressed in the bioethics literature. This paper draws upon data from a qualitative empirical study to investigate parents' use of the moral ideal of authenticity as part of their narrative justifications for dosing decisions and actions. I show that therapeutic decisions and actions are embedded in valued cultural ideals about masculinity, self-actualization and success, (...) as well as in moral conceptions of authenticity and personal freedom. I argue that this investigation of parents' moral justifications and dosing dilemmas raises questions about the validity of authenticity as a transcendent moral principle. Moreover, this study demonstrates that in order to be relevant, bioethical analysis of neurocognitive enhancement must engage with ground-up studies of moral principles and decision-making in context. (shrink)

In this article, I examine children's reported experiences with stimulant drug treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in light of bioethical arguments about the potential threats of psychotropic drugs to authenticity and moral agency. Drawing on a study that involved over 150 families in the USA and the UK, I show that children are able to report threats to authenticity, but that the majority of children are not concerned with such threats. On balance, children report that stimulants improve their capacity (...) for moral agency, and they associate this capacity with an ability to meet normative expectations. I argue that although under certain conditions stimulant drug treatment may increase the risk of a threat to authenticity, there are ways to minimise this risk and to maximise the benefits of stimulant drug treatment. Medical professionals in particular should help children to flourish with stimulant drug treatments, in good and in bad conditions. (shrink)

Balkan history has been presented, in gender terms, as a history of oppressed women, stark patriarchy and male domination. This narrative has rarely been questioned, its echoes still lingering in the corridors of those disciplines that helped its creation and promotion. Being one of them, ethnology can, and should play a central role in the deconstruction of the role of women in the so-called traditional cultures, thus establishing a potential continuity between their past and their present struggles. nema.

The VOICES study involved at least one radical move in the decades-old debates about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnosis and stimulant drug treatments: to systematically investigate young people's perspectives and experiences so that these could be included as evidence in social, ethical and policy deliberations about the benefits and risks of these interventions. The findings reported in this article were both surprising and unsurprising to us as researchers. We were surprised at the consistency of children's positive responses to stimulant medication, (...) and at the robustness of the experience of increased capacity for moral agency with medication. We were unsurprised at the insights many young people have into their own behaviours and that of others.I am hopeful that the perspectives of children reported in this article will inspire a fresh public conversation about the ethics of stimulant drug treatments, as well as further research with children. In order to believe that children's perspectives add something new and valuable to the social discourse, one must first view children as capable of reliably reporting their own experiences as part of a well-designed research study. It seems that Steven Rose does …. (shrink)

Eighteen months ago, I left a permanent professorship in a generously interdisciplinary department of sociology and took an impermanent, lower-paying job at a university where I had to apply to something called the “Committee on Distinction” to retain the title of “Professor.” Some people say, “That's what happens when Oxford calls.” But it wasn't just that. It was the opportunity to engage in a groundbreaking experiment: to embed and integrate ethics within the Oxford Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience. It's a (...) dream job, for which I was willing to cross the disciplinary line into the medical sciences. In the United Kingdom, many bioethicists still work in departments outside science and medicine; similarly, those of us who work on neuroethics and psychiatric ethics tend to inhabit departments of philosophy, law, or sociology. I can report already that interdisciplinarity from this side feels and looks different. (shrink)

Abstract:In this article, we present a pragmatic approach to neuroethics, referring back to John Dewey and his articulation of the “common good” and its discovery through systematic methods. Pragmatic neuroethics bridges philosophy and social sciences and, at a very basic level, considers that ethics is not dissociable from lived experiences and everyday moral choices. We reflect on the integration between empirical methods and normative questions, using as our platform recent bioethical and neuropsychological research into moral cognition, action, and experience. Finally, (...) we present the protocol of a study concerning teenagers’ morality in everyday life, discussing our epistemological choices as an example of a pragmatic approach in empirical ethics. We hope that this article conveys that even though the scope of neuroethics is broad, it is important not to move too far from the real life encounters that give rise to moral questions in the first place. (shrink)

This article seeks to contribute to the literature on corporate governance with particular focus on state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We put our analysis into the context of Russian SOEs operating in an economy with a high level of the state presence, and investigate the relationship between board characteristics and the dividend policy of SOEs. Specifically, we add to the studies on corporate governance in emerging markets by consideration of professional attorneys, a special category of mandated directors and a unique feature of (...) boards of Russian SOEs. We analysed a panel of 1,226 firm-year observations for 2009-2012, the specific period of incremental innovations in SOEs' governance. Generally, our results support the agency theory and demonstrate that an increase in the proportion of independent directors and professional attorneys and an increase in the dividend payouts occur simultaneously, while the proportion of executives on the board is negatively related to the payout ratio. (shrink)

Gary Becker and others have done important work to broaden the content of self interest, but have not departed from seeing rationality in terms of the exclusive pursuit of self-interest. One reason why committed behavior is important is that a person can have good reason to pursue objectives other than self interest maximization (no matter how broadly it is construed). Indeed, one can also follow rules of behavior that go beyond the pursuit of one's own goals, even if the goals (...) include non-self-interested concerns. By living in a society, one develops possible reasons for considering other people's goals as well, which takes one beyond an exclusive concentration on one's own goals, not to mention the single-minded pursuit of one's own self interest. The recognition of other people's goals may be a part of rational thought. If rational behavior may depart from the relentless pursuit of one's own goals, commitment has to be important in a theory of rationality. Furthermore, seeing the role of commitment in human behavior can have explanatory importance in allowing us to understand behavior patterns that are hard to fit into the narrow format of contemporary rational choice theory. Commitment is, thus, important both for practical reason and for causal explanation. (shrink)

Review of Glendinning, S. (2021). Europe: A Philosophical History (Parts 1-2). London & New York: Routledge.

And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political ...

本书是王森先生的遗作,如1989年出版的《中国逻辑史·唐明卷》中的《藏传因明》一章;梵文汉译的《胜论经》;梵文古写本《七句义论》校注;《正理滴论》、《中论》、《辨中边论》梵藏汉文会勘;贝叶本《俱舍论颂 》梵藏汉文索引;以及《正理滴论》梵汉对照索引等.

Colloquially, episodic memory is described as “the memory of personally experienced events”. Even though episodic memory has been studied in psychology and neuroscience for about six decades, there is still great uncertainty as to what episodic memory is. Here we ask how episodic memory should be characterized in order to be validated as a natural kind. We propose to conceive of episodic memory as a knowledge-like state that is identified with an experientially based mnemonic representation of an episode that allows (...) for a mnemonic simulation thereof. We call our analysis the Sequence Analysis of Episodic Memory since episodes will be analyzed in terms of sequences of events. Our philosophical analysis of episodic memory is driven and supported by experimental results from psychology and neuroscience. We discuss selected experimental results that provide exemplary evidence for uniform causal mechanisms underlying the properties of episodic memory and argue that episodic memory is a natural kind. The argumentation proceeds along three cornerstones: First, psychological evidence suggests that a violation of any of the proposed conditions for episodic memory amounts to a deficiency of episodic memory and no form of memory or cognitive process but episodic memory fulfills them. Second, empirical results support a claim that the principal anatomical substrate of episodic memory is the hippocampus. Finally, we can pin down causal mechanisms onto neural activities in the hippocampus to explain the psychological states and processes constituting episodic memory. (shrink)

This book develops some of the most important themes of Sen's works over the last decade. He argues in a rich and subtle approach that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than their resources or welfare.

Commodities and Capabilities presents a set of inter-related theses concerning the foundations of welfare economics, and in particular about the assessment of personal well-being and advantage. The argument presented focuses on the capability to function, i.e. what a person can do or can be, questioning in the process the more standard emphasis on opulence or on utility. In fact, a person's motivation behind choice is treated here as a parametric variable which may or may not coincide with the pursuit of (...) self-interest. Given the large number of practical problems arising from the roles and limitations of different concepts of interest and the judgement of advantage and well-being, this scholarly investigation is both of theoretical interest and practical import. (shrink)

Early intervention aims to identify children or families at risk of poor health, and take preventative measures at an early stage, when intervention is more likely to succeed. EI is concerned with the just distribution of “life chances,” so that all children are given fair opportunity to realize their potential and lead a good life; EI policy design, therefore, invokes ethical questions about the balance of responsibilities between the state, society, and individuals in addressing inequalities. We analyze a corpus of (...) EI policy guidance to investigate explicit and implicit ethical arguments about who should be held morally responsible for safeguarding child health and well-being. We examine the implications of these claims and explore what it would mean to put the proposed policies into practice. We conclude with some remarks about the useful role that philosophical analysis can play in EI policy development. (shrink)

Patients have received experimental pharmaceuticals outside of clinical trials for decades. There are no industry-wide best practices, and many companies that have granted compassionate use, or ‘preapproval’, access to their investigational products have done so without fanfare and without divulging the process or grounds on which decisions were made. The number of compassionate use requests has increased over time. Driving the demand are new treatments for serious unmet medical needs; patient advocacy groups pressing for access to emerging treatments; internet platforms (...) enabling broad awareness of compelling cases or novel drugs and a lack of trust among some that the pharmaceutical industry and/or the FDA have patients’ best interests in mind. High-profile cases in the media have highlighted the gap between patient expectations for compassionate use and company utilisation of fair processes to adjudicate requests. With many pharmaceutical manufacturers, patient groups, healthcare providers and policy analysts unhappy with the inequities of the status quo, fairer and more ethical management of compassionate use requests was needed. This paper reports on a novel collaboration between a pharmaceutical company and an academic medical ethics department that led to the formation of the Compassionate Use Advisory Committee. Comprising medical experts, bioethicists and patient representatives, CompAC established an ethical framework for the allocation of a scarce investigational oncology agent to single patients requesting non-trial access. This is the first account of how the committee was formed and how it built an ethical framework and put it into practice. (shrink)

Based on the 1972 Radcliffe Lectures, this book presents a systematic treatment of the conceptual framework as well as the practical problems of measurement of inequality.

This paper is about three distinct but interrelated problems: (1) the role 0f rights in moral theory, (2) thc characterization 0f agent relative values and their admissibility in consequ<—:ncc—bascd evaluation, and ( 3) the nature 0f moral evaluation 0f states 0f aihirs.

Cognitive enhancement (CE) covers a broad spectrum of methods, including behavioral techniques, nootropic drugs, and neuromodulation interventions. However, research on their use in children has almost exclusively been carried out in high-income countries with limited understanding of how experts working with children view their use in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs). This study examines perceptions on cognitive enhancement, their techniques, neuroethical issues about their use from an LMICs perspective.Seven Indian experts were purposively sampled for their expertise in bioethics, child (...) development and child education. In-depth interviews were conducted using a semi-structured topic guide to examine (1) understanding of CE, (2) which approaches were viewed as cognitive enhancers, (3) attitudes toward different CE techniques and (4) neuroethical issues related to CE use within the Indian context. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed before thematic analysis.Findings indicate Indian experts view cognitive enhancement as a holistic positive impact on overall functioning and well-being, rather than improvement in specific cognitive abilities. Exogenous agents, and neuromodulation were viewed with skepticism, whereas behavioral approaches were viewed more favorably. Neuroethical concerns included equitable access to CE, limited scientific evidence and over-reliance on technology to address societal problems. This highlights the need for more contextually relevant neuroethics research in LMICs. (shrink)