Since the introduction of a new criterion for determining death (i.e., the brain death criterion) in 1968, the research community has been embroiled in debates about whether this criterion should b...

Tekst stanowi recenzję książki Joanny Erbel pt. Wychylone w przyszłość. Jak zmienić świat na lepsze. W recenzji omówiona zostaje kluczowa dla książki koncepcja protopii, która oznacza proces stopniowego ulepszania rzeczywistości. Przywoływane przez Erbel przykłady skutecznych rozwiązań przeanalizowane są w kontekście kategorii lokalności i ucieleśnienia. Przedstawiona zostaje krytyka koncepcji innowacji opartej na rozwiązaniach instytucjonalnych, zaawansowanych technologicznie i wymagających dużych nakładów finansowych.

There is a move towards more use of engagement strategies in responsible investment. This change in strategies is motivated by a number of claims about the effectiveness of engagement versus exclusion of companies from the investment universe. This paper examines the basis for three central claims: That engagement, in contrast to exclusion, does not reduce the investment universe; That exclusion reduces an investor's influence on a company; and That engagement with exclusion is necessarily a more effective means of influencing companies (...) than pure exclusion. All three claims are argued to be open to challenge. It is possible that the move towards more engagement reflects bureaucratic incentives and political considerations among institutional investors, rather than arguments about the effectiveness and efficiency of engagement. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross‐cultural principles of law? In a between‐subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also (...) whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross‐culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice. (shrink)

The best books in the world are not the ones that give all the answers. These are books you read, agree with right away or are convinced by, and then that is that, and you do not have any use for them any more. The best books in the world are those that are full of provocative points of view and loose ends, rich examples and inconclusive discussions, and maybe even inconsequences and confusions, for to these books you must return (...) again and again, and their very inconclusiveness makes them take on new aspects every time you return to them with your own new background, and they will always be generous in giving stuff for new considerations and new ideas. (shrink)

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across (k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for the emergence of textualism: (...) in a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (total n = 5,794) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers, and judges. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Miller’s recent claim that 1) the ideal of value-freedom is implausible because evidence from experimental psychology reveals how scientific reasoning is val...

During my (Hafiz) childhood in Bangladesh, I experienced the negative impact of the educational system. My experiences initiated a process of conscientization leading to values-driven activism through the establishment of Education for Development and Sustainability (EDS), a child-friendly community of practice, with Trine and Alamin. In encounters with Erling and Sigrid, we became aware that our activities were in accordance with action research based on cooperative inquiry (Heron & Reason, 2008). From that point of departure, we developed our own collaborative (...) living theory. In this paper, we explore the research question “How did we become action researchers and what is our driving force?” by using Stoller’s (1989) autobiographical narrative method to analyse selected, lived experiences. Sharing lived experiences and engaging in activism with each other and the EDS children became the base for our conscientization, radical empiricism and contemplating involvement in EDS. Value based activism can create empathic relations and emotions through shared engagement for social justice and the realization that we create a shared reality. Hence, conducting action research with children/youth is in our experience a key to sustainable development. However, to increase the transparency and validity of our research, we needed to explore how our experiences and actions have influenced our values, emotions and decisions to conduct research, our research topic and the research in itself. Therefore, we have engaged co-researchers and participants to critically question the research practice and made it open for discussion and comments in order to see alternative ways of interpreting situations and processes. (shrink)

Rifamycin is a clinically useful macrolide antibiotic produced by the gram positive bacterium. Amycolatopsis mediterranei. This antibiotic is primarily used against Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium leprae, causative agents of tuberculosis and leprosy, respectively. In these bacteria, rifamycin treatment specifically inhibits the initiation of RNA synthesis by binding to β‐subunit of RNA polymerase. Apart from its activity against the bacteria, rifamycin has also been reported to inhibit reverse transcriptase (RT) of certain RNA viruses. Recently, rifamycin derivatives have been dis‐covered that are (...) effective against Mycobacterium avium, which is associated with the AIDS complex. Consequently, the importance of and demand for rifamycin has increased tremendously, the world over. In this article, recent trends in rifamycin research and accessability of recombinant DNA techniques to increase rifamycin production are reviewed. (shrink)

In his paper “The challenge of brain death for the sanctity of life ethic”, Peter Singer advocates two options for dealing with death criteria in a way that is compatible with efficient organ transplantation policy. He suggests that we should either redefine death as cortical death or go back to the old cardiopulmonary criterion and scrap the Dead Donor Rule. We welcome Singer’s line of argument but raise some concerns about the practicability of the two alternatives advocated by him. We (...) propose adding a third alternative that also – as the two previous alternatives – preserves and extends the possibility of organ transplantation without using anyone without their consent. Namely, we would like to draw readers’ attention to a proposal by Robert Veatch, formulated 42 years ago in his 1976 book “Death, dying, and the biological revolution” and developed further in his later publications. Veatch argues for a conscience clause for the definition of death that would permit people to pick from a reasonable range of definitional options. This autonomy-based option, we believe, is more likely to be practicable than the two options advocated by Singer. Furthermore, we present data from a study with Lithuanian participants that suggest that there is quite pronounced variation of preferences concerning death determination. (shrink)

Some philosophers have claimed that pleasures and pains are characterized by their particular or . Most contemporary writers reject this view: they hold that hedonic states have nothing in common except being liked or disliked (alternatively: pursued or avoided) for their own sake. In this article, I argue that the hedonic tone view has been dismissed too quickly: there is no clear introspective or scientific evidence that pleasures do not share a phenomenal quality. I also argue that analysing hedonic states (...) in terms of liking or wanting is implausible. If it is correct that pleasures and pains are not united by any particular hedonic tone, we should instead simply conclude that there are several different hedonic tones. This pluralistic understanding of the hedonic tone view has generally been overlooked in the literature, but appears to be fairly plausible as a philosophical account of pleasure and pain. (shrink)

Conservatives and liberals disagree sharply on matters of morality and public policy. We propose a novel account of the psychological basis of these differences. Specifically, we find that conservatives tend to emphasize the intrinsic value of actions during moral judgment, in part by mentally simulating themselves performing those actions, while liberals instead emphasize the value of the expected outcomes of the action. We then demonstrate that a structural emphasis on actions is linked to the condemnation of victimless crimes, a distinctive (...) feature of conservative morality. Next, we find that the conservative and liberal structural approaches to moral judgment are associated with their corresponding patterns of reliance on distinct moral foundations. In addition, the structural approach uniquely predicts that conservatives will be more opposed to harm in circumstances like the well-known trolley problem, a result which we replicate. Finally, we show that the structural approaches of conservatives and liberals are partly linked to underlying cognitive styles. Collectively, these findings forge a link between two important yet previously independent lines of research in political psychology: cognitive style and moral foundations theory. (shrink)

Logic is widely held to be a normative discipline. Various claims have been offered in support of this view, but they all revolve around the idea that logic is concerned with how one ought to reason. I argue that most of these claims—while perhaps correct—only entail that logic is normative in a way that many, if not all, intellectual disciplines are normative. I also identify some claims whose correctness would make logic normative in a way that sets it apart from (...) other disciplines. I argue that we have no reason think that these claims are correct. In other words, logic is not a distinctively normative discipline. (shrink)

This article focuses on critical realist analysis of concrete processes of structure formation and realization of structural propensity. It aims to explain the reasons for the rise and fall of the neoliberal regime in Iceland that led to the extreme expansion of the Icelandic financial system and its crisis. The article argues that the neoliberal regime was actively constructed by economic and political actors within the framework of the particular structural characteristics of Iceland. It claims that rigid structural conditions due (...) to the very small size of the economy and severe problem of oligopoly undermined the neoliberal utopia of perfect market competition. In order to develop this argument, the paper observes how power elites actively affect public opinion and establish their hegemonic position in the political system. (shrink)

Socioscientific issues receive considerable public attention and there are concerns that people in general are not able or willing to deal with information at odds with what they believe to be true. In this study, we focused on students’ beliefs about two controversial issues: whether consumption of the artificial sweetener aspartame and use of cell phones, respectively, represent any serious health risks. Our aim was to investigate whether students’ trust in the information was related to prior beliefs, the nature of (...) the message, and students’ critical reading strategies. Results showed interactions between prior beliefs about the issues and text condition (risk vs. no risk) on trust in conclusions that indicated a confirmation bias assumption. Additionally, students trusted conclusions ascertaining that there were risks more than conclusions ascertaining that there were no risks. Finally, students’ self-reported use of critical reading strategies implied less trust in both types of conclusions. (shrink)

A pesar de que, a grandes rasgos, el análisis marxista del proceso de alienación sigue vigente, ha llegado a perder toda su fuerza revolucionaria. La razón parece encontrarse en que la dinámica del consumo integra y supera a un tiempo las carencias propias de la alienación, complementando el papel de trabajador con el de consumidor. De hecho, es una idea común que en la sociedad de consumo el sujeto se ha liberado de las trabas que limitaban el desarrollo de su (...) personalidad, y que parece tener a toda la industria al servicio de sus deseos. Detrás de este supuesto encontramos una trasformación de fondo de los conceptos de libertad, sujeto y realidad. Pero algunos autores como Z.Baumann han puesto en duda que el consumismo sea un sistema plegado al sujeto y que no sea pertinente hablar de alienación del consumidor. (shrink)

Though corporate social responsibility (CSR) is on the agenda of most major corporations, corporate executives still largely support the view that corporations should maximize the returns to their owners. There are two lines of defence for this position. One is the Friedmanian view that maximizing owner returns is the social responsibility of corporations. The other is a position voiced by many executives, that CSR and profits go together. This article argues that the first position is ethically untenable, while the latter (...) is not supported by empirical evidence. The implication is that there may be good reason for firms to deviate from a maxim of profit maximization. (shrink)

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a widespread tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which acts violate the rule. This tendency’s strength varied markedly across (k = 15) field sites, owing to cultural variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared to laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether, and consequently exhibited more pronounced textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for (...) the emergence of textualism: In a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (Ntotal = 5495) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an easily identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers and judges. (shrink)