Prudence has long been an important topic for rhetorical theorists and its place in intellectual history is becoming increasingly well documented. This essay develops a conception of prudence as an ideological construct, a term crafted in the history of its public usages to govern the relationship between common sense and political action as enacted in the name of historically situated social actors. From this perspective, prudence represents the recursive interaction between a rhetoric of judgment and the grounds on which that (...) rhetoric is evaluated by a historically particular community of arguers. A case study of the 1991 U.S. Senate debate regarding the authorization of offensive military action in the Persian Gulf illustrates how competing standards of prudential judgment are crafted and evaluated in discursive controversy. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the ambiguities and confusions that arise when studies of the ‘surveillance state’ are contrasted with studies of the ‘service state’. Surveillance studies take a largely negative view of the information capture and handling of personal data by Government agencies. Studies that examine Government service providing take a largely positive view of such data capture as Government is seen to be attempting to enhance service provision to individual citizens. This paper examines these opposing perspectives through a (...) series of case studies and concludes that a new understanding and methodology should be brought forward so as to create a reconciliation of these two points of departure for research. The call is for an holistic appreciation of data capture activities by Government so that researchers and public policy makers alike can appreciate and reconcile these competing perspectives. (shrink)

Journal editorials, career features, and the popular press commonly talk of a graduate student mental health crisis. To date, studies on graduate student mental health have employed cross-sectional designs, limiting any causal conclusions regarding the relationship between entry into graduate study and mental health. Here, we draw on data from a longitudinal study of undergraduate students in Aotearoa New Zealand, allowing us to compare participants who did, and did not, transition into PhD study following the completion of their undergraduate degree. (...) Using multilevel Bayesian regression, we identified a difference in mental wellbeing between those who entered PhD study and those who did not. This difference, however, was largely due to those not entering PhD study displaying an increase in mental wellbeing. Participants that entered PhD study displayed a small decrease in mental wellbeing, with the posterior distribution of the simple effect heavily overlapping zero. This latter finding was orders of magnitude smaller than one might expect based on previous cross-sectional research and provides an important message; that a marked drop in mental health is not an inevitable consequence of entering graduate study. (shrink)

BackgroundThe pursuit of a cure for HIV is a high priority for researchers, funding agencies, governments and people living with HIV (PLWH). To date, over 250 biomedical studies worldwide are or have been related to discovering a safe, effective, and scalable HIV cure, most of which are early translational research and experimental medicine. As HIV cure research increases, it is critical to identify and address the ethical challenges posed by this research.MethodsWe conducted a scoping review of the growing HIV cure (...) research ethics literature, focusing on articles published in English peer-reviewed journals from 2013 to 2021. We extracted and summarized key developments in the ethics of HIV cure research. Twelve community advocates actively engaged in HIV cure research provided input on this summary and suggested areas warranting further ethical inquiry and foresight via email exchange and video conferencing.DiscussionDespite substantial scholarship related to the ethics of HIV cure research, additional attention should focus on emerging issues in six categories of ethical issues: (1) social value (ongoing and emerging biomedical research and scalability considerations); (2) scientific validity (study design issues, such as the use of analytical treatment interruptions and placebos); (3) fair selection of participants (equity and justice considerations); (4) favorable benefit/risk balance (early phase research, benefit-risk balance, risk perception, psychological risks, and pediatric research); (5) informed consent (attention to language, decision-making, informed consent processes and scientific uncertainty); and (6) respect for enrolled participants and community (perspectives of people living with HIV and affected communities and representation).ConclusionHIV cure research ethics has an unfinished agenda. Scientific research and bioethics should work in tandem to advance ethical HIV cure research. Because the science of HIV cure research will continue to rapidly advance, ethical considerations of the major themes we identified will need to be revisited and refined over time. (shrink)

BackgroundHIV cure research involving cell and gene therapy has intensified in recent years. There is a growing need to identify ethical standards and safeguards to ensure cell and gene therapy (CGT) HIV cure research remains valued and acceptable to as many stakeholders as possible as it advances on a global scale.MethodsTo elicit preliminary ethical and practical considerations to guide CGT HIV cure research, we implemented a qualitative, in-depth interview study with three key stakeholder groups in the United States: (1) biomedical (...) HIV cure researchers, (2) bioethicists, and (3) community stakeholders. Interviews permitted evaluation of informants’ perspectives on how CGT HIV cure research should ethically occur, and were transcribed verbatim. We applied conventional content analysis focused on inductive reasoning to analyze the rich qualitative data and derive key ethical and practical considerations related to CGT towards an HIV cure.ResultsWe interviewed 13 biomedical researchers, 5 community members, and 1 bioethicist. Informants generated considerations related to: perceived benefits of CGT towards an HIV cure, perceived risks, considerations necessary to ensure an acceptable benefit/risk balance, CGT strategies considered unacceptable, additional ethical considerations, and considerations for first-in-human CGT HIV cure trials. Informants also proposed important safeguards to developing CGT approaches towards an HIV cure, such as the importance of mitigating off-target effects, mitigating risks associated with long-term duration of CGT interventions, and mitigating risks of immune overreactions.ConclusionOur study identified preliminary considerations for CGT-based HIV cure across three key stakeholder groups. Respondents identified an ideal cure strategy as one which would durably control HIV infection, protect the individual from re-acquisition, and eliminate transmission to others. Known and unknown risks should be anticipated and perceived as learning opportunities to preserve and honor the altruism of participants. Preclinical studies should support these considerations and be transparently reviewed by regulatory experts and peers prior to first-in-human studies. To protect the public trust in CGT HIV cure research, ethical and practical considerations should be periodically revisited and updated as the science continues to evolve. Additional ethics studies are required to expand stakeholder participation to include traditionally marginalized groups and clinical care providers. (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

Provision of adequate nutrition to elderly patients who develop dysphagia after a stroke can be quite challenging, often leading to the placement of a percutaneous entero‐gastrostomy (PEG) tube for nutritional support. This hypothetical case describes the additional challenge of cross‐cultural belief that leads a daughter to provide oral feeding to her mother, an act that the medical team believes is dangerous and the daughter sees as salubrious. In this case, what is the proper balance between patient safety and deference to (...) cultural traditions and norms? Where are the limits? Two commentaries offer insights for conflict resolution, including recommending that the medical team seek to understand the cultural motivations of the family, balancing safety and respect for cultural norms. The second commentary also disagrees with the team's presumption that the daughter's feeding of her mother is a greater threat to the patient than the PEG tube feeding is. (shrink)

This paper introduces the design principle of legibility as means to examine the epistemic and ethical conditions of sensing technologies. Emerging sensing technologies create new possibilities regarding what to measure, as well as how to analyze, interpret, and communicate said measurements. In doing so, they create ethical challenges for designers to navigate, specifically how the interpretation and communication of complex data affect moral values such as autonomy. Contemporary sensing technologies require layers of mediation and exposition to render what they sense (...) as intelligible and constructive to the end user, which is a value-laden design act. Legibility is positioned as both an evaluative lens and a design criterion, making it complimentary to existing frameworks such as value sensitive design. To concretize the notion of legibility, and understand how it could be utilized in both evaluative and anticipatory contexts, the case study of a vest embedded with sensors and an accompanying app for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is analyzed. (shrink)

The Last Gift is an observational HIV cure-related research study conducted with people with HIV at the end of life (EOL) at the University of California San Diego. Participants agree to voluntarily donate blood and other biospecimens while living and their bodies for a rapid research autopsy postmortem to better understand HIV reservoir dynamics throughout the entire body. The Last Gift study was initiated in 2017. Since then, 30 volunteers were enrolled who are either (1) terminally ill with a concomitant (...) condition and have a prognosis of 6 months or less or (2) chronically ill with multiple comorbidities and nearing the EOL.Multiple ethical and logistical challenges have been revealed during this time; here, we share our lessons learnt and ethical analysis. Issues relevant to healthcare research include surrogate informed consent, personal and professional boundaries, challenges posed conducting research in a pandemic, and clinician burnout and emotional support. Issues more specific to EOL and postmortem research include dual roles of clinical care and research teams, communication between research personnel and clinical teams, legally required versus rapid research autopsy, identification of next of kin/loved ones and issues of inclusion. Issues specific to the Last Gift include logistics of body donation and rapid research autopsy, and disposition of the body as a study benefit.We recommend EOL research teams to have clear provisions around surrogate informed consent, rotate personnel to maintain boundaries, limit direct contact with staff associated with clinical care and have a clear plan for legally required versus research autopsies, among other recommendations. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

The hanging of the mobile aloft was annually performed with a solemnity and care suited to so important a matter. For each year, as it was resurrected from its storage place, it hung foolishly askew, demoralized by vicissitude, like a drunkard's hat crushed out of shape. Not that it had not still an equilibrium, a static balance, which it would assume and, if disturbed, would assume again, as if to declare idiocy alone immortal. It did not wait, in order to (...) have an equilibrium, for an artful hand to give it one. Such equilibrium as it had, from the accidental concert of its parts, it had with the indifferent equanimity of all things merely physical. Beauty was its accident, as idiocy also was its accident. It was as innocent of virtue as it was innocent of sin: it knew no propriety, therefore deserted none. I admired in it only what I demanded of it, a virtue of which it knew nothing. Yet, for my part, I permitted myself no such egotist reflection. I regarded it all as the contrivance of the hand which adjusted it. In my child's world, that was the secret of my mother's hand, which no other sought to compete with, much less to penetrate. She knew, at least her hand knew, that of all of the possible equilibria which were available equally for choice, there was one special equilibrium needed, only one which was alive, resonant, essential to the production of that effect to which it intricately ministered. That equilibrium was indispensable to the music which the mobile gave forth, its beginning and its end, the poise from which its movement issued, the cadence in which it came with perfect finality to rest. (shrink)

In Democracy and the Claims of Nature, the leading thinkers in the fields of environmental, political, and social theory come together to discuss the tensions and sympathies of democratic ideals and environmental values. The prominent contributors reflect upon where we stand in our understanding of the relationship between democracy and the claims of nature. Democracy and the Claims of Nature bridges the gap between the often competing ideals of the two fields, leading to a greater understanding of each for the (...) other. (shrink)

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better if we were immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Life, Death, and Meaning brings together key readings, primarily by English-speaking philosophers, on such 'big questions.'.

This volume brings together for the first time all the writings of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill on equality between the sexes, including John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women, a classic in the history of the women's rights ...

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.

Ordinary judgments about personal identity are complicated by the fact that phrases like “same person” and “different person” have multiple uses in ordinary English. This complication calls into question the significance of recent experimental work on this topic. For example, Tobia (2015) found that judgments of personal identity were significantly affected by whether the moral change described in a vignette was for the better or for the worse, while Strohminger and Nichols (2014) found that loss of moral conscience had more (...) of an effect on identity judgments than loss of biographical memory. In each case, however, there are grounds for questioning whether the judgments elicited in these experiments engaged a concept of numerical personal identity at all (cf. Berniūnas and Dranseika 2016; Dranseika 2017; Starmans and Bloom 2018). In two pre-registered studies we validate this criticism while also showing a way to address it: instead of attempting to engage the concept of numerical identity through specialized language or the terms of an imaginary philosophical debate, we should consider instead how the identity of a person is described through the connected use of proper names, definite descriptions, and the personal pronouns “I”, “you”, “he”, and “she”. When the experiments above are revisited in this way, there is no evidence that the differences in question had an effect on ordinary identity judgments. (shrink)

This essay is the journal editor's introduction to part 3 of an ongoing symposium on quietism. With reference to writings of James Joyce, Francis Picabia, J. M. Coetzee, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elaine Pagels, and Karen King—and with extended reference to Jonathan Lear's study of “cultural devastation,” Radical Hope—Jeffrey Perl explores the possibility that the fear of anomie (“anomiphobia”) is misplaced. He argues that, in comparison with the violence and narrowness of any given social order, anomie may well be (...) preferable, and, in any case, may be no more than another name for quietism. (shrink)

There are now various approaches to understand where and how in the brain consciousness arises from neural activity, none of which is universally accepted. Difficulties among these approaches are reviewed, and a missing ingredient is proposed here to help adjudicate between them, that of ''perspectivalness.'' In addition to a suitable temporal duration and information content of the relevant bound brain activity, this extra component is posited as being a further important ingredient for the creation of consciousness from neural activity. It (...) guides the development of what is termed the ''Central Representation,'' which is supposed to be present in all mammals and extended in humans to support self-consciousness as well as phenomenal consciousness. Experimental evidence and a theoretical framework for the existence of the central representation are presented, which relates the extra component to specific buffer working memory sites in the inferior parietal lobes, acting as attentional coordinators on the spatial maps making up the central representation. The article closes with a discussion of various open questions. (shrink)

Patients with persistent pain who lack adetectable underlying disease challenge thetheories supporting much of biomedicalbody-mind discourse. In this context,diagnostic labeling is as inherently vulnerableto the same pitfalls of uncertainty that besetany other interpretative endeavour. The endpoint is often no more than a name ratherthan the discovered essence of a pre-existentmedical condition. In 1990 a Committee of theAmerican College of Rheumatology (ACR)formulated the construct of Fibromyalgia in anattempt to rectify a situation of diagnosticconfusion faced by patients presenting withwidespread pain. It was (...) proposed thatFibromyalgia existed as a ``specific entity'',separable from but curiously able to co-existwith any other painful condition. Epistemological and semiotic analyses ofFibromyalgia have failed to find any sign,clinical or linguistic, which coulddifferentiate it from other diffusemusculoskeletal pain states. The construct ofFibromyalgia sought to define a discernablereality outside the play of language and topass it off as a natural phenomenon. However,because it has failed both clinically andsemiotically, the construct also fails the testof medical utility for the subject inpersistent pain. (shrink)

BackgroundInternational partnerships in research are receiving ever greater attention, given that technology has diminished the restriction of geographical barriers with the effects of globalisation becoming more evident, and populations increasingly more mobile.DiscussionIn this article, we examine the merits and risks of such collaboration even when strict universal ethical guidelines are maintained. There has been widespread examples of outcomes beneficial and detrimental for both high and low –income countries which are often initially unintended.SummaryThe authors feel that extreme care and forethought should (...) be exercised by all involved parties, despite the fact that many implications from such international work can be extremely hard to predict. However ultimately the benefits gained by enhancing medical research and philanthropy are too extensive to be ignored. (shrink)

Elementary teachers can integrate social studies into their curriculum through thematic or interdisciplinary units. This study explores fourth-grade students’ responses to a month-long, structured inquiry. For two weeks, fourth-graders engaged in multiple readings of five secondary and fourteen primary sources using closed- and open-ended analysis questions and extemporaneous, text-based writing. For another two weeks, the writing process guided students through concept mapping, skeleton outlining, peer- and teacher-review, and revision. Three researchers examined students’ writings for criticality, complexity, and clarity. Findings yielded (...) positive, statistically significant correlations between secondary source usage and historical significance, secondary source usage and continuity-and-change, and primary source usage and contextualization. Positive, weak correlations appear between primary source usage and sourcing. No relationship appears between corroboration and other variables. Meaning is extrapolated for classroom practice and applied to seminal studies. Limitations include a small sample of largely homogeneous, inexperienced students. (shrink)

BackgroundOne of the next frontiers in HIV research is focused on finding a cure. A new priority includes people with HIV (PWH) with non-AIDS terminal illnesses who are willing to donate their bodies at the end-of-life (EOL) to advance the search towards an HIV cure. We endeavored to understand perceptions of this research and to identify ethical and practical considerations relevant to implementing it.MethodsWe conducted 20 in-depth interviews and 3 virtual focus groups among four types of key stakeholders in the (...) United States (PWH, biomedical HIV cure researchers, HIV clinicians, and bioethicists) to obtain triangulated viewpoints because little was known about the ethics of this topic. Each group was queried as to ethical considerations, safeguards, and protections for conducting HIV cure-related research at the EOL to ensure this research remains acceptable.ResultsAll four key stakeholder groups generally supported HIV cure-related research conducted at the EOL because of the history of altruism within the PWH community and the potential for substantial scientific knowledge to be gained. Our informants expressed that: (1) Strong stakeholder and community involvement are integral to the ethical and effective implementation, as well as the social acceptability of this research; (2) PWH approaching the EOL should not inherently be considered a vulnerable class and their autonomy must be respected when choosing to participate in HIV cure-related research at the EOL; (3) Greater diversity among study participants, as well as multi-disciplinary research teams, is necessitated by HIV cure-related research at the EOL; (4) The sensitive nature of this research warrants robust oversight to ensure a favorable risk/benefit balance and to minimize the possibility of therapeutic misconception or undue influence; and (5) Research protocols should remain flexible to accommodate participants’ comfort and needs at the EOL.ConclusionBecause of the ethical issues presented by HIV cure-related research at the EOL, robust ethical safeguards are of utmost importance. The proposed ethical and practical considerations presented herein is a first step in determining the best way to maximize this research’s impact and social value. More much inquiry will need to be directed towards understanding context-specific and cultural considerations for implementing EOL HIV cure research in diverse settings. (shrink)

To a student audience seduced by the claims of a ‘secular Christianity’, Professor Gordon Rupp once urged the combined loyalties of ‘worldmanship’ and ‘other-worldmanship’. The Muslim world shows little friendship to secularist ideologies which explicitly reject the eschatological dimension, but Muslims are increasingly involved in secularising processes; many of these are ‘Islamised’, if they are compatible with Islamic social or political ideals, and the stigma of bid‘ah , innovation, is thereby avoided. A Lebanese author, Muhammad Darwazah, in his Dustūr al-Qur’ (...) ānī , Cairo 1956, advocated a ‘Qur'ānic Constitution’ for the modern world since the Qur'ān’s world-view is both in-worldly and other-worldly: ‘Islam is a religion of the world , of government, society, morals and order, to the same extent as it is a religion of faith and belief and the next world .’. (shrink)