Background: Previous research shows that pediatricians inconsistently utilize the ethics consultation service (ECS). Methods: Pediatricians in two suburban, Midwestern academic hospitals were asked to reflect on their ethics training and utilization of ECS via an anonymous, electronic survey distributed in 2017 and 2018, and analyzed in 2018. Participants reported their clinical experience, exposure to formal and informal ethics training, use of formal and informal ethics consultations, and potential barriers to formal consultation. Results: Less experienced pediatricians were more likely to utilize (...) formal ethics consultation and more likely to have formal ethics training. The most commonly reported reasons not to pursue formal ECS consultation were inconvenience and self-reported expertise in pediatric ethics. Conclusions: These results inform ongoing discussions about ethics consultation among pediatricians and the role of formal ethics training in both undergraduate and graduate medical education. (shrink)

In a crisis, societal needs take precedence over a patient’s best interests. Triage guidelines, however, differ on whether limited resources should focus on maximizing lives or life-years. Choosing between these two approaches has implications for neonatology. Neonatal units have ventilators, some adaptable for adults. This raises the question of whether, in crisis conditions, guidelines for treating extremely premature babies should be altered to free-up ventilators. Some adults who need ventilators will have a survival rate higher than some extremely premature babies. (...) But surviving babies will likely live longer, maximizing life-years. Empiric evidence demonstrates that these babies can derive significant survival benefits from ventilation when compared to adults. When “triaging” or choosing between patients, justice demands fair guidelines. Premature babies do not deserve special consideration; they deserve equal consideration. Solidarity is crucial but must consider needs specific to patient populations and avoid biases against people with disabilities and extremely premature babies. (shrink)

In “Postponed Withholding: Balanced Decision-Making at the Margins of Viability,” Syltern et al. (2022) propose a novel approach to life-and-death decision making for extremely preterm infants in t...

In a passage from Apollodorus’ Against Neaera ([Dem.] 59.113), the manuscripts have unanimously transmitted the feminine plural genitive of ‘citizen’, πολιτίδων. Since Reiske's 1770 emendation, however, editions of the text have printed the considerably more common masculine form, πολιτῶν. Emphasizing the importance of female citizenship in Athens, this note proposes restoring the manuscript reading of the text.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 12, Page 70-72, December 2011.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 4, Page 17-19, April 2012.

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 77-80.

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 40-42.

In the development of new vaccines, many trials use age de-escalation: after establishing safety and efficacy in adult populations, progressively younger cohorts are enrolled and studied. Age de-escalation promotes many values. The responsibility to protect children from potential risks of experimental vaccines is significant, not only given increased risks of adverse effects but also because parents and medical professionals have a moral responsibility to protect children from harms associated with novel, uncertain interventions. Further, given that young children cannot provide informed (...) consent, acceptable risks for research requiring proxy consent are lower than for adults making decisions for themselves. Although age de-escalation approaches are widely used in vaccine trials, including notably in the recent development of pediatric COVID-19 vaccines, ethicists have not addressed the benefits and risks of these approaches. Their benefits are largely assumed and unstated, while their potential risks are usually overlooked. There are no official ethics guidelines for the use of age de-escalation in clinical research. In this paper, we provide a systematic account of key moral factors to consider when employing age de-escalation. Analyzing pediatric COVID-19 vaccine development as our key case study, we clarify the benefits, risks, and trade-offs involved in age de-escalation approaches and call for the development of evidence-based best practice guidelines to identify when age de-escalation is likely to be an ethical strategy in vaccine development. (shrink)

Are doctors right when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when so many of our political leaders don't? Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength--and the greatest reason we can trust it. Tracing the history and philosophy of science from the late (...) nineteenth century to today, this timely and provocative book features a new preface by Oreskes and critical responses by climate experts Ottmar Edenhofer and Martin Kowarsch, political scientist Jon Krosnick, philosopher of science Marc Lange, and science historian Susan Lindee, as well as a foreword by political theorist Stephen Macedo. (shrink)

Executive functions (EFs) and impulsivity are dimensions of self-regulation that are both related to psychopathology. However, self-report measures of impulsivity and laboratory EF tasks typically display small correlations, and existing research indicates that impulsivity and EFs may tap separate aspects of self-regulation that independently statistically predict psychopathology in adulthood. However, relationships between EFs, impulsivity, and psychopathology may be different in childhood compared to adulthood. Here, we examine whether these patterns hold in the baseline assessment of the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive (...) Development (ABCD) sample, a national sample of over 11,000 children (including 749 twin pairs) ages 9–10 years. We examine the phenotypic and genetic relationships among latent variables for different components of EFs and multiple facets of impulsivity. Additionally, we assess how EFs and impulsivity relate to composite measures and latent variables of psychopathology derived from parent report. EFs were weakly correlated with impulsivity, and the strength varied by impulsivity facet, emphasizing their separability. We did not identify significant genetic and environmental correlations between EFs and impulsivity. Moreover, controlling for their small relationships with each other, both EFs and some facets of impulsivity statistically predicted an Externalizing factor, attention problems, and social problems, and twin analyses suggested these relationships were genetic in origin. These findings indicate that EFs and impulsivity represent phenotypically and genetically separable aspects of self-regulation that are both transdiagnostic correlates of psychopathology in childhood. (shrink)

My goal in this lecture is to continue the adventure of feminist thought about religion that has been going on for over 30 years now. It's a discursive adventure, isn't it? A bit like hiking through new terrain—we explore how far we can go today so that others who come after us can go even farther. Or, more optimistically, so that tomorrow we ourselves can go farther still in our own lifetimes. Of course, a metaphor like hiking breaks down over (...) this point: when we hike we don't create the terrain—although we might change it just by passing through. The land has a thereness that our activities in discourse do not—or, rather, the thereness of discourse is of a different order. Our adventure as feminist theorists is one in which we have a large part in creating that which we explore. (shrink)

What are we to make of the Walrus’ sobs and tears and his claim to “deeply sympathize”? Alice, at least, makes something of them: when Tweedledee is done, she says, “I like the Walrus best, … because he was a little sorry for the poor Oysters.” She’s indignant, however, when Tweedledee tells her, “He ate more than the Carpenter, though…. You see he held his handkerchief, so that the Carpenter couldn’t count how many he took; contrariwise.” The Oysters, understandably, take (...) a thoroughly sceptical view of the sobs and tears: “O woeful, weeping Walrus, your tears are all a sham! You’re greedier for Oysters than children are for jam.”. (shrink)

Many philosophers assert that psychological verbs generate opaque contexts and that the object of a psychological verb cannot be replaced with a co‐referring expression salva veritate as the objects of non‐psychological verbs can be. I argue that the logical and linguistic concerns which govern this assertion do not transfer to observational and experimental situations because the criteria that we use in order to verify that an observed subject has one hypothesized desire rather than another provide inconclusive evidence when we don't (...) allow for all regular substitutions in psychological contexts. This becomes more obvious when we contextualize intentional behavior within the appropriate framework by recognizing that, in order to make sense of any desire attribution, we must understand the subject experiencing the desire to be pursuing each desired situation as a means to a further overarching goal. I conclude that the object of desire should always be read de re. (shrink)

Connecting the issues of the female gaze and of the female narrative is the issue of desire. As [Stanley] Cavell repeatedly stresses, a central theme of these films is the heroine’s acknowledgment of her desire of its true object—frequently the man from whom she mistakenly thought she needed to be divorced. The heroine’s acknowledgment of her desire, and of herself as a subject of desire, is for Cavell what principally makes a marriage of equality achievable. It is in this achievement (...) that Cavell wants to locate the feminism of the genre: it is the “comedy of equality” . There is, therefore, an obvious explanation in Cavell’s terms for the anomalous nature of these films: if their vision is explicitly feminist in embracing an ideal of equality, in approvingly foregrounding female desire, and in characterizing that desire as active and as actively gazing, then they would not be expected to fit an analysis based on films whose view of female desire and the female gaze is passive, absent, or treacherous. If we accept Cavell’s readings, these films provide genuine counterexamples to feminist claims of the normative masculinity of film .My affection for these films, and the ways in which Cavell accounts for that affection, leads me to want to believe that his account, or something like it, is true: that there did briefly emerge a distinctively feminist sensibility in some popular Hollywood movies, one which unsurprisingly succumbed to the repressive redomestication of women in the postwar years. But, for a number of reasons, I can’t quite believe it. Some version of the feminist critical theory of popular cinema does, in an odd way, apply to these movies: they are, to use a frequent phrase of Cavell’s, the exceptions that prove the rule. Though they do have some claim to being considered feminist, their feminism is seriously qualified by the terms in which it is presented, by the ways in which female desire and the female gaze are framed.Naomi Scheman is associate professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Minnesota. She is currently working on the roles played by bodies and by differences in modern and feminist postmodern accounts of knowledge. (shrink)

Political philosophers have traditionally focused on justice and regarded equality as an ideal despite its lack of factual support; normative universal human equality is a new, twentieth-century regulative moral construct. The theoretical focus on justice overlooks what most people care about in reality—injustice. In modern democratic society, formal or legal equality now co-exists with real inequality. One reason is that justice is not applied to all groups in society and applicative justice––applying justice to those who don’t now receive it––is a (...) remedy. But injustice theory also includes other forms of injustice such as legal, humanitarian, and injustice without blame or responsibility. (shrink)

Casey O’Callaghan has argued that rather than hearing meanings, we hear phonemes. In this note I argue that valuable though they are in an account of speech perception – depending on how we define ‘hearing’ – phonemes either don’t explain enough or they go too far. So, they are not the right tool for his criticism of the semantic perceptual account (SPA).

BackgroundThis study aimed at standardizing and providing preliminary evidence on the clinical usability of the Italian telephone-based Verbal Fluency Battery, which includes phonemic, semantic and alternate verbal fluency tasks.MethodsThree-hundred and thirty-five Italian healthy participants and 27 individuals with neurodegenerative or cerebrovascular diseases were administered the t-VFB. Switch number and cluster size were computed via latent semantic analyses. HPs underwent the telephone-based Mental State Examination and Backward Digit Span. Construct validity, factorial structure, internal consistency, test-retest and inter-rater reliability and equivalence with (...) the in-person Verbal Fluency tasks were assessed. Norms were derived via Equivalent Scores. Diagnostic accuracy against clinical populations was assessed.ResultsThe majority of t-VFB scores correlated among each other and with the BDS, but not with the MMSE. Switch number correlated with t-PVF, t-SVF, t-AVF scores, whilst cluster size with the t-SVF and t-AVF scores only. The t-VFB was underpinned by a mono-component structure and was internally consistent. Test-retest and inter-rater reliability were optimal. Each t-VFB test was statistically equivalent to its in-person version. Education predicted all t-VFB scores, whereas age t-SVF and t-AVF scores and sex only some t-SVF scores. Diagnostic accuracy against clinical samples was optimal.DiscussionThe t-VFB is a valid, reliable and normed telephone-based assessment tool for language and executive functioning, equivalent to the in-person version; results show promising evidence of its diagnostic accuracy in neurological populations. (shrink)

The body may be the object we know the best. It is the only object from which we constantly receive a flow of information through sight and touch; and it is the only object we can experience from the inside, through our proprioceptive, vestibular, and visceral senses. Yet there have been very few books that have attempted to consolidate our understanding of the body as it figures in our experience and self-awareness. This volume offers an interdisciplinary and comprehensive treatment of (...) bodily self-awareness, the first book to do so since the landmark 1995 collection The Body and the Self, edited by José Bermúdez, Naomi Eilan, and Anthony Marcel. Since 1995, the study of the body in such psychological disciplines as cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and neuropsychology has advanced dramatically, accompanied by a resurgence of philosophical interest in the significance of the body in our mental life. The sixteen specially commissioned essays in this book reflect the advances in these fields. The book is divided into three parts, each part covering a topic central to an explanation of bodily self-awareness: representation of the body; the sense of bodily ownership; and representation of the self. ContributorsAdrian Alsmith, Brianna Beck, José Luis Bermúdez, Anna Berti, Alexandre Billon, Andrew J. Bremner, Lucilla Cardinali, Tony Cheng, Frédérique de Vignemont, Francesca Fardo, Alessandro Farnè, Carlotta Fossataro, Shaun Gallagher, Francesca Garbarini, Patrick Haggard, Jakob Hohwy, Matthew R. Longo, Tamar Makin, Marie Martel, Melvin Mezue, John Michael, Christopher Peacocke, Lorenzo Pia, Louise Richardson, Alice C. Roy, Manos Tsakiris, Hong Yu Wong. (shrink)

Our symposium on Naomi Zack's newest book, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), had its origin in an Author Meets Critics panel of the Radical Philosophy Association at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division conference in 2012, organized by José Jorge Mendoza. The respondents--Kristie Dotson, Lewis Gordon, José Jorge Mendoza, and Lucius T. Outlaw Jr.--have revised and expanded their original papers and Naomi Zack has in turn provided a (...) detailed response to their contributions. The result is an insightful, critical, and multiperspectival engagement with Zack's work. Throughout the respondents' papers you will find references to the twelve requirements that Zack argues are necessary for an ethics of race. These can be found in an appendix to Naomi Zack's response. (shrink)

Why hasn’t the Marx-inspired Left seized upon catastrophic climate change as the basis for reconceiving historical materialism and the contradictions fueling anticapitalist struggle in the twenty-first century? Defining core participants as energy users and abusers, anchored in the opposition to fossil-fueled profit and growth rather than in traditional class conflicts, the struggle to create a postcapitalist energy commons can become the leading edge of a more broadly conceived global struggle for a sustainable and just postcapitalist society. The new global movement (...) will be enabled by technologies of green energy microproduction, an energy internet for sharing energy on postcapitalist grids, and efforts to create more sustainable community relationships and practices. Catastrophic climate change can become the occasion for reigniting a Marx-inspired sense of transformative agency and solidarity that will enable us to confront transnational capitalism globally and locally in ways that are beyond the imaginative bounds of the current paper. (shrink)

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author note: Naomi Zack is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Albany. She herself is of mixed race: Jewish, African American, and Native American.

Naomi Scheman argues that the concerns of philosophy emerge not from the universal human condition but from conditions of privilege. Her books represents a powerful challenge to the notion that gender makes no difference in the construction of philosophical reasoning. At the same time, it criticizes the narrow focus of most feminist theorizing and calls for a more inclusive form of inquiry.

Reigning orthodoxy in the philosophical study of human rational capacities, such as being able to act intentionally and to reason, is to characterize them in causal psychological terms. That is, to analyze these capacities in terms of mental states and their causal relations. It is against this background that the work of G.E.M. Anscombe has gained renewed interest. The main goal of this chapter is twofold. First, I will explicate Anscombe’s philosophical approach by analyzing her account of intentional action and (...) by relating it to the misperceptions of that account in (the history of) the philosophy of action. Importantly, Anscombe holds that an analysis of intentional action in terms of what it is, e.g., an event with certain specific features, cannot provide non-circular explanations. Instead, following Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Wittgenstein, Anscombe seeks to explicate intentional action in terms of its form, i.e., the way in which it exists. The second aim of the chapter is to show the import of Anscombe’s approach by applying it to the philosophy of reasoning. After discussing two main problems for the current orthodox view in epistemological debates on reasoning, I will propose an alternative Anscombe-inspired view of reasoning. In this so-called form view of reasoning, reasoning is characterized as a tool to drag out implications, embodied in judgments of the form p as following from q. The upshot of the chapter is that concepts of our rational capacities do not depict certain psychological states or processes, but rather our involvement with rational connections that exist in our lives and practices. (shrink)

Peopling the donor world -- The meaning of family in a changing world -- Creating families -- Creating communities across families -- The laws of the donor world: parents and children -- Law, adoption, and family secrets: disclosure and incest -- Reasons to regulate -- Regulating for connection -- Regulating for health and safety: setting limits in the gamete world -- Why not to regulate -- Conclusion: challenging and creating kinship.

Vaak wordt gesteld dat ongelijkheid een individuele verantwoordelijkheid is. Om sociale ongelijkheid te verkleinen zoekt men dan de oplossingen in het ondersteunen van individuen. Maar daarbij wordt meestal voorbijgegaan aan de morele dimensies van ongelijkheid, en aan het belang van de groep of de netwerken waarin mensen wonen, werken en leven. De essays in dit boek, gebaseerd op de nieuwste wetenschappelijke inzichten, tonen aan dat juist die groepsdimensie een zeer belangrijk perspectief is, waaraan in beleidsoplossingen te vaak voorbij wordt gegaan. (...) 0Als je leven niet loopt zoals je dat voor ogen hebt, is dat dan je eigen schuld of hangt dat wellicht met meer zaken samen? Iedereen weet dat omgevingsfactoren een belangrijke rol spelen: Waar ben je geboren? Welk netwerk heb je tot je beschikking? Toch worden bij pogingen om de ongelijkheid in de wereld te reduceren in de eerste plaats individuele oplossingen aangedragen. Dit boek laat voor de verschillende domeinen in de samenleving als de zorg, het onderwijs, werk, migratie en milieu zien hoe dat (niet) werkt. (shrink)

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. These scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. -/- Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and (...) scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. -/- Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era. (shrink)

Amid the highly industrialized, export-focused food system of the Canadian prairies, some farmers and consumers are turning to localized agriculture as an alternative—they are “going local”. Despite farmers’ obvious importance to the food system, surprisingly little research has examined their motivations and reasons for localization. To date, most local food scholarship in North America has focused on either consumers’ motivations to buy local or the systemic aspects of local food, such as regulations, infrastructure, and marketing arrangements. Existing research suggests that (...) local food systems are supported by consumers’ rejection of the industrial paradigm and desire to connect with their food and its source. But what drives farmers to localize, particularly when export-focused production is firmly entrenched as the status quo? Based on interviews and focus groups with 60 farmers, processors, policy experts, and retailers in the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan, this paper examines local food systems from the producer perspective in a rural context of high industrialization and geographical dispersion. We examine what motivates farmers to produce for local markets, and what forces they must resist to do so. The findings indicate that farmers’ main motivations for localization are political and social in nature, and stem from a critique of the dominant neoliberal agri-food system. We map farmers’ agential responses to this dominant system on a spectrum that ranges from acceptance of a neoliberal “feed the world” ideology to promotion of food sovereignty. Drawing on farmers’ perspectives, our findings question the straightforward equation of local food with environmental sustainability and also challenge neoliberal economic assumptions of “scaling up”. (shrink)

Buddhism and Jainism share the concepts of karma, rebirth, and the desirability of escaping from rebirth. The literature of both traditions contains many stories about past, and sometimes future, lives which reveal much about these foundational doctrines. Naomi Appleton carefully explores how multi-life stories served to construct, communicate, and challenge ideas about karma and rebirth within early South Asia, examining portrayals of the different realms of rebirth, the potential paths and goals of human beings, and the biographies of ideal (...) religious figures. Appleton also deftly surveys the ability of karma to bind individuals together over multiple lives, and the nature of the supernormal memory that makes multi-life stories available in the first place. This original study not only sheds light on the individual preoccupations of Buddhist and Jain tradition, but contributes to a more complete history of religious thought in South Asia, and brings to the foreground long-neglected narrative sources. (shrink)

It’s widely accepted that we have most reason to accept theories that best fulfill the following naturalistically respectable criteria: internal consistency, consistency with the facts, and exemplification of the theoretical virtues. It’s also widely accepted that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. I argue that if you accept the aforementioned criteria, you have most reason to reject that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. By applying the criteria to worlds that are all prima facie possible, I show that contingent local matters of (...) particular fact partly determine which theory of composition we should accept at a world. For instance, I argue that when we apply the criteria to our world, we should accept Mereological Nihilism. Furthermore, even if you think that the worlds I mention, such as gunky worlds, are impossible, you should still reject the brute principle that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. Instead, you should only accept that a theory of composition is necessarily true if contingent local matters of particular fact at possible worlds cannot tell in favor of one theory of composition over another. (shrink)