While the human papillomavirus vaccine is medically indicated to reduce the risk of genital warts and certain types of cancer, rates of HPV vaccination repeatedly fall short of public health goals. Individual-level factors contributing to low vaccination rates are well documented. However, system-level barriers, particularly the need for parental consent, have been less explored. To date, there is no legal or ethical consensus in the USA regarding whether adolescents might permissibly self-consent to the HPV vaccine. Consequently, there is considerable variability (...) in medical practice at the provider and state level. In this essay, we explore the ethical acceptability of vaccinating adolescents for HPV without parental consent. We argue that the same ethical considerations that justify permitting minors to consent to treatment for sexual and reproductive health care—namely, public health benefit and adolescents’ developing autonomy—similarly justify permitting minors to consent to HPV vaccination. Based on this analysis, we conclude that allowing adolescents to self-consent to the HPV vaccine is ethically justifiable and should be reflected in US state policies. (shrink)

Was Jesus crucified on the cross? Did Jesus die by crucifixion? This topic generates so much emotion and conflict in Christian-Islamic dialogue as many theories have developed to prove one side of the equation. While several methods can answer Islamic objections against the biblical belief, the evidential Apologetics is the best method to provide evidence for the Christian claims. Evidential Apologetics is one of the methods that seeks to prove the truthfulness of the Christian worldview by showing historical and scientific (...) evidences. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to use the evidential method to answer three major objections that Muslims raise against the crucifixion of Jesus: Jesus was never crucified, the swoon theory, and the substitute theory. The paper will conclude that there are surmounted historical and scientific evidences that support the event of Jesus’s crucifixion. (shrink)

Recent interest in the external validity of prediction models has produced many methods for finding predictive distributions that are invariant to dataset shifts and can be used for prediction in new, unseen environments. However, these methods consider different types of shifts and have been developed under disparate frameworks, making it difficult to theoretically analyze how solutions differ with respect to stability and accuracy. Taking a causal graphical view, we use a flexible graphical representation to express various types of dataset shifts. (...) Given a known graph of the data generating process, we show that all invariant distributions correspond to a causal hierarchy of graphical operators, which disable the edges in the graph that are responsible for the shifts. The hierarchy provides a common theoretical underpinning for understanding when and how stability to shifts can be achieved, and in what ways stable distributions can differ. We use it to establish conditions for minimax optimal performance across environments, and derive new algorithms that find optimal stable distributions. By using this new perspective, we empirically demonstrate that that there is a tradeoff between minimax and average performance. (shrink)

On 27 March 2014, Loreal Tsingine, a 27-year-old Navajo woman was shot and killed by Austin Shipley, a white male police officer, also 27 years old, who said he was trying to apprehend her for a suspected shoplifting. Shipley was never charged, and the Department of Justice declined to investigate the Winslow police on the matter. This article explores Shipley’s killing of Loreal Tsingine and the police investigation of the shooting as quotidian events in settler colonial states. Police shootings of (...) Indigenous people and the legal response to police use of force (along with everyday settler violence) are a part of the racial terror that is a central part of settler colonialism. Both the shooting and the official narratives of it as a justifiable use of force reveal the psychic and material underpinnings of a settler state, a state that continually imagines and consolidates itself as a community of whites imperiled by Indians among others. White settler violence directed at those imagined as threats lives just beneath the surface of everyday settler life, and importantly, flows through institutions such as policing, embedding itself in everyday professional routines. The extractive relations that are the basis of settler colonialism require and produce white subjects for whom Indigenous lands and bodies are the resource for white identity; policing is one site where white men and women (as well as those aspiring to whiteness), can enact racial hierarchy on behalf of the colonial state with impunity. (shrink)

Prior studies provide consistent evidence of deficits for psychopaths in processing verbal emotional material but are inconsistent regarding nonverbal emotional material. To examine whether psychopaths exhibit general versus specific deficits in nonverbal emotional processing, 34 psychopaths and 33 nonpsychopaths identified with Hare's (R. D. Hare, 1991) Psychopathy Checklist-Revised were asked to complete a facial affect recognition test. Slides of prototypic facial expressions were presented. Three hypotheses regarding hemispheric lateralization anomalies in psychopaths were also tested (right-hemisphere dysfunction, reduced lateralization, and reversed (...) lateralization). Psychopaths were less accurate than nonpsychopaths at classifying facial affect under conditions promoting reliance on right-hemisphere resources and displayed a specific deficit in classifying disgust. These findings demonstrate that psychopaths exhibit specific deficits in nonverbal emotional processing. (shrink)

: For the better part of the last decade, Canadian peacekeepers have been encouraged to frame their activities in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia as encounters with "absolute evil." Peacekeeping is seen as a moral project in which the North civilizes the South. Using the Canadian peacekeeping context, I reflect on President Bush's use of the phrase "axis of evil" in the New World Order. I argue that this phrase reveals an epistemology structured by notions of the civilized (White) (...) North and the barbaric (Racialized) South. These racial underpinnings give the concept of an "axis of evil" its currency in countries of the North. (shrink)

For the better part of the last decade, Canadian peacekeepers have been encouraged to frame their activities in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia as encounters with “absolute evil.” Peacekeeping is seen as a moral project in which the North civilizes the South. Using the Canadian peacekeeping context, I reflect on President Bush's use of the phrase “axis of evil” in the New World Order. 1 argue that this phrase reveals an epistemology structured by notions of the civilized North and (...) the barbaric South. These racial underpinnings give the concept of an “axis of evil” its currency in countries of the North. (shrink)

How is it possible to acknowledge and confront patriarchal violence within Muslim migrant communities without descending into cultural deficit explanations (they are overly patriarchal and inherently uncivilised) and without inviting extraordinary measures of stigmatisation, surveillance and control so increased after the events of September 11, 2001? In this paper, I explore this question by examining Norway's responses to the issue of forced marriages. I argue that social and political responses to violence against women in Muslim communities have been primarily culturalist. (...) That is, the violence is understood as originating entirely in culture, an approach that obscures the multiple factors that give rise to and sustain the violence. The culturalist approach enables the stigmatising and surveillance of Muslim communities. I approach this argument in two parts. In part one I discuss two important and influential books written by women who identify their concerns as feminist and who lay out the case for considering the problem of forced marriage as a problem of controlling fundamentally unassimilable and culturally inferior Muslims. I explore these works as paradigmatic of the culturalising or culturalist move. In part two, I review a variety of legal initiatives in Norway, first contextualising them as part of a larger European venture to control Muslim populations and then examining what they share conceptually with the approaches in part one. I end with how we might begin to develop an anti-racist response to the problem of violence against women. (shrink)

Studies on so-called Change Blindness and Inattentional Blindness have been taken to establish the claim that conscious perception of a stimulus requires the attentional processing of that stimulus. One might contend, against this claim, that the evidence only shows attention to be necessary for the subject to have access to the contents of conscious perception and not for conscious perception itself. This “Methodological Argument” is gaining ground among philosophers who work on attention and consciousness, such as Christopher Mole. I find (...) that, without the supporting evidence of inaccessible consciousness, this argument collapses into an indefensible form of inductive parsimony. The Methodological Argument is thus shown to be unsuccessful when used against the claim that attention is required for conscious perception, though I suggest that it may be successful against the more ambitious claim that attention is necessary for all conscious experience. (shrink)

To aid neuroscientists in determining the ethical limits of their work and its applications, neuroethical problems need to be identified, catalogued, and analyzed from the standpoint of an ethical framework. Many hospitals have already established either autonomy or welfare-centered theories as their adopted ethical framework. Unfortunately, the choice of an ethical framework resists resolution: each of these two moral theories claims priority at the exclusion of the other, but for patients with neurological pathologies, concerns about the patient’s welfare are treated (...) as meaningless without consideration of the patient’s expressed wishes, and vice versa. Ethicists have long fought over whether suffering or autonomy should be our primary concern, but in neuroethics a resolution of this question is essential to determine the treatment of patients in medical and legal limbo. I propose a solution to this problem in the form of ethical dualism. This is a conservative measure in that it retains both sides of the debate: both happiness and autonomy have intrinsic value. However, this move is often met with resistance because of its more complex nature—it is more difficult to make a decision when there are two parallel sets of values that must be considered than when there is just one such set. The monist theories, though, do not provide enough explanatory power: namely, I will present two recently publicized cases where it is clear that neither ethical value on its own (neither welfare nor autonomy) can fully account for how a vegetative patient should be treated. From the neuroethical cases of Terri Schiavo and Lauren Richardson, I will argue that a dualist framework is superior to its monist predecessors, and I will describe the main features of such an account. (shrink)

The normative figure in Western feminism remains the liberal autonomous individual of modernity. ‹Other’ women are those who have their freedom to choose restricted. Typically, ‹other’ women are those burdened by culture and hindered by their communities from entering modernity. If we remain in the terrain of thinking about women as vulnerable or imperilled, and some women as particularly imperilled, as we generally do of Muslim women, we remain squarely within the framework of patriarchy understood as abstracted from all other (...) systems. A modernity/premodernity distinction will continue to invade any projects intending to help Muslim women. This paper shows the persistence of the modernity/premodernity distinction in contemporary debates around applying Sharia law to the settlement of family law disputes under the Arbitration Act in Ontario, Canada. I argue below that in their concern to curtail conservative and patriarchal forces within the Muslim community, Canadian feminists (both Muslim and Non-Muslim) utilized frameworks that installed a secular/religious divide that functions as a colour line, marking the difference between the modern, enlightened West, and tribal, religious Muslims. I suggest that feminist responses might have helped to sustain a new form of governmentality, one in which the productive power of the imperilled Muslim woman functions to keep in line Muslim communities at the same time that it defuses more radical feminist and anti-racist critique of conservative religious forces. I end by exploring how this effect could have been restricted. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Excited DeliriumThe Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Police BrutalityKathryn Petrozzo (bio)In their timely and pressing piece, Arjun Byju and Phoebe Friesen explore the contentious diagnosis of excited delirium; a syndrome characterized by erratic, aggressive, and “delusional” behavior (2023). Overwhelmingly, this term is used when individuals come in contact with police and/or first responders. Although much attention has been given to debating whether or not this is a “real” diagnosis, the authors (...) want to shift the focus to examining the work that excited delirium is doing in the world, as well as the underlying beliefs guiding it that are perpetuating substantial harm. Drawing significantly on the work of Ian Hacking (1998, 2006) and Sherene Razack (2015), Byju and Friesen explore what kinds of people are being made up by the label of “excited delirium” and the subsequent dehumanization that perpetuates violence towards those in this grouping.Despite the lack of an agreed upon definition, excited delirium tends to frequently group together young Black men and other marginalized people of color, who have a psychiatric history, and those who have taken or are suspected to have taken drugs (Byju & Friezen, 2023). As this is “observed” when individuals come into contact with law enforcement and/or first responders, those who are presumed to be suffering from excited delirium are typically met with physical restraints (chokeholds, hogties, etc.), forced injections of sedatives, and/or taser guns. The violent reactions are often justified not only by this “diagnosis,” but the employment of racial stereotypes; notably, the notion that Black bodies as being less susceptible to pain. As the authors aptly put it:This kind of symptom language helps make up the novel category of a person who suffers from excited delirium: a crazed and inhumane monster, a golem that must be met with unrelenting and superordinate force, who is fated, regardless of interventions, to die a spontaneous death. This paradox, that those with excited delirium are supposedly both too strong and too weak, is at the core of the illness narrative.(2023)It is evident that this label is reinforcing the combination of two harmful stereotypes: the notion that those suffering from severe mental illness occupy a space that is “less than fully human,” and racist stereotyping of Black bodies “superseding human strength.” This perpetuates total dehumanization of the individual, where it is then justified to invoke brutal tactics, as well as signal [End Page 357] to the greater community this is how individuals with mental illnesses and/or belonging to a particular racial group (chiefly, Black men), should be treated. This is despite the fact that those suffering from mental illnesses are significantly more likely to be victims of violent crimes, Black Americans are 3.2 times more likely to be murdered by police, and convergence of these factors (being Black and living with a mental illness) increases likelihood of such fatal interactions (Schwartz & Jahn 2020; Shadravan, Edwards, & Vinson 2021; Stuart, 2003).Although I am in wholehearted support of their account, I take issue with the authors’ conceptualization of excited delirium as non-falsifiable, as well as the notion that diseases, generally, are falsifiable. In an attempt to further criticize the utilization of excited delirium, Byju and Friesen call upon Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion as a measure for what constitutes as scientific; arguing that excited delirium is not a legitimate scientific concept as it is impossible to falsify. First, I am not convinced that excited delirium is in principle non-falsifiable; as the way in which it’s conceptualized actually appears to be falsifiable. The authors point out that external factors, such as tasing and violent restraints, are clearly the causal explanation, which should in fact, lead one to reject the hypothesis of an excited delirium diagnosis. However, in practice, those who are seeking to exonerate the police/first responders responsible for these deaths, are not accepting this evidence leading them to reject the excited delirium diagnosis, but rather, are crafting an incorrect causal narrative. This is deeply problematic, but it does not necessarily render excited delirium as non-falsifiable. More broadly, I am concerned with the reliance on the falsifiability criterion, which has been widely criticized in the... (shrink)

In this paper, I consider pedagogical moments when the project of pedagogy is to _not understand_, as understanding would entail complicity with dehumanization. I explore the slipperiness of understanding and parse when understanding is helpful and when it reinscribes structures of dehumanization. I examine when it might be important in music education pedagogy to foster a refusal to understand, specifically in cases of extreme suffering that might occur in projects of dehumanization, atrocity, and genocide. Then, I explore the ethics embedded (...) in different forms of understanding and consider why not understanding is sometimes the ethical path and tease out the complexities of such refusals to understand. Subsequently, I focus on what music might contribute to this pedagogical approach. I then explore and critique empathy and the project of empathy in education. Ultimately, I consider the role of discomfort in music education to facilitate these kinds of refusals. I center the work of several scholars in this discussion: Sherene Razack (Dark threats and White knights: The Somalia Affair, peacekeeping, and the new imperialism University of Toronto Press Toronto, ON, 2004, Rev Educ Pedag Cult Stud 29 (4): 375-394, 2007), Megan Boler (Feeling power: Emotions and education. Routledge, New York, NY, 1999), Jennifer Geddes (Hypatia 18 (1):104-115, 2003), Charlotte Delbo (_Auschwitz and after_. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995/2014), Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Penguin Books, New York, NY, 1963/2006), Marie Hållander (Ethics Educ 10(2): 175-185, 2015, Stud Philos Educ 38: 467–480, 2019), Barbara Applebaum (Being White, being good: White complicity, White moral responsibility, and social justice pedagogy. Lexington Books, New York 2010, White educators negotiating complicity: Roadblocks paved with good intentions. Lexington Books, New York, NY, 2022), and Liora Gubkin (Teach Theol Relig 18(2): 103–120, 2015). (shrink)