As the HIV epidemic continues to grow worldwide, women are increasingly and disproportionally affected. With the introduction of anti-retroviral medications that have been found to effectively prevent perinatal transmission of HIV, the approach to HIV testing in pregnant women has grown increasingly more controversial. In recent years, the model of voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) has come into question with opt-out testing now advocated for by the Centers for Disease Control and occurring widely in pregnancy. The benefits of opt-out testing (...) are numerous and may justify its use in replacing the VCT that many have come to see as insufficient. An ethical analysis of opt-out testing suggests it may be at odds with true informed consent and involve a degree of coercion that would not be allowed outside the prenatal setting. If opt-out testing is going to remain the standard of care then the ethical issues it raises must be made transparent. Strategies need to be designed for ensuring that HIV counseling and testing in pregnancy is done in accordance with ethical and reproductive rights principles. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement among large segments of western society that we are living in a period of hard times. At first glance such a belief might seem exceedingly odd. After all, persons in western society find themselves living in a time of unprecedented material abundance. Hunger and disease, evils all too familiar to the members of earlier generations, although far from eradicated from modern life, are plainly on the wane. Persons alive today can look forward to healthier, longer, and (...) more comfortable lives than those of their grand parents. Nevertheless, the feeling that life today is especially difficult is rampant in government, in the media, in popular books, and in academic circles. Western society is perceived in many quarters as wracked by crises of all sorts-of faith, of power, of authority, of social turmoil, of declining quality in workmanship and products, and of a general intellectual malaise afflicting both those on the Left and the Right. A tone of crisis permeates the language of public life. Editorials in major newspapers are full of dire warnings about the dangers of unbridled egoism, avarice and greed, and the risks and horrors of pollution, overpopulation, the arms race, crime, and indulgent lifestyles. (shrink)

Comment by Aaron L. Mackler on “‘Through Her I Too Shall Bear a Child’: Birth Surrogates in Jewish Law” by Elie Spitz Reply by Elie Kaplan Spitz Research Note by G. Scott Davis.

Emotional memories are vivid and lasting but not necessarily accurate. Under some conditions, emotion even increases people’s susceptibility to false memories. This review addresses when and why emotion leaves people vulnerable to misremembering events. Recent research suggests that pregoal emotions—those experienced before goal attainment or failure —narrow the scope of people’s attention to information that is central to their goals. This narrow focus can impair memory for peripheral details, leaving people vulnerable to misinformation concerning those details. In contrast, postgoal emotions—those (...) experienced after goal attainment or failure —broaden the scope of attention leaving people more resistant to misinformation. Implications for legal contexts, such as emotion-related errors in eyewitness testimony, are discussed. (shrink)

Comment by Aaron L. Mackler on “‘Through Her I Too Shall Bear a Child’: Birth Surrogates in Jewish Law” by Elie Spitz Reply by Elie Kaplan Spitz Research Note by G. Scott Davis.

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while its (...) feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)

In his target article, Yarkoni prescribes descriptive research as a potential antidote for the generalizability crisis. In our commentary, we offer four guiding principles for conducting descriptive research that is generalizable and enduring: prioritize context over control; let naturalistic observations contextualize structured tasks; operationalize the target phenomena rigorously and transparently; and attend to individual data.

This collection brings together fourteen contributions by authors from around the globe. Each of the contributions engages with questions about how local and global bioethical issues are made to be comparable, in the hope of redressing basic needs and demands for justice. These works demonstrate the significant conceptual contributions that can be made through feminists' attention to debates in a range of interrelated fields, especially as they formulate appropriate responses to developments in medical technology, global economics, population shifts, and poverty.

The United States relies on uncompensated family caregivers to provide most of the long-term care required by older adults as they age. But such care comes at a significant financial cost to these caregivers in the form of lower lifetime earnings and diminished Social Security retirement benefits, ineligibility for Medicare coverage of their healthcare costs, and minimal retirement savings. To reduce the impact of uncompensated caregiving on the intergenerational transmission of poverty, this paper discusses three possible mechanisms of compensating family (...) caregivers: public payments, deemed wage credits under Social Security, and income tax incentives. (shrink)

The say-on-pay regulation in the Dodd-Frank Act requires publicly-traded U.S. firms to hold a nonbinding, advisory shareholder vote on executive compensation. Advocates claim that SOP voting gives shareholders a mechanism to hold managers and boards more accountable. Critics contend that SOP votes may simplistically reflect shareholders’ reactions to the overall value of CEO compensation or the firm’s net income. However, based on prior research, we contend that market participants’ SOP votes are likely to consider current income attributes. For example, the (...) market punishes firms that do not meet or beat benchmarks such as analyst earnings expectations, and that shareholders scrutinize the quality of the income sources of firms that consistently meet/beat analyst expectations. We thus expect that more shareholders will provide ‘agree’ SOP votes for a firm that consistently meets/beats analyst forecasts and does so when net income does not include nonrecurring gains. Further, we consider whether perceptions about the fairness of CEO compensation play a mediating role in the relationship between the interaction of these two current income attributes and SOP votes. Results from an experiment using evening MBA students as participants indicates that the two current income attributes significantly interact with respect to the percentage of agree SOP votes, and that compensation fairness perceptions fully mediate this relationship. Further, the mediating effect of compensation fairness perceptions is robust to including CEO-level and other determinants found in prior research. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and their implications for public policy and research. (shrink)

This paper examines social determinants of resource competition among Tsimane Amerindian women of Bolivia. We introduce a semi-anonymous experiment (the Social Strategy Game) designed to simulate resource competition among women. Information concerning dyadic social relationships and demographic data were collected to identify variables influencing resource competition intensity, as measured by the number of beads one woman took from another. Relationship variables are used to test how the affiliative or competitive aspects of dyads affect the extent of prosociality in the game. (...) Using a mixed-modeling procedure, we find that women compete with those with whom they are quarreling over accusations of meat theft, mate competition, and rumor spreading. They also compete with members of their social network and with those who were designated as cooperative helpers or as close kin. Women take fewer beads from desired friends, neighbors, and from those viewed as enemies. We interpret favoritism toward enemies as resulting from fear of retribution. Our results suggest that social relations among women are multifaceted and often cannot be simplified by exclusive focus on genetic relatedness, physical proximity, or reciprocity. We argue that a complex understanding of cooperation and competition among women may require important contextual information concerning relationship history in addition to typical features of resource ecology. (shrink)

Over the last decade, numerous interventions and techniques that aim to engender, strengthen, and expand compassion have been created, proliferating an evidence base for the benefits of compassion meditation training. However, to date, little research has been conducted to examine individual variation in the learning, beliefs, practices, and subjective experiences of compassion meditation. This mixed-method study examines changes in novice meditators’ knowledge and contemplative experiences before, during, and after taking an intensive course in CBCT®, a contemplative intervention that is increasingly (...) used for both inter- and intrapersonal flourishing. The participants in this study were Christian healthcare chaplains completing a 1-year residency in Clinical Pastoral Education who learned CBCT as part of their professional chaplaincy training curriculum. Prior to and upon completion of training, we surveyed participants to assess their beliefs about the malleability of compassion, types of engagement in compassion meditation, and perceptions of the impact of taking CBCT. We also conducted in-depth interviews with a subset of participants to gain a qualitative understanding of their subjective experiences of learning and practicing compassion meditation, a key component of CBCT. We found that participants reported increases in the extent to which they believed compassion to be malleable after studying CBCT. We also found high levels of variability of individual ways of practicing and considered the implications of this for the study of contemplative learning processes. This multi-methodological approach yielded novel insights into how compassion practice and compassion-related outcomes interrelate, insights that can inform the basic scientific understanding of the experience of learning and enacting compassion meditation as a means of strengthening compassion itself. (shrink)

Roderick Chisholm famously held that our knowledge of the world is supported entirely by a foundation of self‐justifying statements, none of which logically implies the existence of any physical object in that world. The only contingent statements to be found in the foundation, he maintained, are those that are “about our own psychological states and the ways we are ‘appeared to’.” It is a view that, as Chisholm was well aware, tallies poorly with our ordinary practice of justifying statements. We (...) are typically happy to justify statements by ultimate appeal to what we have seen or heard; that is, by ultimate appeal to statements that logically imply that certain things in the world are as we take them to be. This essay examines how Chisholm sought to explain away this apparent disconfirmation of foundationalism by ordinary practice—in effect, how Chisholm responded to one of the chief criticisms of foundationalism launched by J. L. Austin. My suggestion will be that, when the dust clears, it is Austin who comes out ahead. (shrink)

Résumé Richelieu envoie, en 1629, Louis Deshayes de Courmenin à Moscou afin de signer un traité pour la reprise du commerce français en Russie. Après Hauser (1944) et Zordanija (1960), nous tentons d’éclairer cette mission à l’aide de textes inédits. Un extrait du journal de voyage de Brisacier et d’autres documents montrent que les Français recherchent surtout les produits russes (fourrures et autres peaux, fournitures de marine, céréales). Bien que le tsar leur refuse le droit d’aller en Perse pour acheter (...) la soie brute via la Russie, la mission de Deshayes est néanmoins un succès, économique et aussi politique. (shrink)

L'auteur cherche, d'abord, à définir les concepts de temps et d'espace, c'est-à-dire non ce qu'ils sont en réalité, mais ce que nous avons dans l'esprit lorsque nous en parlons. Il constate à partir de là que la réalité, en première analyse, ne leur correspond qu'à peu près - que ce sont des idéaltypes - et que nous sommes obligés de les " bricoler " pour les adapter à elle. La mécanique quantique, la cosmologie et la simple expérience psychologique semblent nous (...) faire aller plus loin et nous faire accéder à une réalité non temporelle et non spatiale, mais là encore, d'une manière ambiguë et seulement négative. Si alors, au lieu d'interroger la réalité, nous interrogeons le temps et l'espace eux-mêmes, nous constatons qu'ils sont essentiellement subjectifs comme le sont les sensations, c'est-à-dire qu'ils ne sont pas plus l'image de la réalité que la sensation du rouge produite par un coquelicot n'est l'image du coquelicot réel. Il est vrai qu'à la sensation du rouge correspond une onde électromagnétique. Quelque chose dans la réalité correspond donc nécessairement au temps et à l'espace, mais tandis que nous connaissons ce qui correspond dans celle-ci aux sensations, nous ne pouvons le faire en ce qui les concerne, faute d'un accès positif à une réalité absolument non temporelle et non spatiale. Ce qui nous oblige à vivre en double registre - sur le mode de la réalité du temps et de l'espace et sur le mode de leur irréalité. (shrink)

Let T be a complete, model complete o-minimal theory extending the theory RCF of real closed ordered fields in some appropriate language L. We study derivations δ on models ℳ⊧T. We introduce the no...

J. L. Austin famously thought that facts about the circumstances in which it is ordinarily appropriate and reasonable to make claims to knowledge have a great bearing on the propriety of a philosophical account of knowledge. His major criticism of the epistemological doctrines about which he wrote was precisely that they lacked fidelity to our ordinary linguistic practices. In The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Barry Stroud argues that Austin was misguided: it is one thing for it to be inappropriate under (...) ordinary circumstances to deny that someone knows that P, another thing for it to be true that she knows that P. Thus, to the philosophical enterprise of determining which knowledge attributions are true, Austin’s form of criticism is beside the point. I argue that, attractive though it may be, this response to Austin badly underestimates the force of his sort of criticism. (shrink)

In Austin's Way with Skepticism, Mark Kaplan argues that J. L Austin's 'ordinary language' approach to epistemological problems has been misread. Contrary to the consensus view, Kaplan presents Austin's methods as both a powerful critique of the project of constructive epistemology and an appreciation of how epistemology needs to be done.

J. L. Austin famously thought that facts about the circumstances in which it is ordinarily appropriate and reasonable to make claims to knowledge have a great bearing on the propriety of a philosophical account of knowledge. His major criticism of the epistemological doctrines about which he wrote was precisely that they lacked fidelity to our ordinary linguistic practices. In The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Barry Stroud argues that Austin was misguided: it is one thing for it to be inappropriate under (...) ordinary circumstances to deny that someone knows that P, another thing for it to be true that she knows that P. Thus, to the philosophical enterprise of determining which knowledge attributions are true, Austin's form of criticism is beside the point. I argue that, attractive though it may be, this response to Austin badly under-estimates the force of his sort of criticism. (shrink)