Data are presented that focus on the nature and development of argumentative reasoning. In particular our study describes how support for or against an issue affects memory for critical parts of an argumentative interaction, judgments of argument goodness, and the content of the reasons given in support of one view versus another. Two other factors were examined: developmental differences in argumentation skill and the conditional nature of supporting one side of an argument across varying contexts. Our results show that even (...) seven year old children can recognize, identify, and use the basic components of an argument to provide evidence for and make judgements about their favored position. Moreover, if position support is held constant across all age groups of students, seven year old children were found to give reasons and explanations that were highly similar in content and principle to college students. The same similarities held across age with respect to biases in memory and judgements of argument goodness. The primary difference between children's and college students' argument behavior lay in the side of an argument the students chose to support. Seven year old children and some eleven yearold children supported positions that impute more value to friendship and social consequences than to the maintenance and advancement of individual rights, as specified in a contract agreement. The similarities and differences across development are discussed with respect to a theory of argumentation that speaks to the importance of understanding the nature of goal conflict and a theory of intentionality in predicting how arguments will be represented and resolved. (shrink)

Skeletal muscle formation is studied in vitro with myogenic cell lines and primary muscle cell cultures, and in vivo with embryos of several species. We review several of the notable advances obtained from studies of cultured cells, including the recognition of myoblast diversity, isolation of the MyoD family of muscle regulatory factors, and identification of promoter elements required for muscle‐specific gene expression. These studies have led to the ideas that myoblast diversity underlies the formation of the multiple types of fast (...) and slow muscle fibers, and that myogenesis is controlled by a combination of ubiquitous and muscle‐specific transcriptional regulators that may be different for each gene. We further review some unexpected results that have been obtained when ideas from work in culture have been tested in developing animals. The studies in vivo point to additional molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate muscle formation in the animal. (shrink)

A volume of essays by leading photography writers and critics, published to benefit Amnesty International, cites such examples as the work of Susan Sontag to question whether photography of disturbing images stirs empathy or voyeurism in its viewers, outlining how to look at photographs to become contextually informed. Original.

ABSTRACT:Business networks, which include joint ventures, supply chains, industry and trade associations, industrial districts, and community business associations, are considered the signature organizational form of the global economy. However, little is known about how they affect the social performance of their members. We utilize institutional theory to develop the position that business social performance has collectivist roots that deserve at least as much scholarly attention as owner/manager characteristics and business attributes. Hypotheses are tested using multilevel analysis on data gathered from (...) 898 members of twenty-nine business associations. Support is provided for institutional theory’s explanation for business social performance. Members of business associations are likely to conform to the pattern of social performance prevailing in their association, but not necessarily to the articulated values of the association. The potential of business associations to influence members’ social performance should be considered by agencies that start and support them as mechanisms for regional and local economic development. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Business networks, which include joint ventures, supply chains, industry and trade associations, industrial districts, and community business associations, are considered the signature organizational form of the global economy. However, little is known about how they affect the social performance of their members. We utilize institutional theory to develop the position that business social performance has collectivist roots that deserve at least as much scholarly attention as owner/manager characteristics and business attributes. Hypotheses are tested using multilevel analysis on data gathered from (...) 898 members of twenty-nine business associations. Support is provided for institutional theory’s explanation for business social performance. Members of business associations are likely to conform to the pattern of social performance prevailing in their association, but not necessarily to the articulated values of the association. The potential of business associations to influence members’ social performance should be considered by agencies that start and support them as mechanisms for regional and local economic development. (shrink)

The rise of the phenomenon of virtue ethics in recent years has increased at a rapid pace. Such an explosion carries with it a number of great possibilities, as well as risks. This volume has been written to contribute a multi-faceted perspective to the current conversation about virtue. Among many other thought-provoking questions, the collection addresses the following: What are the virtues, and how are they enumerated? What are the internal problems among ethicists, and what are the objections and replies (...) to contemporary virtue ethics? Additionally, the practical implications following from the answers to these questions are discussed in new and fascinating research. Fundamental concepts such as teleology and eudaimonism are addressed from both a historical and dialectical approach. This tome will contribute not only to providing further clarity to the current horizons in virtue ethics, but also to the practical conclusion following from the study: to challenge the reader toward a greater pursuit of the virtuous life. (shrink)

As an alternative to universalism and particularism, Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics proposes "intermedialities" as a new model of social relations and intercultural dialogue. The concept of "intermedialities" stresses the necessity of situating debates concerning social relations in the divergent contexts of new media and avant-garde artistic practices as well as feminist, political, and philosophical analyses.

I reply to the excellent commentaries by Nancy Snow and Jennifer Cole Wright on my book, The Character Gap: How Good Are We? Topics discussed include the criteria of virtue, kinds of virtuous motives, vicious motivation and behavior, continence and incontinence, the possibility of widespread vice, and a recent meta-analysis of helping behavior.

This book updates and adds to the classic Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies, showing how social movement theory has grown and changed.

Derrida has been perennially concerned with hands and touching. This interest finds its most concentrated form in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. This text outlines a number of concerns Derrida has in that book which might be extrapolated as exemplary of Derrida's reading strategies in general. It concludes with a consideration of what is revealed about the Derrida-Nancy relationship in this book.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Holding Doctors Responsible at Guantánamo*Nancy Sherman (bio)I recently visited the Guantánamo Bay Detention Center with a small group of civilian psychiatrists, psychologists, top military doctors, and Department of Defense health affairs officials to discuss detainee medical and mental health care. The unspoken reason for the invitation to go on this unusual day trip was the bruising criticism the Bush administration has received for its use of psychiatrists and (...) psychologists in the interrogation of suspected terrorist detainees.1We disembarked from our Navy jet to find an island lush and green from recent storms. A small boat took us from the airfield to the naval hospital. From the boat there was no sign of Camp Delta, where the detainees are actually held. Nor was there a sign of prisons or barbed wire or the detention facility's 505 inmates.Our host was the commanding officer of Gitmo, Major General Jay W. Hood (an artillery officer by training), who had replaced Major General Geoffrey Miller, implicated in the "migration" of torture methods from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib. Dressed in fatigues, General Hood briefed us using PowerPoint. His intelligence director told us that interrogators have not used harsh "fear up" tactics—the ones designed to terrify—since 2003.We went by bus from the naval hospital to the 30-bed detainee hospital for quick briefings from a psychiatrist and a physician. Still, we were not permitted to see any detainees or hunger strikers, despite our requests. During our six hours on the ground, we had only a fleeting glimpse of a few detainees outside their cellblocks behind barbed wire and screened fences.Indeed, when I got home and saw the play "Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom," by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, I had the disquieting feeling that I had absorbed more about detainee life at the theater than I had from actually being at Gitmo. This only amplified my anxiety that what I had heard and seen during my VIP visit sidestepped the central moral issue of whether abuse is still occurring at Gitmo and whether health professionals are, or have been, a party to coercive interrogation. [End Page 199]The question that the Pentagon leadership has been focusing on, and which was a key subject of discussion during our day at Gitmo, is whether there is an ethical difference between using psychologists or psychiatrists on interrogation teams—what the Pentagon calls, "behavioral consultation teams," or BSCTs, pronounced "biscuit." Some in the Pentagon would like to have doctors and psychiatrists, who are bound by the Hippocratic teaching to "do no harm," be the clinicians treating detainees. Psychologists, who are not as bound by Hippocratic dicta, would consult with and advise interrogators. But this is a red herring. It is hair-splitting that detracts from the real issue of whether health professionals of any stripe can ethically be involved in interrogations that may involve coercive techniques or torture. The answer is clearly no. They should not be involved, directly or indirectly, in situations that may lead to the breach of confidential medical records; to torture or to cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment; or to exploitation of fears or phobias. Mental health professionals simply should not be collaborating with interrogators in inflicting psychological torture.Hood said that "rapport building" was the preferred and an effective interrogation technique, but that is no guarantee that rougher tactics will not be used. The fact is that there is enormous pressure on the people at Guantánamo Bay to get good intelligence for the war on terror, and it is as easy for behavioral scientists as it is for interrogators to compromise their moral standards. Cunning and deception to extract information may be acceptable in some cases. But many people have been outraged to learn from media reports that methods developed by military psychologists to train our own troops to resist torture—the so-called "survival, evasion, resistance, and escape" methods taught at Ft. Bragg—have been "reverse engineered" at Guantánamo Bay to create coercive, psychologically manipulative interrogation techniques for use against detainees.Plato warned long ago that a doctor's skill, abstracted from good character and wisdom, is a neutral... (shrink)

1. A Profession of Faith -- 2. Who or What Decides, for Derrida : A Catastrophic Theory of Decision -- 3. Derrida's Destinerrance -- 4. The Late Derrida -- 5. Derrida's Remains -- 6. Derrida Enisled -- 7. Derrida's Special Theory of Performativity --8. "Don't Count Me In" : Derrida's Refraining -- 9. Derrida's Ethics of Irresponsibilization ; or, How to Get Irresponsible, in Two Easy Lessons -- 10. Derrida's Politics of Autoimmunity -- 11. Touching Derrida's Touching Nancy -- (...) 12. Absolute Mourning : It Is Jacques You Mourn For -- Notes -- Index. (shrink)

This book is an important example of how philosophers can make their work better known to the nonacademic public without sacrificing too much by way of rigor. Miller’s academic work stands at the intersection of philosophy and psychology: he draws on a wide array of psychological studies to help make the case for ‘mixed traits.’ He does the same here, though in a very accessible way. Here I remark on ways in which I think the book might have been (...) stronger, and engage with some of the psychological studies. Finally, I introduce a recent meta-analysis of 24,512 controlled psychological studies of helping behavior. I am curious whether Lefevor et al.’s conclusions will induce Miller to rethink his approach to helping studies or will have other implications for his future research. (shrink)

Virtue theorists have recently been focusing on the important question of how virtues are developed, and doing so in a way that is informed by empirical research from psychology. However, almost all of this recent work has dealt exclusively with the moral virtues. In this paper, we present three empirically-informed accounts of how virtues can be developed, and we assess the merits of these accounts when applied specifically to intellectual (or epistemic) virtues.

To provide some background for the commentaries by Nancy Snow and Jennifer Cole Wright, I summarize the main ideas from the three parts of my book, The Character Gap: How Good Are We?

In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory (...) of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the “bottom up” approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the “top down” approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open. With respect to history, we outline several independent paths that have led to some of the approaches now prevalent in origins-of-life studies. These include one path from early views of life through the scientific revolutions brought about by Linnaeus (von Linn.), Wöhler, Miller, and others. In this approach, new theories, tools, and evidence guide new thoughts about the nature of life and its origin.We also describe another family of paths motivated by a” circularity” approach to life, which is guided by such thinkers as Maturana & Varela, Gánti, Rosen, and others. These views echo ideas developed by Kant and Aristotle, though they do so using modern science in ways that produce exciting avenues of investigation. By exploring the history of these ideas, we can see how many of the issues that currently interest us have been guided by the contexts in which the ideas were developed. The disciplinary backgrounds of each of these scholars has influenced the questions they sought to answer, the experiments they envisioned, and the kinds of data they collected. We conclude by encouraging scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to explore ways in which they can interact to provide a deeper understanding of the conceptual assumptions, structure, and history of origins-of-life research. This may be useful to help frame future research agendas and bring awareness to the multifaceted issues facing this challenging scientific question. (shrink)

Response to Emily A. Largent, Franklin G. Miller and Steven Joffe, A Prescription for Ethical Learning, Hastings Center Report, 43, s1, (S28-S29), (2013).

An international team of four authors, led by distinguished philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, and leading scholar of the Vienna Circle, Thomas E. Uebel, have produced this lucid and elegant study of a much-neglected figure. The book, which depicts Neurath's science in the political, economic and intellectual milieu in which it was practised, is divided into three sections: Neurath's biographical background and the socio-political context of his economic ideas; the development of his theory of science; and his legacy as (...) illustrated by his contemporaneous involvement in academic and political debates. Coinciding with the renewal of interest in logical positivism, this is a timely publication which will redress a current imbalance in the history and philosophy of science, as well as making a major contribution to our understanding of the intellectual life of Austro-Germany in the inter-war years. (shrink)

Why mediation? -- What makes bioethics mediation unique? -- Before you begin a bioethics mediation program -- The stages of bioethics mediation -- Techniques for mediating bioethics disputes -- How to write a bioethics mediation chart note -- Mediation with a competent patient : Mr. Samuels's case -- Mediation with a dysfunctional family : Mrs. Bates's case -- A complex mediation with a large and involved family : Mrs. Leonari's case -- Discharge planning for a dying patient : a role-play (...) -- An at-risk pregnancy : a role-play -- HIV and postsurgical complications in the ICU : a role-play -- Treating the dying adolescent : a role-play -- She didn't mean it : a role-play -- Don't tell mama : a role-play -- An at-risk pregnancy : a role-play transcript -- HIV and postsurgical complications in the ICU : a role-play transcript -- She didn't mean it: a role-play transcript -- Don't tell mama : a role-play transcript. (shrink)

This work examines the concept of trust in the light of virtue theory, and takes our responsibility to be trustworthy as central. Rather than thinking of trust as risk-taking, Potter views it as equally a matter of responsibility-taking. Her work illustrates that relations of trust are never independent from considerations of power, and that asking ourselves what we can do to be trustworthy allows us to move beyond adversarial trust relationships and toward a more democratic, just, and peaceful society.

It is possible to wholly exist at multiple spatial locations at the same time. At least, if time travel is possible and objects endure, then such must be the case. To accommodate this possibility requires the introduction of a spatial analog of either relativising properties to times—relativising properties to spatial locations—or of relativising the manner of instantiation to times—relativising the manner of instantiation to spatial locations. It has been suggested, however, that introducing irreducibly spatially relativised or spatially adverbialised properties presents (...) some difficulties for the endurantist. I will consider an objection according to which embracing such spatially relativised properties could lead us to reject mereology altogether in favour of a metaphysics according to which objects are wholly present at every space-time point at which they exist. I argue that although such a view is coherent, there are some good reasons to reject it. Moreover, I argue that the endurantist can introduce spatially relativised or adverbialised properties without conceding that objects lack spatial parts. Such a strategy has the additional advantage that it allows the endurantist not only to explain time travel, but also to reconcile our competing intuitions about cases of fission. (shrink)

: Bioethicists have failed to understand the pervasively paternalistic character of research ethics. Not only is the overall structure of research review and regulation paternalistic in some sense; even the way informed consent is sought may imply paternalism. Paternalism has limits, however. Getting clear on the paternalism of research ethics may mean some kinds of prohibited research should be reassessed.

There is a takeover movement fast gaining influence in development economics, a movement that demands that predictions about development outcomes be based on randomized controlled trials. The problem it takes up—of using evidence of efficacy from good studies to predict whether a policy will be effective if we implement it—is a general one, and affects us all. My discussion is the result of a long struggle to develop the right concepts to deal with the problem of warranting effectiveness predictions. Whether (...) I have it right or not, these are questions of vast social importance that philosophers of science can, and should, help answer. (shrink)

Cutting edge feminist investigations of rationality.

Public health ethics in the future will be distinguished from public health ethics in the past by this new subfield being labeled as such, acknowledged, and called upon for service. Ethical dilemmas have been present throughout the history of public health. The question of whether to force Henning Jacobson to be immunized in 1905 in accordance with the 1902 Massachusetts smallpox vaccination law was one of ethics as well as law. How Thomas Parran, Surgeon General in 1936, chose to respond (...) to a raging syphilis epidemic in the United States in the early part of the 2W century raised considerable moral debate in determining the appropriate public health response for a government? More recently, questions have arisen concerning the appropriate reach of government in controlling HIV banning smoking, or promoting healthy lifestyles. Debates over government infringement, morality, and justice recur throughout the history of public health. (shrink)

This paper gives an ethical argument for temporarily waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines. It examines two proposals under discussion at the World Trade Organization : the India/South Africa proposal and the WTO Director General proposal. Section I explains the background leading up to the WTO debate. Section II rebuts ethical arguments for retaining current IP protections, which appeal to benefiting society by spurring innovation and protecting rightful ownership. It sets forth positive ethical arguments for a temporary waiver that (...) appeal to standing in solidarity and holding companies accountable. After examining built-in exceptions to existing agreements and finding them inadequate, the paper replies to objections to a temporary waiver and concludes, in section III, that the ethical argument for temporarily waiving IP protection for COVID-19 vaccines is strong. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

The volume brings together for the first time original essays by leading philosophers working on powers in relation to metaphysics, philosophy of natural and social science, philosophy of mind and action, epistemology, ethics and social and political philosophy. In each area, the concern is to show how a commitment to real causal powers affects discussion at the level in question. In metaphysics, for example, realism about powers is now recognized as providing an alternative to orthodox accounts of causation, modality, properties (...) and laws. Dispositional realist philosophers of science, meanwhile, argue that a powers ontology allows for a proper account of the nature of scientific explanation. In the philosophy of mind there is the suggestion that agency is best understood in terms of the distinctive powers of human beings. Those who take virtue theoretic approaches in epistemology and ethics have long been interested in the powers that allow for knowledge and/or moral excellence. In social and political philosophy, finally, powers theorists are interested in the powers of sociological phenomena such as collectivities, institutions, roles and/or social relations, but also in the conditions of possibility for the cultivation of the powers of individuals. The book will be of interest to philosophers working in any of these areas, as well as to historians of philosophy, political theorists and critical realists. (shrink)

Public engagement in ethically laden pandemic planning decisions may be important for transparency, creating public trust, improving compliance with public health orders, and ultimately, contributing to just outcomes. We conducted focus groups with members of the public to characterize public perceptions about social distancing measures likely to be implemented during a pandemic. Participants expressed concerns about job security and economic strain on families if businesses or school closures are prolonged. They shared opposition to closure of religious organizations, citing the need (...) for shared support and worship during times of crises. Group discussions elicited evidence of community-mindedness, while some also acknowledged strong self-interest. Participants conveyed desire for opportunities for public input and education, and articulated distrust of government. Social distancing measures may be challenging to implement and sustain due to strains on family resources and lack of trust in government. (shrink)