This paper explores organ donation through the perspective of Reconstructionist Confucianism. I argue that for organ donation in China to be morally permissible, public policy must conform to the norms of Confucian benevolence. Reconstructionist Confucianism appreciates benevolence as an objectively important feature of morality deeply connected to moral rules governing propriety, integrity, righteousness, and human freedom. Here, benevolence involves sincere affection for another as an intrinsic good, rather than as a means to achieve other purposes. It requires developing self-restraint and (...) proper respect for others. As I argue, family-based consent is essential for ensuring that organ donation conforms to such an understanding of benevolence and is, thereby, compatible with Confucian culture. Consequently, legislation in China should solidify family-based consent for organ donation to consolidate a benevolent family environment as the basis of morality, law, and social existence. (shrink)

Sequential recommendation algorithm can predict the next action of a user by modeling the user’s interaction sequence with an item. However, most sequential recommendation models only consider the absolute positions of items in the sequence, ignoring the time interval information between items, and cannot effectively mine user preference changes. In addition, existing models perform poorly on sparse data sets, which make a poor prediction effect for short sequences. To address the above problems, an improved sequential recommendation algorithm based on short-sequence (...) enhancement and temporal self-attention mechanism is proposed in this paper. In the proposed algorithm, a backward prediction model is trained first, to predict the prior items in the user sequence. Then, the reverse prediction model is used to generate a batch of pseudo-historical items before the initial items of the short sequence, to achieve the goal of enhancing the short sequence. Finally, the absolute position information and time interval information of the user sequence are modeled, and a time-aware self-attention model is adopted to predict the user’s next action and generate a recommendation list. Various experiments are conducted on two public data sets. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper has excellent performance on both dense and sparse data sets, and its effect is better than that of the state of the art. (shrink)