We report on the deliberations of an interdisciplinary group of experts in science, law, and philosophy who convened to discuss novel ethical and policy challenges in stem cell research. In this report we discuss the ethical and policy implications of safety concerns in the transition from basic laboratory research to clinical applications of cell-based therapies derived from stem cells. Although many features of this transition from lab to clinic are common to other therapies, three aspects of stem cell biology pose (...) unique challenges. First, tension regarding the use of human embryos may complicate the scientific development of safe and effective cell lines. Second, because human stem cells were not developed in the laboratory until 1998, few safety questions relating to human applications have been addressed in animal research. Third, preclinical and clinical testing of biologic agents, particularly those as inherently complex as mammalian cells, present formidable challenges, such as the need to develop suitable standardized assays and the difficulty of selecting appropriate patient populations for early phase trials. We recommend that scientists, policy makers, and the public discuss these issues responsibly, and further, that a national advisory committee to oversee human trials of cell therapies be established. **NB we did not reccommend a NAC, we think it might be appropriate**. (shrink)

In 2012, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed capping the size of sugary beverages that could be sold in the city’s restaurants, sporting and entertainment facilities and food carts. After a lawsuit and multiple appeals, the proposal died in June 2014, deemed an unconstitutional overreach. In dissecting the saga of the proposed soda cap, we highlight both the political perils of certain anti-obesity efforts and, more broadly, the challenges to public health when issues of consumer choice and the threat (...) of paternalism are involved. (shrink)

Patients have received experimental pharmaceuticals outside of clinical trials for decades. There are no industry-wide best practices, and many companies that have granted compassionate use, or ‘preapproval’, access to their investigational products have done so without fanfare and without divulging the process or grounds on which decisions were made. The number of compassionate use requests has increased over time. Driving the demand are new treatments for serious unmet medical needs; patient advocacy groups pressing for access to emerging treatments; internet platforms (...) enabling broad awareness of compelling cases or novel drugs and a lack of trust among some that the pharmaceutical industry and/or the FDA have patients’ best interests in mind. High-profile cases in the media have highlighted the gap between patient expectations for compassionate use and company utilisation of fair processes to adjudicate requests. With many pharmaceutical manufacturers, patient groups, healthcare providers and policy analysts unhappy with the inequities of the status quo, fairer and more ethical management of compassionate use requests was needed. This paper reports on a novel collaboration between a pharmaceutical company and an academic medical ethics department that led to the formation of the Compassionate Use Advisory Committee. Comprising medical experts, bioethicists and patient representatives, CompAC established an ethical framework for the allocation of a scarce investigational oncology agent to single patients requesting non-trial access. This is the first account of how the committee was formed and how it built an ethical framework and put it into practice. (shrink)

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

After witnessing extraordinary scientific and regulatory efforts to speed development of and access to new COVID-19 interventions, patients facing other serious diseases have begun to ask “where’s...

Advancements in fetal assessment and therapeutic intervention in medical practice and clinical research call for corresponding progress in regulatory and ethical guidance. In “A new ethical framewo...

The scientific, ethical, and policy issues raised by research involving the engraftment of human neural stem cells into the brains of nonhuman primates are explored by an interdisciplinary working group in this Policy Forum. The authors consider the possibility that this research might alter the cognitive capacities of recipient great apes and monkeys, with potential significance for their moral status.

Deciding whether to grant an expanded access request for a child whose sibling is enrolled in a gene therapy trial involves a number of complex factors: considering the best interests of the child, the psychosocial and economic impact on the family, and the concerns and obligations of researchers. Despite the challenges in coming to a substantively fair outcome in cases of discordant eligibility, creating a procedurally fair decision-making process to adjudicate requests is essential.

Volume 19, Issue 6, June 2019, Page 22-25.

The question of how the ‘border’ is conceived in international law, and how it shapes identity and peoples’ lives, remains largely unexplored in the international legal literature. This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the meaning of the border in international law, and in the contemporary context, by drawing on the work of the philosopher and political theorist, Étienne Balibar, and by reflecting, in the light of his work, on the recent decision of the House of Lords (...) in R v Immigration Officer at Prague Airport. It is shown that international law's focus on the territorial border may render invisible other borders which are significant for subaltern groups, and thereby fail to address the manner in which borders affect lives and determine outcomes. Borders are not stable and ‘univocal’, but instead, ‘multiple’, shifting in meaning and function from group to group. They are also being ‘exported’ such that a person may experience a foreign border while still within the territory of their own country. In highlighting the multiplicity of borders, the article seeks to prompt further reflection on the articulation and application of norms of international law in a way that addresses the realities of the contemporary context. (shrink)

International political economy identifies declining nominal interest rates, securitization, and financial liberalization as drivers of rising housing prices. Despite witnessing these common credit shocks, however, developed economies experienced divergent trends in housing inflation since the 1980s. We offer a comparative political economy explanation of variation in house prices, arguing that by restraining household incomes, wage-setting institutions can blunt financial liberalization’s inflationary impact on housing markets. Employing quantitative analysis and a comparative study of Ireland and the Netherlands, we uncover two (...) findings. First, countries where political coalitions in the export sector held veto powers over those in the nontraded sector in national wage setting realized lower housing inflation. Second, the impact of sectoral coalitions on housing prices in OECD countries is similar to that of financial variables. Our results suggest that the organization of labor politics continues to play an important role in mitigating the destabilizing effects of global finance on developed economies. (shrink)

Insofar as the material residues of interest to archaeologists are cultural and, as such, have specifically symbolic significance, it is argued that archaeology must employ some form of structuralist analysis (i.e. as specifically concerned with this aspect of the material). Wylie examines the prevalent notion that such analysis is inevitably 'unscientific' because it deals with a dimension of material culture which is inaccessible of any direct, empirical investigation, and argues that this rests on an entrenched misconception of science; it assumes (...) that scientific enquiry must be restricted to observables. It is clear, as realist critics of this view have argued, that scientific (explanatory) understanding depends fundamentally on theoretical extensions beyond observables; extensions which bring into view underlying and inaccessible causal structures or mechanisms responsible for the mani- fest phenomena through a procedure of analogical model construc- tion. In consideration of realist models of these procedures and of the potential of linguistic modes of analysis for archaeology, it is pro- posed that archaeologists might (and, in fact, often do) effectively grasp the symbolic, structural order of surviving material culture through analysis governed by a rigorous and controlled use of ethno- graphic analogy. It is claimed, moreover, that the archaeological record can provide empirical bases for evaluating these theoretical constructs if a procedure of recursive and systematic testing is adopted in research, but the standard hypothetico-deductive model is seriously flawed as an account of an ideal for this procedure. Glassie's analysis of Middle Virginian folk housing is an example of research along these lines which illustrates the potential for a rigorous structuralist alternative. (shrink)

Philosophical debates about the metaphysics of time typically revolve around two contrasting views of time. On the A-theory, time is something that itself undergoes change, as captured by the idea of the passage of time; on the B-theory, all there is to time is events standing in before/after or simultaneity relations to each other, and these temporal relations are unchanging. Philosophers typically regard the A-theory as being supported by our experience of time, and they take it that the B-theory clashes (...) with how we experience time and therefore faces the burden of having to explain away that clash. In this paper, we investigate empirically whether these intuitions about the experience of time are shared by the general public. We asked directly for people’s subjective reports of their experience of time—in particular, whether they believe themselves to have a phenomenology as of time’s passing—and we probed their understanding of what time’s passage in fact is. We find that a majority of participants do share the aforementioned intuitions, but interestingly a minority do not. (shrink)

A collection of personal narratives and essays, Living Professionalism is designed to help medical students and residents understand and internalize various aspects of professionalism. These essays are meant for personal reflection and above all, for thoughtful discussion with mentors, with peers, with others throughout the health care provider community who care about acting professionally.

Animal and human studies suggest that parenting style is transmitted from one generation to the next. The hypotheses of this study were that a mother’s rearing experiences would predict her own parenting resources and current maternal mood, motivation to care for her offspring, and relationship with her parents would underlie this association. In a subsample of 201 first-time mothers participating in the longitudinal Maternal Adversity, Vulnerability and Neurodevelopment project, we assessed a mother’s own childhood maltreatment and rearing experiences using the (...) Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the Parental Bonding Instrument. At 6 months postpartum, mothers completed questionnaires on parenting stress, symptoms of depression, maternal motivation, and current relationship with their own parents. The sample consisted of mostly high socioeconomic status mothers recruited from Montréal or Hamilton, Canada, with an age range from 18 to 43 years. More severe maltreatment and less supportive rearing by the mother’s parents predicted increased parenting stress at 6 months. These associations were mediated through distinct psychosocial pathways: maltreatment on parenting stress through symptoms of depression ; maternal rearing on parenting stress through maternal motivation and symptoms of depression ; and paternal rearing on parenting stress through current relationship with the father. Maternal rearing experiences predict a mother’s own parenting resources though distinct psychosocial pathways, including depressed mood, maternal motivation, and social support. (shrink)

Animal and human studies suggest that parenting style is transmitted from one generation to the next. The hypotheses of this study were that a mother’s rearing experiences would predict her own parenting resources and current maternal mood, motivation to care for her offspring, and relationship with her parents would underlie this association. In a subsample of 201 first-time mothers participating in the longitudinal Maternal Adversity, Vulnerability and Neurodevelopment project, we assessed a mother’s own childhood maltreatment and rearing experiences using the (...) Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the Parental Bonding Instrument. At 6 months postpartum, mothers completed questionnaires on parenting stress, symptoms of depression, maternal motivation, and current relationship with their own parents. The sample consisted of mostly high socioeconomic status mothers recruited from Montréal or Hamilton, Canada, with an age range from 18 to 43 years. More severe maltreatment and less supportive rearing by the mother’s parents predicted increased parenting stress at 6 months. These associations were mediated through distinct psychosocial pathways: maltreatment on parenting stress through symptoms of depression ; maternal rearing on parenting stress through maternal motivation and symptoms of depression ; and paternal rearing on parenting stress through current relationship with the father. Maternal rearing experiences predict a mother’s own parenting resources though distinct psychosocial pathways, including depressed mood, maternal motivation, and social support. (shrink)

People hold intuitive theories of the physical world, such as theories of matter, energy, and motion, in the sense that they have a coherent conceptual structure supporting a network of beliefs about the domain. It is not yet clear whether people can also be said to hold a shared intuitive theory of time. Yet, philosophical debates about the metaphysical nature of time often revolve around the idea that people hold one or more “common sense” assumptions about time: that there is (...) an objective “now”; that the past, present, and future are fundamentally different in nature; and that time passes or flows. We empirically explored the question of whether people indeed share some or all of these assumptions by asking adults to what extent they agreed with a set of brief statements about time. Across two analyses, subsets of people's beliefs about time were found consistently to covary in ways that suggested stable underlying conceptual dimensions related to aspects of the “common sense” assumptions described by philosophers. However, distinct subsets of participants showed three mutually incompatible profiles of response, the most frequent of which did not closely match all of philosophers’ claims about common sense time. These exploratory studies provide a useful starting point in attempts to characterize intuitive theories of time. (shrink)

IntroductionAcademic integrity policy that is inaccessible, ambiguous or confusing is likely to result in inconsistent policy enactment. Additionally, policy analysis and development are often undertaken as top down processes requiring passive acceptance by users of policy that has been developed outside the context in which it is enacted. Both these factors can result in poor policy uptake, particularly where policy users are overworked, intellectually critical and capable, not prone to passive acceptance and hold valuable grass roots intelligence about policy enactment.Case (...) descriptionThe case study presented in this paper describes the actions of a community of practice at a regional Australian university to deconstruct and translate ambiguous academic integrity policy into a suite of accessible academic integrity resources that were intelligible to staff and students, and which assisted academic staff to consistently enact policy. The paper narrates the formation of the CoP, the tangible and intangible value it created, the social learning practices enacted by its members, its grassroots policy work and the material resources produced from that work.Discussion and evaluationAn evaluation of the CoP was conducted using a value creation framework to explore its immediate value, potential value, applied value, realised value, and reframing value. These values were considered at each stages of the CoP’s lifespan. The evaluation was a useful process that demonstrated the wide-ranging value created by the CoP. Six insights were drawn from the evaluation which promote understanding of the value created for a university by a CoP, particularly in contributing to academic integrity culture over a sustained period of time.ConclusionsThis paper contributes to a research gap on specific examples of discretion within rule-based systems. It illustrates how academics and members of the CoP used their discretion to interpret and enact academic integrity policy within a higher education setting. Drawing from the evaluation of the CoP we argue for greater understanding of the grass-roots contribution of academic and professional staff to academic integrity policy translation and enactment. (shrink)

Written by leading scholars in feminist theory, Feminist Frameworks was one of the first anthologies in its field and, in the third edition, remains on the cutting edge. Comprehensive, the book covers current issues, problems, theory, and historical texts regarding the oppression of women. With the third edition comes a new section, "Why Theory?" in Part II, explaining the value of feminist theory. Also, the emerging areas of multicultural feminism and global feminism are covered in Part IV. Introductions to each (...) major theme expose students to the readings in a meaningful context. (shrink)

Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...) urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity. (shrink)

Young children spend a large portion of their time pretending about non-real situations. Why? We answer this question by using the framework of Bayesian causal models to argue that pretending and counterfactual reasoning engage the same component cognitive abilities: disengaging with current reality, making inferences about an alternative representation of reality, and keeping this representation separate from reality. In turn, according to causal models accounts, counterfactual reasoning is a crucial tool that children need to plan for the future and learn (...) about the world. Both planning with causal models and learning about them require the ability to create false premises and generate conclusions from these premises. We argue that pretending allows children to practice these important cognitive skills. We also consider the prevalence of unrealistic scenarios in children's play and explain how they can be useful in learning, despite appearances to the contrary. (shrink)

In this paper, we report on the development and validity of the Professional Decision-Making in Research measure, a vignette-based test that examines decision-making strategies used by investigators when confronted with challenging situations in the context of empirical research. The PDR was administered online with a battery of validity measures to a group of NIH-funded researchers and research trainees who were diverse in terms of age, years of experience, types of research, and race. The PDR demonstrated adequate reliability and parallel form (...) correlation. As hypothesized, the PDR was significantly negatively correlated with narcissism, cynicism, moral disengagement, and compliance disengagement; it was not correlated with socially desirable responding. In regression analysis, the strongest predictors of higher PDR scores were low compliance disengagement, speaking English as a native language, conducting clinical research with human subjects, and low levels of narcissism. Given that the PDR was written at an eighth grade reading level to be suitable for use with English as a second language participants and that only one-fourth of items focused on clinical research, further research into the possible roles of culture and research ethics training across specialties is warranted. This initial validity study demonstrates the potential usefulness of the PDR as an educational outcome assessment measure and a research instrument for studies on professionalism and integrity in research. (shrink)

David Albert explains why we can typically influence the future but not the past by appealing to an initial low-entropy state of the universe. And he argues that in the rare cases where we can influence the past, we cannot use this influence to knowingly gain future rewards: so it does not constitute control. I introduce an important new case in which Albert's account implies we can not only influence the past but control it: a case where our actions in (...) the present are reliably correlated with several events in the present and past. To deal with such cases, we need to appeal to epistemic conditions on deliberation: being agents requires our decisions being epistemically undetermined at the time we make them. In a world with the past-hypothesis, this implies that deliberation will typically come prior to decision. Once deliberation in this direction is established, correlations towards the past cannot then be exploited for control. To explain why we cannot effectively control the past, we need to appeal to deliberation, whether as part of a defence of Albert's account, or used independently to explain the asymmetry of control. (shrink)

Kierkegaard is no doubt a philosopher whose focus is inwardness and irreducible individuality. On the surface, he therefore seems to have little to teach us about the sphere of the political: not only was this dimension never explicitly addressed in the writings of the Danish philosopher, but also the positions he took with regard to such a domain where always marked by a strong critical attitude. Moreover, he appeared to be a conservative with regard to any movement towards democratization and (...) equality, opposing liberal democracy as well as socialism, while not refraining from taking up explicitly misogynous positions. With this in mind, one could easily dismiss Kierkegaardian philosophy as exclusively relevant to the private domain of individual existence and irremediably unable to speak to wider concerns such as those encountered in the public dimension. However, in spite of his emphasis on singularity, or perhaps precisely because of it, over the years Kierkegaard's philosophy has given rise to interpretations that recognise its relevance for the political. For instance, the crucial importance of such ideas as self-choice, earnestness and subjective passion are easily imported from the individual sphere into the realm of the political, coming to have a bearing on notions such as responsibility and commitment. In addition, Kierkegaard's accent on the irreducibility of the individual to the universal resonates interestingly in those forms of thinking that, from the margins, call into question the domination of an exclusionary model of reason. Furthermore, his ethical writings on love are directly relevant to the political sphere. This book seeks to draw out, from a range of perspectives, some of the ways in which Kierkegaard's ideas are not only relevant, but highly significant for political thought. (shrink)

The Beloved Self is about the holy grail of moral philosophy, an argument against egoism that proves that we all have reasons to be moral. Part One introduces three different versions of egoism. Part Two looks at attempts to prove that egoism is false, and shows that even the more modest arguments that do not try to answer the egoist in her own terms seem to fail. But in part Three, Hills defends morality and develops a new problem for egoism, (...) an epistemological problem. She shows that it is not epistemically rational to believe the most plausible versions of egoism. The first part of the book will be most relevant to those interested in moral theory, as it contains detailed discussions of recent interpretations of virtue ethics and especially of Kant's moral theory. The second and third part of the book turn to epistemology, particularly moral epistemology, and include an account of the relationship between knowledge and action, a new theory of moral understanding, and a discussion of the epistemically rational response to various kinds of disagreement. Hills also defends a new account of virtue and of morally worthy action. (shrink)

This paper problematises the ways women’s leadership has been understood in relation to male leadership rather than on its own terms. Focusing specifically on ethical leadership, we challenge and politicise the symbolic status of women in leadership by considering the practice of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. In so doing, we demonstrate how leadership ethics based on feminised ideals such as care and empathy are problematic in their typecasting of women as being simply the other to men. We apply (...) different strategies of mimesis for developing feminist leadership ethics that does not derive from the masculine. This offers a radical vision for leadership that liberates the feminine and women’s subjectivities from the masculine order. It also offers a practical project for changing women’s working lives through relationality, intercorporeality, collective agency and ethical openness with the desire for fundamental political transformation in the ways in which women can lead. (shrink)

Voluntary actions and their distal effects are intimately related in conscious awareness. When an expected effect follows a voluntary action, the experience of the interval between these events is compressed in time, a phenomenon known as ‘intentional binding’ . Current accounts of IB suggest that it serves to reinforce associations between our goals and our intention to attain these goals via action, and that IB only occurs for self-generated actions. We used a novel approach to study IB in the context (...) of shared intentions and actions. Pairs of participants judged the time of occurrence of actions and events attributed either to oneself or to another agent. We found that IB and subjective agency are not mutually predictive when an action can be attributed to only one of two ‘co-intending’ agents. Our results pose a complication for the prevailing view that IB and subjective agency reflect a common mechanism. (shrink)

Abstract: If anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the anger that saturates the silences (...) that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones’s pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Cook et al. overstate the evidence supporting their associative account of mirror neurons in humans: most studies do not address a key property, action-specificity that generalizes across the visual and motor domains. Multivariate pattern analysis of neuroimaging data can address this concern, and we illustrate how MVPA can be used to test key predictions of their account.

I argue that miscarriage, referred to by poet Susan Stewart as “the event that was nothing,” is a liminal event along four distinct and inter-related dimensions: parenthood, procreation, death, and induced abortion. It is because of this liminality that miscarriage has been both poorly addressed in our society, and enrolled in larger debates over women's reproduction and responsibility for reproduction, both conceptually and legally. If miscarriage’s liminality were better understood, if miscarriage itself were better theorized, perhaps it would not so (...) easily be enrolled in these other debates to the detriment of women who miscarry, and their families. However, its very liminality and the fact that it is enrolled in these debates sheds light on the complicated network of concepts within which miscarriage lies. (OPEN ACCESS AT URL). (shrink)