The National Science Foundation's Second Merit Criterion, or Broader Impacts Criterion , was introduced in 1997 as the result of an earlier Congressional movement to enhance the accountability and responsibility as well as the effectiveness of federally funded projects. We demonstrate that a robust understanding and appreciation of NSF BIC argues for a broader conception of research ethics in the sciences than is currently offered in Responsible Conduct of Research training. This essay advocates augmenting RCR education with training regarding broader (...) impacts. We demonstrate that enhancing research ethics training in this way provides a more comprehensive understanding of the ethics relevant to scientific research and prepares scientists to think not only in terms of responsibly conducted science, but also of the role of science in responding to identified social needs and in adhering to principles of social justice. As universities respond to the mandate from America COMPETES to “provide training and oversight in the responsible and ethical conduct of research”, we urge institutions to embrace a more adequate conception of research ethics, what we call the Ethical Dimensions of Scientific Research, that addresses the full range of ethical issues relevant to scientific inquiry, including ethical issues related to the broader impacts of scientific research and practice. (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)

In this essay we develop and argue for the adoption of a more comprehensive model of research ethics than is included within current conceptions of responsible conduct of research (RCR). We argue that our model, which we label the ethical dimensions of scientific research (EDSR), is a more comprehensive approach to encouraging ethically responsible scientific research compared to the currently typically adopted approach in RCR training. This essay focuses on developing a pedagogical approach that enables scientists to better understand and (...) appreciate one important component of this model, what we call intrinsic ethics . Intrinsic ethical issues arise when values and ethical assumptions are embedded within scientific findings and analytical methods. Through a close examination of a case study and its application in teaching, namely, evaluation of climate change integrated assessment models, this paper develops a method and case for including intrinsic ethics within research ethics training to provide scientists with a comprehensive understanding and appreciation of the critical role of values and ethical choices in the production of research outcomes. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have begun to lay the groundwork to justify a distinct application of ethics to the field of public health. They have highlighted important features that differentiate public health ethics from bioethics, especially public health’s emphasis on population health rather than issues of individual health. Articulations of public health ethics also tend to emphasize the role of social justice compared to the predominance of autonomy in the bioethical literature. Now that the field of public health ethics is (...) developing a unique focus and a language of its own, including a code of ethics disseminated by the American Public Health Association, the future of public health ethics may well be global health ethics, focusing on issues of global justice. As public health ethics evolves from its nascent stage of reflection to a place of action and application in the national and global arenas, two interrelated developments will need to occur: public health professionals, including practitioners, policymakers, and scholars, will need a richer understanding of the ethical challenges practitioners face on a daily basis and scholars will need to develop useful tools that practitioners may employ for identifying and tackling these ethical challenges. (shrink)

Ethical challenges in public health can have a significant impact on the health of communities if they impede efficiencies and best practices. Competing needs for resources and a plurality of values can challenge public health policymakers and practitioners to make fair and effective decisions for their communities. In this paper, the authors offer an analytic framework designed to assist policymakers and practitioners in managing the ethical tensions they face in daily practice. Their framework is built upon the following set of (...) six considerations: determining population-level utility of the proposed action; demonstrating evidence of need and effectiveness of actions; establishing fairness of goals and proposed implementation strategies; ensuring accountability; and, assessing expected efficiencies and costs associated with the proposed action. Together, these considerations create a structured guide to assist decision-makers in identifying potential ethical challenges and in assessing the moral considerations that underlie public health practice - and possibly even, if the conditions are met, reduce the creation of ethical tension. Although the authors’empirical experiences provide the basis for the framework advanced here, their approach remains to be tested and evaluated by public health practitioners. (shrink)

In this essay we develop and argue for the adoption of a more comprehensive model of research ethics than is included within current conceptions of responsible conduct of research (RCR). We argue that our model, which we label the ethical dimensions of scientific research (EDSR), is a more comprehensive approach to encouraging ethically responsible scientific research compared to the currently typically adopted approach in RCR training. This essay focuses on developing a pedagogical approach that enables scientists to better understand and (...) appreciate one important component of this model, what we call intrinsic ethics . Intrinsic ethical issues arise when values and ethical assumptions are embedded within scientific findings and analytical methods. Through a close examination of a case study and its application in teaching, namely, evaluation of climate change integrated assessment models, this paper develops a method and case for including intrinsic ethics within research ethics training to provide scientists with a comprehensive understanding and appreciation of the critical role of values and ethical choices in the production of research outcomes. (shrink)

Questions of whether anything exceeds reasonable sense and meaning have persisted throughout the history of philosophy. These questions have even continued in postmodern thought as well as in liberatory philosophies in which many kinds of events and lineages are experienced and seen as beyond philosophy. In this cowritten text, distinguished philosophers Nancy Tuana and Charles Scott pay particular attention to lineages and their dynamism as they develop the idea of things beyond philosophy, beyond norms. This is not a history (...) of philosophy or a critical study of a particular philosopher but a way to engage experience around dimensions of events that are beyond measuring, counting, meaning, and value. These attunements, they assert, are vitally important for the ways people orient themselves in the world and comport themselves in it. Tuana and Scott build on the alternatives to normative ethics that they find in the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Anzaldúa. They urge attunement to the world as a way to speak about what is impossible to give voice to, to live in the spaces between speech and the unspeakable, and to conceptualize and articulate the boundaries of rational sensibility. (shrink)

The current orthodoxy in cognitive science, what I describe as a commitment to deep representationalism, faces intractable problems. If we take these objections seriously, and I will argue that we should, there are two possible responses: 1. We are mistaken that representation is the locus of our cognitive capacities — we manage to be the successful cognitive agents in some other, non-representational, way; or, 2. Our representational capacities do give us critical cognitive advantages, but they are not fundamental to us (...) qua human beings. As Andy Clark has convincingly argued, antirepresentationalism, option one, is explanatorily weak. Consequently, I will argue, we need to take the second option seriously. In the first half of the paper I rehearse the problems with the current representational view and in the second half of the paper I defend and give a positive sketch of a two-systems view of cognition – a non-representational perceptual system coupled with a representational language-dependent one – and look at some consequences of the view. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar el impacto del aprendizaje adaptativo ante Covid-19 en la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas Administrativas de la Universidad Autónoma del Carmen.Para este estudio se realizó una revisión documental de los conceptos teóricos abordados y posteriormente se hizo un análisis descriptivo de una muestra de 291 estudiantes.Los resultados muestran que la mayoría de los estudiantes logró un desempeño satisfactorio, usando de manera preferente la plataforma Teams, aunque también se utilizaron otras plataformas como apoyo. Con esto (...) se concluye que la comunidad universitaria se adaptó rápidamente al entorno virtual impuesto por la pandemia. (shrink)

Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference offers a powerful intervention to the field of climate justice scholarship by addressing a neglected aspect of the field of climate justice, namely systemic racisms. Building on the work of Black feminist theorists, the work develops an ecointersectional approach designed to reveal the depth and complexities of racial climates overlooked even in the environmental justice literature. The book’s conception of ecological indifference underscores the disposition of seeing the environment as a resource for human consumption and enjoyment, (...) a resource that is usable, fungible, disposable, and without intrinsic worth or standing. The many examples in the book offer new insights demonstrating that systemic racisms emerge out of and give rise to environmental degradation; that is, they are often mutually constitutive. The ecointersectional analyses provided throughout the book reveal that ecological indifference and climate injustice are two sides of the same coin. Three distinctive but interrelated domains in which the intersections between systemic racisms and ecological indifference are manifest are identified: (1) differential distribution of harms/benefits due to systemic racisms, (2) racist institutions and practices fueling or causing environmental degradation, and (3) the basic social structures that generate environmental degradation being the same ones that generate systemic oppression of certain groups of people. One of the aims of Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference is to underscore that any effort to protect the environment must also be a fight against systemic racisms and other forms of systemic inequity. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

The Aesthetic Commonplace is a study of the everyday as a region of overlooked value in the work of William Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Romantic poet, the realist novelist, and the modern philosopher are each separately associated with a commitment to the common, the ordinary, and the everyday as a vital resource for reflection on language, on feeling, on ethical insight, and social attunement. The Aesthetic Commonplace is the first study to draw substantive lines of connection between (...) Wittgenstein and the cultural and literary history of nineteenth century England. Tracing conceptual and formal affinities between the poet, the novelist, and the philosopher, the book brings to light significant links between the intellectual history of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, making the case for a continuous cultural commitment to the aesthetic as a distinctive mode of investigating thought, feeling, and the everyday language upon which we depend for their articulation. Addressed to both literary studies and to philosophy, The Aesthetic Commonplace makes a compelling case for the interdependence of form, concept, and emotion in the history and interpretive practices of both disciplines. (shrink)

The main thesis of this paper is that, Contrary to general belief, George berkeley did in fact express a coherent philosophy of mathematics in his major published works. He treated arithmetic and geometry separately and differently, And this paper focuses on his philosophy of arithmetic, Which is shown to be strikingly similar to the 19th and 20th century philosophies of mathematics known as 'formalism' and 'instrumentalism'. A major portion of the paper is devoted to showing how this philosophy of mathematics (...) follows directly from berkeley 's theory of signs and his philosophy of language, And from his discovery of an alternative to the correspondence theory of truth used by most of his predecessors. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est construit autour d'un chapitre (texte original) de Judith Butler sur l'éthique de la non-violence. En réponse se construisent quatre réflexions philosophiques. Mylène Botbol-Baum présente le collectif à partir de sa traduction du texte de Judith Butler, et aborde la question du sujet et de la norme à partir de la lecture butlerienne de Levinas et Arendt, sur la question des limites de la légitimité de la violence pour une éthique de la relationalité. Jean de Munck traite (...) une lecture croisée de Benjamin et Butler sur la violence. Romildo Pineiro et Jose Erraruz off rent une lecture historique et politique du concept de violence et y confrontent l'interprétation de la non violence dans le texte de Butler. Trois textes plus sociologiques suivent sur l'impact de la non-violence, dans une perspective qui vise à " défaire le genre " dans le cadre sociopolitique critique des vulnérabilités, dans le cadre du travail des femmes migrantes (Ghaliya Dejelloul) ou du travail domestique non rémunéré (Anna Safuta), à partir d'une enquête sur la mobilité spatiale des femmes dans les zones pré-urbaines d'Alger ou de Bruxelles, off rant une analyse sur l'hostilité masculine et le rôle du discours religieux dans la légitimation de cette violence. Matthieu de Nanteuil conclut le volume sur la question de la violence et de la sensibilité politique en mettant à jour la théorie de la démocratie radicale chez Judith Butler. Il sera donc question dans ce volume de penser la non-violence à partir d'une approche fondée sur la normalisation des corps, en réintroduisant le sujet de la vie comme interlocuteur critique du sujet de la norme en démocratie. (shrink)

Synthetic Biology and Renewal of the Ethics of the Research. From the Genome Editing to Organoids of the Brains In this paper I will address the philosophical and scientific impact brought up by “synthetic biology” from the beginning of embryogeny to the fabrication of organoids, to analyze how this paradigm shift impacts on our definition of what a good life is, or should be, in rehabilitation a dialog between sciences and philosophy.

We argue that, to be trustworthy, Computa- tional Intelligence (CI) has to do what it is entrusted to do for permissible reasons and to be able to give rationalizing explanations of its behavior which are accurate and gras- pable. We support this claim by drawing par- allels with trustworthy human persons, and we show what difference this makes in a hypo- thetical CI hiring system. Finally, we point out two challenges for trustworthy CI and sketch a mechanism which could be (...) used to gener- ate sufficiently accurate as well as graspable rationalizing explanations for CI behavior. (shrink)

Streszczenie Klauzula sumienia została wprowadzona do obszaru prawnych regulacji międzynarodowych w związku z uchwałą Rady Europy o nr 1763 z dnia 7 października 2010 r. Zgodnie z treścią dokumentu istnieje przyzwolenie odstąpienia od wykonania określonego świadczenia medycznego ze względu na zastrzeżenia moralne (religijne lub światopoglądowe) zgłaszane przez przedstawicieli opieki zdrowotnej. W przepisach polskiego prawa medycznego powołanie się na zasadę klauzuli sumienia jest dozwolone, ale wyłącznie dla lekarzy, pielęgniarek i położnych. Farmaceuci są pozbawieni tej możliwości. Jednak wykonywanie niektórych czynności zawodowych budzi (...) zastrzeżenia etyczne wśród farmaceutów. Autorzy artykułu postanowili zbadać opinię farmaceutów zarówno na temat klauzuli sumienia oraz określonych regulacji prawnych, które zdaniem respondentów powinny podlegać zmianom legislacyjnym. Celem pracy jest zaprezentowanie wyników z przeprowadzonych badań, które zostały zrealizowane w 2020 r. na terenie Wielkopolskiej Okręgowej Izby Farmaceutycznej w Poznaniu. Słowa kluczowe: wolność sumienia i wyznania, klauzula sumienia, farmacja, antykoncepcja, Polska. (shrink)

How the new conspiracists are undermining democracy—and what can be done about it Conspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new—conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. In A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum show how the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, how it undermines democracy, and what needs to be (...) done to resist it. (shrink)

The tremendous toll that COVID-19 has taken on this country’s minority population is the most recent reminder of the health disparities between people of color and people who classify themselves as white. There are many reasons for these disparities, but one that gets less attention than it deserves is the lack of physicians of color available to treat patients of color.

Atomically precise manufacturing (APM) is the assembly of materials with atomic precision. APM does not currently exist, and may not be feasible, but if it is feasible, then the societal impacts could be dramatic. This paper assesses the net societal impacts of APM across the full range of important APM sectors: general material wealth, environmental issues, military affairs, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and space travel. Positive effects were found for material wealth, the environment, military affairs (specifically nuclear disarmament), and space travel. (...) Negative effects were found for military affairs (specifically rogue actor violence and AI. The net effect for surveillance was ambiguous. The effects for the environment, military affairs, and AI appear to be the largest, with the environment perhaps being the largest of these, suggesting that APM would be net beneficial to society. However, these factors are not well quantified and no definitive conclusion can be made. One conclusion that can be reached is that if APM R&D is pursued, it should go hand-in-hand with effective governance strategies to increase the benefits and reduce the harms. (shrink)

How the new conspiracists are undermining democracy—and what can be done about it Conspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new—conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. In A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum show how the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, why so few officials speak truth to conspiracy, and (...) what needs to be done to resist it. Classic conspiracy theory insists that things are not what they seem and gathers evidence—especially facts ominously withheld by official sources—to tease out secret machinations. The new conspiracism is different. There is no demand for evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of shadowy plotters. Dispensing with the burden of explanation, the new conspiracism imposes its own reality through repetition and bare assertion. The new conspiracism targets democratic foundations—political parties and knowledge-producing institutions. It makes it more difficult to argue, persuade, negotiate, compromise, and even to disagree. Ultimately, it delegitimates democracy. Filled with vivid examples, A Lot of People Are Saying diagnoses a defining and disorienting feature of today's politics and offers a guide to responding to the threat. (shrink)

" Nancy Bauer begins her book by asking: "Then what kind of a problem does being a woman pose?

Bioethics needs an expanded moral vision. It is now time for bioethics to take full account of the problems of health disparities and structural injustice that are made newly urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of climate change. Nancy M. P. King, Gail E. Henderson, and Larry R. Churchill make the case for a more social understanding and application of justice, a deeper humility in assessing expertise in bioethics consulting, a broader and more relevant research agenda, and (...) greater appreciation of the profound health implications of global warming. (shrink)

Nancy Fraser’s powerful new book documents the “movements of feminism” and the shifts in the feminist imaginary since the 1970s. Fraser follows the history of feminism from the ferment of the New Left, during which “Second Wave” feminism emerged as a struggle for women’s liberation alongside other social movements, to its emersion in identity politics following the decline of its initial utopian energies. Alongside this detailed history, Fraser recognizes the need for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism to respond to the (...) crisis in neoliberalism. She argues for a feminism that could join other egalitarian movements in struggles aimed at subjecting capitalism to democratic control, while retrieving the core utopian insights of feminism’s earlier phases. (shrink)