The paper by Susan M. Wolf and Jeffrey P. Kahn published in this issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics notes that we are members of the Working Group on Genetic Testing in Disability Insurance and that the members of the Working Group do not necessarily subscribe to its recommendations. Although we agree with some of Wolf and Kahn's recommendations, we do not agree with recommendations 1, 3, 4, and 5 for individual disability insurance and recommendations 1, 2, (...) and 3 for group disability insurance. We use this paper to delineate our areas of disagreement, but we do not discuss areas such as employment law as they are not our areas of expertise.First, understanding our roles on the Working Group is important. As members, we provided technical expertise on disability insurance. Our input to the Working Group represents our individual opinions. (shrink)

While the low conviction rate for cases of sexual violence is often justified by the so-called ‘he-said-she-said’ nature of these cases, the increasing presence of digital evidence has begun to challenge this justification. This digital evidence can provide new opportunities for intervening in and prosecuting sexual violence. However, it may also be used against complainants or deemed still insufficient for proving guilt. Thus, while digital evidence may be challenging typical criminal justice responses to sexual violence, it may equally be utilised (...) to buttress entrenched stereotypes and criminal justice practices that lead to complainant dissatisfaction and serve to support low conviction rates. I draw on critical feminist legal theory, feminist engagements with digital technology and sexual violence, and visual criminology to theorise the burgeoning role of the digital witness in sexual violence cases. (shrink)

As members of the Working Group on Genetic Testing in Disability Insurance, the authors of this alternative opinion describe their areas of disagreement with some of the conclusions in the paper written by Susan M. Wolf and Jeffrey P. Kahn.

Medical underwriting involves the application of actuarial science by analyzing medical information to predict the future risk of a claim. The objective is that individuals with like risk are treated in a like manner so that the premium paid is proportional to the risk of future claim.

Predictive medical information is used by underwriters to assess the future risk of a claim in medically based insurance products such as health, life, and disability insurance. Medical underwriting involves the science of evaluating medical information to determine the risk for groups of individuals with various medical conditions. In disability insurance, this involves an evaluation of medical information to predict the risk of becoming disabled.Before discussing medical underwriting, an understanding of certain terms used by disability insurance companies and the products (...) that are available is required. The first is the definition of disability. The Americans with Disabilities Act defines disability as the following:A physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities; or has a record of such an impairment; or is regarded as having such an impairment even when no impairment exists, no substantial limitation results from the impairment, or the impairment is only substantially limiting because of the attitudes of others. (shrink)

A national sample of 362 respondents assessed the ethical predisposition of the American marketplace by calculating a consumer ethics index. The results indicate that the population is quite intolerant of perceived ethical abuses. The situations where consumers are ambivalent tend to be those where the seller suffers little or no economic harm from the consumer's action. Younger, more educated, and higher income consumers appear more accepting of these transgressions. The results provided the basis for developing a four-group taxonomy of consumers (...) which retailers should find insightful in assessing potential consumer actions in a variety of situations. (shrink)

Media, police, and educational responses to nonconsensual pornography (i.e. ‘revenge porn’) have been critiqued for relying on sex negative beliefs that result in victims of this act being blamed and shamed for their own victimisation. In this article I analyse judicial discourse in nonconsensual pornography case law to assess the extent to which sex negativity is embedded in legal responses. I find that, while overt victim blaming and shaming is not present in the judicial discourse, subtle forms of sex negativity (...) are expressed in a minority of cases through references to consensual youth image sharing as inappropriate and through the framing of reputational harms. I argue that it is essential for legal responses to not only avoid sex negative narratives (as most currently do) but to actively reveal and counter the sex negative beliefs that underlie many of the harms associated with nonconsensual pornography. (shrink)

Providing a rich combination of theoretical resources, methodological approaches and empirical investigation, each of the chapters takes a distinct aspect of touch within a particular spatial context, exploring this through a mixture of sustained empirical work, critical theories of embodiment, philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to gendered touch and touching, or the relationship between visual and non-visual culture, to articulate something of the variety and variability of touching experiences. The volume has a strong thematic identity and therefore represents the formative collection (...) concerning the multiple senses of touch within social science scholarship at this time.. (shrink)

Within some online communities, discussion often centers on issues on which writers take sides, and within some subset of those debate-prone communities, we find over time that particular sets of writers almost always end up on the same side of an issue. These sets we call factions. In this paper, we describe a tool to perform what we call faction discovery on online communities. Generalizing methods developed in the bibliometrics and information retrieval literature, we define a network determined by similarities (...) of content in a community of users and add in direct evidence of online ties between users. We then perform community detection on the network to find factions. Using a set of data collected from science and fantasy blogs, we show that the discovered factions accurately reflect an active conflict in the community leading to significant, politically related social fracture. (shrink)

Approximately one in 10 children in foster care are medically complex and require intensive medical supervision, frequent hospitalization, and difficult medical decision making. Some of these children are in foster care because their parents cannot care for their medical needs; other parents are responsible for their child’s medical needs due to abuse or neglect. In either case, there can be uncertainty about the role that a child’s biological parents should play in making serious medical decisions. Here we highlight some of (...) the ethical challenges inherent in making these decisions for children in foster care, as seen through the lenses of a child welfare provider, an inpatient care physician, and a primary care pediatrician. (shrink)

The primary psychological process leading aggressive children to grow into dysfunctional adults is a defensive mindset, which encompasses a pattern of deviant social information processing steps, including hypervigilance to threat; hostile attributional biases; psychophysiological reactivity, experience of rage and testosterone release (in males); aggressive problem-solving styles; aggressogenic decision-making biases; and deficient behavioral skills. These processes are acquired in childhood and predict adult maladjustment outcomes, including incarceration and premature death. The antecedents of defensive mindset lie in early childhood experiences of trauma (...) and threat. The Fast Track (FT) intervention was designed to improve social competence in aggressive children. A randomized controlled trial demonstrated that FT is effective in preventing externalizing psychopathology; the primary mediating factor is the reduction of defensive mindset processes. This Element concludes with insights that defensive mindset might also explain dysfunction in other realms, including school culture, parenting, marriage, the workplace, intergroup relationships, politics, and international relations. (shrink)