In this article, we examine the effects of time spent in household labor on the gender gap in earnings. We identify that part of the gender gap in earnings directly attributable to women's greater household labor time. After controlling for years of work experience, hours worked per week, occupation, industry, union membership, and education, we find that household labor time can directly account for 8.2 percent of the gender gap in earnings. In addition to the direct effect of women's household (...) responsibilities on earnings, they also may affect occupational location, work experience, and number of hours worked per week, and through these variables, their earnings. These findings indicate that we cannot truly understand women's earnings relative to those of men without considering the impact of their unpaid labor on their paid work. (shrink)

Voraussetzungen -- Carla Henius, Cathy Berberian und Roy Hart : drei vokale Fallbeispiele -- Interpretationen : Konklusionen -- Verzeichnis der Archive -- Abbildungsverzeichnis -- Literaturverzeichnis.

In 2004, the agricultural economies of many rural communities in the United States were impacted by the cessation of a price-support and supply-control program for tobacco production. Tobacco was not only an important livelihood, but also was central to social and cultural life. Using a social–ecological systems lens and the adaptive cycle metaphor, we examine the reorganization of agriculture in communities that previously produced tobacco under the program. Specifically, we seek to understand how transitional policy that provided financial support to (...) tobacco farmers interacted with other social, cultural, physical and human capitals to condition system reorganization. We conducted semi-structured interviews with farmers, extension agents, and policy makers in Kentucky as well as examined trends in income and number of farmers before and after the transition as indicators of reorganization. We determined that the financial support was perceived as helpful in supporting the transition and that tobacco farmers reorganized their livelihoods primarily around existing, remnant assets and endogenous capacities. In addition, we determined that though the agricultural system may be reorganizing economically, it is not necessarily supportive of the same social bonds and values that co-existed with tobacco economy. Understanding agricultural economies as part of complex social–ecological systems that consist of interconnected values, identities, ecology and social ties is important for developing policies to support systems and communities through economic transitions. (shrink)

We describe a virtue ethics approach and its application in a four-year, integrated, longitudinal, and required undergraduate medical education course that attempts to address some of the challenges of the hidden curriculum and minimize some of its adverse effects on learners. We discuss how a curriculum grounded in virtue ethics strives to have the practical effect of allowing students to focus on their professional identity as physicians in training rather than merely on knowledge and skills acquisition. This orientation, combined with (...) a student-generated curriculum, is designed to prepare students to identify and face challenges during their clinical years, further nurturing their professional growth. In short, a four-year integrated ethics and professionalism curriculum intentionally centered on cultivating virtuous physicians may alleviate, and even counteract, the effects of the hidden curriculum in the clinical years of medical training. (shrink)

Medical students’ concerns during clinical clerkships may not always be addressed with mentors who work under significant time constraints. This study examined 3rd year students’ survey responses regarding patient encounters to elucidate what may be hidden aspects of their learning environment. We analyzed results to an 18-item survey completed during a required ethics and professionalism course in third-year medicine clerkships over a period of 18 months. The survey covered types of concerns elicited by patient encounters, interactions with mentors about concerns, (...) perceptions of mentors, and level of moral distress. We also examined results of a 7-item evaluation of small group discussions during the study period. 1210 surveys and 195 evaluations constituted the study samples. Students’ concerns related primarily to ethics (36.4%, n = 441) and quality of care (34.5%, n = 418). Concerns had not been raised with a mentor in 535 (44.2%) instances. Students experienced moral distress in connection with 35.4% (n = 324) of cases; this was particularly common when a concern applied to a mentor. Higher levels of moral distress were associated with a lower likelihood of wishing to emulate the mentor (r = -0.27, p <.001). Two thirds of students, 66.9% (n = 107), stated that small group discussions where concerns were discussed lowered their stress levels. We suggest that clinical mentors be made aware of students’ learning needs and that structured discussions be available for students to articulate concerns with peers and facilitators in efforts to uncover elements of the hidden curriculum with the goal of optimizing students’ well-being, learning and professional development. (shrink)

Rather than focusing on political and legal debates surrounding attempts to determine if and when genocidal rape has taken place in a particular setting, this essay turns instead to a crucial, yet neglected area of inquiry: the moral significance of genocidal rape, and more specifically, the nature of the harms that constitute the culpable wrongdoing that genocidal rape represents. In contrast to standard philosophical accounts, which tend to employ an individualistic framework, this essay offers a situated understanding of harm that (...) features the importance of interdependence and relationality and that conceptualizes harms as embodied and contextual. The paper ultimately reveals what is distinctive about this particular crime of sexual violence by exploring the logic of genocidal rape: genocidal rape involves the harm of forced self-betrayal unleashed relationally, causing victims as representatives of their group to participate inadvertently in the destruction of that group. (shrink)

This paper attempts to provide a descriptive theoretical overview of the medical futility debate. I will first argue that quantitative data cannot alone resolve the medical futility debate. I will then examine two aspects of medical futility, which I call the prospective and immediate, respectively. The first involves making prospective factual and value judgments about the efficacy of proposed medical interventions, while the latter involves making value judgments about ongoing medical conditions where the clinical data are clear. At stake is (...) the nature and scope of individual rights. Thus, I maintain there is an undeveloped aspect to the medical futility debate and, briefly, analyze two political perspectives which give rise to different understandings of medical futility. The view that I will defend is that only a system with defined collective goals can accommodate a normative concept of medical futility. These larger questions are the value options which, if unaddressed, may be settled by default of economic grounds. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that only a subset of the reason statementsWilliams defines as external must be rejected as false. `A has areason to '' is necessarily false when the ends and aimsconstitutive of A''s good close off the deliberative route from her S to the conclusion she has reason to . But when less important ends are at stake, it seems that a person''s needs generally provide reasons for action, contrary to Williams''s internalist account. I suspect, however, that (...) there may remain inexorable disagreementover these claims because people value things in two distinct ways. Tosupport my suspicion, I explain how people''s valuation can take either an agency-prioritizing or an end-prioritizing form. I then argue thatresolving the disagreement over Williams''s internalist account ofreasons depends on whether it can be established that the agency-prioritizingform is the rationally superior form of valuation. (shrink)

In the present article, we argue that the constant pressure that leaders face may limit the willpower required to behave according to ethical norms and standards and may therefore lead to unethical behavior. Drawing upon the ego depletion and moral self-regulation literatures, we examined whether self-regulatory depletion that is contingent upon the moral identity of leaders may promote unethical leadership behavior. A laboratory experiment and a multisource field study revealed that regulatory resource depletion promotes unethical leader behaviors among leaders who (...) are low in moral identity. No such effect was found among leaders with a high moral identity. This study extends our knowledge on why organizational leaders do not always conform to organizational goals. Specifically, we argue that the hectic and fragmented workdays of leaders may increase the likelihood that they violate ethical norms. This highlights the necessity to carefully schedule tasks that may have ethical implications. Similarly, organizations should be aware that overloading their managers with work may increase the likelihood of their leaders transgressing ethical norms. (shrink)

The possible future use of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) and the challenges associated with assigning moral responsibility leads to several debates. Some authors argue that the highly autonomous capability of such systems may lead to a so-called responsibility gap in situations where LAWS cause serious violations of international humanitarian law. One proposed solution is the doctrine of command responsibility. Despite the doctrine’s original development to govern human interactions on the battlefield, it is worth considering whether the doctrine of command (...) responsibility could provide a solution by applying the notion analogously to LAWS. A fundamental condition underpinning the doctrine’s application is the control requirement, stipulating that a superior must exert some degree of control over subordinates. The aim of this article is to provide an in-depth analysis of this control condition and assess whether it leads to the impossibility of applying the doctrine of command responsibility to LAWS. To this end, the first section briefly introduces the topic of LAWS and responsibility gaps. The subsequent section provides a concise overview of the doctrine itself and the conditions typically necessitated for its application. In the third section, a comprehensive scrutiny of the control requirement is undertaken through examination of key case law, examining how the concept has been interpreted. Finally, the fourth section delves into the evaluation of commanders’ potential to exert effective control over their (non-human) subordinates. Based on this, the feasibility of considering command responsibility as a viable solution is assessed, aiming to determine whether its application should be prima facie excluded or warrants further exploration. (shrink)

Character strengths research has the potential to imply that youth have character deficits or moral failings that cause their problematic behavior. This ignores the impact of context, especially for youth who are members of historically marginalized groups in under resourced communities. On the other hand, framing youth who are members of underrepresented groups solely as products of oppression undermines their agency and the power of collective action. It may be possible to promote character development in a contextually relevant, culturally grounded (...) way through a transdisciplinary, participatory action approach. We engaged in this work in three phases: goal specification; logic model identification; and intervention development and testing. Lessons learned included the need for intensive trust-building and identifying the limitations in scope and capacity. Overall, a transdisciplinary, participatory action approach is a promising strategy to overcome the existing bias in virtue development research and to leverage positive psychology to address health disparities. (shrink)

Because of the transfer of responsibility from hospitals to community-based settings, providers in home-based care have more responsibilities and a wider range of tasks and responsibilities than before, often with limited resources. The increased responsibilities and the complexity of tasks and patient groups may lead to several ethical challenges. A systematic search in the databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, and SveMed+ was carried out in February 2019 and August 2020. The research question was translated into a modified PICO worksheet. A total of (...) 40 articles were included. The review is conducted according to the Vancouver Protocol. The main findings from the systematic literature review show that ethical challenges experienced by healthcare and social care providers in home-based care are related to autonomy and balancing ethical principles, decisions regarding intensity of care, challenges related to priority settings, truth-telling, and balancing the professional role. Findings regarding ethical challenges within home-based care are in line with findings from institutional healthcare and social care settings. However, some significant differences from the institutional context are also highlighted. (shrink)

Females' tendency to place a high value on protecting their own lives enhanced their reproductive success in the environment of evolutionary adaptation because infant survival depended more upon maternal than on paternal care and defence. The evolved mechanism by which the costs of aggression (and other forms of risk taking) are weighted more heavily for females may be a lower threshold for fear in situations which pose a direct threat of bodily injury. Females' concern with personal survival also has implications (...) for sex differences in dominance hierarchies because the risks associated with hierarchy formation in nonbonded exogamous females are not offset by increased reproductive success. Hence among females, disputes do not carry implications for status with them as they do among males, but are chiefly connected with the acquisition and defence of scarce resources. Consequently, female competition is more likely to take the form of indirect aggression or low-level direct combat than among males. Under patriarchy, men have held the power to propagate images and attributions which are favourable to the continuance of their control. Women's aggression has been viewed as a gender-incongruent aberration or dismissed as evidence of irrationality. These cultural interpretations have evolutionarily based sex differences by a process of imposition which stigmatises the expression of aggression by females and causes women to offer exculpatory (rather than justificatory) accounts of their own aggression. (shrink)

Background: Empathy and moral courage are important virtues in nursing and nursing ethics. Hence, it is of great importance that nursing students and nurses develop their ability to empathize and their willingness to demonstrate moral courage. Research aim: The aim of this article is to explore third-year undergraduate nursing students’ perceptions and experiences in developing empathy and moral courage. Research design: This study employed a longitudinal qualitative design based on individual interviews. Participants and research context: Seven undergraduate nursing students were (...) interviewed during or immediately following their final clinical placement. Ethical considerations: The Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD) approved the study. Participants were informed that their participation was voluntary and were assured confidentiality. They were informed that they could withdraw from the study at any time, without providing reasons. Findings: Affective empathy seemed to be strong among third-year undergraduate nursing students. However, they tried to handle the situations in a ‘professional’ way, and to balance their emotions. At the same time, they expressed how difficult it can be to show moral courage when confronted with poor patient care. In addition, they spoke about a lack of role models during clinical practice and supervision. Conclusions: Undergraduate nursing students are in a vulnerable position throughout their journey to become professional and to develop empathy and moral courage. The professional socialisation and forming of professional empathy and moral courage among nursing students, may be seen as a complex interaction of formal and hidden curriculum, where role models play an important role. We argue that the main theme ‘Vulnerable students – a journey towards professional empathy and moral courage’ may cover the longitudinal project as a whole. This vulnerability is something both teachers and supervisors should be aware of when following up with students in their clinical placements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Far-Future Paleontology: The Baffling Case of Brunaspis enigmaticaAnne-Sophie Milon (bio) and Jan Zalasiewicz (bio)Paleontologists, for more than two centuries, have studied and debated the petrified remains of plants and animals that have evolved over the past three billion years on Earth. They have argued over the grand concepts that they reveal, such as biological evolution and climate change, and also the many specific questions thrown up by these (...) relics: was such-and-such a shell, a mollusk, or an arthropod? Did this fossil fish live high up in the water, among the plankton, or grub in the mud on the sea floor?These studies have for many paleontologists been a blessedly human-free zone, detached from the busy realities of our everyday lives. The science of paleontology, though, is simply one obscure part of a burgeoning and rapidly evolving technosphere that underpins our lives, and that is now evolving millions of new kinds of fossils—technofossils—far more rapidly than ever happened in biological evolution. Many of these objects will, quite certainly, become part of Earth’s future fossil record.If such an endeavor as paleontology were ever to arise again, in a distant post-human future, how would its practitioners deal with these bizarre relics?We provide a preview, on the following pages, of just one such enigma, and how it may be resolved (or not) by our puzzled disciplinary descendants. [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 32] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 33] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 34] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 35] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 36] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 37] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 38] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 39] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 40] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 41] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 42] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 43] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 44]Anne-Sophie Milon Anne-Sophie Milon is an artist-researcher who applies her illustration skills (HEAR, Strasbourg, France, 2010) and 2D traditional animation (UWE, Bristol, UK, 2012) to political arts (SPEAP, Sciences Po, 2015) and science and technology studies (HSTS, EHESS, 2022). For the past ten years, she has translated geological narratives–and ordinary ones for Earth sciences–into extraordinary plots for the uninitiated, including the humanities. She is currently working with Jan Zalasiewicz on a play, The Petrified Museum (2024), based on the British Geological Survey (Keyworth, UK), and on a PhD project in science and technology studies looking at limestones’ agencies in extractive industry practices (2025). She regularly collaborates with researchers from the Anthropocene Working Group: The Cosmic Oasis (Oxford University Press, 2022), “The Victims of Carbon Dioxide are Starting to Appear” in Feral Atlas (2021), and The Epochs of Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2016).Jan Zalasiewicz Jan Zalasiewicz is Emeritus Professor of Paleobiology at the University of Leicester. He was formerly a field geologist and paleontologist with the British Geological Survey, involved in the geological mapping of eastern England and central Wales. His interests include Early Paleozoic fossils, notably the graptolites (a kind of extinct zooplankton), mud and mudrocks, the Quaternary Ice Ages, the nature of geological time, and the geology made by humans. In recent years, he has helped develop the concept of an Anthropocene epoch. He enjoys writing popular science articles and books, and being involved in art/science projects.Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and SubStance, Inc... (shrink)

Two significant, apparently unrelated, trends have emerged in American society and medicine. First, American medicine is reexamining its approach to dying. The Institute of Medicine, the American Medical Association and private funding organizations have recognized that too many dying people suffer from pain and other distress that clinicians can prevent or relieve. Second, this past decade has marked a sharp increase in the number of physicians prosecuted for criminal negligence based on arguably negligent patient care. The case often cited as (...) a watershed is People u. Einaugfer, which involved a New York nursing home patient whose physician was convicted in 1993 of two criminal misdemeanors after he ordered an elderly dialysis patient to be tube fed through a peritoneal dialysis Catheter.How is the growing awareness of dying patients’ pain and the increasing willingness of prosecutors to charge physicians with crimes connected? Pain at the end of life is frequently treated with narcotics, prescription drugs that are closely regulated by state and federal law. That complex web of laws—and a growing fear of legal sanctions—has deterred physicians from prescribing controlled substances. As those legal sanctions move from disciplinary actions to criminal charges, physicians’ fears may expand. (shrink)

This paper explores the conditions under which feminine beautification constitutes a feminist practice. Distinguishing between the process and product of beautification allows us to isolate those aesthetic, interapos;Subjective, and embodied elements that empower rather than disempower women. The empowering characteristics of beautification, however, are difficult and perhaps impossible to represent in a sexist context; therefore, while beautifying may be a positive experience for women, being viewed as a beautified object in current Western society is almost always opposed to women's equality (...) and autonomy. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s _History of Sexuality_ has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of _History of Sexuality_ in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom (...) issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault’s history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In _Race and the Education of Desire, _Stoler challenges Foucault’s tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of _History of Sexuality_ contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race. Drawing on Foucault’s little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as “racisms of the state.” In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault’s insights have in the past constrained—and in the future may help shape—the ways we trace the genealogies of race. _Race and the Education of Desire_ will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault. (shrink)

Reading and writing are increasingly performed with digital, screen-based technologies rather than with analogue technologies such as paper and pen. The current digitization is an occasion to “unpack,” theoretically and conceptually, what is entailed in reading and writing as embodied, multisensory processes involving audiovisual and ergonomic interaction with devices having particular affordances. Highlighting the sensorimotor contingencies of substrates and technologies — how movement and object manipulation affect perception, experience, and sensory “feel” — this article presents an embodied approach to reading, (...) writing, and literacy, using three cases of digitization as illustrations of some educational implications: beginning writing by hand or by keyboard; dialogic reading with iPads and print picture books in kindergarten; and deep reading of long, linear texts on paper and on screens. (shrink)

In recent decades, concepts of group agency and the morality of groups have increasingly been discussed by philosophers. Notions of collective or joint duties have been invoked especially in the debates on global justice, world poverty and climate change. This paper enquires into the possibility and potential nature of moral duties individuals in unstructured groups may hold together. It distinguishes between group agents and groups of people which – while not constituting a collective agent – are nonetheless capable of performing (...) a joint action. It attempts to defend a notion of joint duties which are neither duties of a group agent nor duties of individual agents, but duties held jointly by individuals in unstructured groups. Furthermore, it seeks to illuminate the relation between such joint duties on the one hand and individual duties on the other hand. Rebutting an argument brought forward by Wringe, the paper concludes that it is not plausible to assume that all humans on earth can together hold a duty to mitigate climate change or to combat global poverty given that the members of that group are not capable of joint action. (shrink)

Goffman is credited with enriching our understanding of the details of interaction, but not with challenging our theoretical understanding of social organization. While Goffman's position is not consistent, the outlines for a theory of an interaction order sui generis may be found in his work. It is not theoretically adequate to understand Goffman as an interactionist within the dichotomy between agency and social structure. Goffman offers a way of resolving this dichotomy via the idea of an interaction order which is (...) constitutive of self and at the same time places demands on social structure. This has significant implications for our understanding of social organization in general. (shrink)

I argue that though a satisfactory semantics for the logic of inexact reference may assign no truth value to some statements, it should not assign truth (or falsity) of various degrees. Well-formed assertions are simply true or not. Inexactness does not “ramify.” I distinguish inexactness from other sorts of vagueness, including nonspecificity. I show that arguments from (i) use of quantifiers, (ii) the existence of properties which can be construed as a series of properties (as, e. g., red can be (...) construed as a set of shades of red), (iii) the constructability of apparently paradoxical sorites arguments, and (iv) the presence of prototypes in the extension of a predicate do not show that there are degrees of truth.Much of the alleged evidence that inexactness ramifies is, in fact, a misreading of the undeniable evidence that there may be uncertainty about the truth value of a claim. In support of my claims, I discuss how cases of deeming that a predicate applies relate to its actually applying. A distinction between predicates of “pure” and “impure” function is essential to this. (shrink)

Public opinion in recent years has soured on multiculturalism, due in large part to fears of radical Islam. In Multiculturalism without Culture, Anne Phillips contends that critics misrepresent culture as the explanation of everything individuals from minority and non-Western groups do. She puts forward a defense of multiculturalism that dispenses with notions of culture, instead placing individuals themselves at its core. Multiculturalism has been blamed for encouraging the oppression of women--forced marriages, female genital cutting, school girls wearing the hijab. Many (...) critics opportunistically deploy gender equality to justify the retreat from multiculturalism, hijacking the equality agenda to perpetuate cultural stereotypes. Phillips informs her argument with the feminist insistence on recognizing women as agents, and defends her position using an unusually broad range of literature, including political theory, philosophy, feminist theory, law, and anthropology. She argues that critics and proponents alike exaggerate the unity, distinctness, and intractability of cultures, thereby encouraging a perception of men and women as dupes constrained by cultural dictates. Opponents of multiculturalism may think the argument against accommodating cultural difference is over and won, but they are wrong. Phillips believes multiculturalism still has an important role to play in achieving greater social equality. In this book, she offers a new way of addressing dilemmas of justice and equality in multiethnic, multicultural societies, intervening at this critical moment when so many Western countries are poised to abandon multiculturalism. (shrink)

I argue that though a satisfactory semantics for the logic of inexact reference may assign no truth value to some statements, it should not assign truth (or falsity) of various degrees. Well-formed assertions are simply true or not. Inexactness does not “ramify.” I distinguish inexactness from other sorts of vagueness, including nonspecificity. I show that arguments from (i) use of quantifiers, (ii) the existence of properties which can be construed as a series of properties (as, e. g., red can be (...) construed as a set of shades of red), (iii) the constructability of apparently paradoxical sorites arguments, and (iv) the presence of prototypes in the extension of a predicate do not show that there are degrees of truth.Much of the alleged evidence that inexactness ramifies is, in fact, a misreading of the undeniable evidence that there may be uncertainty about the truth value of a claim. In support of my claims, I discuss how cases of deeming that a predicate applies relate to its actually applying. A distinction between predicates of “pure” and “impure” function is essential to this. (shrink)

Moral duties concerning climate change mitigation are – for good reasons – conventionally construed as duties of institutional agents, usually states. Yet, in both scholarly debate and political discourse, it has occasionally been argued that the moral duties lie not only with states and institutional agents, but also with individual citizens. This argument has been made with regard to mitigation efforts, especially those reducing greenhouse gases. This paper focuses on the question of whether individuals in industrialized countries have duties to (...) reduce their individual carbon footprint. To this end it will examine three kinds of arguments that have been brought forward against individuals having such duties: the view that individual emissions cause no harm; the view that individual mitigation efforts would have no morally significant effect; and the view that lifestyle changes would be overly-demanding. The paper shows how all three arguments fail to convince. While collective endeavours may be most efficient and effective in bringing about significant changes, there are still good reasons to contribute individually to reducing emission. After all, for most people the choice is between reducing one’s individual emissions and not doing anything. The author hopes this paper shows that one should not opt for the latter. (shrink)

This book engages with the most urgent philosophical questions pertaining to the problem of terrorism. What is terrorism? Could it ever be justified? Assuming that terrorism is just one of many kinds of political violence, the book denies that it is necessarily wrong and worse than war. In fact, it may be justifiable under certain circumstances.

Although moral distress is now a well-recognized phenomenon among all of the healthcare professions, few evidence-based strategies have been published to address it. In morally distressing situations, the “presenting problem” may be a particular patient situation, but most often signals a deeper unit- or system-centered issue. This article describes one institution’s ongoing effort to address moral distress in its providers. We discuss the development and evaluation of the Moral Distress Consultation Service, an interprofessional, unit/system-oriented approach to addressing and ameliorating moral (...) distress. (shrink)

Benefits to females of short-term mating have recently been identified, and it has been suggested that women have evolved adaptations for this strategy. One piece of evidence supporting such a female adaptation would be that women find the experience of a one-night stand as affectively positive as men. Individuals (N = 1,743) who had experienced a one-night stand were asked to rate aspects of their “morning after” feelings (six positive and six negative). Women were significantly more negative and less positive (...) than men. Although women did not especially view these relationships as a prelude to long-term relationships, they felt greater regret than men about having been “used.” Extra-pair copulations were rated more negatively, but not less positively, than singles’ experiences. There was no interaction between gender and mated status on positivity or negativity. Although, in terms of subsequent affective response, women do not seem well adapted to casual sexual encounters, it may be important to distinguish impelling sexual motivation preceding intercourse from later evaluations of the event. Menstrual cycle changes may also be important in altering the strength and target of sexual motivation. (shrink)

This article discusses explanatory theories of normative concepts and argues for a set of criteria of adequacy by which such theories may be evaluated. The criteria offered fall into four categories: ontological, theoretical, pragmatic, and moral. After defending the criteria and discussing their relative weighting, this article uses them to prune the set of available explanatory theories of oppression. Functionalist theories, including Hegelian recognition theory and Foucauldian social theory, are rejected, as are psychoanalytic theory and social dominance theory. Finally, the (...) article defends structural rational choice theory as the most promising methodology for explaining oppression. Key Words: oppression • explanation • rational choice theory. (shrink)

Relatively few articles discuss the ethical issues that accompany healthcare in rural areas. This article presents and discusses the key findings obtained from multi-method research studies conducted over a 9-year period of time in a multi-state rural area. It challenges the efficacy of current models for bioethics, shows what kinds of ethical issues develop in rural communities, and offers a framework for envisioning resources and approaches that may be more appropriate.

There is no agreed minimum standard with regard to what is considered safe, competent nursing care. Limited resources and organizational constraints make it challenging to develop a minimum standard. As part of their everyday practice, nurses have to ration nursing care and prioritize what care to postpone, leave out, and/or omit. In developed countries where public healthcare is tax-funded, a minimum level of healthcare is a patient right; however, what this entails in a given patient’s actual situation is unclear. Thus, (...) both patients and nurses would benefit from the development of a minimum standard of nursing care. Clarity on this matter is also of ethical and legal concern. In this article, we explore the case for developing a minimum standard to ensure safe and competent nursing care services. Any such standard must encompass knowledge of basic principles of clinical nursing and preservation of moral values, as well as managerial issues, such as manpower planning, skill-mix, and time to care. In order for such standards to aid in providing safe and competent nursing care, they should be in compliance with accepted evidence-based nursing knowledge, based on patients’ needs and legal rights to healthcare and on nurses’ codes of ethics. That is, a minimum standard must uphold a satisfactory level of quality in terms of both professionalism and ethics. Rather than being fixed, the minimum standard should be adjusted according to patients’ needs in different settings and may thus be different in different contexts and countries. (shrink)

I defend an instrumentalist account of moral responsibility and adopt Manuel Vargas’ idea that our responsibility practices are justified by their effects. However, whereas Vargas gives an independent account of morally responsible agency, on my account, responsible agency is defined as the susceptibility to developing and maintaining moral agency through being held responsible. I show that the instrumentalism I propose can avoid some problems more crude forms of instrumentalism encounter by adopting aspects of Strawsonian accounts. I then show the implications (...) for our understanding of responsibility: my account requires us to adopt a graded notion of responsibility and accept the claim that certain individuals may not be responsible because they are not susceptible to being influenced by our moral responsibility practices. Finally, I discuss whether the account is committed to allowing the instrumentalization of non-responsible individuals in cases where blaming them may benefit others’ moral agency. (shrink)

As clinical ethics consultants move toward professionalization, the process of certifying individual consultants or accrediting programs will be discussed and debated. With certification, some entity must be established or ordained to oversee the standards and procedures. If the process evolves like other professions, it seems plausible that it will eventually include a written examination to evaluate the core knowledge competencies that individual practitioners should possess to meet peer practice standards. The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities has published core knowledge (...) competencies for many years that are accepted by experts as the prevailing standard. Probably any written examination will be based upon the ASBH core knowledge competencies. However, much remains to be done before any examination may be offered. In particular, it seems likely that a recognized examining board must create and validate examination questions and structure the examination so as to establish meaningful, defensible parameters after dealing with such challenging questions as: Should the certifying examination be multiple choice or short-answer essay? How should the test be graded? What should the pass rate be? How may the examination be best administered? To advance the field of health care ethics consultation, thought leaders should start to focus on the written examination possibilities, to date unaddressed carefully in the literature. Examination models—both objective and written—must be explored as a viable strategy about how the field of health care ethics consultations can grow toward professionalization. (shrink)

This experimental writing piece by the Earth Unbound Collective explores the ethical, political and pedagogical challenges in addressing climate change, activism and justice. The provocation Earth Unbound: the struggle to breathe and the creative thoughts that follow are inspired by the contagious energy of what Donna Haraway calls response-ability or the ability to respond. This energy ripples through monthly reading groups and workshops organised by this interdisciplinary collective that emerged organically in January 2020.

This article focuses on the ethical implications of so-called ‘collateral damage’. It develops a moral typology of collateral harm to innocents, which occurs as a side effect of military or quasi-military action. Distinguishing between accidental and incidental collateral damage, it introduces four categories of such damage: negligent, oblivious, knowing and reckless collateral damage. Objecting mainstream versions of the doctrine of double effect, the article argues that in order for any collateral damage to be morally permissible, violent agents must comply with (...) high standards of care. In order for incidental harm to be permissible, an agent must take pains to avoid such harm even at higher cost to him- or herself. It is argued that accidentally but negligently caused collateral damage may be just as difficult to excuse as incidental harm. Only if high precautionary standards of care are met, can unintended harm to innocents – incidental or accidental – be permissible. In practice, such a strong commitment to avoiding harm to civilians may well lead us to question more generally and rethink more radically how violent conflicts ought to be fought, how military violence ought to be used and whether there are better ways of achieving those aims that we think are legitimate than those we are currently using. (shrink)

Introduction The mainstream view in philosophy of language is that sentence meaning determines truth-conditions. A corollary is that the truth or falsity of an utterance depends only on what words mean and how the world is arranged. Although several prominent philosophers (Searle, Travis, Recanati, Moravcsik) have challenged this view, it has proven hard to dislodge. The alternative view holds that meaning underdetermines truth-conditions. What is expressed by the utterance of a sentence in a context goes beyond what is encoded in (...) the sentence itself. Truth-conditional content depends on an indefinite number of unstated background assumptions, not all of which can be made explicit. A change in background assumptions can change truth-conditions, even bracketing disambiguation and reference assignment. That is, even after disambiguating any ambiguous words in a sentence and assigning semantic values to any indexical expressions in the sentence, truth-conditions may vary with variations in the background. (shrink)

The question of whether psychopaths are criminally and morally responsible has generated significant controversy in the literature. In this paper, we discuss what relevance a psychopathy diagnosis has for criminal responsibility. It has been argued that figuring out whether psychopathy is a mental illness is of fundamental importance, because it is a precondition for psychopaths’ eligibility to be excused via the legal insanity defense. But even if psychopathy counts as a mental illness, this alone is not sufficient to show the (...) insanity defense is applicable; it must also be shown that, as a result of the illness, specific deficits in moral understanding or control are present. In this paper, we show that a diagnosis of psychopathy will generally not indicate that a defendant is eligible for an insanity defense. This is because the group of individuals subsumed under the diagnosis is so heterogeneous that while some psychopaths do show significant impairments in affect and control which may impact on their responsibility, many psychopaths are not incapacitated in a way relevant to responsibility. (shrink)

BackgroundClinical ethics consultations can be complex interventions, involving multiple methods, stakeholders, and competing ethical values. Despite longstanding calls for rigorous evaluation in the field, progress has been limited. The Medical Research Council proposed guidelines for evaluating the effectiveness of complex interventions. The evaluation of CEC may benefit from application of the MRC framework to advance the transparency and methodological rigor of this field. A first step is to understand the outcomes measured in evaluations of CEC in healthcare settings. ObjectiveThe primary (...) objective of this review was to identify and map the outcomes reported in primary studies of CEC. The secondary objective was to provide a comprehensive overview of CEC structures, processes, and roles to enhance understanding and to inform standardization.MethodsWe searched electronic databases to identify primary studies of CEC involving patients, substitute decision-makers and/or family members, clinicians, healthcare staff and leaders. Outcomes were mapped across five conceptual domains as identified a priori based on our clinical ethics experience and preliminary literature searches and revised based on our emerging interpretation of the data. These domains included personal factors, process factors, clinical factors, quality, and resource factors. ResultsForty-eight studies were included in the review. Studies were highly heterogeneous and varied considerably regarding format and process of ethical intervention, credentials of interventionist, population of study, outcomes reported, and measures employed. In addition, few studies used validated measurement tools. The top three outcome domains that studies reported on were quality, process factors, and clinical factors. The majority of studies examined multiple outcome domains. All five outcome domains were multidimensional and included a variety of subthemes.ConclusionsThis scoping review represents the initial phase of mapping the outcomes reported in primary studies of CEC and identifying gaps in the evidence. The confirmed lack of standardization represents a hindrance to the provision of high quality intervention and CEC scientific progress. Insights gained can inform the development of a core outcome set to standardize outcome measures in CEC evaluation research and enable scientifically rigorous efficacy trials of CEC. (shrink)

Current advances in connectivity, sensor technology, computing power and the development of complex algorithms for processing health-related data are paving the way for the delivery of innovative long-term health care services in the future. Such technological developments will, in particular, assist the elderly and infirm to live independently, at home, for much longer periods. The home is, in fact, becoming a locus for health care innovation that may in the future compete with the hospital. However, along with these advances come (...) valid privacy and security questions arising from the fact that the data collected and transmitted through these technologies could also allow for individual monitoring as well as unauthorized access to critical diagnostic and other health data. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOrganization and management researchers praise the value of care in the workplace. However, they overlook the conflict between caring for work and for coworkers, which resonates with the dilemma of care allocation highlighted by ethicists of care. Through an in-depth qualitative study of two organizations, we examine how this dilemma is confronted in everyday organizational life. We draw on the concept of boundary work to explain how employees negotiate the boundary of their caring responsibilities in ways that grants or denies (...) care to coworkers. We argue that the possibility of an ethics of care for coworkers requires boundary work that suspends the separation of personal and professional selves and constitutes the worker as a whole person. We contribute to research on care in organizations by showing how care for coworkers may be enabled or undermined by maintaining or suppressing the care allocation dilemma. (shrink)