As the expansion of the Internet and the digital formatting of all kinds of creative works move us further into the information age, intellectual property issues have become paramount. Computer programs costing thousands of research dollars are now copied in an instant. People who would recoil at the thought of stealing cars, computers, or VCRs regularly steal software or copy their favorite music from a friend's CD. Since the Web has no national boundaries, these issues are international concerns. The contributors-philosophers, (...) legal theorists, and business scholars, among others-address questions such as: Can abstract ideas be owned? How does the violation of intellectual property rights compare to the violation of physical property rights? Can computer software and other digital information be protected? And how should legal systems accommodate the ownership of intellectual property in an information age? Intellectual Property is a lively examination of these and other issues, and an invaluable resource for librarians, lawyers, businesspeople, and scholars. (shrink)

Understanding positive emotions' shared and differentiating features can yield valuable insight into the structure of positive emotion space and identify emotion states, or aspects of emotion states, that are most relevant for particular psychological processes and outcomes. We report two studies that examined core relational themes (Study 1) and expressive displays (Study 2) for eight positive emotion constructs—amusement, awe, contentment, gratitude, interest, joy, love, and pride. Across studies, all eight emotions shared one quality: high positive valence. Distinctive core relational theme (...) and expressive display patterns were found for four emotions—amusement, awe, interest, and pride. Gratitude was associated with a distinct core relational theme but not an expressive display. Joy and love were each associated with a distinct expressive display but their core relational themes also characterised pride and gratitude, respectively. Contentment was associated with a distinct expressive display but not a core relational theme. The implications of this work for the study of positive emotion are discussed. (shrink)

Dementia is dead, long live aging! This chapter sets out the philosophical sources for understanding working with "dementia." The concept, "dementia," serves no useful purpose. Even "Alzheimer's disease" turns out to be problematic. This is because there is a lack of precision around the boundaries of these notions. The messiness that surrounds these notions, in terms of facts and values, is made obvious when we consider mild cognitive impairment, which is said to be a pre-dementia state. It makes more biological (...) sense to think in terms of the ageing brain, rather than to search for discrete disease entities. We need to think in terms of dementia-in-the-world. Ageing is not something that we do solely at the end of our lives: it is a part of our lives, to be celebrated. We must look more broadly at dementia-in-the-world as a feature of our ageing lives. (shrink)

The liver progenitor cell (LPC) has enormous potential for use in cell therapy to treat liver disease. Since liver regenerates readily from pre‐existing hepatocytes, a role for LPCs and, indeed, their existence have been questioned. Research during the last decade has established that LPCs are an important alternative source of cells for liver regeneration. Their utility for cell therapy lies in their ability to generate both hepatocytes and cholangiocytes. However, they are observed in liver diseases that often lead to cancer (...) and there is experimental evidence that implicates LPCs as the source of tumours. This article provides a brief history of the studies that established the functional importance of LPCs in liver disease. It focuses on mouse models that have led to the identification of factors that regulate LPC growth and differentiation and discusses LPCs derived from different sources. Recent promising results from both in vitro and vivo studies suggest that LPCs could be useful for cell therapy. In the context of liver disease, LPCs may indeed be the cell of the future and understandably “our favourite cell”. BioEssays 27:1192–1202, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new 'ethic of parts' for which the divisible body is severed from (...) the self, torn from the social fabric, and thrust into commercial transactions -- as organs, secretions, reproductive capacities, and tissues -- responding to the dictates of an incipiently global marketplace. Breaking with established approaches which prioritize the body as 'text', the chapters in this book examine not only images of the body-turned-merchandise but actually existing organisms considered at once as material entities, semi-magical tokens, symbolic vectors and founts of lived experience. The topics covered range from the cultural disposal and media treatment of corpses, the biopolitics of cells, sperm banks and eugenics, to the international trafficking of kidneys, the development of 'transplant tourism', to the idioms of corporeal exploitation among prizefighters as a limiting case of fleshly commodity. This insightful and arresting volume combines perspectives from anthropology, law, medicine, and sociology to offer compelling analyses of the concrete ways in which the body is made into a commodity and how its marketization in turn remakes social relations and cultural meanings. (shrink)

Sandia National Laboratories, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was originally a part of Los Alamos Laboratory. In 1949, AT&T agreed to manage Sandia, which they did for the next 44 years. During those Cold War years, Sandia was the prime weapons engineering laboratory for Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. As such, it bore prime responsibility for designing and adapting nuclear weapons for the military services' delivery systems, and ensuring the safety and reliability of the stockpile. The Labs' history has been (...) unevenly documented, hindered by the secret nature of its work and the desire of management to maintain a low public profile. There have been three history programs at Sandia: a restricted history published internally in 1963; another history program in the early 1980s that resulted in a history of the Labs' first decade; and the current history program dating from the mid-1990s, which has published a general history and several monographs. This article discusses the challenges and problems inherent in documenting the history of a national weapons laboratory during the last 50 years. (shrink)

Ever since its inception, the theory of evolution has been reified into an “-ism”: Darwinism. While biologists today tend to shy away from the term in their research, the term is still actively used in the broader academic and societal contexts. What exactly is Darwinism, and how precisely are its various uses and abuses related to the scientific theory of evolution? Some call for limiting the meaning of the term “Darwinism” to its scientific context; others call for its abolition; yet (...) others claim the term refers to a myth-like story. In this paper we propose a conceptually grounded overview of the term. We show how the scientific dimension of Darwinism feeds into, and is influenced by, guises of Darwinism as a methodology and as an ethically and politically charged “worldview”. The full meaning of Darwinism, as well as how this meaning has changed over time, can only be understood through the complex interaction between these three dimensions. (shrink)

Childhood cancer incidence is rising, affecting a growing proportion of elementary school students. For most of these children, school attendance can be limited by hospitalisations, treatments and side effects. However, little is yet known about the educational needs and experiences of this population. This phenomenological study explored the school experiences of 10 6- to 12-year-old children with cancer as they underwent chemotherapy. Results revealed perceptions that attending school in the hospital or home during cancer treatment is essentially lonely, confusing and (...) “different”. These perceptions intertwined to illuminate five themes: school should involve fun activities; group educational formats are preferable; old school is the “best school”; being a “good student” is important during treatment; and attending school is complicated during treatment. Therefore, hospital-based and homebound schooling programmes should integrate socially interactive and cognitively engaging curriculum to best support the learning needs of this population. (shrink)

In this volume, the sixth in Blackwell's Great Debates in Philosophy series, Smart and Haldane discuss the case for and against religious belief. The debate is unusual in beginning with the negative side. After a short jointly authored introduction, there is a fairly extended presentation of the atheist position by Smart. Haldane then offers an equally extended defense of theism. The authors respond to one another in the same order, and the book concludes with a brief co-authored treatment of antirealism, (...) which both reject. The discussion is broad-ranging, in part reflecting the size of the topic. It addresses the existence of God and the problem of evil, along with related issues having to do with God's nature and his involvement with the world: necessary being, eternity versus sempiternity, the relation between divine sovereignty and human freedom, and the possibility of miracles. But there is also discussion of subjects having to do with revealed religion, such as the reliability of scripture, and the roles of faith and reason in the life of the believer. The fact that the book commences with the case for atheism also contributes to its scope, since without a specific version of theism on which to focus, Smart has to aim broadly. The result is that topics that might otherwise have been ignored—moral arguments, and Pascal's wager, to cite two—are at least broached, though not pursued. (shrink)

Successful tutoring depends in part on child tutors’ ability to recognise and interpret accurately signals of misunderstanding by their tutees. Age- and gender-related differences were investigated in a study which exposed 80 children to a video-recorded episode involving a target child receiving ambiguous instructions in her attempts to move a model car along a designated route on a playmat roadway from one destination to another. The results showed that explicit, general and facial modes of displaying puzzlement by the target child (...) were judged as equally powerful expressions of degree of puzzlement, but 8-10 year olds judged the target child as significantly more puzzled than did 7 year olds. Older children were also more likely to attribute the puzzlement of the target child to the ambiguous instructions than to her verbal or facial expression of puzzlement. Girls were generally more accurate than boys in judging facial expressions and less likely than boys to give wrong or alternatively ambiguous responses when given the opportunity to correct the video-recorded ambiguous instructions. The results throw some light on the developing sensitivities of boys and girls in recognising and attributing failures of understanding by other children. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction:The Heat of Mild Cognitive ImpairmentJulian C. Hughes (bio)Keywordsaging, explanation, mild cognitive impairment, understanding, valuesDebates about mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are generating heat, albeit civilized heat. But under the surface, as I think the papers in this special issue demonstrate, the civilized heat comes from a good deal of passion. One way in which philosophy can contribute to the debate is by making plain the sources of this (...) passion, so that the motivating forces are clearer.One motivating force is this: There will be people who do not have dementia but who have symptoms or signs that might predict dementia, which cause them concern, whom we might help by early intervention. The intervention might involve advice and support, or it might involve some form of drug treatment; and in the utopia of our dreams, it might involve prevention. All of this is very motivating for clinical scientists. It also offers a laudable motivation to pharmaceutical companies, who simultaneously must have regard to the possibility of profits for their shareholders.Here, however, is an alternative motivation: The effects of aging must not be ignored if help can be given, but older people must not be stigmatized by a medical process that thrusts disabling labels on them. People age, but they age differently, and it is better to recognize difference, both from a biological and from a philosophical perspective. Thus, a passionate commitment to the cause of individual agency in old age and a desire for authentic autonomy for older people provide strong motivation too.At root, then, the conflicting passions over MCI reflect the age-old struggle in the philosophy of psychiatry between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the human or cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften): the tension is between a tendency to approach the problem with the aim of eliciting a scientific explanation and a tendency to try to achieve a human and cultural understanding of the phenomena (Phillips 2004). So, although MCI can be regarded as an explanatory diagnostic entity with some predictive value, it can also be regarded as a label that might cause harm or as a human phenomenon that requires understanding. Furthermore, MCI raises ontological questions about the nature of disease entities. And there is a wider issue as well about how aging itself should be regarded.From a biological perspective, it turns out there is no clear cutoff between what is normal and what [End Page 1] is not. Hence, in a number of ways, values seem to be as important as facts (Sadler 2005). Perhaps philosophy should content itself with saying no more than this: MCI ought not to be considered or debated as if it lies outside the realm of evaluative judgment. The very possibility of its existence as a clinical entity is a matter worthy of moral and social discourse.The direction of thought indicated here and in the papers that follow, however, is more radical than the easily won point that the "diagnosis" of MCI is not value free. On the back of the biological point, that there is a continuum between physiological and pathological aging, is the broader philosophical point that aging can neither be understood solely in terms of physiology nor in terms of pathology, nor even in terms of both. Ageing represents, inter alia, a social and cultural phenomenon manifest in the context of particular psychological and spiritual responses to a mixture of physiological adaptations and pathological predispositions. Without the broader picture, we tend to characterize old age, as Michael Bavidge has suggested elsewhere, in terms of deteriorations: "We should think of old age as offering alternative rather than impaired ways of experiencing life" (2006, 49). The difficulty is that any diagnosis seems to suggest impairment in one form or another. The radical suggestion, therefore, might be to commend descriptions that encourage shared understanding over and above the giving of names and labels.In a brief critique of the scientific approach to "banal memory disorders and MCI", Jean-Marie Léger, like Bavidge, regrets the extent to which people with cognitive impairment "are described in terms of what they have lost, with no regard for the wealth of faculties which are still present." Léger... (shrink)

Does the content of a physically dangerous job affect the moral permissibility of hiring for that job? To what extent may employers consider costs in choosing workplace safety measures? Drawing on Kantian ethical theory, this article defends two strong ethical standards of workplace safety. First, the content of a hazardous job does indeed affect the moral permissibility of offering it. Unless employees need hazard pay to meet basic needs, it is permissible to offer a dangerous job only if prospective employees (...) have a reason other than hazard pay to choose this job instead of safer alternatives. Second, employers typically cannot justify omitting expensive safety measures by paying employees more, even if employees prefer higher pay to greater safety. Employers offering dangerous jobs must meet these two standards to avoid treating their employees merely as means. (shrink)

Studies suggest that emotional complexity—the experience of positive and negative emotion in response to the same event—is unusual in Western samples. However, recent research finds that the co-occurrence of positive and negative emotion during unstructured situations is more common among East Asians than Westerners, consistent with theories emphasising the prevalence of dialectical folk epistemology in East-Asian culture. The present study builds upon previous research by examining Asian- and European-Americans' experience of a particular positive emotion—love—and a situationally appropriate negative emotion during (...) four structured laboratory conversations with their romantic partner. Among Asian Americans, love and the experience of negative emotion were typically less negatively correlated during these conversations than was true for European Americans. (shrink)

Recently, dramatic price increases by several pharmaceutical companies have provoked public outrage. These scandals raise questions both about how pharmaceutical firms should be regulated and about how pharmaceutical executives ethically ought to make pricing decisions when drug prices are largely unregulated. Though there is an extensive literature on the regulatory question, the ethical question has been largely unexplored. This article defends a Kantian approach to the ethics of pharmaceutical pricing in an unregulated market. To the extent possible, pharmaceutical companies must (...) price drugs so that those who genuinely need them can get them without financial ruin. This requirement is an ethical side constraint, like the moral prohibitions on deception and theft, that takes precedence over a business’s interest in maximizing profit. That said, the requirement’s application is sensitive to the need to recoup the costs of research and to produce a return that financially justifies the original investment. It may not be either feasible or desirable for government to attempt to enforce the ethical requirements concerning just pharmaceutical pricing. Either price regulation or subsidy could fulfill government’s obligation to protect patients from being objectionably vulnerable to pricing decisions by private companies. (shrink)

In this paper I consider, in connection with dementia, two views of the person. One view of the person is derived from Locke and Parfit. This tends to regard the person solely in terms of psychological states and his/her connections. The second view of the person is derived from a variety of thinkers. I have called it the situated-embodied-agent view of the person. This view, I suggest, more readily squares with the reality of clinical experience. It regards the person as (...) embedded in a history and culture. The human person is also an embodied agent. I contend that this view encourages a more appropriate approach towards the ethical issues that arise in dementia and towards people with dementia. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Digital mental health interventions have emerged as a promising means of expanding access to mental healthcare. Prospective participants reporting severe symptoms or suicidal ideation are often excluded from DMHI trials and may struggle to access alternative treatments. However, evidence suggests that DMHIs are efficacious for people reporting these characteristics. We suggest that there are risks to both including and excluding people from DMHI trials, and we urge researchers to ensure that their eligibility criteria are designed in an evidence-based and (...) ethically conscious manner. We also make specific recommendations for those working in various other capacities within the academic community. (shrink)

Dementia affects millions of people throughout the world. Thinking through Dementia offers a critique of the main models used to understand dementia-the biomedical, neuropsychological, and social constructionist. It discusses clinical issues and cases, together with philosophical work that might help us to better understand and treat this illness.

Government’s use of imprisonment raises distinctive moral issues. Even if government has broad authority to make and to enforce law, government may not be entitled to use imprisonment as a punishment for all the criminal laws it is entitled to make. Indeed, there may be some serious crimes that it is wrong to punish with imprisonment, even if the conditions of imprisonment are humane and even if no adequate alternative punishments are available.

When a business has competitors that break a burdensome law, is it morally required to obey this law, or may it break the law to avoid an unfair competitive disadvantage? Though this ethical question is pervasive in the business world, many non-skeptical theories of the obligation to obey the law cannot give it a clear answer. A broadly Kantian account, by contrast, can explain why businesspeople ought to obey laws of a certain type even under competitive pressure, namely laws that (...) play a direct role in defining rights to use physical or financial resources free from substantial interference. Businesspeople must obey these laws even at the cost of allowing their businesses to fail and even when the acts proscribed are mala prohibita. This argument for obeying the law in competitive contexts has limited scope. Considerations of fairness or self-preservation may justify violating laws of other types under competitive pressure. (shrink)

In response to Frederick Schauer's book The Force of Law, I argue that the available evidence indicates that non-coercive law could influence many people's behavior. It may sometimes be best to forgo coercive enforcement of an important law.

Many assume that whenever government is entitled to make a law, it is entitled to enforce that law coercively. I argue that the justification of legal authority and the justification of governmental coercion come apart. Both in ideal theory and in actual human societies, governments are sometimes entitled to make laws that they are not entitled to enforce coercively.

Dementia is an illness that raises important questions about our own attitudes to illness and aging. It also raises very important issues beyond the bounds of dementia to do with how we think of ourselves as people--fundamental questions about personal identity. Is the person with dementia the same person he or she was before? Is the individual with dementia a person at all? In a striking way, dementia seems to threaten the very existence of the self.LThis book brings together philosophers (...) and practitioners to explore the conceptual issues that arise in connection with this increasingly common illness. Drawing on a variety of philosophers such as Descartes, Lock, Hume, Wittgenstein, the authors explore the nature of personal identity in dementia. They also show how the lives and selfhood of people with dementia can be enhanced by attention to their psychological and spiritual environment. Throughout, the book conveys a strong ethical message, arguing in favor of treating people with dementia with all the dignity they deserve as human beings. The book covers a range of topics, stretching from talk of basic biology to talk of a spiritual understanding of people with dementia. Accessibly written by leading figures in psychiatry and philosophy, the book presents a unique and long overdue examination of an illness that features in so many of our lives. (shrink)