In this open peer commentary, we categorize the possible “neuroscience in national security” definitions of misuse of science and identify which, if any, are uniquely presented by advances in neuroscience. To define misuse, we first define what we would consider appropriate use: the application of reasonably safe and effective technology, based on valid and reliable scientific research, to serve a legitimate end. This definition presents distinct opportunities for assessing misuse: misuse is the application of invalid or unreliable science, or is (...) the use of reliable scientific methods to serve illegitimate ends. Ultimately, we conclude that while national security is often a politicized issue, assessing the state of scientific progress should not be. (shrink)

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

Introducing Applied Ethics Edited by Brenda Almond, Blackwell, 1995. Pp. 375. ISBN 0-631-19389-8. 45.00 (hbk), 14.99 (pbk). Environmental Ethics Edited by Robert Elliot, Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. 255. ISBN 9-19-875144-3. 9.95 (pbk) Medicine and Moral Reasoning Edited by K.W.M. Fulford, Grant Gillett and Janet Martin Soskice Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 207. ISBN 0-521-45325-9 37.50 (hbk), 12.95 (pbk). Enlightenment and Religion. Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-century Britain Edited by Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 348. ISBN (...) 0-521-56060-8. 40.00. Dialettica, Arte e Societ : Saggio su Theodor W. Adorno By Giacomo Rinaldi, Quattroventi, Urbino, 1994. Pp. 205. L. 30,000. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, new revised edition, By Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Blackwell, 1995. Pp. 326. ISBN 0-631-19878-4. 15.99. Autobiographical Reflections By Eric Voegelin (Edited, with Introduction, by Ellis Sandoz), Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Pp. 131. ISBN 0807120766 $10.95. (shrink)

Is there a limit to the legitimate demands of morality? In particular, is there a limit to people's responsibility to promote the well-being of others, either directly or via social institutions? Utilitarianism admits no such limit, and is for that reason often said to be an unacceptably demanding moral and political view. In this original new study, Murphy argues that the charge of excessive demands amounts to little more than an affirmation of the status quo. The real problem with (...) utilitarianism is that it makes unfair demands on people who comply with it in our world of nonideal compliance. Murphy shows that this unfairness does not arise on a collective understanding of our responsibility for others' well being. Thus, according to Murphy, while there is no general problem to be raised about the extent of moral demands, there is a pressing need to acknowledge the collective nature of the demands of beneficence. (shrink)

The ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The book explores the relationship between word meanings and syntax and semantics more generally. It provides a balanced overview of the main theoretical approaches, along with a lucid explanation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. After covering the main topics in lexical meaning, such as (...) polysemy and sense relations, the textbook surveys the types of meanings represented by different word classes. It explains abstract concepts in clear language, using a wide range of examples, and includes linguistic puzzles in each chapter to encourage the student to practise using the concepts. 'Adopt-a-Word' exercises give students the chance to research a particular word, building a portfolio of specialist work on a single word. (shrink)

This book explores how some word meanings are paradigmatically related to each other, for example, as opposites or synonyms, and how they relate to the mental organization of our vocabularies. Traditional approaches claim that such relationships are part of our lexical knowledge (our "dictionary" of mentally stored words) but Lynne Murphy argues that lexical relationships actually constitute our "metalinguistic" knowledge. The book draws on a century of previous research, including word association experiments, child language, and the use of synonyms (...) and antonyms in text. (shrink)

Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals (...) help us see the value in rejecting (a) restrictive social norms of emotional expressiveness and (b) restrictive artistic norms about how one ought to express or represent pain in art, namely that if one is going to do so they must ensure the pain has been ‘beautified’. In developing this second point I argue that emotional hardcore is well-suited (though not individually so) for putting pressure on longstanding views in the history of aesthetics about the formal relationship between art and human pain. (shrink)

BackgroundSocial media has globalised compassion enabling requests for donations to spread beyond geographical boundaries. The use of social media for medical crowdfunding links people with unmet healthcare needs to charitable donors. There is no doubt that fundraising campaigns using such platforms facilitates access to financial resources to the benefit of patients and their caregivers.Main textThis paper reports on a critical review of the published literature and information from other online resources discussing medical crowdfunding and the related ethical questions. The review (...) highlighted the benefits of crowdfunding as well as the under-exploration of the risk of having patients’ desires and human rights undermined during online fundraising campaigns. Majority of these campaigns get initiated on behalf of the patients, especially the very sick and dependant. The ethical questions raised relate to the voluntariness of informed consent and the possibility of patients being used as a means to an end. Vulnerability of patients may expose them to coercion, undue influence, manipulation, and violation of their human rights. The success of these campaigns is influenced by the digital skills, pre-existing social networks and, the emotional potency. Healthcare is a public good, and online market forces should not determine access to essential health services. The benefits of crowdfunding cannot be subverted, but it can perpetuate unintended injustices, especially those arising from socio-economic factors.ConclusionsPolicymakers ought to monitor the utilisation of crowdfunding sites to identify policy failures and unmet essential health care needs responsible for driving individuals to use these platforms. The upholding of human rights and the fundamental respect of the individual’s wishes is a moral imperative. The need for an ethics framework to guide different stakeholders during medical crowdfunding needs further examination. (shrink)

Worldwide, there is renewed public and political attention focused on public health fueled by the globally explosive H1N1 pandemic. Pandemic planning emerged as a major area for public action in the absence of an overarching ethics framework appropriate for the community and population focus of public health. Baylis, Sherwin, and Kenny propose relational personhood and relational solidarity as core values for a public health ethics. The Catholic faith tradition makes three useful contributions in support of a relational ethic: first, a (...) religious ontology that aligns with the view that human persons are inherently relational; second, a coherent account of the requisite social and communal ideals and structures that this belief demands; and third, inspiration and motivation for the attitudes and actions that are required in response to a relational ontology. (shrink)

Indeed, data from impaired performance have often played a central role in our understanding of the skills and abilities of the human mind/brain This volume ...

In seeking for an understanding of ethical practices in health care situations, our challenge is always both to recognize and respond to the call of individuals in need. In attuning ourselves to the call of the vulnerable other an ethical moment arises. Asking ‘how are you?’ in health care practice is our very first possibility to learn how a particular person finds herself or himself in this particular situation. Here, ‘how are you?’ shows itself as an ethical question that opens (...) up a relational space that calls forth a response. It is a way to understand the situated moments in which we are already that enables us to act respectfully. Our ethical frameworks assist us in trying to decide what is the right thing to do given a set of circumstances. Yet there is a prior step that already calls us to ethical attention; this is when we ask ‘how are you?’, which transforms a seemingly small interaction into an ethical moment. ‘How are you?’ is a question that turns us back to who we are as health care professionals and calls us to be more deeply attentive to the moment. When we sincerely ask ‘how are you?’ we enact our ethical commitments to one another. (shrink)

Despite a growing body of research by management scholars to understand and explain failures in ethical decision making (EDM), misconduct prevails. Scholars have identified character, founded in virtue ethics, as an important perspective that can help to address the gap in organizational misconduct. While character has been offered as a valid perspective in EDM, current theorizing on how it applies to EDM has not been well developed. We thus integrate character, founded in virtue ethics, into Rest’s (1986) EDM model to (...) reveal how shifting attention to the nature of the moral agent provides critical insights into decision making more broadly and EDM specifically. Virtue ethics provides a perspective on EDM that acknowledges and anticipates uncertainties, considers its contextual constraints, and contemplates the development of the moral agent. We thus answer the call by many scholars to integrate character in EDM in order to advance the understanding of the field and suggest propositions for how to move forward. We conclude with implications of a character-infused approach to EDM for future research. (shrink)

Employee performance plays a crucial role in the productivity of organizations, especially in the hospitality industry in Malaysia. This work performance is influenced by leadership style, and finding the type of leadership style that is suitable to apply to employees is crucial, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Transformational leadership theory is selected for this study in determining leadership styles. There are four dimensions under transformational leadership theory, namely idealized influence, individualized consideration, inspirational motivation and intellectual stimulation. Data (...) were collected online from 400 employees working in the hospitality industry in Malaysia and analyzed using partial least square structure equation modeling. The findings show that only two dimensions of transformational leadership, namely idealized influence and inspirational motivation, have a significant positive influence on employee performance. Implications in the context of human resource management and recommendations to increase employee performance are also discussed. (shrink)

Although many modern philosophers of law describe custom as merely a minor source of law, formal law is actually only one source of the legal customs that govern us. Many laws grow out of custom, and one measure of a law's success is by its creation of an enduring legal custom. Yet custom and customary law have long been neglected topics in unsettled jurisprudential debate. Smaller concerns, such as whether customs can be legitimized by practice or by stipulation, stipulated by (...) an authority or by general consent, or dictated by law or vice versa, lead to broader questions of law and custom as alternative or mutually exclusive modes of social regulation, and whether rational reflection in general ought to replace sub-rational prejudice. Can legal rules function without customary usage, and does custom even matter in society? The Philosophy of Customary Law brings greater theoretical clarity to the often murky topic of custom by showing that custom must be analyzed into two more logically basic concepts: convention and habit. James Bernard Murphy explores the nature and significance of custom and customary law, and how conventions relate to habits in the four classic theories of Aristotle, Francisco Suarez, Jeremy Bentham, and James C. Carter. He establishes that customs are conventional habits and habitual conventions, and allows us to better grasp the many roles that custom plays in a legal system by offering a new foundation of understanding for these concepts. (shrink)

The dominant discourse in chronic disease management centres on the ideal of person-centred healthcare, with an empowered patient taking an active role in decision-making with their healthcare provider. Despite these encouraging developments toward healthcare democracy, many person-centred conceptions of healthcare and programming continue to focus on the healthcare institution’s perspective and priorities. In these debates, the patient’s voice has largely been absent. This article takes the example of patient empowerment to show how the concept has been influenced by a variety (...) of competing and shifting influences that have led to conceptualisations and programming designed for the patient, but developed without the patient. The framework of epistemic injustice is proposed to unravel the complexity of these omissions. The concept can be defined as a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. It occurs when a person is ignored or not believed due to a prejudice of some kind. It has been applied to healthcare in order to better understand barriers for patient participation and will be used to better understand the problems with current empowerment definitions and implementation strategies. The article will end by proposing some methodologies to facilitate patient-developed concepts of empowerment. (shrink)

The first IVF baby was born in the 1970s. Less than 20 years later, we had cloning and GM food, and information and communication technologies had transformed everyday life. In 2000, the human genome was sequenced. More recently, there has been much discussion of the economic and social benefits of nanotechnology, and synthetic biology has also been generating controversy. This important volume is a timely contribution to increasing calls for regulation - or better regulation - of these and other new (...) technologies. Drawing on an international team of legal scholars, it reviews and develops the role of human rights in the regulation of new technologies. Three controversies at the intersection between human rights and new technology are given particular attention. First, how the expansive application of human rights could contribute to the creation of a brave new world of choice, where human dignity is fundamentally compromised; second, how new technologies, and our regulatory responses to them, could be a threat to human rights; and, third, how human rights could be used to create better regulation of these technologies. (shrink)

A citizen’s jury brings together a mix of citizens from different socio-economic groups who deliberate on a particular policy issue over a number of days. Since their development in the 1970s in th...

This essay evaluates Charles Taylor's defence of a politics of recognition in light of his broader account of modern identity and the self. I argue that his call for a politics of recognition betrays what is most ethically promising in his own account of modern subjectivity – namely, its emphasis on and affirmation of inner multiplicity. The first part of the paper identifies the ways in which his account of the self affirms inner multiplicity. The second part of the paper (...) outlines how a politics of recognition circumscribes this inner plurality by rendering core aspects of personal identity rigid and by promoting attitudes that inhibit attentiveness to multiplicity within the self. By outlining the ways in which it circumscribes inner multiplicity, I show that Taylor's preferred form of politics undermines two of his own central goals: that of securing the conditions in which authentic identity can be realized and that of promoting mutually receptive relations among diverse selves. A form of liberalism that strives for neutrality with respect to cultural symbols and practices more effectively facilitates the realization of these goals. (shrink)

Medical care of critically ill and injured infants and children globally should be based on best research evidence to ensure safe, efficacious treatment. In South Africa and other low and middle-income countries, research is needed to optimise care and ensure rational, equitable allocation of scare paediatric critical care resources.

This paper proposes a dynamic theory of embodiment that aims to get beyond the absent moving body in embodied social theory. The first somatic revolution, inspired by Merleau Ponty, provided theories based on the feeling and experience of the body. The theory of dynamic embodiment focuses instead on the doing itself as embodied social action, in which the embodied person is fore-grounded as a complex resource for meaning making. This represents a theoretical enrichment of the earlier turn to the body (...) in social theory, which tended to separate the semiotic, as necessarily representational and/or linguistic, from the somatic as a wide range of corporeal processes and practices assumed to be separated from mind, language and/or conscious thought. We argue that overcoming this persistent Cartesianism requires a New Realist approach to the proper location of human agency as a causal power, one that promotes a bio-psycho-social concept of personhood. Part one of the paper presents a general framework for this perspective, while part two applies this paradigm ethnographically to illustrate how bringing semiosis and somatics together requires a robust conception of multi-sensory modalities. (shrink)

Aim Genetic research representative of the population is crucial to understanding the underlying causes of many diseases. In a prospective evaluation of informed consent we assessed the willingness of individuals of different ethnicities, gender and drug dependence history to participate in genetic studies in which their genetic sample could be shared with a repository at the National Institutes of Health. Methods Potential subjects were recruited from the general population through the use of flyers and referrals from previous participants and clinicians (...) with knowledge of our study. They could consent to 11 separate choices so that they could specify how and with whom their genetic sample could be shared. Rates of affirmative consent were then analysed by gender, ethnicity and drug dependence history. Results Of 1416 volunteers enrolled, 99.7% gave affirmative informed consent for studies of addiction conducted in our laboratory. No significant difference was found for participation in genetic studies conducted in our laboratory by gender, ethnicity or drug dependence history. Over all 11 questions, individuals with a history of drug use were more likely to agree to consent to participate in our study than were healthy volunteers. Conclusion A high percentage of each category of gender, ethnicity and drug history, gave affirmative consent at all levels. The level of detail in and the amount of time spent reviewing the informed consent, and a relationship of trust with the clinical investigator may contribute to this outcome. (shrink)

This is an important collection of works, from an international team of authors, on corporate power and its justification and authority. It highlights the growing importance of corporate governance issues, an area which now has unprecedented coverage by the media in the commercial sector and is increasingly important in business schools.

It has usually been assumed that the Actian Games at Nicopolis were founded in 28 B.C. . In Mélanges d'Arch. et d'Hist., 1936, pp. 94 ff., J. Gagé argues also for 28 B.C., his principal grounds being as follows: ‘Comme Auguste leur conféra en même temps le rang isolympique et que le calcul du temps par Actiades fut admis çá et lá á remplacer celui des Olympiades, il est logique de penser que ces deux computs coïncidaient. Or, la première célébration (...) olympique après Actium est celle de l'an 28 av. J-C.; c'est done presque sûrement en 28 que commence en fait la première Actiade.’. (shrink)

This article explores an aspect of women’s transnational labor migration that has been understudied in many labor-sending countries: how men experience shifts in the household labor division triggered by women’s migration. In so doing, we shed light on the diverse ways notions of masculinity and gender identities are being reworked and renegotiated in the transnational family. Drawing on qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews with carers of left-behind children in Northern Vietnam, we show how men are confronted with the need (...) to take on child care duties, which have traditionally been ascribed to women, while at the same time being under considerable pressure to live up to locally accepted masculinity ideals. We provide interesting insights into the changing family structures and dynamics in Vietnamese society where patriarchal norms continue to exert significant influence on different facets of life. (shrink)

There is growing recognition that good ethics can have a positive economic impact on the performance of firms. Many statistics support the premise that ethics, values, integrity and responsibility are required in the modern workplace. For consumer groups and society at large, research has shown that good ethics is good business. This study defines and traces the emergence and evolution within the business literature of the concepts of values, business ethics and corporate social responsibility to illustrate the increased emphasis that (...) has been placed on these issues over time. Two organizations that have successfully dealt with these issues were analyzed to identify the links among values, ethics, and corporate social responsibility as they are incorporated into the culture and management of a firm. This study identified the presence and implementation of values, business ethics, and CSR actions within the two organizations studied. (shrink)

This book delivers a definitive contribution to the understanding of Habermas's oeuvre as it applies to education. The authors examine Habermas's contribution to pedagogy, learning and classroom interaction; the relation between education, civil society and the state; forms of democracy, reason and critical thinking; and performativity, audit cultures and accountability.

This article analyses how faith-based civil society organisations have advocated the value-add of faith to governmental and non-governmental development actors in the highly secularised context of the Netherlands. Its social value lies in the space for reflexivity it opens up on how the religious and the secular are entangled in the field of development through shifting the gaze towards secularised Europe. Its academic value lies in how it combines the study of faith and development, with a critical analysis of the (...) secular formations in which much of the thinking around faith and development is shaped. The article builds on an academic study of and long-term engagement with the Dutch non-governmental organisation (NGO)-based Knowledge Centre Religion and Development (KCRD), offering a critical overview of the KCRD’s work between 2006 and 2016. Data were gathered through interviews, document analysis and participant observation as part of the academic research, as well as informal observations and analysis through professional engagement. The KCRD, because of its institutional setting, had to adopt an instrumental approach towards the role of religion in development, which prevented it from challenging the reigning secular paradigm in development and its biases towards faith-based actors. The article will recommend that future initiatives on faith and development more consciously anchor their approach to faith in their institutional practices and mainstream discussions on the European continent. (shrink)

El objetivo principal de este artículo consiste en mostrar la organización, institucionalización y control de saberes y prácticas que tienen lugar en diversas representaciones de la armonía universal en los comienzos del siglo xvii. En primer lugar, nos proponemos analizar los fundamentos teológicos, físico-matemáticos y musicales de las nociones de armonía universal evocadas en el intercambio erudito entre Johannes Kepler, Robert Fludd, Marin Mersenne y Pierre Gassendi. En segundo lugar, examinaremos los elementos teóricos y prácticos que garantizan la legitimidad epistemológica (...) de sus demostraciones o experiencias científicas. En particular, procuraremos evitar caer en interpretaciones historiográficas que ponen énfasis en una oposición entre la tradición ocultista, que representa una armonía numerológica, y la revolución científica, que la concibe matemáticamente. De este modo, podremos considerar con justicia los aportes científico-filosóficos y las proyecciones político-religiosas de este debate. (shrink)