In healthcare, a tension sometimes arises between the injunction to do as much good as possible with scarce resources and the injunction to rescue identifiable individuals in immediate peril, regardless of cost (the “Rule of Rescue”). This tension can generate serious ethical and political difficulties for public policy makers faced with making explicit decisions about the public funding of controversial health technologies, such as costly new cancer drugs. In this paper we explore the appropriate role of the Rule of Rescue (...) in public resource allocation decisions by health technology funding advisory bodies such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. We consider practical approaches to operationalising the Rule of Rescue from Australia and the UK before examining the relevance of individual moral imperatives to public policy making. We conclude that that whilst public policy makers in a humane society should facilitate exceptional departures from a cost effectiveness norm in clinical decisions about identified individuals, it is not so obvious that they should, as a matter of national public policy, exempt any one group of unidentified individuals within society from the rules of opportunity cost at the expense of all others. (shrink)

This paper compares the recently proposed Robust Full Computational Tree Logic to model robustness in concurrent systems with other computational tree logic -based logics. RoCTL* extends CTL* with the addition of the operators Obligatory and Robustly, which quantify over failure-free paths and paths with one more failure respectively. This paper focuses on examining the succinctness and expressiveness of RoCTL* by presenting translations to and from RoCTL*. The core result of this paper is to show that RoCTL* is expressively equivalent to (...) CTL* but is non-elementarily more succinct. That is, RoCTL* does not add any expressive power over CTL*, but can represent some properties using vastly reduced formulae. We present a translation from RoCTL* into CTL* that preserves truth but may result in non-elementary growth in the length of the translated formula, as each nested Robustly operator may result in an extra exponential blowup. However, we show that this translation is optimal in the sense th.. (shrink)

We investigated the association between cognitive control and individual differences in cortisol response to stress in participants with generalised anxiety disorder and in never-disordered c...

Selon son Autobiographie, c’est la révolution parisienne de 1848 qui a incité Mill à revendiquer plus clairement la désignation de socialiste dans l’édition de 1852 de ses Principes d’économie politique. On a pu voir dans les Chapitres sur le socialisme posthumes l’abandon de cette position. Mais ses craintes à l’égard du « socialisme révolutionnaire » ne sont en opposition ni à la révolution ni au socialisme : un « socialisme légitime », violent seulement s’il doit se défendre, n’impliquant pas la (...) disparition de toute propriété privée, préférant la coopération à la main mise de l’État, doit revendiquer tout ce qui de « liberté, égalité et fraternité » peut être réalisé dès maintenant et préparé pour plus tard. (shrink)

In the pantheon of liberal political thought, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, with its defence of freedom of thought, conscience, speech and private property, takes pride of place. So why did Mill c...

A number of late Stoic sources describe either ethical concepts or a supposed universal belief in gods as being innate in the human animal. Though Chrysippus himself is known to have spoken of "implanted preconceptions" (ἔμφυτοι προλήψεις) of good and bad, scholars have typically argued that the notion of innate concepts of any kind would have been entirely incompatible with his theory of knowledge. Both Epictetus' notion of innate concepts of good and bad and the references to an innate belief (...) in gods by other philosophers of the Roman era are thus generally held to be later developments, probably owing to a Platonist-Stoic syncretism. Review of the evidence, however, shows that Chrysippus, like Epictetus, held ethical concepts to represent a special category of conception in that their formation was guaranteed by oikeiôsis. Unlike other concepts, that is, these represent a formal conceptualization of an innate tendency to distinguish between things fitting for one's constitution and things not fitting that all animals, according to the Stoics, bring to their empirical experiences. While the notion that human belief in gods is similarly innate does seem to have been a later development, it too was explained with reference to oikeiôsis rather than resulting from a simple "syncretism.". (shrink)

The remember–know paradigm is one of the most widely used procedures to examine the subjective experience associated with memory retrieval. We examined how the terminology and instructions used to describe the experiences of remembering and knowing affected remember–know judgments. In Experiment 1 we found that using neutral terms, i.e., Type A memory and Type B memory, to describe the experiences of remembering and knowing reduced remember false alarms for younger and older adults as compared to using the terms Remember and (...) Know, thereby increasing overall memory accuracy in the neutral terminology condition. In Experiment 2 we found that using what we call source-specific remember–know instructions, which were intended to constrain remember judgments to recollective experiences arising only from the study context, reduced remember hits and false alarms, and increased know hits and false alarms. Based on these data and other considerations, we conclude that researchers should use neutral terminology and source-specific instructions to collect the most accurate reports of the experiences of remembering and knowing arising from the study context. (shrink)

The sheer gamut of issues impacting transgender health equity may seem overwhelming. This article seeks to introduce readers to the breadth of topics addressed in this symposium edition, exemplifying that transgender health equity is a global issue that demands an interdisciplinary approach.

Academic integrity policies at 200 institutions of higher education were examined for the presence of academic prohibitions against the nonmedical use of prescription stimulants or any other cognitive enhancing drug. Researchers used online search tools to locate policy handbooks in a stratified random sample of IHE’s drawn from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System database, searching for NMUPS/CED use as violations of either academic integrity or alcohol and other drug policies. Of 191 academic integrity policies found online, NMUPS/CED prohibitions were (...) present in only one. However, NMUPS was addressed in all but two of the 200 IHE AOD policies, often with language referencing IHE adherence to federal or state law. NMUPS/CED prohibitions are predominantly absent in IHE academic integrity policies, raising questions about whether colleges and universities are concerned about the use of enhancement drugs as a form of cheating. Implications for fairness, health promotion, and future research are discussed. (shrink)

Plato's Individuals is rich and rewarding. McCabe's reading will compel us to examine anew the presuppositions we bring to the enterprise of understanding Plato. Her devotion to showing that her thesis is found almost everywhere in the corpus is noteworthy. At times she also seems to strain to assimilate modern and Platonic concerns. If one can accept that Plato's tripartite soul goes over into something we might recognize as the problem of personal identity, it can only be because we (...) are writing off his devotion to reincarnation and transmigration. It is, however, McCabe's novel and energetic defense of individuation that deserves closest scrutiny. Here charges of anachronism and projection will be heard. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader Edited by Brian Brock and John SwintonKevin McCabeDisability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader EDITED BY BRIAN BROCK AND JOHN SWINTON Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. 576 pp. $45.00Disability in the Christian Tradition makes an important contribution to the growing area of theological inquiry known as “theology of disability.” While questions of physical and intellectual difference are getting much-deserved attention from (...) religious ethicists and constructive theologians today, relatively little attention has been given to the treatment of what we now call “disability” throughout the history of Christian thought and especially in the premodern era. This volume seeks to remedy this situation by highlighting the theological consideration of disability in Christian thinkers from the patristic era to the present. Against tendencies to treat disability as a “special case” for thinking about humanity, this volume seeks to show the often overlooked presence of reflection on disability throughout the tradition.The volume pairs introductory and interpretive essays from contemporary scholars with primary source selections from each historical thinker. Essays on Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther help to correct the historical record, which often remembers these theologians as advocating rationalist or exclusionary anthropologies that marginalize or significantly compromise the humanity of persons with disabilities. These thinkers prove to be more nuanced and insightful than is often thought. However, as Brian Brock points out with respect to Augustine, and as Stefan Heuser points out with respect to Luther, [End Page 238] these figures are often ambivalent or at odds with themselves on the practical and theological significance of disability. Following the work started here, further interpretation and analysis will be needed in order to assess the legacies of these figures and to discern their usefulness for thinking about disability today. In this respect the reader serves as a helpful invitation for further historical and constructive work.Some of the finest essays in the volume focus on disability in order to illuminate the theologians under consideration in surprising ways. Christopher Craig Brittain’s essay on Kierkegaard appeals to his letters and manuscripts in order to show how questions of suffering, marginalization, and self-acceptance are crucial aspects of Kierkegaard’s understanding of being human and being Christian—and how his work might contribute to current debates in disability theory and theology. Bernd Wannenwetsch shows how Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s visit to a community for persons with disabilities in 1933 was a pivotal experience in the formation of his anthropology. Wannenwetsch compellingly argues that Bonhoeffer’s advocacy on behalf of the weak and disabled is integrally connected to his opposition to the destructive rival anthropology advocated under Nazi rule. These essays make important contributions both to our reflection on disability as well as to our understanding of Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer’s wider thought.A variety of perspectives on the meaning of disability are on display in this volume. One comes away with the impression that the “dialogue with the communion of saints” (3) called for in the introduction might be more of a debate than a harmonious discourse. The historical thinkers featured here do not offer one Christian account of disability that might be set against modern and secular perspectives on disability, but they do offer much that is productive for ethicists and theologians today.This volume is important for anyone concerned with theological reflection on disability, but it would be a shame if the book’s readership were limited to such a group. Historical theologians and readers interested in the theological and ethical issues pertaining to Christian anthropology and questions of embodiment, suffering, and vulnerability will find much that is of value. Indeed, it is one of the lessons of the volume that disability is not just a marginal or trendy topic in the contemporary theological scene but a central aspect of human personhood that has played an important if complex role in the understanding of what it means to be human throughout the Christian tradition. [End Page 239]Kevin McCabeUniversity of Notre DameCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Voltaire (1694-1778), novelist, dramatist, poet, philosopher, historian, and satirist, was one of the most renowned figures of the Age of Enlightenment. In this collection of anti-clerical works from the last twenty-five years of Voltaire's life, he roundly attacks the philosophical optimism of the deists, the so-called inspiration of the Bible, the papacy, and vulgar superstition. These great works reveal Voltaire not only as a polemicist but also as a profound humanitarian. Selections include "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster," "We Must Take (...) Sides," "The Questions of Zapate," "The Sermon of the Fifty," homilies on superstition and the interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, and his famous "Treatise on Toleration.". (shrink)

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over other (...) methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

Why did Plato put his philosophical arguments into dialogues, rather than presenting them in a plain and readily understandable fashion? A group of distinguished scholars here offer answers to this question by studying the relation between form and argument in his late dialogues. These penetrating studies show that the literary structure of the dialogues is of vital importance in the ongoing interpretation of Plato.

Two experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that the nature of the remember–know instructions given to participants influences whether these responses reflect different memory states or different degrees of memory confidence. Participants studied words and nonwords, a variable that has been shown to dissociate confidence from remember–know judgments and were given a set of published remember–know instructions that either emphasized know judgments as highly confident or as less confident states of recognition. Experiment 1 replicated the standard finding showing that (...) remembering and knowing were differently influenced by the word–nonword variable, whereas confidence responses were not. By contrast, Experiment 2 showed a similar pattern of data for remember–know and sure–unsure responses, thus demonstrating the importance of the instructions for interpreting the relationship between remembering and knowing and confidence. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the various types of physical universe which could exist according to modern mathematical physics. The paper begins with an introduction that approaches the question from the viewpoint of ontic structural realism. Section 2 takes the case of the `multiverse' of spatially homogeneous universes, and analyses the famous Collins-Hawking argument, which purports to show that our own universe is a very special member of this collection. Section 3 considers the multiverse of all solutions (...) to the Einstein field equations, and continues the discussion of whether the notions of special and typical can be defined within such a collection. (shrink)

Individuals and businesses make numerous payments every day. They sometimes have choices about what forms of payment to make or accept, and at other times are effectively forced to use a particular form. Often there is an asymmetric power relationship between payer and payee that raises the issue of whether one side unfairly exploits the other. Is it unethical exploitation for an employer to pay employees with a fee-laden payroll card over other more convenient forms of payment? Does the fee (...) structure of payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard unfairly exploit merchants? The bitcoin payment system is an ethical as well as technological evolution as it was designed to be an electronic payment system that does not rely upon trust. Can an entire payment system like bitcoin be “evil,” as charged by Krugman? Payment tools as such are ethically neutral, but can be used in an ethical or unethical manner. (shrink)

Abstract:This field survey focused on two constructs that have been developed to represent the ethical context in organizations: ethical climate and ethical culture. We first examined issues of convergence and divergence between these constructs through factor analysis and correlational analysis. Results suggested that the two constructs are measuring somewhat different, but strongly related dimensions of the ethical context. We then investigated the relationships between the emergent ethical context factors and an ethics-related attitude (organizational commitment) and behavior (observed unethical conduct) for (...) respondents who work in organizations with and without ethics codes. Regression results indicated that an ethical culture-based dimension was more strongly associated with observed unethical conduct in code organizations while climate-based dimensions were more strongly associated with observed unethical conduct in non-code organizations. Ethical culture and ethical climate-based factors influenced organizational commitment similarly in both types of organizations. Normative implications of the study are discussed, as are implications for future theorizing, research and management practice. (shrink)

Where does the road to reality lie? This fundamental question is addressed in this collection of essays by physicists and philosophers, inspired by the original ideas of Sir Roger Penrose, the English mathematical physicist and philosopher of science. The topics range from black holes and quantum information to the very nature of mathematical cognition itself. *** Librarians: ebook available on ProQuest and EBSCO [Subject: Philosophy, Physics, Mathematics, Cosmology].

These three reflections look at the theological and ethical implications of sexual violence in light of the attention brought by #MeToo. The first explores ethnographic interviews which indicate that Church leaders, teachers, and parents contribute to rape culture by leaving sexual violence unaddressed in Christian sexual education, arguing that it must be reconstructed to eliminate the Church’s participation in a culture that promotes gender-based violence. The second notes that feminist scholarship has made the case that rape and “unjust sex” are (...) associated with what is considered acceptable heterosexuality, require the category of “cultural sin” to account for the social responsibility of persons. Finally, the third explores how a feminist political theological ethics of “dangerous memory” is required to critique of the structures and systems that violate women’s selves and bodies. (shrink)

In this study meal sharing is used as a way of quantifying food transfers between households. Traditional food-sharing studies measure the flow of resources between households. Meal sharing, in contrast, measures food consumption acts according to whether one is a host or a guest in the household as well as the movement of people between households in the context of food consumption. Our goal is to test a number of evolutionary models of food transfers, but first we argue that before (...) one tests models of who should receive food one must understand the adaptiveness of food transfers. For the Ye’kwana, economies of scale in food processing and preparation appear to set the stage for the utility of meal sharing. Evolutionary models of meal sharing, such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism, are evaluated along with non-evolutionary models, such as egalitarian exchange and residential propinquity. In addition, a modified measure of exchange balance—proportional balance—is developed. Reciprocal altruism is shown to be the strongest predictor of exchange intensity and balance. (shrink)