Through the early twentieth century, asthmatics were advised to move to a more suitable climate, or to vacation in one during their worst season. In the late nineteenth century, physicians sought to quantify the ideal temperature, humidity, altitude, and pollen count to help travellers to select a suitable place, but these investigations led some physicians to question contradictions between expected and actual conditions. Given that even the best climate was not perfect at all times, and that many patients could not (...) afford to travel or relocate, a group of physicians—who came to be known as allergists—sought ways to adapt their patients to any climate through changes in their indoor environments and treatments to manage their symptoms. Their approach included changes in household design, furnishings, and cleaning techniques, especially a strict avoidance of dust, which could carry feathers, animal hair, skin debris, pollen, moulds, and an unknown ‘dust’ allergen. Air filtering and air conditioning were also promoted as ways to protect asthmatics and hay fever sufferers. These modifications of patients and their microenvironments signalled both a move away from climactic approaches to asthma and toward the sanitary, modernist home of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her discovery of mobile genetic elements. Her Nobel work began in 1944, and by 1950 McClintock began presenting her work on "controlling elements." McClintock performed her studies through the use of controlled breeding experiments with known mutant stocks, and read the action of controlling elements (transposons) in visible patterns of pigment and starch distribution. She taught close colleagues to "read" the patterns in her maize kernels, "seeing" pigment and starch genes turning (...) on and off. McClintock illustrated her talks and papers on controlling elements or transposons with photographs of the spotted and streaked maize kernels which were both her evidence and the key to her explanations. Transposon action could be read in the patterns by the initiated, but those without step by step instruction by McClintock or experience in maize often found her presentations confusing. The photographs she displayed became both McClintock's means of communication, and a barrier to successful presentation of her results. The photographs also had a second and more subtle effect. As images of patterns arrived at through growth and development of the kernel, they highlight what McClintock believed to be the developmental consequences of transposition, which in McClintock's view was her central contribution, over the mechanism of transposition, for which she was eventually recognized by others. Scientific activities are extremely visual, both at the sites of investigation and in communication through drawings, photographs, and movies. Those visual messages deserve greater scrutiny by historians of science. (shrink)

The increased recognition and reported prevalence of autism spectrum disorders combined with the associated societal and clinical impact call for a broad grassroots community-based dialogue on treatment related ethical and social issues. In these Stony Brook Guidelines, which were developed during a full year of community dialogue with affected individuals, families, and professionals in the field, we identify and discuss topics of paramount concern to the ASD constituency: treatment goals and happiness, distributive justice, managing the desperate hopes for a cure, (...) sibling responsibilities, intimacy and sex, diagnostic ethics, and research ethics. The members of the dialogue core committee included doctors, ethicists, administrators, social workers, ministers, disability experts, and many family members of individuals with autism who were especially engaged in community activities on behalf of their constituency, including siblings, parents, and grandparents. Our guidelines are not based on “top-down” imposition of professional expertise, but rather on a “bottom-up” grass roots attention to the voices of affected individuals and families speaking from experience. These guidelines can inform clinical practice, but they also are meaningful for the wider social conversation emerging over the treatment of individuals with ASD. (shrink)

Some moral claims strike us as objective. It is often argued that this shows morality to be objective. Moral experience – broadly construed – is invoked as the strongest argument for moral realism, the thesis that there are moral facts or properties.See e.g. Jonathan Dancy, “Two conceptions of Moral Realism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 60 : 167–187. Realists, however, cannot appropriate the argument from moral experience. In fact, constructivists argue that to validate the ways we experience the objectivity of (...) moral claims, realism must be rejected.Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity . There is a general agreement that ethical theory bears the burden of proof of explaining the objective-seeming features of our moral experience.While disputing objectivity, antirealists commit themselves to account for the objectivist pretensions of moral claims. Anti-realists agree with the traditional view that moral experie .. (shrink)

: The purpose of this paper is to highlight some difficulties of Neil Sinhababu’s Humean theory of agency, which depend on his radically reductivist approach, rather than to his Humean sympathies. The argument is that Sinhababu’s theory builds upon a critique of reflective agency which is based on equivocation and misunderstandings of the Kantian approach. Ultimately, the objection is that his reductivist view is unequipped to address the rclassical problems of rational deliberation and agential authority. Keywords: Humean Theory; Rational Deliberation; (...) Agency; Authority; Christine Korsgaard Efficacia riflessiva Riassunto: Questo articolo mette in luce alcune difficoltà della teoria proposta da Neil Sinhababu, che dipendono daun approccio radicalmente riduttivista. Si argomenta che la teoria di Sinhababu è basata su alcuni fraintendimenti a proposito dell'approccio kantiano alla teoria dell'azione. L'obiezione fondamentale è che questa posizione riduttivista non riesce a rendere conto adeguatamente della deliberazione razionale e dell'autorità dell'agente. Parole chiave: Teoria humeana; Deliberazione razionale; Agentività; Autorità; Christine Korsgaard. (shrink)

Vulnerability is an important concern of moral philosophy, political philosophy and many discussions in applied ethics. Yet the concept itself—what it is and why it is morally salient—is under-theorized. _Vulnerability, Autonomy, and Applied Ethics _brings together theorists working on conceptualizing vulnerability as an action-guiding principle in these discussions, as well as bioethicists, medical ethicists and public policy theorists working on instances of vulnerability in specific contexts. This volume offers new and innovative work by Joel Anderson, Carla Bagnoli, Samia Hurst, (...) Catriona Mackenzie and Christine Straehle, who together provide a discussion of the concept of vulnerability from the perspective of individual autonomy. The exchanges among authors will help show the heuristic value of vulnerability that is being developed in the context of liberal political theory and moral philosophy. The book also illustrates how applying the concept of vulnerability to some of the most pressing moral questions in applied ethics can assist us in making moral judgments. This highly innovative and interdisciplinary approach will help those grappling with questions of vulnerability in medical ethics—both theorists and practitioners—by providing principles along which to decide hard cases. (shrink)

Comme ailleurs dans le monde, les courants évangéliques et pentecôtistes ont tenté dès les années 1980 de s’imposer dans l’espace public de l’Afrique de l’Ouest. Bien qu’apparus au début du XX e siècle, ce n’est que dans la deuxième moitié du siècle que l’on observe un changement dans l’engagement évangélique vis-à-vis de la société : d’un retrait du monde à une « ouverture vers l’activité politique », marquée par le thème du combat spirituel pour les territoires. En Afrique de l’Ouest, (...) cette nouvelle visibilité dans l’espace public s’est concrétisée par l’élection de présidents évangéliques, comme Matthieu Kérékou au Bénin en 1996, ou Laurent Gbagbo en Côte d’Ivoire en 2000. Mais au sein d’une même société, les relations entre évangélismes et politique peuvent ainsi être multiples. Pour les saisir, il est nécessaire d’adopter différents points de vue, depuis les instances de pouvoir jusqu’aux relations interpersonnelles de la vie quotidienne. (shrink)

On Kant's view, the feeling of respect is the mark of moral agency, and is peculiar to us, animals endowed with reason. Unlike any other feeling, respect originates in the contemplation of the moral law, that is, the idea of lawful activity. This idea works as a constraint on our deliberation by discounting the pretenses of our natural desires and demoting our selfish maxims. We experience its workings in the guise of respect. Respect shows that from the agent's subjective perspective, (...) morality is the experience of being bound and necessitated, but also of being free and emancipated from inclinations.Respect is a feeling that is generated by the agent's reflection on the nature of her own agency. It is not directed to anybody in particular, but to the very idea of rational agency, which is characterized by self-mastery and self-legislation. Contrary to animals, we do not derive our ends from nature, but we are capable of setting ends of our own, by exercising practical reason, that is, by engaging in the activity of law making. (shrink)

This publication features the stories and experiences of pharmacy professionals who identify as members of historically underrepresented groups. This collection of personal essays presents significant events in the lives of those in the pharmacy community whose experiences have been shaped by their race, ethnicity, gender or gender presentation, sexual orientation, ability, language, mental health, or other factors. The perspectives from the narratives highlight the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the healthcare sector. The authors of the narratives also reflect (...) on their experience to consider what they wish would have happened in the experience, to offer advice for others that may be faced with similar situations. Access to these stories will deepen the collective understanding among pharmacy colleagues, patients, and society of the experiences that individuals from historically underrepresented groups within pharmacy have experienced. (shrink)

Background Ethical decision making in intensive care is a demanding task. The need to proceed to ethical decision is considered to be a stress factor that may lead to burnout. The aim of this study is to explore the ethical problems that may increase burnout levels among physicians and nurses working in Portuguese intensive care units . A quantitative, multicentre, correlational study was conducted among 300 professionals.Results The most crucial ethical decisions made by professionals working in ICU were related to (...) communication, withholding or withdrawing treatments and terminal sedation. A positive relation was found between ethical decision making and burnout in nurses, namely, between burnout and the need to withdraw treatments , to withhold treatments and to proceed to terminal sedation . This did not apply to physicians. Emotional exhaustion was the burnout subdimension most affected by the ethical decision. The nurses' lack of involvement in ethical decision making was identified as a risk factor. Nevertheless, in comparison with nurses , it was the physicians who more keenly felt the need to proceed to ethical decisions in ICU.Conclusions Ethical problems were reported at different levels by physicians and nurses. The type of ethical decisions made by nurses working in Portuguese ICUs had an impact on burnout levels. This did not apply to physicians. This study highlights the need for education in the field of ethics in ICUs and the need to foster inter-disciplinary discussion so as to encourage ethical team deliberation in order to prevent burnout. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s practical incursions on the domain of art were many and well known. It is worth drawing attention to the design that he did together with Paul Engelmann for his sister Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein’s house and the bust he made for, and was inspired by, the sculptor Michael Drobil. To attribute just an anecdotal character to Wittgenstein’s few artistic projects is a misunderstanding. The Austrian philosopher devoted himself to them with the fervor and rigor that characterize his philosophical writings. He (...) took care of every detail in his sister’s house, which sometimes ended up in difficult changes, although quite minimal (as when he had the ceilings lowered a few centimeters just before .. (shrink)

Research on children’s ability to attribute false mental states to others has focused exclusively on false beliefs. We developed a novel paradigm that focuses instead on another type of false mental state: false perceptions. From approximately 4 years of age, children begin to recognize that their perception of an illusory object can be at odds with its true properties. Our question was whether they also recognize that another individual viewing the object will similarly experience a false perception. We tested 33 (...) preschool children with a task in which distorting lenses caused a small object to appear large and a large object to appear small. To succeed, children needed to recognize that a naive agent would falsely perceive the relative size of the objects and to correctly anticipate the agent’s actions on that basis. Children performed significantly better than chance in our false perception test, and there was a developmental progression in performance from 4 to 5 years of age similar to that seen in standard false belief tests. Our findings demonstrate that preschool children are capable of understanding that other individuals will be perceptually misled by illusory objects and that these false perceptions will influence their actions in predictable ways. (shrink)

This article explores twelve short narrative films created by women and trans people living with disabilities and embodied differences. Produced through Project Re•Vision, these micro documentaries uncover the cultures and temporalities of bodies of difference by foregrounding themes of multiple histories: body, disability, maternal, medical, and/or scientific histories; and divergent futurities: contradictory, surprising, unpredictable, opaque, and/or generative futures. We engage with Alison Kafer's call to theorize disability futurity by wrestling with the ways in which “the future” is normatively deployed in (...) the service of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, a deployment used to render bodies of difference as sites of “no future”. By re-storying embodied difference, the storytellers illuminate ongoing processes of remaking their bodily selves in ways that respond to the past and provide possibilities for different futures; these orientations may be configured as “dis-topias” based not on progress, but on new pathways for living, uncovered not through evoking the familiar imaginaries of curing, eliminating, or overcoming disability, but through incorporating experiences of embodied difference into time. These temporalities gesture toward new kinds of futures, giving us glimpses of ways of cripping time, of cripping ways of being/becoming in time, and of radically re-presencing disability in futurity. (shrink)

Neoliberal ideology and exclusionary policies based on racialized identities characterize the current contexts in North America and Western Europe. Nursing knowledge cannot be abstracted from social, political and historical contexts; the task of examining the influence of race and racial ideologies on disciplinary knowledge and inquiry therefore remains an important task. Contemporary analyses of the role and responsibility of the discipline in addressing race‐based health and social inequities as a focus of nursing inquiry remain underdeveloped. In this article, we examine (...) nursing's engagement with ideas about race and racism and explore the ways in which nursing knowledge and inquiry have been influenced by race‐based ideological discourses. Drawing on Henry and Tator's framework of democratic racism, we consider how strategic discursive responses—the discourses of individualism, multiculturalism, colour‐blindness, political correctness and denial—have been deployed within nursing knowledge and inquiry to reinforce the belief in an essentially fair and just society while avoiding the need to acknowledge the persistence of racist discourses and ideologies. Greater theoretical, conceptual and methodological clarity regarding race, racialization and related concepts in nursing inquiry is needed to address health and social inequities. (shrink)

I investigate the reciprocal relationship between social accounts of knowledge production and efforts to increase the representation of women and some minorities in the academy. In particular, I consider the extent to which feminist social epistemologies such as Helen Longino’s critical contextual empiricism can be employed to argue that it is in researchers’ epistemic interests to take active steps to increase gender diversity. As it stands, critical contextual empiricism does not provide enough resources to succeed at this task. However, considering (...) this view through an employment equity lens highlights areas where such theories need to be further developed. I argue that views such as Longino’s ought to attend to nuances of community structure and cultural features that inhibit critical social interactions, if we are to maximize the epistemic as well as the ethical improvements associated with a social approach to knowing. These developments advance these epistemic theories for their own sake. They also help develop these theories into a tool that can be used by those calling for increased diversity in the academy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As we strive for a more polyvocal history of science, historians have placed increasing emphasis on local case studies as a way to globalize the field. This tension between the local and the global extends to the practice as well as the content of the history of science, as the field has begun to pay more attention not just to local case studies, but also to local cultures of historiography. Many historians of science want multiple historiographical voices that take (...) seriously the concerns and literatures in different linguistic and national contexts. As more journals urge translation into what are perceived as the dominant languages in “global” humanities discourses and scholars are encouraged to facilitate the Englishing of their historical research, many questions remain: In what ways does it make sense to nationalize or culturally locate individual cultures of the history of science? Is translation a democratic and positive force in the discipline, and/or does it kill local difference? Will it continue to be meaningful to talk about the history of science? A collective dialogue within the field depends on finding a way to take local diversity in historiography and epistemology seriously while translating that local difference into a meaningful common conversation. This essay considers the challenges of embracing multiple ways of knowing that might fall under the purview of the history of science, while wondering what that means for the coherence of the field as we move forward into the next century of work in Isis. (shrink)

In symmetrical moral dilemmas, the agent faces a choice between two incompatible actions, which are equally justified on the basis of the same value. These cases are generally discounted as spurious or irrelevant on the assumption that, when there is no failure of commensurability, choice between symmetrical requirements is indifferent and can be determined by randomization. Alternatively, this article argues that the appeal to randomization allows the agent to overcome a deliberative impasse, but it does not really resolve the moral (...) dilemma. This is because randomization fails to provide the agent with a genuine reason for action. The argument is based on an account of arbitrariness as a threat to the agent’s authorship on action. By focusing on lack of authorship, rather than on failure of commensurability, we gain the adequate perspective to assess the philosophical significance of moral dilemmas, their impact on the agential integrity, and their consequences for ethical theory. (shrink)

"First Published in 1998, Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.".

Studies have found that academic dishonesty is widespread. Of particular interest is the case of business students since many are expected to be the leaders of tomorrow. This study examines the cheating behaviors and perceptions of 819 business and engineering students at three private Lebanese universities, two of which are ranked as the top two universities in the country. Our results show that cheating is pervasive in the universities to an alarming degree. We first analyzed the data by looking at (...) the variables gender, college, GPA, and whether the students had taken the business ethics course. We then supplemented this analysis by building an ordered logistic regression model to test whether these independent variables affect the level of engagement in cheating behavior when we control for the other variables. The results show that males engage in cheating more than females and that students with a lower GPA engage in cheating more. We initially find a difference between business and engineering students, but once we control for the other variables, this difference ceases to exist. Our most surprising result is that the business ethics course seems to have a detrimental effect on the cheating behavior of students. Finally, we find that perception plays a key role in defining the behavior of students. The more that students perceive that others are engaging in a certain behavior, the higher the probability that they will engage in the behavior, even if they believe that this behavior constitutes cheating. (shrink)

Theory of Mind (ToM, also referred to as mentalising; Fonagy, 1991; Frith & Frith, 2006) was coined by primatologists, Premack and Woodruff (1978) and adapted in developmental psychology to refer t...

Understanding the role of emotion in moral judgment has been an active area of investigation and debate. Here we comment on this topic by examining the interaction between emotion and moral judgment in certain psychopathological groups that are characterized by abnormalities in emotion processing, such as psychopaths and sexual offenders with paraphilic disorders.

The evolution of sexual reproduction is a case of explanatory pluralism, meaning that there is more than one explanation for this phenomenon. I use the concept of a domain to more clearly explicate the various explananda that can be found in this case. I argue that although pluralism with respect to some types of domains can be decreased using van Fraassen's pragmatics of explanation, there remains an important class of domain, an orthogonal domain, for which this is not the case.