BackgroundThe phenomenon of ‘moral distress’ has continued to be a popular topic for nursing research. However, much of the scholarship has lacked conceptual clarity, and there is debate about what it means to experience moral distress. Moral distress remains an obscure concept to many clinical nurses, especially those outside of North America, and there is a lack of empirical research regarding its impact on nurses in the United Kingdom and its relevance to clinical practice.Research aimTo explore the concept of moral (...) distress in nursing both empirically and conceptually.MethodologyFeminist interpretive phenomenology was used to explore and analyse the experiences of critical care nurses at two acute care trauma hospitals in the United Kingdom. Empirical data were analysed using Van Manen’s six steps for data analysis.Ethical considerationsThe study was approved locally by the university ethics review committee and nationally by the Health Research Authority in the United Kingdom.FindingsThe empirical findings suggest that psychological distress can occur in response to a variety of moral events. The moral events identified as causing psychological distress in the participants’ narratives were moral tension, moral uncertainty, moral constraint, moral conflict and moral dilemmas.DiscussionWe suggest a new definition of moral distress which captures this broader range of moral events as legitimate causes of distress. We also suggest that moral distress can be sub-categroised according to the source of distress, for example, ‘moral-uncertainty distress’. We argue that this could aid in the development of interventions which attempt to address and mitigate moral distress.ConclusionThe empirical findings support the notion that narrow conceptions of moral distress fail to capture the real-life experiences of this group of critical care nurses. If these experiences resonate with other nurses and healthcare professionals, then it is likely that the definition needs to be broadened to recognise these experiences as ‘moral distress’. (shrink)

There has been increasing debate in recent years about the conceptualization of moral distress. Broadly speaking, two groups of scholars have emerged: those who agree with Jameton’s ‘narrow definition’ that focuses on constraint and those who argue that Jameton’s definition is insufficient and needs to be broadened. Using feminist empirical bioethics, we interviewed critical care nurses in the United Kingdom about their experiences and conceptualizations of moral distress. We provide our broader definition of moral distress and examples of data that (...) both challenge and support our conceptualization. We pre‐empt and overcome three key challenges that could be levelled at our account and argue that there are good reasons to adopt our broader definition of moral distress when exploring prevalence of, and management strategies for, moral distress. (shrink)

We refine the intuitively appealing idea that you are blameworthy for something if it happened because you did not care enough. More formally: you are blameworthy for X (where X may be an action, omission, or outcome) just in case there is the right causal-explanatory relation between your poor quality of will and X. First, we argue that blameworthiness for actions, omissions, and outcomes is concerned with negative differences: you are blameworthy for the fact that X occurred instead of X*, (...) where X is worse than X*. Second, we argue that the way in which your quality of will is poor has to fit what you are blameworthy for. With these refinements, the account already gives intuitively correct verdicts in cases of forgetting, making a negative difference to a nevertheless good result, and doing an action with runaway consequences. We then discuss what the right causal-explanatory relation is and suggest that it is simply causation, understood in the right way. Here, we draw on the account of causation developed in Touborg, The Dual Nature of Causation. According to this account, there are two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for causation. Roughly, C causes E rather than E* iff (a) C is process-connected to E, and (b) C makes E more secure and E* less secure. With this account of causation, our account of blameworthiness now also gives correct verdicts in omission, pre-emption, and switching cases, Frankfurt-style cases, and collective harm cases. (shrink)

This study explores the connections between time, travel, and creative acts such as painting and poetry, highlighting the similarities that unite these themes. It also focuses on the relationships between the East and the West in regards to these subjects, and posits that travel can be understood as an active form of meditation. The study argues that the meaning of wanderings can be found by learning to make them conscious, and that there has been a deep reflection on time, consciousness, (...) and mobility since ancient times. (shrink)

Research using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPLP) has consistently shown that English‐learning children aged 2 can associate transitive argument structure with causal events. However, studies using the same methodology investigating 2‐year‐old children’s knowledge of the conjoined agent intransitive and semantic role assignment have reported inconsistent findings. The aim of the present study was to establish at what age English‐learning children have verb‐general knowledge of both transitive and intransitive argument structure using a new method: the forced‐choice pointing paradigm. The results (...) suggest that young 2‐year‐olds can associate transitive structures with causal (or externally caused) events and can use transitive structure to assign agent and patient roles correctly. However, the children were unable to associate the conjoined agent intransitive with noncausal events until aged 3;4. The results confirm the pattern from previous IPLP studies and indicate that children may develop the ability to comprehend different aspects of argument structure at different ages. The implications for theories of language acquisition and the nature of the language acquisition mechanism are discussed. (shrink)

We define an easily verifiable notion of an atomic formula having uniformly bounded arrays in a structure M. We prove that if T is a complete L-theory, then T is mutually algebraic if and only if there is some model M of T for which every atomic formula has uniformly bounded arrays. Moreover, an incomplete theory T is mutually algebraic if and only if every atomic formula has uniformly bounded arrays in every model M of T.

The term “race,” and the concept it refers to, namely genetically different human populations in the world, is one of the most intellectually and emotionally charged in society, and in science as well. This article focuses on how human beings recognize individual faces of their own versus another “racial group,” and the term “face race” is used in the context of visual recognition, as traditionally done in the scientific literature. The article reviews the well-known phenomenon that people have greater difficulty (...) distinguishing and recognizing individual faces from a different human population, or “race,” than their own. Experience-based holistic accounts encompass and extend most other proposals, such as a more densely clustered organization of other-race faces in an internal face-space centered on a “norm,” and it leads to a number of interesting predictions about the processing of same race and other-race faces. (shrink)

In this article, Peter and Rowland explore the role of implicit statistical learning in syntactic development. It is often accepted that the processes observed in classic implicit learning or statistical learning experiments play an important role in the acquisition of natural language syntax. As Peter and Rowland point out, however, the results from neither research strand can be used to fully explain how children's syntax becomes adult‐like. They propose to address this shortcoming by using the structural priming paradigm.

Mounting ambitions and capabilities for public and private, non-government sector crewed space exploration bring with them an increasingly diverse set of space travelers, raising new and nontrivial ethical, legal, and medical policy and practice concerns which are still relatively underexplored. In this piece, we lay out several pressing issues related to ethical considerations for selecting space travelers and conducting human subject research on them, especially in the context of non-governmental and commercial/private space operations.

Leadership takes a central role in the public affairs agenda. This article is a review of published works on leadership focusing on the concept of grace. It discusses the role of compassion and kindness in current leadership theory and practice and whether these attributes have value in sustainable models. Findings indicate that there is conceptual confusion regarding the definition of compassion and its application in leadership practices. Kindness is not discussed within the concept of compassion and kindness itself may be (...) viewed as a weakness in contemporary self-selected leadership characteristics. The conclusions suggest there is disconnect between contemporary models of leadership and calls for sustainable ethical leadership in the spheres of public and business environments. Compassion and kindness remain in the side-lines yet the implications for future trust and commitment are neglected in times where discretionary effort of workers and volunteers is crucial to goal achievement. (shrink)

Mitochondrial donation poses the latest regulatory challenge for policy-makers in the context of assisted conception. Since 2010 the Human Genetics Commission, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics have all considered the policy implications of permitting use of these techniques in treatment. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics reported its recommendations in June 2012 following a consultation on the ethical issues raised by these techniques; and a separate consultation by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in (...) conjunction with Sciencewise-ERC followed in September 2012. Matters for consideration included the potential relationships created by the use of three parties’ genetic material and the associated ramifications, eg whether or not there is a need to establish records of such donations and, if so, to whom should information later be provided? Thus, mitochondrial donation poses both novel and familiar questions about the ‘genetic family’, ‘parentage’ and ‘identity’. This article explores some of the ways in which mitochondrial DNA is constructed as relatively significant in recent Parliamentary debates, policy and consultation documents. It reflects on the ways in which the role of some genetic connections, or lack thereof, are mediated in law and policy. (shrink)

Discute-se a interface entre discursos poéticos e proféticos e a área de atuação de seus respectivos especialistas, na Grécia arcaica, a partir de uma análise de certas passagens dos poemas Teogonia e Trabalhos e dias de Hesíodo. O enfoque é a afirmação, na Teogonia , que a consagração do poeta pelas Musas, ou seja, sua união com uma realidade sagrada, lhe permite celebrar o futuro. A afirmação é discutida através da interpretação de passagens em Trabalhos e dias.

The production of complex sequences like music or speech requires the rapid and temporally precise production of events (e.g., notes and chords), often at fast rates. Memory retrieval in these circumstances may rely on the simultaneous activation of both the current event and the surrounding context (Lashley, 1951). We describe an extension to a model of incremental retrieval in sequence production (Palmer & Pfordresher, 2003) that incorporates this logic to predict overall error rates and speed—accuracy trade-offs, as well as types (...) of serial ordering errors. The model—assumes that retrieval of the current event is influenced by activations of surrounding events. Activations of surrounding events increase over time, such that both the accessibility of distant events and overall accuracy increases at slower production rates. The model's predictions were tested in an experiment in which pianists performed unfamiliar music at 8 different tempi. Model fits to speed—accuracy data and to serial ordering errors support model predictions. Parameter fits to individual data further suggest that working memory contributes to the retrieval of serial order and overall accuracy is influenced in addition by motor dexterity and domain-specific skill. (shrink)

Beyond the eras a dialogue seems to have been established between Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569) and Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). The poet’s wonder at the « painting of the North », both realistic and emblematic, reveals his deepest ideal as an artist : painting, a « magical » operation, deploys a power of expression based on signs and no longer on words, which the theatre is also called upon to seize. The juxtaposition of Bruegel’s Triumph of Death and a famous drawing (...) by Artaud, Le Théâtre de la cruauté [The Theatre of Cruelty], highlights the striking convergences between the two artists. Through their pictorial works, both of them renew over the centuries the funerary and mythical symbolism of death, inherited from the macabre scenes of medieval paintings, but also from ancient times. Studying the references to theatrical iconography in Bruegel’s painting, where carnival and crudity of death reinforce each other, allows us to deepen the meaning of these resonances. For the two artists, form and poetic momentum meet so that representation, as a structure common to painting and theatre, fixes a moment of the world, while animating that moment to infinity, thanks to signs conceived as « true hieroglyphs » (Artaud), a problem that Michel Foucault associated with the strongest truth that the experience of madness carries. (shrink)

Fix an integer $r \ge 3$. We consider metric spaces on n points such that the distance between any two points lies in $\left\{ {1, \ldots,r} \right\}$. Our main result describes their approximate structure for large n. As a consequence, we show that the number of these metric spaces is $\left\lceil {{{r + 1} \over 2}} \right\rceil ^{\left + o\left}.$Related results in the continuous setting have recently been proved by Kozma, Meyerovitch, Peled, and Samotij [34]. When r is even, our (...) structural characterization is more precise and implies that almost all such metric spaces have all distances at least $r/2$. As an easy consequence, when r is even, we improve the error term above from $o\left$ to $o\left$, and also show a labeled first-order 0-1 law in the language ${\cal L}_r $, consisting of r binary relations, one for each element of $[r]$. In particular, we show the almost sure theory T is the theory of the Fraïssé limit of the class of all finite simple complete edge-colored graphs with edge colors in $\left\{ {r/2, \ldots,r} \right\}$.Our work can be viewed as an extension of a long line of research in extremal combinatorics to the colored setting, as well as an addition to the collection of known structures that admit logical 0-1 laws. (shrink)

L'ouvrage publié réunit les actes d'une journée d'étude consacrée à L'imprévu et le droit, souhaitée par les doctorants et organisée par l'Ecole doctorale de droit comparé de l'Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Le sujet est immédiatement apparu très riche. Si le terme d'imprévu n'est pas essentiellement juridique, il fait écho à des critères du droit tels que la prévisibilité d'une situation ou d'un texte, ou l'imprévisibilité d'un événement comme cause exonératoire de responsabilité. Il renvoie plus généralement à l'exigence de sécurité juridique (...) qui s'opposerait à l'imprévu juridique. En outre le contexte était des plus propices, quelle que soit la discipline concernée, droit public, droit privé et/ou droit pénal. L'imprévu est entendu comme tout ce qui n'a pas été prévu, tout ce qui arrive lorsqu'on ne s'y attend pas. Prévoir, c'est admettre comme probable. La question de l'imprévu confronté au droit est intéressante car les deux concepts semblent antinomiques. Le droit apparaît en effet comme quelque chose de figé, permettant de régler par anticipation les comportements humains. Il doit permettre à chacun de régler sa conduite puisque nul n'est censé ignorer la loi. Le droit doit donc être à la fois connu et prévisible dans ses effets même s'il n'en est pas toujours ainsi. La notion d'imprévu semble rencontrer le droit de deux manières. D'une part, il existe la norme imprévue : la norme nouvelle, la coutume en formation ou l'interprétation surprenante. Se posent alors les questions de la prévisibilité du droit, et corrélativement celle de la sécurité juridique. D'autre part, il y a le fait imprévu. La norme doit se saisir de comportements humains ou de situations de fait qui n'avaient pas été anticipés. L'appréhension du risque et de la survenance d'événements inattendus par des règles de droit préexistantes devient alors un enjeu essentiel. (shrink)

Kants Ethik ist gut begründbar, es fehlt ihr aber anscheinend an Motivationskraft. Wie soll man nach Kant dazu bewegt werden, moralisch zu sein? Seine ethischen Schriften problematisieren, was die Anthropologie zu lösen versucht: Motivation zum moralischen Handeln. Diese "Lösung" steht in einer Tradition europäischer Moralistik, in der es darum geht, Moral anthropologisch zu reflektieren. Sie beschreiben einen Handlungsraum, in dem Regeln der Klugheit, Manieren und Höflichkeit und ein Konzept des "moralischen Scheins" das selbstbestimmte Individuum leiten. Die Aufgabe des vorliegenden Buches (...) ist es, Kant systematisch, also nicht allein historisch, durch die Leitfrage nach Motivation und Begründung in den Horizont moralistischer Ethik einzufügen. Die theoretische Verortung von Kants Moralsystem und seine Einordnung in die "historische Semantik" von Moral und Anthropologie nimmt Maß an Niklas Luhmanns Ansätzen zu diesem Thema.. (shrink)

"Dealing with the Visual will be of great use to advanced students because it offers an overview of current debates, and to graduate students and professionals in the field because the essays offer in-depth investigations of the methodological issues involved and various historical ways of defining visuality. The topics included range from early modern ways of viewing pictures and sixteenth-century views of Palladio's villas in their landscape settings to contemporary debate about whether there is life yet in painting."--BOOK JACKET.

In this paper, we present a new account of teleological reasons, i.e. reasons to perform a particular action because of the outcomes it promotes. Our account gives the desired verdict in a number of difficult cases, including cases of overdetermination and non-threshold cases like Parfit’s famous _Drops of water._ The key to our account is to look more closely at the metaphysics of causation. According to Touborg (_The dual nature of causation_, 2018), it is a necessary condition for causation that (...) a cause increases the security of its effect. Building on this idea, we suggest, roughly, that you have a teleological reason to act in a certain way when doing so increases the security of some good outcome. This represents a middle way between the proposal that you have a reason to act in a certain way just in case this _would_ cause a good outcome and the proposal that you have a reason to act in a certain way just in case this _could_ cause a good outcome. (shrink)

to be published in the Proceedings of the 18. International Conference of Linguistics, Seoul, Korea.

The production of complex sequences like music or speech requires the rapid and temporally precise production of events (e.g., notes and chords), often at fast rates. Memory retrieval in these circumstances may rely on the simultaneous activation of both the current event and the surrounding context (Lashley, 1951). We describe an extension to a model of incremental retrieval in sequence production (Palmer & Pfordresher, 2003) that incorporates this logic to predict overall error rates and speed—accuracy trade-offs, as well as types (...) of serial ordering errors. The model—assumes that retrieval of the current event is influenced by activations of surrounding events. Activations of surrounding events increase over time, such that both the accessibility of distant events and overall accuracy increases at slower production rates. The model's predictions were tested in an experiment in which pianists performed unfamiliar music at 8 different tempi. Model fits to speed—accuracy data and to serial ordering errors support model predictions. Parameter fits to individual data further suggest that working memory contributes to the retrieval of serial order and overall accuracy is influenced in addition by motor dexterity and domain-specific skill. (shrink)

Liberals agree that free speech should be protected, where speech is understood broadly to include all forms of intentional communication, including actions and pictures, not merely the spoken or written word. A surprising view about free speech in some liberal and legal circles is that communications should be protected on free-speech grounds only if the communications are mentally mediated. By “mentally mediated communication” we mean speech which communicates its message in such a way that the message can be rationally evaluated (...) by hearers, and causes the hearers to believe it, when it does, through the mechanism of those hearers employing their rational capacity to judge that it is correct. The mental-mediation or persuasion principle, as it is sometimes called, has some important legal and public policy implications. It has been applied to argue that certain forms of expression, despite being forms of speech or expression, lack even a prima facie claim to protection on free speech grounds. -/- Our central aim is to show why the mental mediation principle is mistaken. Liberals should think that some speech which is not mentally mediated deserves protection for the very same reasons that speech which is mentally mediated is often thought to deserve protection. (shrink)

ArgumentIn his Philosophia practica universalis, Christian Wolff proposes a “mathematical” theory of moral action that includes his statements on the Aesopian fable. As a sort of moral example, Wolff claims, the fable is an appropriate means to influence human conduct because it conveys general truths to intuition. This didactic concept is modeled on the geometrical figure: Just as students intuit mathematical demonstrations by looking at figures on a blackboard, one can learn how to execute complex actions by listening to a (...) fable. Wolff's “scientific” fable theory met with an ambivalent reception. Lessing, who in his fable treatises re-translates Wolff's suggestions into the conceptual framework of poetics, interprets the geometric model as a stylistic ideal. The famous passage on Homer's successive descriptions in Lessing's Laokoon can be seen as another attempt to apply the representational model of geometry to literature. Herder, reading Wolff in a way that might be called deconstructive, replaces Wolff's geometric theory of poetry by a poetic anthropology of geometry. (shrink)

Despite general agreement within philosophy that peer review is indispensable, its fairness and reliability is often questioned. This article suggests that such worries can to a large extent be met by adopting the practice that reviews as well as earlier versions of papers are made publicly available when the final version of a paper is published. This suggestion combines the advantages of transparency with the merits of anonymity of reviewers. While there are obstacles to this suggestion, the article argues that (...) it would be worthwhile to implement it because it can help map patterns of conduct and secure confidence in the fairness and reliability of review procedures and journal editing within philosophy. (shrink)

This study investigates the choice of genitive forms (the woman’s book vs. the book of the woman) in the English of Japanese-English bilingual returnees (i.e. children who returned from a second language dominant environment to their first language environment). The specific aim was to examine whether change in language dominance/exposure influences choice of genitive form in the bilingual children; the more general question was the extent to which observed behaviour can be explained by cross linguistic influence (CLI). First, we compared (...) the choice of genitive form between monolingual Japanese speakers and bilinguals who had recently returned to Japan from an English monolingual environment. Second, we tracked changes in genitive preference within bilingual children, comparing their performances upon return to Japan to those of one year later. Results show that CLI alone is insufficient to explain the difference in genitive evaluation between bilinguals and monolinguals, as well as the intra-group bilingual variation over time. We suggest that both CLI and general processing considerations couple together to influence the changes in genitive preference. (shrink)

Cet article propose une réflexion sur les activités de recherche à partir de laboratoires industriels et académiques et d’organisations « intermédiaires » (laboratoires communs ; spin offs etc.). Les observations faites ponctuellement depuis une vingtaine d’années dans des laboratoires de chimie et de biologie montrent qu’elles sont l’objet d’une compétition accrue au niveau mondial entre différentes institutions et entre individus. La première hypothèse de l’article est que cette concurrence exacerbée entre entreprises, entre laboratoires académiques, entre scientifiques conduit à des stratégies (...) ayant pour objectifs une diminution des temps réservés par les prescripteurs (« les temps officiels ») pour chaque acte de recherche et à une rationalisation du travail scientifique dans le but d’accélérer la mise sur les marchés de produits, qu’ils soient académiques ou industriels, et ainsi d’en diminuer les coûts. Pour rendre compte de cette évolution, l’organisation des temps de travail en « opérations de recherche » est comparée à celle qui semble devenir prédominante aujourd’hui, la « logique-projet ». La seconde hypothèse est que ces nouvelles normes contraignantes influencent « la disponibilité temporelle » des travailleurs de la recherche et obligent de ce fait à s’interroger sur la place des chercheurs dans le salariat. (shrink)

This volume maps the areas of ethical concern in the debate regarding the governance of genetic information, and suggests alternative ethical frameworks and models of regulation in order to inform its restructuring. Genetic governance is at the heart of medical and scientific developments, and is connected to global exploitation, issues of commodification, commercialisation and ownership, the concepts of property and intellectual property and concerns about individual and communal identity. Thus the decisions that are made in the next few years about (...) appropriate models of genetic governance will have knock-on effects for other areas of governance. In short the final answer to 'Who Decides?' in the context of genetic governance will fundamentally shape the ethical constructs of individuals and their networks and relationships in the public sphere. (shrink)