While Nozick and his sympathizers assume there is a widespread anti-hedonist intuition to prefer reality to an experience machine, hedonists have marshalled empirical evidence that shows such an assumption to be unfounded. Results of several experience machine variants indicate there is no widespread anti-hedonist intuition. From these findings, hedonists claim Nozick's argument fails as an objection to hedonism. This article suggests the argument surrounding experience machines has been misconceived. Rather than eliciting intuitions about what is prudentially valuable, these intuitive judgements (...) are instead calculations about prudential pay-offs and trade-offs. This position can help explain the divergence of intuitions people have about experience machines. (shrink)

Purpose: to characterize ethics course content, structure, resources, pedagogic methods, and opinions among academic administrators and course directors at U.S. medical schools. Method: An online questionnaire addressed to academic deans and ethics course directors identified by medical school websites was emailed to 157 Association of American Medical Colleges member medical schools in two successive waves in early 2022. Descriptive statistics were utilized to summarize responses. Results: Representatives from 61 (39%) schools responded. Thirty-two (52%) respondents were course directors; 26 (43%) were (...) deans of academic affairs, medical education, or curriculum; and 3 with other roles also completed the survey (5%). All 61 schools reported some form of formal ethics education during the first year of medical school, with most (n = 54, 89%) reporting a formal mandatory introductory course during preclinical education. Schools primarily utilized lecture and small-group teaching methods. Knowledge-based examinations, attendance, and participation were most commonly used for assessment. A large majority regarded ethics as equally or more important than other foundational courses, but fewer (n = 37, 60%) provided faculty training for teaching ethics. Conclusions: Despite a response rate of 39 percent, the authors conclude that medical schools include ethics in their curricula in small-group and lecture formats with heterogeneity regarding content taught. Preclinical curricular redesigns must innovate and implement best practices for ensuring sound delivery of ethics content in future curricula. Additional large-scale research is necessary to determine said best practices. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 123-125.

The prevailing normative model of contemporary journalism, drawn primarily from a liberal enlightenment tradition emphasizing universal notions of rights, contributes to what many perceive as a crisis in contemporary journalism; at the least, Kantian models are too "thin" to provide an adequate ethical standard. We consider the extent to which an ethic of care, reconceived to address weaknesses identified in recent scholarly critiques, provides journalists with an alternative framework for moral decision making. We use the concept of unequal ethical pull (...) to rework caring and to promote caring for distant others because caring that remains at the personal level is inadequate as a moral value. We conclude by noting that public journalism and our retooled ethic of care share several important ideals. We suggest a program of mutually beneficial exploration, one that might help today's journalists cultivate the virtue of care as they work toward justice. (shrink)

Given a rich environment, how do we decide on what information to use? A view of a single entity (e.g., a group of birds) affords many distinct interpretations, including their number, average size, and spatial extent. An enduring challenge for cognition, therefore, is to focus resources on the most relevant evidence for any particular decision. In the present study, subjects completed three tasks—number discrimination, surface area discrimination, and convex hull discrimination—with the same stimulus set, where these three features were orthogonalized. (...) Therefore, only the relevant feature provided consistent evidence for decisions in each task. This allowed us to determine how well humans discriminate each feature dimension and what evidence they relied on to do so. We introduce a novel computational approach that fits both feature precision and feature use. We found that the most relevant feature for each decision is extracted and relied on, with minor contributions from competing features. These results suggest that multiple feature dimensions are separately represented for each attended ensemble of many items and that cognition is efficient at selecting the appropriate evidence for a decision. (shrink)

In this paper we provide a critical review of research concerned with social/environmental mechanisms that modulate human neuroendocrine function. We survey research in four behavioral systems that have been shaped through evolution: competition, partnering, sex, and pregnancy/parenting. Generally, behavioral neuroendocrine research examines how hormones affect behavior. Instead, we focus on approaches that emphasize the effects of behavioral states on hormones (i.e., the “reverse relationship”), and their functional significance. We focus on androgens and estrogens because of their relevance to sexually selected (...) traits. We conclude that the body of research employing a reversed or bidirectional perspective has an incomplete foundation: participants are mainly heterosexual men, and the functionality of induced shifts in neuroendocrine factors is generally unknown. This area of research is in its infancy, and opportunities abound for developing and testing intriguing research questions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard H. Popkin 1923-2005Harry M. Bracken and Richard A. WatsonRichard H. Popkin, founding editor of the journal of the History of Philosophy, died on April 14, 2005. He was 81 years old and had continued his research and writing to the last moment before he entered the hospital on march 21st with extreme respiratory difficulties.Popkin's The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (1960) revolutionized the study and understanding (...) of early modern philosophy. Popkin entered the minds and world of thinkers from Erasmus to Descartes in a way few other scholars had done, and he showed how the development of philosophy and science was far from an easy series of steps from success to success. Instead, philosophers and scientists pursued a dozen lines from the scepticism of Sextus Empiricus through religious belief, atheism, numerology, astrology, alchemy, eschatology, magic, and millenarianism—a maelstrom of ideas out of which emerged the major figures and ideas of Modern philosophy and science. Dick once explained that actually he lived in the 17th century, and certainly he knew as many of those thinkers and their thoughts as did many people who actually lived at that time. Of course Popkin did not originate the notion of exploring the history of philosophy in the context of its times, but he made that approach central today. It led him not only through the Early Modern period, but also from medieval jewish philosophy to a critical analysis of the Kennedy assassination.Popkin received his PhD at Columbia University, and in his career he taught at the universities of Connecticut, Iowa, California (San Diego and Los Angeles), Washington University in St. Louis, and Harvey Mudd College. He served as the first editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and as president of JHP, Inc. For many years, and was active in its operation for over four decades, having attended the annual meeting of the Board of Directors a little over a month before he died. After retirement, he lived in close association with the Clark Library in Los Angeles. He was well known to scholars and librarians throughout the world. Whatever library he visited, he was likely to find some obscure or hidden document that would either clear up some mystery, or give rise to a new problem. His memory was extraordinary. During his final years when he was virtually blind, he would sift through his mind, send assistants off to look for something that had to be in this or that library and write papers in his head for later dictation. Besides his memory, indispensable throughout his lifetime he had Julie, his co-worker and wife of 60 years, without whom, the Popkin we knew could not have existed.These few paragraphs are meant to be neither an obituary nor an adequate memorial. We were Dick's first two PhDs, and we were barely five years his junior. He treated us from the beginning as colleagues and he became a lifelong friend. He changed our lives, as he did the lives of many other aspiring scholars. We miss him.Copyright © 2005 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

We report on an unpublished and previously unknown manuscript of John von Neumann and contextualize it within the development of the theory of shock waves and detonations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Von Neumann studies bombs comprising a primary explosive charge along with explosive booster material. His goal is to calculate the minimal amount of booster needed to create a sustainable detonation, presumably because booster material is often more expensive and more volatile. In service of this goal, he formulates (...) and analyzes a partial differential equation-based model describing a moving shock wave at the interface of detonated and undetonated material. We provide a complete transcription of von Neumann’s work and give our own accompanying explanations and analyses, including the correction of two small errors in his calculations. Today, detonations are typically modeled using a combination of experimental results and numerical simulations particular to the shape and materials of the explosive, as the complex three dimensional dynamics of detonations are analytically intractable. Although von Neumann’s manuscript will not revolutionize our modern understanding of detonations, the document is a valuable historical record of the state of hydrodynamics research during and after World War II. (shrink)

In the 4 1/2 to 5 days between fertilization and implantation, the mouse conceptus must gain the abilities to implant and produce an embryo. Each of these is the sole developmental responsibility of one of two cell types forming the blastocyst, trophectoderm and inner cell mass (ICM), respectively. Trophectoderm is a polarized transporting epithelium while the ICM is an aggregate of non‐epithelial pluripotent stem cells. These two cell types originate from the division of polar blastomeres when their cleavage furrows parallel (...) their apical surfaces. Blastomeres polarize in response to asymmetric cell–cell contact, and understanding the mechanism of this induction is regarded as the key to understanding the origin of trophectoderm and ICM. Here we propose a model based on transcellular ion current loops for the induction of cell polarity during the development of the first epithelium, trophectoderm. (shrink)

Machery's case against hybrids rests on a principle that is too strong, even by his own lights. And there are likely important generalizations to be made about hybrids, if they do exist. Moreover, even if there were no important generalizations about concepts themselves, the term picks out an important class of entities and should be retained to help guide inquiry.

A dozen papers by internationally known scholars explore questions largely unthinkable without Richard Watson's classic Downfall of Cartesianism: Descartes in Holland, Descartes and Simon Foucher, and issues raised by Descartes for philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, translation and toleration.

Each of the following papers gives an account of a different UK clinical ethics committee. The committees vary in the length of time they have been established, and also in the main focus of their work. The accounts discuss the development of the committees and some of the ethical problems that have been brought to them. The issues raised will be relevant for other National Health Service (NHS) trusts in the UK that wish to set up such a committee.

Recent experimental philosophy arguments have raised trouble for philosophers' reliance on armchair intuitions. One popular line of response has been the expertise defense: philosophers are highly-trained experts, whereas the subjects in the experimental philosophy studies have generally been ordinary undergraduates, and so there's no reason to think philosophers will make the same mistakes. But this deploys a substantive empirical claim, that philosophers' training indeed inculcates sufficient protection from such mistakes. We canvass the psychological literature on expertise, which indicates that people (...) are not generally very good at reckoning who will develop expertise under what circumstances. We consider three promising hypotheses concerning what philosophical expertise might consist in: (i) better conceptual schemata; (ii) mastery of entrenched theories; and (iii) general practical know-how with the entertaining of hypotheticals. On inspection, none seem to provide us with good reason to endorse this key empirical premise of the expertise defense. (shrink)

It has become increasingly popular to respond to experimental philosophy by suggesting that experimental philosophers haven’t been studying the right kind of thing. One version of this kind of response, which we call the reflection defense, involves suggesting both that philosophers are interested only in intuitions that are the product of careful reflection on the details of hypothetical cases and the key concepts involved in those cases, and that these kinds of philosophical intuitions haven’t yet been adequately studied by experimental (...) philosophers. Of course, as a defensivemove, thisworks only if reflective intuitions are immune from the kinds of problematic effects that form the basis of recent experimental challenges to philosophy’s intuition-deploying practices. If they are not immune to these kinds of effects, then the fact that experimental philosophers have not had the right kind of thing in their sights would provide little comfort to folks invested in philosophy’s intuition-deploying practices. Here we provide reasons to worry that even reflective intuitions can display sensitivity to the same kinds of problematic effects, although possibly in slightly different ways. As it turns out, being reflective might sometimes just mean being wrong in a different way. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms may radically improve our ability to diagnose and treat disease. For moral, legal, and scientific reasons, it is essential that doctors and patients be able to understand and explain the predictions of these models. Scalable, customisable, and ethical solutions can be achieved by working together with relevant stakeholders, including patients, data scientists, and policy makers.

Abstract:By combining normative philosophy and empirical social science, we craft a research framework for assessing differential expectations embodied in normative conceptions of the economic social contract in the United States. We argue that there are distinct views of such a contract grounded in individualist and communitarian philosophical ideologies. We apply this framework to organizational downsizing, postulating that certain human resource practices, in combination with the respective ideological orientations, will affect perceptions of the justice of downsizing policies.

Arguably, children are among those most affected by contemporary models of conflict. Yet their plight is little discussed when it comes to agreeing on the minutiae of a peace proposal, despite the fact that children are widely recognized as significant to the sustainability of peace.

The practice of appealing to esoteric intuitions, long standard in analytic philosophy, has recently fallen on hard times. Various recent empirical results have suggested that philosophers are not currently able to distinguish good intuitions from bad. This paper evaluates one possible type of approach to this problematic methodological situation: calibration. Both critiquing and building on an argument from Robert Cummins, the paper explores what possible avenues may exist for the calibration of philosophical intuitions. It is argued that no good options (...) are currently available, but leaves open the real possibility of such a calibration in the future. (shrink)

A small but growing body of philosophically informed survey work calls into question whether the value-free ideal is a dominant viewpoint among scientists. However, the survey instruments in used in these studies have important limitations. Previous work has also made little headway in developing hypotheses that might predict or explain differing views about the value-free ideal among scientists. In this article, we review previous survey work on this topic, describe an improved survey instrument, report results from an initial administration of (...) it that strengthen and refine previous results, and develop two hypotheses that may account for gender effects found in the data. (shrink)

We routinely need to process the identity of many faces around us, and how the brain achieves this is still the subject of much research in cognitive neuroscience. To date, insights on face identity processing have come from both healthy and clinical populations. However, in order to directly compare results across and within participant groups, and across different studies, it is crucial that a standard task is utilised which includes different exemplars (for example, non-face stimuli along with faces), is memory-neutral, (...) and taps into identity recognition across orientation and across viewpoint change. The goal of this study was to test a previously behaviourally tested, optimised face and object identity matching design in a healthy control sample whilst being scanned using fMRI. Specifically, we investigated categorical, orientation, and category-specific orientation effects while participants were focused on identity processing of simultaneously presented exemplar stimuli. Alongside observing category and orientation specific effects in a distributed set of brain regions, we also saw an interaction between stimulus category and orientation in the bilateral fusiform gyrus and bilateral middle occipital gyrus. Generally these clusters showed the pattern of a heightened response to inverted, as opposed to upright faces; and to upright, as opposed to inverted shoes. These results are discussed in relation to previous studies and to potential future research within prosopagnosic individuals. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of two organizational variables, budget goal difficulty and promotion availability, on employee fraud. Limited research shows that difficult, specific goals result in more unethical behavior than general goals :422–432, 2004). We predict that goal difficulty and promotion availability will interact to affect employee fraud. Specifically, we contend that the availability of promotions will have little, if any, effect on employee fraud under easy goals but have a substantial effect on fraud (...) under extremely difficult goals. To test this prediction, we use an experiment in which participants play the role of production employees. All participants are assigned cost goals and are responsible for reporting costs to the organization. Information asymmetry exists such that the organization is unable to assess whether costs have been reported accurately, and any overstatement of costs directly increases the employee’s compensation at the expense of the organization. The results of our experiment support the prediction, even though the cost goal is not tied to current period compensation. Our results have implications for academics and practitioners concerned with factors that affect fraud in organizations. (shrink)

Although social contracts theory has been applied to organizations (Donaldson & Dunfee, 1994), rarely has the theory been tested empirically. This article uses the traditions of communitarianism and individualism to instantiate an ideal-type economic social contract. We asked 269 subjects to complete the Ideological Orientation Scale and to make judgments on eight downsizing scenarios. Using social judgment theory, we assess the direct and indirect influences of ideology on judgments of fairness. Our findings suggest that ideology indeed shapes individual’s conceptions of (...) organizational fairness. (shrink)

By combining normative philosophy and empirical social science, we craft a research framework for assessing differential expectations embodied in normative conceptions of the economic social contract in the United States. We argue that there are distinctviews of such a contract grounded in individualist and communitarian philosophical ideologies. We apply this framework to organizational downsizing, postulating that certain human resource practices, in combination with the respective ideological orientations, will affect perceptions of the justice of downsizing policies.Living up to one’s word is (...) a decisive measure of moral character. Within the microsocial realm of the family, promises and commitments derive their social force and cultural meaning from the idea that love or biology binds people together in an absolute way. But outside of this world, in the larger society, the only thing binding people together is a sense that there is a social contract, a set of common obligations held collectively by society as a whole. But today’s workers say no one seems to care whether these promises are kept. (shrink)

Faces carry key personal information about individuals, including cues to their identity, social traits, and emotional state. Much research to date has employed static images of faces taken under tightly controlled conditions yet faces in the real world are dynamic and experienced under ambient conditions. A common approach to studying key dimensions of facial variation is the use of facial caricatures. However, such techniques have again typically relied on static images, and the few examples of dynamic caricatures have relied on (...) animating graphical head models. Here, we present a principal component analysis -based active appearance model for capturing patterns of spatiotemporal variation in videos of natural dynamic facial behaviours. We demonstrate how this technique can be applied to generate dynamic anti-caricatures of biological motion patterns in facial behaviours. This technique could be extended to caricaturing other facial dimensions, or to more general analyses of spatiotemporal variations in dynamic faces. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review current practice in sharing and mining medical data revealing benefits, costs and ethical issues. Based on stakeholder perspectives and values, the authors create an ethical code to regulate the sharing and mining of medical information. Design/methodology/approach The framework is based on a review of academic, practitioner and legal research. Findings Owing to the inability of current safeguards to protect consumers from risks related to the disclosure of medical information, the authors develop (...) a framework for ethical sharing and mining of medical data, security, transparency, respect, accountability, community and quality, which espouses security, transparency, respect, accountability, community and quality as the basic tenets of ethical data sharing and mining practice. Research limitations/implications The STRACQ framework is an original, previously unpublished contribution that will require modification over time based on discussion and debate within and among the academy, medical community and public policymakers. Social implications The framework for sharing borrows from the Fair Credit Reporting Act, allowing the collection and dissemination of identified medical data but placing strict limitations on use. Following this framework, benefits of shared and mined medical data are freely available with appropriate safeguards for consumer privacy. Originality/value Mandates for adoption of electronic health-care records require an understanding of medical data mining. This paper presents a review of data mining techniques and reasons for engaging in the practice of identifying benefits, costs and ethical issues. The authors create an original framework, STRACQ, for ethical sharing and mining of medical information, allowing knowledge exploration while protecting consumer privacy. (shrink)

The concept of wilderness, as denned in the U.S.A. Wilderness Act of 1964, is analyzed and found to be ambiguous. This is an administrative advantage. The concept of underground wilderness is then introduced and found to be applicable under the terms of the Act. It is argued that the longest cave in the world, the Flint Ridge Cave System in Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky, can and should be officially declared as wilderness by Congress even though the surface above it (...) is now developed. (shrink)

The underrepresentation of females in mathematics-related fields may be explained by gender differences in mathematics self-concept (rather than ability) favoring males. Mathematics self-concept typically declines with student age, differs with student ethnicity, and is sensitive to teacher influence in early schooling. We investigated whether change in mathematics self-concept occurred within the context of a longitudinal intervention to raise and sustain teacher expectations of student achievement. This experimental study was conducted with a large sample of New Zealand primary school students and (...) their teachers. Data were analyzed using longitudinal multilevel modelling with mathematics self-concept as the dependent variable and time (which represents students’ increasing age each year), gender, and ethnicity entered as predictors and achievement in mathematics included as a control variable. Interaction terms were also explored to investigate changes over time for different groups. All students demonstrated a small increase in mathematics self-concept over the three-year period of the current study but mathematics self-concept was consistently greater for boys than girls. Māori, Asian, and Other students’ initial mathematics self-concept was higher than that of New Zealand European and Pacific Islanders’ (after controlling for achievement differences). However, a statistically significant decline in mathematics self-concept occurred for Māori students alone by the end of the study. The expected age-related reduction over time in student mathematics self-concept appeared to be mitigated in association with the longitudinal study. Nevertheless, the demonstration of a comparatively lower mathematics self-concept remained for girls overall and declined for Māori. Our results reinforce implications for future research into mathematics self-concept as a possible determinant of female student career choices. (shrink)