In March 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that humanity was entering a global pandemic phase. This unforeseen situation caught everyone unprepared and had a major impact on several professional categories that found themselves facing important ethical dilemmas. The article revolves around the category of biomedical and clinical engineers, which were among those most involved in dealing with and finding solutions to the pandemic. In hindsight, the major issues brought to the attention of biomedical engineers have raised important ethical (...) implications, such as the allocation of resources, the responsibilities of science and the inadequacy and non-universality of the norms and regulations on biomedical devices and personal protective equipment. These issues, analyzed one year after the first wave of the pandemic, come together in the appeal for responsibility for thought, action and, sometimes, even silence. This highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity and the definitive collapse of the Cartesian fragmentation of knowledge, calling for the creation of more fora, where this kind of discussions can be promoted. (shrink)

Identity, self-sufficiency and disability in the context of educational and vocational activity This study focused on relations between identity and sense of self-sufficiency. These relations were analysed in the context of educational and vocational activity. 204 persons without disabilities and 230 persons with different kinds of disability participated in the study. Participants were divided into three groups: 18-24-year-olds - students, 25-30-year-olds - unemployed and 25-30-year-olds - employed. The results revealed that unemployed people have significant problems with identity formation. This group (...) obtained the highest scores on ruminative exploration and the lowest scores on the scales of commitment making and identification with commitment. Self-sufficiency proved to be a moderator of the relations between educational/vocational activity on the one hand and exploration in breadth and exploration in depth on the other hand. In students, level of exploration was high in individuals with a high sense of self-sufficiency whereas in the unemployed strong exploration was observed in the group with low sense of self-sufficiency. The need to conduct studies where participants are recruited from populations which seldom attract researchers' interest, such as the unemployed and people of low social status, is also noted. (shrink)

What sort of claims do scientific models make and how do these claims then underwrite empirical successes such as explanations and reliable policy interventions? In this paper I propose answers to these questions for the class of models used throughout the social and biological sciences, namely idealized deductive ones with a causal interpretation. I argue that the two main existing accounts misrepresent how these models are actually used, and propose a new account. *Received July 2006; revised August 2008. †To contact (...) the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri, St. Louis, 599 Lucas Hall (MC 73), One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63121-4400; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Can social phenomena be understood by analyzing their parts? Contemporary economic theory often assumes that they can. The methodology of constructing models which trace the behavior of perfectly rational agents in idealized environments rests on the premise that such models, while restricted, help us isolate tendencies, that is, the stable separate effects of economic causes that can be used to explain and predict economic phenomena. In this paper, I question both the claim that models in economics supply claims about tendencies (...) and also the view that economics, when successful, necessarily follows this method. When economics licenses successful policy interventions, as it did in the case of the Federal Communications Commission spectrum auctions, its method is not to study tendencies but rather to study the phenomenon as a whole. Key Words: economic models • tendencies • economic experiments • policy making • John Stuart Mill. (shrink)

Do powers have powers? More urgently, do powers need further powers to do what powers do? Stathis Psillos says they do. He finds this a fatal flaw in the nature of pure powers: pure powers have a regressive nature. Their nature is incoherent to us, and they should not be admitted into the ontology. I argue that pure powers do not need further powers; rather, they do what they do because they are powers. I show that at the heart of (...) Psillos’ regress is a metaphysical division he assumes between a pure power to φ and its directedness towards the manifestation of φ-ing, i.e. between a pure power and its essence. But such an ontological division between an entity and its essence has already been shown by Aristotle to be detrimental, condemning the entity to a regressive nature. I show that Psillos’ regress is but an instance of Aristotle’s regress argument on the relation between an entity and its essence. I compare Aristotle’s, Bradley’s, and Psillos’ regresses, showing that Bradley’s and Psillos’ (different) conclusions from the regress arguments lead to impasses. I then build on Aristotle’s directive against regressive natures, arguing with him that an entity is not other than its nature (being divided from its nature by a relation between them). Rather, an entity is an instantiated nature itself. The Aristotelian position I put forward explains how the oneness of the entity is achieved by its being an instance of a type. Thus, the regress is blocked, and the nature of pure powers is shown to pose no threats of an ontological or epistemological kind, if physics gave us reasons to posit pure powers. (shrink)

Executive Summary There is a general perception that biomedical research has not given the same attention to the health problems of women that it has given ...

Recent research has demonstrated an asymmetry between the origins and endpoints of motion events, with preferential attention given to endpoints rather than beginnings of motion in both language and memory. Two experiments explore this asymmetry further and test its implications for language production and comprehension. Experiment 1 shows that both adults and 4-year-old children detect fewer within-category changes in source than goal objects when tested for memory of motion events; furthermore, these groups produce fewer references to source than goal objects (...) when describing the same motion events. Experiment 2 asks whether the specificity of encoding source/goal relations differs in both spatial memory and the comprehension of novel spatial vocabulary. Results show that endpoint configuration changes are detected more accurately than source configuration changes by both adults and young children. Furthermore, when interpreting novel motion verbs, both age groups expect more fine-grained lexical distinctions in the domain of endpoint configurations compared to that of source configurations. These studies demonstrate that a cognitive-attentional bias in spatial representation and memory affects both the detail of linguistic encoding during the use of spatial language and the specificity of hypotheses about spatial referents that learners build during the acquisition of the spatial lexicon. (shrink)

edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.

This article describes a survey among Finnish business students to find answers to the following questions: How do business students define a well-run company? What are their attitudes on the responsibilities of business in society? Do the attitudes of women students differ from those of men? What is the influence of business education on these attitudes? Our sample comprised 217 students pursuing a master’s degree in business studies at two Finnish universities. The results show that, as a whole, students valued (...) the stakeholder model of the company more than the shareholder model. However, attitudes differed according to gender: women students were more in favor of the stakeholder model and placed more weight on corporate ethical, environmental, and societal responsibilities than their men counterparts – both at the beginning and at the end of their studies. Thus, no gender socialization effect of business school education could be observed in this sense. Business school education was found to shape women and men students’ attitudes in two ways. Firstly, valuation of the shareholder model increased and, secondly, the importance of equal-opportunity employment decreased in the course of education. This raises the question whether the educational context is creating an undesirable tendency among future business professionals. The results further suggest that the sociocultural context can make a difference in how corporate social responsibility is perceived. The article also discusses possible ways to influence the attitudes of business students. (shrink)

This study examined the effects of computer-assisted cognitive rehabilitation in a group of 16 brain-damaged patients. Therapeutic effectiveness was assessed by improvement on computer tasks, the results of neuropsychological tests and quality of life ratings. Participants suffered from mild to moderate attention and memory problems or aphasia. The procedure involved baseline assessment, a 15-week course of therapy conducted twice a week and posttest. Neuropsychological tests assessing attention, memory and language problems and quality of life ratings were administered twice: in pre- (...) and posttests. Twelve healthy controls were also examined twice using the same battery of neuropsychological tests. The RehaCom program and the Polish computer therapy program for aphasics called Afa-System were used for rehabilitation. The computer-assisted rehabilitation tasks were selected individually for each patient. The results showed significant improvement on computer-assisted tasks in all braindamaged subjects. However, none or very little improvement was observed on neuropsychological tests and quality of life ratings. The results of the study confirm the importance of using different types of measures to estimate the effectiveness of computer-assisted neuropsychological rehabilitation as well as the necessity of applying various kinds of therapy to improve cognitive, emotional and social functioning in brain-damaged patients. (shrink)

Cross-dressing, as a cultural practice, suggests gender ambiguity and allows freedom of self expression. Yet, it may also serve to reaffirm ideological stereotypes and the binary distinctions between male and female, masculine and feminine, homosexual and heterosexual. To explore the nature and function of cross-dressing in Chinese and Western cultures, this paper analyzes the portrayals of cross-dressing heroines in two Chinese stories: The Ballad of Mulan, and The Butterfly Lovers. Distorted representations in the English translated texts are also explored..

This paper considers the relationship between institutions and the “sexual imaginary,” understood as the set of affective and imaginative resources that produce certain forms of sexual subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Moira Gatens, I argue that institutions play an important role in shaping sexual imaginaries. Historically, institutions have been sites in which unjust sexual norms have been reinforced and legitimized. I analyse the growing trend of consent education at Australian universities to explore how institutions may also (...) represent potential sites for contesting and reimagining these norms. Feminist critiques of consent suggest that consent education may in fact reproduce a narrow and conservative vision of sexuality, one that aligns with the neoliberal politics of the contemporary university. This paper contributes to these critiques by exploring how both the neoliberal university and consent theory are premised on a distorted vision of the subject as a rational, disembodied being. I argue that transforming dominant sexual imaginaries requires recognizing and interrogating both how desire permeates institutional spaces and the role of desire in ethical sexual relations. (shrink)

How do we talk about events we perceive? And how tight is the connection between linguistic and non-linguistic representations of events? To address these questions, we experimentally compared motion descriptions produced by children and adults in two typologically distinct languages, Greek and English. Our findings confirm a well-known asymmetry between the two languages, such that English speakers are overall more likely to include manner of motion information than Greek speakers. However, mention of manner of motion in Greek speakers' descriptions increases (...) significantly when manner is not inferable; by contrast, inferability of manner has no measurable effect on motion descriptions in English, where manner is already preferentially encoded. These results show that speakers actively monitor aspects of event structure, which do not find their way into linguistic descriptions. We conclude that, in regard to the differential encoding of path and manner, which has sometimes been offered as a prime example of the effects of language encoding on non-linguistic thought, surface linguistic encoding neither faithfully represents nor strongly constrains our mental representation of events. (shrink)

First-person reports are central to the study of subjective well-being in contemporary psychology, but there is much disagreement about exactly what sort of first-person reports should be used. This paper examines an influential proposal to replace all first-person reports of life satisfaction with introspective reports of affect. I argue against the reasoning behind this proposal, and propose instead a new strategy for deciding what measure is appropriate.

Over the last decade, states have increasingly emphasised the importance of integration, and translated it into legal regulations that demand integration from immigrants. This paper criticises a specific aspect to this development, namely the tendency to make permanent residency dependent on language skills and, as such, seeks to raise doubts as to the moral acceptability of the requirement of linguistic integration. The paper starts by arguing that immigrants after a relatively short period of time acquire a moral claim to permanent (...) residency in their host country. Accordingly, states may not limit residency at their discretion. Nevertheless, three arguments may seem promising for defending the requirement of linguistic integration: that the immigrants’ moral claim conflicts with a stronger moral claim on the part of the larger society, and this makes an infringement of the immigrants’ claim proportionate; that language requirements may be legally demanded as a precondition for permanent residency for the immigrants’ own sake; and that language requirements are defensible, as far as immigrants may be understood to have consented to such regulation upon entry to the country. This paper argues that all three must be rejected. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework for understanding women leaders in working life. Our starting point is in statistics and earlier women-in-management literature, which show that women leaders represent a minority of the managerial population. We assume such underlying mechanisms causing discriminatory practices towards women leaders to exist which have become naturalized and invisible. Our concern is that everyone irrespective of gender should have a fair chance in career progression. This is both a moral and also an economic (...) challenge. The framework we develop in this paper is an alternative approach to studying women leaders compared to traditional women-in-management literature. It aims at revealing the "natural and taken-for-granted" cultural mechanisms behind discriminatory practices. Our framework is based on a critical discursive approach, which draws on ideas of how women''s leadership becomes symbolically represented and constructed in discursive practices. These symbolic constructions, which are mediated through language, often have an ideological loading which positions women leaders and builds their identities in ways that can help to legitimize unequal relations between the genders. However, our framework emphasizes the possibility of multiple discourses and a dynamic view of culture. The cultural constructions of women leaders are, thus, open to change. (shrink)

Perceivers generally show a poor ability to detect changes, a condition referred to as “Change Blindness” . They are, in addition, “blind to their own blindness”. A common explanation of this “Change Blindness Blindness” is that it derives from an inadequate, “photographical” folk-theory about perception. This explanation, however, does not account for intra-individual variations of CBB across trials. Our study aims to explore an alternative theory, according to which participants base their self-evaluations on two activity-dependent cues, namely search time and (...) perceived success in prior trials. These cues were found to influence self-evaluation in two orthogonal ways: success-feedback influenced self-evaluation in a global, contextual way, presumably by recalibrating the norm of adequacy for the task. Search time influenced it in a local way, predicting the success of a given trial from its duration. (shrink)

Judgments of well-being across different circumstances and spheres of life exhibit a staggering diversity. Depending on the situation, we use different standards of well-being and even treat it as being constituted by different things. This is true of scientific studies as well as of everyday life. How should we interpret this diversity? I consider three ways of doing so: first, denying the legitimacy of this diversity, second, treating well-being as semantically invariant but differentially realizable, and, third, adopting contextualist semantics for (...) well-being expressions. I reject the first option on the grounds that it is unable to make sense of much of everyday and scientific linguistic practices, and also because it makes the category of well-being insignificant or even otiose for practical purposes. We should thus pick between the second and the third options. I argue that contextualism about well-being is more plausible and faces fewer objections than the differential realization view. I conclude with a discussion of other features of contextualism: it does not imply that well-being is relative to individual taste, it need not result in eliminativism about well-being, nor in scepticism about a general theory of well-being. It does not commit us to an “anything goes” approach, nor does it threaten anarchy and miscommunication. (shrink)

There are two main ways of understanding the function of surrogate decision making in a legal context: the Best Interests Standard and the Substituted Judgment Standard. First, we will argue that the Best Interests Standard is difficult to apply to unconscious patients. Application is difficult regardless of whether they have ever been conscious. Second, we will argue that if we accept the least problematic explanation of how unconscious patients can have interests, we are also obliged to accept that the Substituted (...) Judgment Standard can be coherently applied to patients who have never been conscious at the same extent as the Best Interests Standard. We then argue that acknowledging this result is important in order to show patients respect. (shrink)

I argue that we are subject to ‘aesthetic luck’ in four senses: constitutive, upbringing, sociogeographic, and circumstantial. I review evidence from our practices, philosophy, and science. I then consider what challenges aesthetic luck raises to the communicability of aesthetic judgments, the formation of one’s aesthetic character, and the goal of a life well lived, as well as possible answers to those challenges.

Although the moral foundations of voting rights regulations have been the subject of widespread scrutiny, there is one aspect of the debate which has gone largely unquestioned and is currently accepted in every state’s actual voting rights regulations. This is the requirement of prior residence, which stipulates that immigrants are granted the right to vote only once they have lived in the host country for a certain period of time. It is this requirement I call into question in this paper. (...) Taking up the most plausible justifications for this requirement, I aim to put substantial pressure on its moral acceptability by arguing that it is not directly grounded by any of the principles that are currently defended as a means to determine the demos, nor a proxy for some other morally relevant feature, nor a warrantor for abilities held to be significant for the right to vote. (shrink)

Char et al. question the extent and degree to which machine learning applications should be treated as exceptional by ethicists. It is clear that of the suite of ethical issues raised by mac...

This conversation between two scholars of international law focuses on the contemporary realities of feminist analysis of international law and on current and future spaces of resistance. It notes that feminism has moved from the margin towards the centre, but that this has also come at a cost. As the language of women’s rights and gender equality has travelled into the international policy worlds of crisis management and peace and security, feminist scholars need to become more careful in their analysis (...) and find new ways of resistance. While noting that we live in dangerous times, this is also a hopeful discussion. (shrink)

In March 1986, a public symposium took place in Heidelberg about the “unresolved potential dangers of genetic engineering”. The event was organized by institutions affiliated with the environmental movement. Choosing this symposium as an example, the article shows how the public appearance of scientists can be understood as a form of political activism. The article shows how specialists from fields as diverse as biology, chemistry, physics, law and political sciences tried to place political messages by putting themselves in the limelight (...) as independent scientists. I argue that the symposium was both: a place of science communication intertwined with political agitation that, as should be noted, happened in a time when the West German government was working on the legislation of genetic engineering, legitimated by relying on independent expertise. It can be concluded that the discourse of scientific independence became a strategic tool in the controversial debate about the uses and dangers of genetic engineering. Thus, it draws attention to a dimension of political-scientific activity which cannot be fully grasped by the concept of ‘the expert’ that is established in the history of science. (shrink)

This article locates a theoretical reflection on the form of legal subjectivity against twenty-first century complexities and pressures, including the structural complexities visible in biotechnological developments, new hybridities and numerous contemporary theoretical and practical manifestations of heterogeneity, multiplicity and complexity emerging in a range of disciplines, including cybernetics, techno-theory, post-humanism and ecology. The author defends the theoretical and critical utility of understanding the legal subject as an explicit (and explicitly limited ) constructus . Criticising the constructed naturalism (and the historical (...) and contemporary exclusions) of the 'human being' of law, the author suggests that the language and concept of the 'legal entity' (rather than that of the 'legal person') draws attention to the patterned 'gap' between law and life (and to related injustices enacted by the form of the materialisation of legal subjectivity) while simultaneously providing the degree of theoretical plasticity now required by the mutable complexities of the twenty-first century and beyond. (shrink)

Feminist Ethics and Narrative Ethics This article defines feminist ethics and narrative ethics and then explores the intersection of the two. A narrative approach to ethics focuses on how stories that are told, written, or otherwise expressed by individuals and groups help to define and structure our moral universe. Specifically, narrative ethicists take the practices … Continue reading Feminist Ethics and Narrative Ethics →.

The scalar approach to negative polarity item (NPI) licensing assumes that NPIs are allowable in contexts in which the introduction of the NPI leads to proposition strengthening (e.g., Kadmon & Landman 1993, Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1997, Chierchia 2006). A straightforward processing prediction from such a theory is that NPI’s facilitate inference verification from sets to subsets. Three experiments are reported that test this proposal. In each experiment, participants evaluated whether inferences from sets to subsets were valid. Crucially, we manipulated whether (...) the premises contained an NPI. In Experiment 1, participants completed a metalinguistic reasoning task, and Experiments 2 and 3 tested reading times using a self-paced reading task. Contrary to expectations, no facilitation was observed when the NPI was present in the premise compared to when it was absent. In fact, the NPI significantly slowed down reading times in the inference region. Our results therefore favor those scalar theories that predict that the NPI is costly to process (Chierchia 2006), or other, nonscalar theories (Giannakidou 1998, Ladusaw 1992, Postal 2005, Szabolcsi 2004) that likewise predict NPI processing cost but, unlike Chierchia (2006), expect the magnitude of the processing cost to vary with the actual pragmatics of the NPI. (shrink)

Among the myriad longstanding political, socioeconomic, and moral debates focused on the fair distribution of health-care resources within the United States, those addressing intergenerational justice tend to produce the most heat and, often, the least amount of light. The familiar narratives tend to be binary ones of opposing generational stakeholders. While a great number of proposed solutions focus on reconfiguring rationing priorities, this paper will instead shift the discourse to intergenerational interdependence, suggesting that these conflict-born moral dilemmas are in important (...) ways false. The alternative view of intergenerational relations defended here is grounded in an interdependent, rather an oppositional, model of human relationships. I argue that this interdependence can best be realized through a deliberate movement toward intergenerational narrative understandings, as well as through physical proximities. I conclude by considering several ongoing intergenerational projects directed at just such a goal. (shrink)

This paper addresses and challenges the pronatalist marginalization and oppression of voluntarily childless women in the Global North. These conditions call for philosophical analyses and for sociopolitical responses that would make possible the necessary moral spaces for resistance. Focusing on the relatively privileged subgroups of women who are the targets of pronatalist campaigns, the paper explores the reasons behind their choices, the nature and methods of Western pronatalism, and distinguishes three specific sources of some of the more lasting, and stigmatizing (...) attacks: popular culture, law and policy, and medicine itself. I then argue that because they are construed by motherhood-essentializing, and increasingly popular, pronatalist narratives as, among other things, “failed” or “selfish,” voluntarily childless women are subsequently burdened with damaged identities that can leave them personally othered and uniquely liminal in ways that are destructive to moral agency. Finally, I conclude with a challenge to the pronatalist master narratives by suggesting the possibility of counter narratives to the voluntarily childless woman's liminality that might serve as the ground of moral and political solidarity among differently situated women, regardless of their motherhood status. (shrink)

Rational choice modeling originating in economics is sweeping across many areas of social science. This paper examines a popular methodological proposal for integrating formal models from game theory with more traditional narrative explanations of historical phenomena, known as “analytic narratives”. Under what conditions are we justified in thinking that an analytic narrative provides a good explanation? In this paper I criticize the existing criteria and provide a set of my own. Along the way, I address the critique of analytic narratives (...) by Jon Elster. (shrink)

Fazekas and Overgaard () present a novel, multidimensional model that explains different ways in which conscious representations can be degraded. Moreover, the authors discuss possible mechanisms that underlie different kinds of degradation, primarily those related to attentional processing. In this letter, we argue that the proposed mechanisms are not sufficient. We propose that attentional mechanisms work differently at various processing stages; and factors that are independent of attentional ones, such as expectation, previous experience, and context, should be accounted for if (...) we are aiming to construct a comprehensive model of conscious visual perception. (shrink)

Background Few empirical studies have been found that explore ethical challenges among persons in high public positions that are responsible for elder care. The aim of this paper was to illuminate the meaning of being in ethically difficult situations related to elder care as experienced by high level decision-makers. Methods A phenomenological-hermeneutic method was used to analyse the eighteen interviews conducted with political and civil servant high level decision-makers at the municipality and county council level from two counties in Sweden. (...) The participants worked at a planning and control as well as executive level and had both budget and quality of elder care responsibilities. Results Both ethical dilemmas and the meaning of being in ethically difficult situations related to elder care were revealed. No differences were seen between the politicians and the civil servants. The ethical dilemmas mostly concerned dealings with extensive care needs and working with a limited budget. The dilemmas were associated with a lack of good care and a lack of agreement concerning care such as vulnerable patients in inappropriate care settings, weaknesses in medical support, dissimilar focuses between the caring systems, justness in the distribution of care and deficient information. Being in ethically difficult situations was challenging. Associated with them were experiences of being exposed, having to be strategic and living with feelings such as aloneness and loneliness, uncertainty, lack of confirmation, the risk of being threatened or becoming a scapegoat and difficult decision avoidance. Conclusion Our paper provides further insight into the ethical dilemmas and ethical challenges met by high level decision-makers', which is important since the overall responsibility for elder care that is also ethically defensible rests with them. They have power and their decisions affect many stakeholders in elder care. Our results can be used to stimulate discussions between high level decision-makers and health care professionals concerning ways of dealing with ethical issues and the necessity of structures that facilitate dealing with them. Even if the high level decision-makers have learned to live with the ethical challenges that confronted them, it was obvious that they were not free from feelings of uncertainty, frustration and loneliness. Vulnerability was revealed regarding themselves and others. Their feelings of failure indicated that they felt something was at stake for the older adults in elder care and for themselves as well, in that there was the risk that important needs would go unmet. (shrink)