In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 schools around the world have been closed to protect against the spread of coronavirus. In several countries, homeschooling has been introduced to replace classroom schooling. With a focus on individual differences, the present study examined 138 schoolers regarding their self-control and boredom proneness. The results showed that both traits were important in predicting adherence to homeschooling. Schoolers with higher levels of self-control perceived homeschooling as less difficult, which in turn increased homeschooling adherence. In (...) contrast, schoolers with higher levels of boredom proneness perceived homeschooling as more difficult, which in turn reduced homeschooling adherence. These results partially hold when it comes to studying in the classroom. However, boredom threatened adherence only in the homeschooling context. Our results indicate that boredom proneness is a critical construct to consider when educational systems switch to homeschooling during a pandemic. (shrink)

Collective dilemmas have attracted widespread interest in several social sciences and the humanities including economics, sociology and philosophy. Since Hardin’s intuitive example of the Tragedy of the Commons, many real-world public goods dilemmas have been analysed with a wide ranging set of possible and actual solutions. The plethora of solutions to these dilemmas suggests that people make different kinds of decision in different situations. Rather than trying to find a unifying kind of reasoning to capture all situations, as the paradigm (...) of rationality has done, this article develops a framework of agent decision-making for social simulation, that takes seriously both different kinds of decision making as well as different interpretations of situations. The Contextual Action Framework for Computational Agents allows for the modelling of complex social phenomena, like dilemma situations, with relatively simple agents by shifting complexity from an agent’s cognition to an agent’s context. (shrink)

I argue that the U.S. ought to reduce its military spending. I first address consequentialist political arguments regarding military spending that are focused on safety and security, and the economy. I then address a justice-oriented argument regarding military spending that is focused on domestic and international opportunity costs. Ultimately, whether the concern is about the consequences of decreasing military spending, or the justice of decreasing military spending, I conclude that we ought to decrease U.S. military spending.

Flow is a gratifying state of deep involvement and absorption that individuals report when facing a challenging activity and they perceive adequate abilities to cope with it. The flow concept was introduced by Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, and interest in flow research is growing. However, to our best knowledge, no scoping review exists that takes a systematic look at studies on flow which were published between the years 2000 and 2016. Overall, 252 studies have been included in this review. Our review (...) provides a framework to cluster flow research, gives a systematic overview about existing studies and their findings, and provides an overview about implications for future research. The provided framework consists of three levels of flow research. In the first “Individual” level are the categories for personality, motivation, physiology, emotion, cognition, and behavior. The second “Contextual” level contains the categories for contextual and interindividual factors and the third “Cultural” level contains cultural factors that relate to flow. Using our framework, we systematically present the findings for each category. While flow research has made progress in understanding flow, in the future, more experimental and longitudinal studies are needed to gain deeper insights into the causal structure of flow and its antecedents and consequences. (shrink)

This chapter interrogates the intersections between wealth, violence, and justice by considering two very different cases: refugees who have had their wealth taken from them, and political activists who are considering using Robin-Hood-style tactics to protest economic injustice. Ordinarily, the involuntary loss of wealth that refugees suffer, while it is viewed as an injustice, is not considered a violent injustice. However, when the involuntary redistribution of wealth is brought up in the context of resolving long-standing economic injustices, opponents cry out (...) that such redistribution would be, not only unjust, but an act of violence. This raises an interesting question: how should we view the involuntary loss, or redistribution, of wealth? Disregarding for the moment whether such involuntary losses of wealth are justified or unjustified—which might well depend on the circumstances and context—it is worth considering whether they are instances of violence. If they are, then refugees have suffered more violence than we normally recognize. If they are not, then Robin-Hood-style tactics (absent the bows and arrows) may be allowed for those who wish to engage in non-violent resistance against economic injustice in all its forms. (shrink)

Written with insight and humor, College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone investigates a broad array of philosophical issues relating to student sex. Examines the ethical issues of dating, cheating, courtship, homosexual experimentation, and drug and alcohol use Considers student-teacher relationships, sexual experimentation, the meaning of sex in a college setting and includes two essays based on influential research projects on ‘friends with benefits’ Many of the authors teach classes that explore the philosophy of love and sex, and most are scholars (...) from the Society of the Philosophy of Sex and Love. (shrink)

From June 26 to 27, the workshop Ironists, Reformers, or Rebels? The Role of the Social Sciences in Participatory Policy Making took place at the Collegium Helveticum of the UZH/ETH in Zurich. The organisers’ motivation was the apparently missing involvement of social scientists in public engagement processes. This impression persists because, while social scientists often observe public debates or develop participatory methods for public policy-making, they rarely take part in those processes themselves. A closer look at ethics commissions, expert committees (...) or public hearings concerned with science and technology issues shows natural scientists, physicians, lawyers and the occasional philosopher. Sociologists, anthropologists and other social scientists, on the other hand, are often not involved. Because of this imbalance, the organisers’ aim was to bring together scholars and researchers from different areas of the social sciences to consider the role of their disciplines in public policy making. This article will focus on some of the ideas about specific roles of social scientists in participatory policy-making, discussed at the workshop, and their implications and give a commentary on some future prospects of the social sciences. (shrink)

An educational provision for young children with autism that offers intensive behavioural intervention based on the principles of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), within an early years mainstream school setting in the UK, is described. The ABA Class at Westwood School is a collaborative project between the School of Psychology, Bangor University, two Local Education Authorities in North East Wales (Flintshire and Wrexham) and the local NHS Trust. Using two case examples, two important features of mainstream education for children with autism (...) are considered: access to the National Curriculum, and inclusion with peers in mainstream settings. Standardised test data on outcomes for these children over the initial 12 months of their educational placements are also provided. (shrink)

Based on an ethnographic study of fingerprint and DNA evidence practices in the Swedish judicial system, this article analyses the materialization of forensic evidence. It argues that forensic evidence, while popularly understood as firmly rooted in materiality, is inseparably technoscientific and cultural. Its roots in the material world are entangled threads of matter, technoscience and culture that produce particular bodily constellations within and together with a particular sociocultural context. Forensic evidence, it argues further, is co-materialized with crimes as well as (...) with particular bodily and social constellations. Consequently, the article suggests that an analysis of how forensic evidence is produced can contribute to feminist understandings of the inseparability of sex and gender: understanding bodies as ongoing technoscientific-material-cultural practices of materialization may be a fruitful approach to analysing their complexity, and the relationships in which they are placed, without surrendering to either cultural or biological determinism. Taking a theoretical point of departure not only in an STS-informed approach, but also in material feminist theorizations, the article also underlines that the suggested theoretical conversations across borders of feminist theory and STS should be understood as a two-way-communication where the two fields contribute mutually to each other. (shrink)

We all know vampires. Count Dracula and Nosferatu, maybe Blade and Angel, or Stephenie Meyer’s sparkling beau, Edward Cullen. In fact, the Euro-American vampire myth has long become one of the most reliable and bestselling fun-rides the entertainment industries around the world have to offer. Quite recently, however, a new type of fanged villain has entered the mainstream stage: the American Indian vampire. Fully equipped with war bonnets, buckskin clothes, and sharp teeth, the vampires of recent U.S. film productions, such (...) as Blade, the Series or the Twilight Saga, employ both the Euro-American vampire trope and denigrating discourses of race and savagery. It is also against this backdrop that American Indian authors and filmmakers have set out to renegotiate not only U.S. America’s myth of the racially overdrawn “savage Indian,” but also the vampire trope per se. Drawing on American Indian myths and folklore that previous scholarship has placed into direct relationship to the Anglo-European vampire narrative, and on recent U.S. mainstream commodifications of these myths, my paper traces and contextualizes the two oppositional yet intimately linked narratives of American Indian vampirism ensuing today: the commodified image of the “Indian” vampire and the renegotiated vampire tropes created by American Indian authors and filmmakers. (shrink)

Can war be justified? Pacifists answer that it cannot; they oppose war and advocate for nonviolent alternatives to war. But defenders of just war theory argue that in some circumstances, when the effectiveness of nonviolence is limited, wars can be justified. -/- In this book, two philosophers debate this question, drawing on contemporary scholarship and new developments in thinking about pacifism and just war theory. Andrew Fiala defends the pacifist position, while Jennifer Kling defends just war traditions. Fiala argues that (...) pacifism follows from the awful reality of war and the nonviolent goal of building a more just and peaceful world. Kling argues that war is sometimes justified when it is a last-ditch, necessary effort to defend people and their communities from utter destruction and death. Pulling from global traditions and histories, their debate will captivate anyone who has wondered or worried about the morality of political violence and military force. Topics discussed include ethical questions of self-defense and other-defense, the great analogy between individuals and states, evolving technologies and methods of warfighting, moral injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, broader political and communal issues, and the problem of regional security in a globalizing world. The authors consider cultural and religious issues as well as the fundamental question of moral obligation in a world saturated in military conflict. The book was written in the aftermath of the war on terrorism and includes reflection on lessons learned from the past decades of war, as well as hopes for the future in light of emerging threats in Europe and elsewhere. -/- The book is organized in a user-friendly fashion. Each author presents a self-contained argument, which is followed by a series of responses, replies, and counter-arguments. Throughout, the authors model civil discourse by emphasizing points of agreement and remaining areas of disagreement. The book includes reader-friendly summaries, a glossary of key concepts, and suggestions for further study. All of this will help students and scholars follow the authors’ dialogue so they may develop their own answer to the question of whether war can be justified. (shrink)

Recent developmental models assume a higher tendency to take risks in mid-adolescence, while the empirical evidence for this assumption is rather mixed. Most of the studies applied quite different tasks to measure risk-taking behavior and used a narrow age range. The main goal of the present study was to examine risk-taking behavior in four task settings, the Treasure Hunting Task (THT) in a gain and a loss domain, the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) and the STOPLIGHT task. These task settings (...) differ in affective task moderators, like descriptive vs. experienced outcomes, anticipation of gains vs. losses, static vs. dynamic risk presentation and time pressure vs. no-time pressure and were applied in a sample of 187 participants from age 9 to 18. Beneath age trends, we were interested in their association with individual differences in approach behavior, venturesomeness, impulsivity and empathy above age, gender and fluid intelligence. Our findings revealed that risk-taking behavior is only low to moderately correlated between the four task contexts, suggesting that they capture different aspects of risk-taking behavior. Accordingly, a mid-adolescent peak in risk-propensity was only found under time pressure in the STOPLIGHT that was associated with higher impulsivity and empathy. In contrast, risky decisions decreased with increasing age in task settings, in which losses were anticipated (THT Loss), and this was associated with higher cognitive abilities. We found no age differences when gains were anticipated, neither in a static (THT Gain) nor in a dynamic task setting (BART). These findings clearly suggest the need to consider affective task moderators, as well as individual differences in temperament and cognitive abilities, in actual models about adolescent development. (shrink)

The creation of biobanks depends upon people’s willingness to donate their samples for research purposes and to agree to sample storage. Moreover, biobanks are a public good that requires active participation by all interested stakeholders at every stage of development. Therefore, knowing public’s attitudes towards participation in a biobank and biobank management is important and deserves investigation.

The proposal of the new criteria for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease based on biomarker data is making possible a diagnosis of AD at the mild cognitive impairment or predementia/prodromal– stage. Given the present lack of effective treatments for AD, the opportunity for the individuals to personally take relevant decisions and plan for their future before and if cognitive deterioration occurs is one the main advantages of an early diagnosis. Advance directives are largely seen as an effective tool for planning (...) medical care in the event the subject becomes incompetent. Nevertheless, their value has been questioned with regard to people with dementia by scholars who refer to the arguments of personal identity and of patient’s changing interests before and after the onset of dementia. In this paper, I discuss the value of advance directives in Alzheimer’s disease and other kind of dementia. Despite critics, I argue that advance directives are especially advisable in dementia and provide reasons in favor of their promotion at an early stage of the disease as a valuable tool to respect patients’ values and preferences on medical treatment, including participation in research and end of life decisions. I mainly support advance directives that include both decisions regarding health care and the appointment of an attorney in fact. I conclude that patients with AD at a prodromal or early stage should be offered the opportunity to execute an advance directive, and that not to honor a demented individual’s directive would be an unacceptable form of discrimination towards those patients. (shrink)

SummaryDavid Hartley's Observations provides an example from the history of medicine of the bearing of theories of the relationship between body and mind on the problem of morality and free will. Further, Hartley's solution requires a distinction between two understandings of what it means for morality to be rationally grounded. The kind of ethics which can be established for moral agents on the basis of medical knowledge alone (and for which Hartley's “Rule of Life” presents but one historical example) has (...) been termed ‘therapeutic’ It leads to a viewpoint in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the kinds of reasons for supporting morals and the kinds of reasons for supporting good teeth. The kind of ethics which requires additional grounds entering into the motivation of the agent himself has been termed “rational.” This distinction between therapeutic and rational ethics rests on the more basic distinction between general and particular grounds on which to establish a rational system of ethics. As a result, the initial problem of how any account of the body-mind relation might allow for the possibility of ethics leads to the more interesting problem of how a therapeutic interpretation of ethics, which is possible on the grounds of medical knowledge, might be reconciled with a fully rational interpretation of ethics which we require on philosophical grounds. “Medical ethics” has traditionally been viewed as the application of concepts from philosophical ethics to the specific problems presented in medical practice. In consequence of the second problem exposed here, it would be useful to extend the domain of medical ethics from the level of concepts and cases to the level of interpreting the rational grounds for those concepts. Otherwise one may fail to distinguish a medical view of ethics from an ethical view of medicine. (shrink)

This article describes how methodologies of EU-funded research within the life sciences and biomedicine have recently become more gender sensitive. This transformation is the result of the Gender Impact Assessments of the EU Fifth Framework Programme, commissioned in 2000-1. The authors assessed the research programme for life sciences, which includes a large health-related component. The new guidelines for research emphasize the need for clear terminology for concepts of sex and gender and for a distinction to be made between the two, (...) for both life sciences and health research. Attention to possible sex differences, even in preclinical research, as well as to effects of gender, will lead to more adequate research data that serve the health of both men and women. The transformation to research becoming more gender-sensitive is further discussed in the context of feminist theory on the body. Being fully aware of the fact that what is happening in bodies is mediated by particular technologies, the authors make an appeal to invest in concepts that take the living and changing body into account. (shrink)

We explore the meaning and implications of Bourdieu’s construct of the field of power and integrate it into a wider conception of the formation and functioning of elites at the highest level in society. Corporate leaders active within the field of power hold prominent roles in numerous organizations, constituting an ‘elite of elites’, whose networks integrate powerful participants from different fields. As ‘bridging actors’, they form coalitions to determine institutional settlements and societal resource flows. We ask how some corporate actors (...) become hyper-agents, those actors who ‘make things happen’, while others remain ‘ordinary’ members of the elite. Three hypotheses are developed and tested using extensive data on the French business elite. Social class emerges as persistently important, challenging the myth of meritocratic inclusion. Our primary contribution to Bourdieusian scholarship lies in our analysis of hyper-agents, revealing the debts these dominants owe to elite schools and privileged classes. (shrink)

In this chapter we argue that poverty should be seen as a violation of dignity, drawing on two of Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative – the formula of humanity and the formula of the kingdom of ends. In our view, poverty should not be seen primarily in terms of exploitation, nor of failures to help people in need. A Kantian perspective should give proper weight to the actual and potential agency of those who suffer poverty. This is a question (...) about power, not just the distribution of material resources. Theoretically, we will place particular emphasis on the rarely remarked reference to “ends and means” in the formula of the kingdom of ends. People are sometimes treated merely as means, which is one sort of disrespect for their equal moral status. Another form of disrespect, deeper and more general in form, is the denial of decent opportunities to act as means for others. The resulting powerlessness, we suggest, should be central to an adequate understanding of poverty and its violations of dignity. (shrink)

A child is a developing person with evolving capacities that include autonomy, mental capacity and capacity to assume responsibility. Hence, children are entitled to participatory rights in South Africa as observed in the Children’s Act 38 of 2005. According to section 129 of the Act a child may consent to his or her own medical treatment provided that he or she is over the age of 12 years and is of sufficient maturity and decisional capacity to understand the various implications (...) of the treatment including the risks and benefits thereof. However, the Act does not provide a definition for what qualifies as ‘sufficient maturity’ nor does it stipulate how health professionals ought to assess the decisional capacity of a child. In addition, South Africa is a culturally diverse country. The Western liberal notion of autonomy may not necessarily find equal prominence in the mores of people with a different worldview. Hence we demonstrate a few salient comparisons between legal liberal moral theory and African communitarianism as pertinent to the autonomy of the child. Children are rights-holders by virtue of their humanity. Their dignity as individual human persons affords them the entitlement to human rights as contemplated under the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. However, contrary to the traditional Western notion of individual autonomous persons African societies hold a communalistic notion of person hence there is less regard for individual autonomy and rights with more emphasis on the communal good and maintaining the continuity of relationships and interdependencies shared within a community. A child considered in this view is not regarded as a full person. This implies that decisions concerning the child, including consent to medical treatment are discussed and determined by the community to which the child belongs. Lastly, in this article, we draw on the notion of capacity for responsibility to produce a pragmatic definition of sufficient maturity. It seems reasonable to suggest a move away from a general legal age of consent for medical treatment toward more individualised, context-specific approaches in determining the maturity of a child patient to consent to medical treatment. Perhaps, decision-making with respect to consent to the medical treatment of a child belonging to a traditional African community where the notion of a person is embedded in communitarianism ought to involve the child’s parents/guardians/caregivers where possible provided that the best interests of the child are awarded priority. (shrink)

Building on the computer science concept of _code smells_, we initiate the study of _law smells_, i.e., patterns in legal texts that pose threats to the comprehensibility and maintainability of the law. With five intuitive law smells as running examples—namely, duplicated phrase, long element, large reference tree, ambiguous syntax, and natural language obsession—, we develop a comprehensive law smell taxonomy. This taxonomy classifies law smells by when they can be detected, which aspects of law they relate to, and how they (...) can be discovered. We introduce text-based and graph-based methods to identify instances of law smells, confirming their utility in practice using the United States Code as a test case. Our work demonstrates how ideas from software engineering can be leveraged to assess and improve the quality of _legal_ code, thus drawing attention to an understudied area in the intersection of law and computer science and highlighting the potential of computational legal drafting. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 43 Heft: 1 Seiten: 250-259.

Dans le cadre de nos recherches sur la correspondance de Descartes, nous avons découvert une lettre inédite du philosophe. La lettre, qui se trouve à la Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, est addressee à Joachim de Wicquefort, datée de Leyde, le 2 octobre 1640. Dans sa lettre Descartes réclame, par l' intermédiaire de Wicquefort, la traduction latine de ses Meteores, qui avait été remis au professeur de philosophie d'Amsterdam, Caspar Barlaeus. Elle précède de trois jours la lettre, déjà connue, à (...) Wicquefort sur le même sujet. L'importance de notre lettre est qu'elle confirme certaines hypothèses concernant l'édition latine du Discours, et le projet abandonné de la publication des objections faites au Discours et aux Essais et des réponses du philosophe. (shrink)