Children’s cognitive and language development is a central aspect of human development and has wide and long-standing impact. The parent-infant relationship is the chief arena for the infant to learn about the world. Studies reveal associations between quality of parental care and children’s cognitive and language development when the former is measured as maternal sensitivity. Nonetheless, the extent to which parental mentalizing – a parent’s understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of a child, and presumed to underlie sensitivity – (...) contributes to children’s cognitive development and functioning, has yet to be thoroughly investigated. According to the epistemic trust theory, high mentalizing parents often use ostensive cues, which signal to the infant that they are perceived and treated as unique subjective beings. By doing so, parents foster epistemic trust in their infants, allowing the infant to use the parents a reliable source of knowledge to learn from. Until recently, parental mentalizing has been limited to verbal approaches and measurement. This is a substantial limitation of the construct as we know that understanding of intentionality is both non-verbal and verbal. In this investigation we employed both verbal and non-verbal, body-based, approaches to parental mentalizing, to examine whether parental mentalizing in a clinical sample predicts children’s cognitive and language development 12 months later. Findings from a longitudinal intervention study of 39 mothers and their infants revealed that parental embodied mentalizing in infancy significantly predicted language development 12 months later and marginally predicted child cognitive development. Importantly, PEM explained unique variance in the child’s cognitive and linguistic capacities over and above maternal emotional availability, child interactive behavior, parental reflective functioning, depression, ethnicity, education, marital status, and number of other children. The theoretical, empirical, and clinical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

The existing literature on the relationship between organizational commitment and ethical decision making suggests that ethical decision makers with higher organizational commitment are less likely to engage in ethically questionable behaviors. The ethical behaviors previously studied in an organizational commitment context have been organization-harm issues in which the organization was harmed and the individual benefited (e.g., overstating an expense report). There is another class of ethical issues in an organizational context, however. These other issues, termed organization-gain issues, focus on the (...) organization obtaining a benefit while outsiders, such as investors, are harmed (e.g., overstating reported revenue). We explore whether individuals with higher organizational commitment are more or less likely to engage in questionable behaviors that benefit the organization. Results of our study indicate that individuals with higher organizational commitment are less likely to engage in ethically questionable behaviors, regardless of whether the behaviors are organization-harm or organizational-gain issues. (shrink)

The extraction of natural resources is a controversial business practice that has profound ethical and economic risk implications for both firms involved in extractive activities and society at large. In response to these implications, the Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 directed the Securities and Exchange Commission to create the first ever rules requiring annual corporate responsibility disclosures. The two proposed rules, requiring disclosure of the source of “conflict minerals” and of payments to foreign governments by extractive firms, conjured intense debate among (...) stakeholders, largely related to the risks of firms providing the information. These risks span from required disclosures increasing compliance costs for firms to non-disclosure threatening human rights. In this study, we seek to understand the way in which stakeholders perceive the risks associated with corporate responsibility disclosures. We analyze comment letters submitted to the SEC related to the two disclosure rules through the lens of Douglas’s cultural perspectives of risk. We find consistencies across the two proposed disclosures with regard to the presence of three risk perspectives within the comment letter discourse for each proposal. We find inconsistencies, however, in the underlying nature of risk perceived across the two rules, which we argue reveals an aspect of risk that incorporates ethicality and is ultimately linked to reputational considerations. We complement these insights by analyzing the market reaction to the proposed regulations. Overall, our analysis suggests that stakeholders’ perceptions of risk have consequences for how risk is perceived and acted upon in the market. (shrink)

The increasing use of opioid treatment agreements has prompted debate within the medical community about ethical challenges with respect to their implementation. The focus of debate is usually on the efficacy of OTAs at reducing opioid misuse, how OTAs may undermine trust between physicians and patients and the potential coercive nature of requiring patients to sign such agreements as a condition for receiving pain care. An important consideration missing from these conversations is the potential for racial bias in the current (...) way that OTAs are incorporated into clinical practice and in the amount of physician discretion that current opioid guidelines support. While the use of OTAs has become mandatory in some states for certain classes of patients, physicians are still afforded great leeway in how these OTAs are implemented in clinical practice and how their terms should be enforced. This paper uses the guidelines provided for OTA implementation by the states of Indiana and Pennsylvania as case studies in order to argue that giving physicians certain kinds of discretion may exacerbate racial health disparities. This problem cannot simply be addressed by minimising physician discretion in general, but rather by providing mechanisms to hold physicians accountable for how they treat patients on long-term opioid therapy to ensure that such treatment is equitable. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

The texts of Walid Daka, a Palestinian political prisoner incarcerated since 1986, challenge the notion that colonial power ends with decolonization and expose the shortcomings of examining colonial prisons solely through the eliminatory prism of death and deprivation. Studying Daka’s texts, the article presents how the Israeli carceral system has managed to utilize prisoners’ hopes and longings – in their relations with one another, their political actions such as hunger strikes or their building of internal leadership hierarchies, and their affective (...) worlds – to further its own goals. Rather than a pessimistic account, this article critically analyzes Daka’s writings to demonstrate how a first-person study of carceral subjectification can unfold within an activist framework. Daka uses these observations to develop an alternative articulation of decolonization that I term ‘abolitionist decolonization’ as a collective and continued insistence on setting the terms of getting free. By ‘abolitionist decolonization,’ I conjure a difficult conversation between a Fanonian project of never-ending decolonization and a Foucauldian project of never-ending abolition. As such, this critical attitude aims to counter settler-colonial carcerality in ways that will foil the administration’s attempts to reproduce the dangers that the prisoners seek to elude, through the very means they deploy to elude them. (shrink)

The upcoming World Congress of Bioethics (WCB) will take place in Qatar in 2024. In response to criticism regarding this location, The international Association of Bioethics (IAB) board members exp...

This paper provides an overview of the various dual-use concepts applied in national and international non-proliferation and anti-terrorism legislation, such as the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons Convention and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540, and national export control legislation and in relevant codes of conduct. While there is a vast literature covering dual-use concepts in particular with regard to life sciences, this is the first paper that incorporates into such discussion the United Nations Security Council Resolution (...) 1540. In addition, recent developments such as the extension of dual-use export control legislation in the area of human rights protection are also identified and reviewed. The discussion of dual-use concepts is hereby undertaken in the context of human- and/or national-security-based approaches to security. This paper discusses four main concepts of dual use as applied today in international and national law: civilian versus military, peaceful versus non-peaceful, legitimate versus illegitimate and benevolent versus malevolent. In addition, the usage of the term to describe positive technology spin-offs between civilian and military applications is also briefly addressed. Attention is also given to the roles civil society and research ethics may play in the governance of dual-use sciences and technologies. (shrink)

The adversarial legal system is traditionally praised for its normative appeal: it protects individual rights; ensures an equal, impartial, and consistent application of the law; and, most importantly, its competitive structure facilitates the discovery of truth – both in terms of the facts, and in terms of the correct interpretation of the law. At the same time, legal representation is allocated as a commodity, bought and sold in the market: the more one pays, the better legal representation one gets. In (...) this article, I argue that the integration of a market in legal representation with the adversarial system undercuts the very normative justifications on which the system is based. Furthermore, I argue that there are two implicit conditions, which are currently unmet, but are required for the standard justifications to hold: that there is (equal opportunity for) equality of legal representation between parties, and that each party has (equal opportunity for) a sufficient level of legal representation. I, therefore, outline an ideal proposal for reform that would satisfy these conditions. (shrink)

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a prolific scholar, impassioned theologian, and prominent activist who participated in the black civil rights movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War. He has been hailed as a hero, honored as a visionary, and endlessly quoted as a devotional writer. In this sympathetic, yet critical, examination, Shai Held elicits the overarching themes and unity of Heschel’s incisive and insightful thought. Focusing on the idea of transcendence—or the movement from self-centeredness to God-centeredness—Held puts Heschel into (...) dialogue with contemporary Jewish thinkers, Christian theologians, devotional writers, and philosophers of religion. (shrink)

I offer a novel distinction between two concepts of competition. The first, parallel competition, is designed to create separate pathways for each competitor wherein they can maximize their performance. The second, friction competition, is designed to facilitate a clash between competitors. Each concept is utilized as an institutional mechanism to generate social benefits. In parallel competition, the social benefit is the result of the aggregation of the independent efforts of each competitor. In friction competition, it emerges from the clash between (...) competitors. I argue that this distinction carries significant normative implications concerning debates over equality, freedom, and democratic institutional design. (shrink)

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a prolific scholar, impassioned theologian, and prominent activist who participated in the black civil rights movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War. He has been hailed as a hero, honored as a visionary, and endlessly quoted as a devotional writer. In this sympathetic, yet critical, examination, Shai Held elicits the overarching themes and unity of Heschel’s incisive and insightful thought. Focusing on the idea of transcendence—or the movement from self-centeredness to God-centeredness—Held puts Heschel into (...) dialogue with contemporary Jewish thinkers, Christian theologians, devotional writers, and philosophers of religion. (shrink)

The Phaedo’s intense preoccupation with the notions of self-liberation and self-transcendence in the face of death is strikingly reminiscent of Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. It is therefore not surprising that comparative philosophers have shown great interest in comparing this particular Platonic work to various South Asian texts: The Phaedo has been compared to the philosophy underlying yoga and Patanjali, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta, the canonical account of the Buddha’s final days. Of particular relevance is the (...) Katha Upanishad, which shares with the Phaedo enough common features, both textual and structural and thematic, for a comparative analysis to be fruitful. These striking resemblances enable me to bring important dissimilarities in the dialogical processes into focus— dissimilarities which have much to convey to us philosophically. These dissimilarities demonstrate that although the two traditions engaged in transformative ideas and practices that centered on the liberation of the soul, there is still a substantial difference between the nature of the philosophy celebrated by the Greeks and the mystical thought developed by the Upanishadic sages. (shrink)

The paper suggests a novel methodology for determining the state of legal doctrine on a particular issue by legal scholars. This methodology is inspired by the philosophical field of phenomenology. In particular, the tool of eidetic reduction developed by Edmund Husserl is applied to reach inter-subjectively valid assessments of doctrine. The methodology developed here argues that scholars who wish to discover legal doctrine on a particular issue need to first define general paradigms that explain the relevant legal field. Then, they (...) should develop a hypothesis about the law on the particular issue that concurs with the essential qualities of all these paradigms. Finally, to determine if a hypothesis about the content of the law should be accepted or rejected, it must be checked against legal sources that often include judgments. Reasoning by analogy should be used to learn from judgments with the same policy implications as the doctrine suggested by the hypothesis. The paper offers several heuristics—demonstrated with examples from international law—that can be used to find judgments that have the same policy implications without determining conclusively what these implications are. (shrink)

Thomas Jefferson’s famous proposal; whereby a state’s constitution should be re-enacted every 19 years by a majority vote; purports to solve the intergenerational problem caused by perpetual constitutions: namely that laws which were enacted by people who are already dead bind living citizens without their consent. I argue that the model fails to fulfil its own normative consent-based aspirations. This is because it produces two groups of people who will end up living under laws to which they did not give (...) their consent: citizens who reach the voting age after the re-enactment process; citizens who did not assent to being obliged by the majority vote’s results. I reject possible responses to my argument by showing that they result in making the model either impractical or redundant. The remainder of the paper discusses whether implementing the model would enhance the consent-based legitimacy of the modern state. (shrink)

International courts strive to enhance their legitimacy, that is, they would like the members of the international community to perceive their judgments as just, correct and unbiased even if they do not agree with their specific content. This Article argues that international courts take into account the actors they interact with, the norms they apply, and the conditions they operate under as they try to enhance their legitimacy. It demonstrates strategic behavior towards that end in the judgments of two prominent (...) international courts - the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. International courts interact with states under their jurisdiction and with their national courts. International courts try to preserve their legitimacy vis-à-vis states; at the same time, they want to signal that states will comply with them even if they issue judgments states disagree with. International courts can cooperate with national courts and gain legitimacy from interacting with legitimate national courts. The norms that international courts apply constrain their ability to maneuver their judgments in ways that can help their legitimacy, but at the same time help legitimize their judgments. International courts use various tactics to shape their reasoning in order to improve their legitimacy. The behavior of international courts is scrutinized by the domestic public within each state. That public has certain agendas, priorities and preferences. The domestic public’s agenda is a condition that the court must respond to, but sometimes courts can also shape that agenda to their benefit. (shrink)

Hittite Logograms and Hittite Scholarship. By mark WeedeN. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten, vol. 54. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011. Pp. xvii + 693. €128.

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 343-358, September 2022.

A well-known objection to prioritarianism, famously levelled by Mike Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve, is that it wrongly ignores the unity of the individual in treating intra-personal cases like inter-personal cases. In this paper we accept that there should be a moral shift between these cases, but argue that this is because autonomy is a relevant consideration in intra-personal but not inter-personal cases, and one to which pluralist prioritarians ought to attend. To avoid this response, Otsuka and Voorhoeve must assume we (...) know nothing about the subjective information of the person being chosen for. But we show that this commits them to two controversial assumptions: that welfare consists in an objective list of goods, and – if one accepts an unorthodox but plausible account of the relationship between risk aversion and rationality – that there is only a narrow range of rational risk aversions. Only prioritarians who accept both these assumptions are on the hook of Otsuka and Voorhoeve’s objection; for all others, the examples have insufficient information, and so lose their sting. (shrink)

A total of 1,281 Chinese students in grades 3–6 participated in a study that examined the relationships among student-perceived supportive learning environment, mathematical achievement, autonomous self-regulation, and creative thinking. The results demonstrated that student PSLE is positively associated with autonomous self-regulation, creative thinking, and mathematical achievement. In addition, the study also demonstrated that the influence of PSLE on students’ mathematical achievements could be mediated through autonomous self-regulation and creative thinking, respectively. The results shed light on the effectiveness of a supportive (...) learning environment on educational and psychological outcomes in Chinese mathematical classrooms. (shrink)

The study of anarchism as a philosophical, political, and social movement has burgeoned both in the academy and in the global activist community in recent years. Taking advantage of this boom in anarchist scholarship, Nathan J. Jun and Shane Wahl have compiled twenty-six cutting-edge essays on this timely topic in New Perspectives on Anarchism.

This study explores how therapists deal with ethical dilemmas in psychotherapy with older adults. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 therapists and analyzed using grounded theory methodology. Findings clustered around three themes: (i) respecting autonomy when interacting with family of vulnerable and dependent older patients; (ii) prioritizing respecting autonomy in risk situations and in suspected financial abuse without impaired judgment; and (iii) prioritizing protecting the patient in risk situations of patients with dementia and of suspected physical abuse or neglect. These (...) findings highlight several important issues regarding the management of ethical dilemmas in psychotherapy with vulnerable and dependent older adults. (shrink)

One of the most popular facets of Schmitt's philosophy is his theory of sovereignty and decisionism, as developed in his early essay Political Theology (1922). There, Schmitt offers an original outlook on the political implications of the secularization of modern Europe and philosophy's purported turn away from theology. The “death of God,” along with the gradual disappearance of the political institution of monarchy, are only symbols of the decline of sovereignty in general. What is lost in the process is not (...) sovereignty as such, since it can assume new forms, such as “reason,” “nature,” “the people,” or “the state.” What…. (shrink)

Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany, by Stefan Bargheer, claims that work and play orientations have respectively organized German and British wild bird conservation efforts. The book argues that work and play are nonmoral categories, and—more broadly—that moral justifications for action should be understood as mere post-hoc surface phenomena that contribute little to social action. The new French pragmatic sociology provides conceptual tools to examine how categories like work and play intertwine with logics of moral evaluation that define (...) what activities rightly qualify as each category, what public goods might each yield, and what value ought to be attached to them. With this approach in mind, this review examines Moral Entanglements’ claims, and identifies ways in which moral logics did indeed play a role in establishing different bird conservation styles in each country. The review highlights the broader importance for comparative-historical sociologists to take moral repertoires into account as they reconstruct historical institutional emergence. (shrink)

What makes modern law and politics modern? What makes the question of "modernity" so central to our understanding of contemporary law and politics? To offer one possible answer to these questions this study examines the changing relationship between animals and humans and, more specifically, the new regulation of the slaughterhouse in turn of the century Germany. If humans and animals meet in the modern agora it is neither because animals are now perceived as more human-like, as champions of progress would (...) have it, nor because humans are perceived as more animal-like, as critics of modernity would suggest. Rather, both animals and humans have undergone a radical transformation, which has put them on the same plane. If life is that which humans and animals share in common, and politics is that which sets them apart, the history of animal laws suggests that modernity entails the radical transformation of both life and politics. This Article strives to understand this change through the transformation of both politics and life into processes, i.e., into that which can be scientifically known and thus manipulated. The different strategies of reformers of slaughtering as well as their opponents are analyzed in light of this fundamental transformation. (shrink)

This book explores dialogue as a transformative form of philosophical practice by unveiling the method behind the unique dialogue developed by mystic and thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986). While Krishnamurti himself generally rejected the cultivation of systems and techniques, Shai Tubali argues that there are easily identifiable patterns through which Krishnamurti strove to realize his dialogical aims. For this reason, he refers to this method, whose existence has evaded Krishnamurti’s followers and scholars alike, as the Krishnamurti dialogue. He suggests that (...) these discursive patterns serve to broaden our understanding of the possibilities of philosophical and religious dialogues and further illuminate established forms of dynamic discourse, such as the Socratic method. Inspired by Pierre Hadot’s revolutionary reading of the classical Greco-Roman texts, the author centers his attention on Plato’s Socratic dialogues and the guru–disciple conversations in the Hindu Upanishads, which fall within the scope of what may be termed ‘the transformative dialogue’: dialogues that have been written with the intention of bringing about a transformation in the mind of the interlocutor and reader and reorienting their way of life. This text appeals to students as well as researchers and suggests that the Krishnamurti dialogue is not only a continuation and development of the transformative dialogue, but that it also amalgamates ingredients of classical Western philosophy and South Asian mysticism. Moreover, this type of dialogue encourages readers to revisit the lost practice of transformative philosophy, in that it reveals new pathways of philosophical and religious inquiry that bear thought-provoking practical implications. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno once wrote an essay to "defend Bach against his devotees." In this book Dana Villa does the same for Hannah Arendt, whose sweeping reconceptualization of the nature and value of political action, he argues, has been covered over and domesticated by admirers who had hoped to enlist her in their less radical philosophical or political projects. Against the prevailing "Aristotelian" interpretation of her work, Villa explores Arendt's modernity, and indeed her postmodernity, through the Heideggerian and Nietzschean theme (...) of a break with tradition at the closure of metaphysics.Villa's book, however, is much more than a mere correction of misinterpretations of a major thinker's work. Rather, he makes a persuasive case for Arendt as the postmodern or postmetaphysical political theorist, the first political theorist to think through the nature of political action after Nietzsche's exposition of the death of God. After giving an account of Arendt's theory of action and Heidegger's influence on it, Villa shows how Arendt did justice to the Heideggerian and Nietzschean criticism of the metaphysical tradition while avoiding the political conclusions they drew from their critiques. The result is a wide-ranging discussion not only of Arendt and Heidegger, but of Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Habermas, and the entire question of politics after metaphysics. (shrink)

This study evaluated the potential contribution of extrageniculate visual pathways to oculomotor orienting reflexes in hemianopic patients. It tested whether extrageniculate pathways mediate inhibition of return —a phenomenon characterized by slowed target detections at recently stimulated locations . Because hemianopic subjects cannot overtly respond to stimuli presented within their hemianopic field, we utilized a spatial cueing paradigm that capitalized on the fact that IOR operates in spatiotopic coordinates. Subjects moved their eyes so that a cue and a target presented at (...) the same spatial location were imaged successively onto blind and seeing portions of their retinas. One hemianopic patient showed a similar IOR effect from cues presented within both the seeing and the hemianopic fields. With a second hemianopic patient, only presentations of the cue to the subject's seeing field produced IOR. The explanation for this discrepancy is not evident. These observations highlight both the potential value and the pitfalls inherent in using “blindsight” as a window into human consciousness. (shrink)

The paper uses the controversy about liberty between the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and Archbishop John Bramhall to illustrate the conflict between the rhetoric of philosophy and the rhetoric of religion. The first part of the paper introduces initial definitions of these two types of rhetoric. The following three parts deal with three distinct parts of the controversy, as Hobbes and Bramhall define them: to the reader, arguments from scripture, and arguments from reason. The fact that Hobbes and Bramhall themselves divide (...) the arguments into those from scripture and those from reason makes this controversy a good illustration of the conflict between rhetoric of philosophy and rhetoric of religion. The rhetorical perspective exposes the epistemological conflict between philosophy and religion that the philosophical discourse often blurs. It is a conflict that concerns the basic attitude of an individual towards the truth as a believer or as a thinker. The rhetoric of philosophy assumes that human understanding defines the truth and therefore gives priority to arguments from reason as they address that understanding. The rhetoric of religion assumes that truth is beyond human understanding and can only be revealed by faith and therefore gives priority to arguments from scripture as they address human faith. The reader may join the opponents in asking whether human liberty is a philosophical issue and therefore subject to arguments from reason or a theological one, subject to arguments from scripture. (shrink)

Abstract. Darwinism has attracted proportionately less attention from Jewish thinkers than from Christian thinkers. One significant reason for the disparity is that the theodicies created by Jews to contend with the catastrophes which punctuated Jewish history are equally suited to address the massive extinctions which characterize natural history. Theologies of divine hiddenness, restraint, and radical immanence, coming together in the sixteenth-century mystical cosmogony of Isaac Luria, have been rehabilitated and reworked by modern Jewish thinkers in the post-Darwin era.

I am grateful to Dien Ho and James Phillips for their comments on my article. Although they approach the topic from different perspectives, they both seem to find my account of the evolution of monoamine theories into neuroplasticity theories to be compelling. They especially seem to find my principal argument to be persuasive: Until quite recently, the use of drugs to generate and test pathophysiological hypotheses—the pharmacological bridge—has been a paramount driving force in psychiatric research.In his thoughtful commentary, Phillips is (...) right to draw attention to the role of "nonbiological" factors, which tend to be overlooked by biological psychiatry, in the etiology of depression. He... (shrink)

Biomedicine is typically defined as the branch of medicine that is based on the principles of biology and biochemistry. A central tenet for biomedicine is the notion of disease and therapeutic specificity, i.e. the idea of tailored treatments for discrete disorders underpinned by specific pathologies. The present paper is concerned with how notions of disease and therapeutic specificity guide biomedical reasoning. To that end, the author proposes a model – the specificity triad – that draws on late philosopher and physician (...) Ludwik Fleck’s concept of “style of thought” to offer a frame for investigating the intricate process through which links between disorders, mechanisms, and therapeutics are established by biomedicine. Next by applying the specificity triad model to scrutinize research efforts in two discrete areas of medicine—psychiatry and regenerative medicine—this paper seeks to stimulate pertinent discussions in and about biomedicine. These include discussions on the ambiguous epistemic status of psychiatry within contemporary biomedicine, as well as the relationship between developmental biology — historically relatively disjointed from biomedical enterprise — and the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine. (shrink)

Jim buys a ticket in a million-ticket lottery. He knows it is a fair lottery, but, given the odds, he believes he will lose. When the winning ticket is chosen, it is not his. Did he know his ticket would lose? It seems that he did not. After all, if he knew his ticket would lose, why would he have bought it? Further, if he knew his ticket would lose, then, given that his ticket is no different in its chances (...) of winning from any other ticket, it seems that by parity of reasoning he should also know that every other ticket would lose. But of course he doesn’t know that; in fact, he knows that not every ticket will lose. (shrink)