Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 4, April 2022.

In this article, we aim to map out the complexities which characterise debates about the ethics of vaccine distribution, particularly those surrounding the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. In doing so, we distinguish three general principles which might be used to distribute goods and two ambiguities in how one might wish to spell them out. We then argue that we can understand actual debates around the COVID-19 vaccine – including those over prioritising vaccinating the most vulnerable – as reflecting disagreements (...) over these principles. Finally, we shift our attention away from traditional discussions of distributive justice, highlighting the importance of concerns about risk imposition, special duties, and social roles in explaining debates over the COVID-19 vaccine. We conclude that the normative complexity this article highlights deepens the need for decision-making bodies to be sensitive to public input. (shrink)

In this study, we analyzed the academic integrity policies of colleges in Ontario, Canada, casting a specific lens on contract cheating. We extracted data from 28 individual documents from 22-publicly-funded colleges including policies and procedures (n = 27) and code of conduct (n = 1). We analyzed the characteristics of the documents from three perspectives: (a) document type and titles; (b) policy language; and (c) policy principles. Then we examined five core elements of the documentation including (a) access; (b) approach; (...) (c) responsibility; (d) detail; and (e) support. Key findings revealed that specific and direct language pertaining to contract cheating was largely absent from the policy documents, that underlying policy principles lacked clear definition, and that exemplary policy has yet to be developed in this context. We conclude with recommendations for increased policy research in the area of academic integrity and a call for policy revision in Canadian higher education institutions to more explicitly address the issue of contract cheating, as well as provide more support to students and other campus stakeholders to better understand how contract cheating impacts and impedes teaching and learning. (shrink)

Introduction: Vulnerability is a poorly understood concept in research ethics, often aligned to autonomy and consent. A recent addition to the literature represents a taxonomy of vulnerability developed by Kipnis, but this refers to the conduct of clinical trials rather than qualitative research, which may raise different issues. Aim: To examine issues of vulnerability in cancer and palliative care research obtained through qualitative interviews. Method: Secondary analysis of qualitative data from 26 black Caribbean and 19 white British patients with advanced (...) cancer. Results: Four domains of vulnerability derived from Kipnis’s taxonomy were identified and included: (i) communicative vulnerability, represented by participants impaired in their ability to communicate because of distressing symptoms; (ii) institutional vulnerability, which referred to participants who existed under the authority of others—for example, in hospital; (iii) deferential vulnerability, which included participants who were subject to the informal authority or the independent interests of others; (iv) medical vulnerability, which referred to participants with distressing medical conditions; and (v) social vulnerability, which included participants considered to belong to an undervalued social group. Participants from both ethnic groups populated all these domains, but those who were black Caribbean were more present among the socially vulnerable. Conclusions: Current classifications of vulnerability require reinterpretation when applied to qualitative research at the end of life. We recommend that researchers and research ethics committees reconceptualise vulnerability using the domains identified in this study and consider the research context and interviewers’ skills. (shrink)

Most of what has been written about Buber and education tend to be studies of two kinds: theoretical studies of his philosophical views on education, and specific case studies that aim at putting theory into practice. The perspective taken has always been to hold a dialogue with Buber's works in order to identify and analyse critically Buber's views and, in some cases, to put them into practice; that is, commentators dialogue with the text. In this article our aims are of (...) a different kind. First and fundamentally, we demonstrate the political and social ontological basis of Buber's thought; that is, we show that Buber, the philosopher of dialogue, held an authentic dialogue with his time, and demonstrate that Buber's work, in this case I and Thou, holds a dialogue with its Zeitgeist; that is the text dialogues with its Zeitgeist. This approach leads us to our second aim, which is to demonstrate that Buber's thought remains relevant to our times, particularly when it serves as a dialogical educational tool with which to resolve conflict of all types and to aid dialogue towards peace in inter‐community relations. (shrink)

Contemporary policy debates about managing the enormous volume of online content have taken a renewed focus on upload filtering, automated detection of potentially illegal content, and other “proactive measures”. Often, policymakers and tech industry players invoke artificial intelligence as the solution to complex challenges around online content, promising that AI is a scant few years away from resolving everything from hate speech to harassment to the spread of terrorist propaganda. Missing from these promises, however, is an acknowledgement that proactive identification (...) and automated removal of user-generated content raises problems beyond issues of “accuracy” and overbreadth--problems that will not be solved with more sophisticated AI. In this commentary, I discuss how the technical realities of content filtering stack up against the protections for freedom of expression in international human rights law. As policymakers and companies around the world turn to AI for communications governance, it is crucial that we recall why legal protections for speech have included presumptions against prior censorship, and consider carefully how proactive content moderation will fundamentally re-shape the relationship between rules, people, and their speech. (shrink)

Lockdown measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic involve placing huge burdens on some members of society for the sake of benefiting other members of society. How should we decide when these policies are permissible? Many writers propose we should address this question using cost-benefit analysis, a broadly consequentialist approach. We argue for an alternative non-consequentialist approach, grounded in contractualist moral theorising. The first section sets up key issues in the ethics of lockdown, and sketches the apparent appeal of addressing (...) these problems in a CBA frame. The second section argues that CBA fundamentally distorts the normative landscape in two ways: first, in principle, it allows very many morally trivial preferences—say, for a coffee—might outweigh morally weighty life-and-death concerns; second, it is insensitive to the core moral distinction between victims and vectors of disease. The third section sketches our non-consequentialist alternative, grounded in Thomas Scanlon’s contractualist moral theory. On this account, the ethics of self-defence implies a strong default presumption in favour of a highly restrictive, universal lockdown policy: we then ask whether there are alternatives to such a policy which are justifiable to all affected parties, paying particular attention to the complaints of those most burdened by policy. In the fourth section, we defend our contractualist approach against the charge that it is impractical or counterintuitive, noting that actual CBAs face similar, or worse, challenges. (shrink)

Bruce Blackshaw and Perry Hendricks have recently developed and defended the impairment argument against abortion, arguing that the immorality of giving a child fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) provides us with reason to believe that abortion is immoral. In this paper we forward two criticisms of the impairment argument. First, we highlight that, as it currently stands, the argument is very weak and accomplishes very little. Second, we argue that Blackshaw and Hendricks are fundamentally mistaken about what makes giving a child (...) FAS immoral. Once we acknowledge this, it is clear that our intuitions about giving a child FAS provide no support for the supposed immorality of abortion. (shrink)

The ongoing generation of expectations is fundamental to listeners’ experience of music, but research into types of statistical information that listeners extract from musical melodies has tended to emphasize transition probabilities and n‐grams, with limited consideration given to other types of statistical learning that may be relevant. Temporal associations between scale degrees represent a different type of information present in musical melodies that can be learned from musical corpora using expectation networks, a computationally simple method based on activation and decay. (...) Expectation networks infer the expectation of encountering one scale degree followed in the near (but not necessarily immediate) future by another given scale degree, with previous work suggesting that scale degree associations learned by expectation networks better predict listener ratings of pitch similarity than transition probabilities. The current work outlines how these learned scale degree associations can be combined to predict melodic continuations and tests the resulting predictions on a dataset of listener responses to a musical cloze task previously used to compare two other models of melodic expectation, a variable‐order Markov model (IDyOM) and Temperley's music‐theoretically motivated model. Under multinomial logistic regression, all three models explain significant unique variance in human melodic expectations, with coefficient estimates highest for expectation networks. These results suggest that generalized scale degree associations informed by both adjacent and nonadjacent relationships between melodic notes influence listeners’ melodic predictions above and beyond n‐gram context, highlighting the need to consider a broader range of statistical learning processes that may underlie listeners’ expectations for upcoming musical events. (shrink)

Adolescents are increasingly at risk for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. The prolonged latency period, sometimes in excess of five years, and the incubation period of up to 10 years before the manifestation of symptoms, may foster adolescents’ false sense of invincibility and denial as they often do not see the devastating effects of the disease in their peers until they are older. In turn, their practice of safer sex may be hindered and thereby contribute (...) to the escalation of this public health crisis among sexually active adolescents. Prevention-focused recommendations were made in the USA as a result of this crisis. Recommendations were made to: (1) include STD/HIV education in the curricula of grades kindergarten to 12; (2) increase to at least 75% the proportion of primary care and mental health professionals who provide age-appropriate STD/HIV prevention counselling to adolescents; and (3) expand HIV prevention services to include age-appropriate HIV education curricula for students in grades 4-12 in 95% of schools. Yet, in the USA, the provision of school-based comprehensive STD/HIV education has been difficult to achieve owing to certain limitations and, in some instances, legal action. These limitations include: limited student access; restricted content; and the implementation of sporadic and/or brief educational programmes. Given these recommendations and the fact that adolescents are acquiring STDs and HIV infections at increasing rates, and despite the limitations and legal actions, do health care professionals not have an ethical obligation to provide adolescents with comprehensive STD/HIV prevention education? This ethical dilemma will be discussed using the ethical decision-making principles of ‘autonomy’ and ‘beneficence’, and a decision-making model proposed by Thompson and Thompson, and by Chally and Loric. (shrink)

Although narcissists often emerge as leaders, the relationship between leader narcissism and follower performance is ambiguous and often even found to be negative. For women, narcissism seems especially likely to lead to negative evaluations. Since narcissists have the tendency to be impulsive and change their minds on a whim, they may come across as inconsistent. We propose “inconsistent leader behavior” as a new mechanism in the relationship between leader narcissism and follower performance and argue that leader gender plays an important (...) role in whether narcissistic leaders are perceived as inconsistent. Specifically, we expect leader narcissism to have a negative relationship with follower performance through perceived inconsistent leader behavior, especially for female leaders. Thus, we examine leader gender as a personal factor moderating the relationship between narcissism and perceived inconsistent behavior. Also, as perceived inconsistency is likely less problematic when a good relationship exists, we examine leader–member exchange as a contextual condition moderating the relationship between leader behavior and follower performance. We test our moderated mediation model in a multi-source study with 165 unique leader–follower dyads. As expected, leader narcissism was positively related to perceived inconsistent leader behavior, and this relationship was stronger for female leaders. Inconsistent leader behavior was negatively related to follower performance, but only when LMX was low. Our research highlights that perceived behavioral inconsistency can be problematic and—for female leaders—provides an explanation of the negative relation of leader narcissism with follower performance and of the inconsistencies in evaluations of narcissistic leaders’ effectiveness. (shrink)

The degradation of modern sport--its commercialization, trivialization, widespread cheating, cult of athletic stars and celebrities, and manipulation by the media--has led to calls for its transformation. William J. Morgan constructs a critical theory of sport that shores up the weak arguments of past attempts and points a way forward to making sport more humane, compelling, and substantive. Drawing on the work of social theorists, Morgan challenges scholars and fans alike to explore new spaces in sport culture and imagine (...) the rich cultural and political possibilities to be found in the pastimes we follow with such passion. (shrink)

Introspection, or metacognition, is the capacity to reflect on our own thoughts and behaviours. Here, we investigated how one specific metacognitive ability develops in adolescence, a period of life associated with the emergence of self-concept and enhanced self-awareness. We employed a task that dissociates objective performance on a visual task from metacognitive ability in a group of 56 participants aged between 11 and 41 years. Metacognitive ability improved significantly with age during adolescence, was highest in late adolescence and plateaued going (...) into adulthood. Our results suggest that awareness of one’s own perceptual decisions shows a prolonged developmental trajectory during adolescence. (shrink)

The use of Big Data—however the term is defined—involves a wide array of issues and stakeholders, thereby increasing numbers of complex decisions around issues including data acquisition, use, and sharing. Big Data is becoming a significant component of practice in an ever-increasing range of disciplines; however, since it is not a coherent “discipline” itself, specific codes of conduct for Big Data users and researchers do not exist. While many institutions have created, or will create, training opportunities to prepare people to (...) work in and around Big Data, insufficient time, space, and thought have been dedicated to training these people to engage with the ethical, legal, and social issues in this new domain. Since Big Data practitioners come from, and work in, diverse contexts, neither a relevant professional code of conduct nor specific formal ethics training are likely to be readily available. This normative paper describes an approach to conceptualizing ethical reasoning and integrating it into training for Big Data use and research. Our approach is based on a published framework that emphasizes ethical reasoning rather than topical knowledge. We describe the formation of professional community norms from two key disciplines that contribute to the emergent field of Big Data: computer science and statistics. Historical analogies from these professions suggest strategies for introducing trainees and orienting practitioners both to ethical reasoning and to a code of professional conduct itself. We include two semester course syllabi to strengthen our thesis that codes of conduct can be harnessed to support the development of ethical reasoning in, and a sense of professional identity among, Big Data practitioners. (shrink)

Objectives“Attachment difficulties” is an umbrella term often used to describe various forms of non-secure attachment. Differentiating “attachment difficulties” from autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has been characterized as challenging. Few studies have explored how this happens in practice, from the perspective of professionals.DesignQualitative study.MethodsWe conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with healthcare professionals from five NHS Foundation Trusts in the United Kingdom. Participants were recruited using a combination of snowballing, convenience and purposive sampling. Data were analyzed using a thematic (...) approach.ResultsWe identified six interrelated themes that might reflect difficulties with differential conceptualization. These include: a clinical lexicon of attachment; approaching attachment with caution; contextual factors; perceived characteristic behaviors; assessing attachment and adjacent supports; spotlighting intervention and dual conceptualization.ConclusionOur results indicate some of the ways suspicions around attachment are raised in practice. We advocate for more dialogue between research and practice communities on issues of differential conceptualization. We call for collaboration between a panel of experts consisting of attachment and neurodevelopmental orientated practitioners and researchers, to clarify issues around differentiating between attachment difficulties, ASD, and ADHD. (shrink)

'Knowledge-First' constitutes what is widely regarded as one of the most significant innovations in contemporary epistemology in the past 25 years. Knowledge-first epistemology is the idea that knowledge per se should not be analysed in terms of its constituent parts (e.g., justification, belief), but rather that these and other notions should be analysed in terms of the concept of knowledge. This volume features a substantive introduction and 13 original essays from leading and up-and-coming philosophers on the topic of knowledge-first philosophy. (...) The contributors' essays range from foundational issues to applications of this project to other disciplines including the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, ethics and action theory. Knowledge First: Approaches in Epistemology and Mind aims to provide a relatively open-ended forum for creative and original scholarship with the potential to contribute and advance debates connected with this philosophical project. (shrink)

In a series of recent works, Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson insist that, given the ease by which irreversible destruction is achievable by a morally wicked minority, (i) strictly cognitive bio-enhancement is currently too risky, while (ii) moral bio-enhancement is plausibly morally mandatory (and urgently so). This article aims to show that the proposal Savulescu and Persson advance relies on several problematic assumptions about the separability of cognitive and moral enhancement as distinct aims. Specifically, we propose that the underpinnings of (...) Savulescu's and Persson's normative argument unravel once it is suitably clear how aiming to cognitively enhance an individual will in part require that one aim to bring about certain moral goods we show to be essential to cognitive flourishing; conversely, aiming to bring about moral enhancement in an individual must involve aiming to improve certain cognitive capacities we show to be essential to moral flourishing. After developing these points in some detail, and their implication for Savulescu's & Persson's proposal, we conclude by outlining some positive suggestions. (shrink)

Recent thinking within philosophy of mind about the ways cognition can extend has yet to be integrated with philosophical theories of emotion, which give cognition a central role. We carve out new ground at the intersection of these areas and, in doing so, defend what we call the extended emotion thesis: the claim that some emotions can extend beyond skin and skull to parts of the external world.

While openmindedness is often cited as a paradigmatic example of an intellectual virtue, the connection between openmindedness and truth is tenuous. Several strategies for reconciling this tension are considered, and each is shown to fail; it is thus claimed that openmindedness, when intellectually virtuous, bears no interesting essential connection to truth. In the final section, the implication of this result is assessed in the wider context of debates about epistemic value.

Recent work in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2010a; Clark 2010b; Palermos 2014) can help to explain why certain kinds of assertions—made on the basis of information stored in our gadgets rather than in biological memory—are properly criticisable in light of misleading implicatures, while others are not.