The emergent Coronavirus Disease 2019 caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 could produce a maternal immune activation via the inflammatory response during gestation that may impair fetal neurodevelopment and lead to postnatal and adulthood mental illness and behavioral dysfunctions. However, so far, limited evidence exists regarding long-term physiological, immunological, and neurodevelopmental modifications produced by the SARS-CoV-2 in the human maternal-fetal binomial and, particularly, in the offspring. Relevant findings derived from epidemiological and preclinical models show that a MIA (...) is indeed linked to an increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders in the offspring. We hypothesize that a gestational infection triggered by SARS-CoV-2 increases the risks leading to neurodevelopmental disorders of the newborn, which can affect childhood and the long-term quality of life. In particular, disruption of either the maternal or the fetal cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway could cause or exacerbate the severity of COVID-19 in the maternal-fetal binomial. From a translational perspective, in this paper, we discuss the possible manifestation of a MIA by SARS-CoV-2 and the subsequent neurodevelopmental disorders considering the role of the fetal-maternal cytokine cross-talk and the CAP. Specifically, we highlight the urgent need of preclinical studies as well as multicenter and international databanks of maternal-fetal psychophysiological data obtained pre-, during, and post-infection by SARS-CoV-2 from pregnant women and their offspring. (shrink)

The assembly of products or components by operators in industries is a complex task with recurring problems. In these processes, operators often make errors that can lead to defective products. Therefore, they need to be inspected later to verify their correct assembly. The main problems are caused by several reasons including high employee turnover, lack of experience in manufacturing specific products or confusion in interpreting instructions to assemble similar components. In this paper, a novel structured language aimed to describe the (...) required actions to manufacture a product in industrial assembly environments is presented. The main contribution is to provide a formal language to feed automatic systems that can verify through visual control whether the actions performed by the operator are carried out following the standard described by this language. In general, the use of this formal language will allow to minimize the negative impact of errors during assembly and to reduce waste in many forms in the industry. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es explorar las relaciones entre la religión católica y la kultura en Timor-Leste desde una perspectiva histórica y antropológica. Pretendemos mostrar que la relación entre ambas se produce mediante una tensa coexistencia y que no se trata apenas de un sincretismo, resultado de la mezcla de elementos tomados de ambas. Para ello veremos cómo ambos regímenes de creencias se apropian de conceptos ajenos a su liturgia y los resignifican representándolos desde sus propios principios cosmovisvos. Veremos (...) también, mediante un análisis del discurso de un especialista ritual, cómo éste manipula activamente entidades no-humanas de ambos regímenes de creencias, reensamblándolos de un modo que le beneficia, con el objetivo de reforzar su posición en la jerarquía social. Así, mostramos cómo el análisis del enrolamiento de este tipo de entidades en el discurso se hace fundamental para entender los mecanismos de adquisición y distribución de poder en el país. (shrink)

8 March, now known as International Women’s Day, is a day for feminist claims where demonstrations are organized in over 150 countries, with the participation of millions of women all around the world. These demonstrations can be viewed as collective rituals and thus focus attention on the processes that facilitate different psychosocial effects. This work aims to explore the mechanisms involved in participation in the demonstrations of 8 March 2020, collective and ritualized feminist actions, and their correlates associated with personal (...) well-being and collective well-being, collective efficacy and collective growth, and behavioral intention to support the fight for women’s rights. To this end, a cross-cultural study was conducted with the participation of 2,854 people from countries in Latin America and Europe, with a retrospective correlational cross-sectional design and a convenience sample. Participants were divided between demonstration participants and non-demonstrators or followers who monitored participants through the media and social networks. Compared with non-demonstrators and with males, female and non-binary gender respondents had greater scores in mechanisms and criterion variables. Further random-effects model meta-analyses revealed that the perceived emotional synchrony was consistently associated with more proximal mechanisms, as well as with criterion variables. Finally, sequential moderation analyses showed that proposed mechanisms successfully mediated the effects of participation on every criterion variable. These results indicate that participation in 8M marches and demonstrations can be analyzed through the literature on collective rituals. As such, collective participation implies positive outcomes both individually and collectively, which are further reinforced through key psychological mechanisms, in line with a Durkheimian approach to collective rituals. (shrink)

El docente de Música en secundaria asume un itinerario formativo que privilegia el desarrollo de capacidades técnico-musicales sobre lo didáctico-pedagógico. Este estudio analiza la percepción del profesorado en Galicia en lo que respecta en su capacitación para la creación musical, respecto al resto de competencias musicales, transversales y pedagógicas. Mediante un estudio exploratorio a través de cuestionario, se concluye que la creación es concebida como uno de los aspectos menos prioritarios, así como uno de los menos movilizados en la práctica. (...) Ello posibilita el diseño de nuevas líneas investigativas y formativas en el ámbito de la formación del profesorado. (shrink)

Among many contemporary challenges faced by our society is the moral and ethical education of new generations. Young students bring to school a variety of cultural (including religious) backgrounds and worldviews, not rarely of very heterogeneous and conflicting nature. In spite of the secular nature of Brazilian public education system, Federal Constitution of 1988 and the Law of Directives and Bases of National Education (issued in 1996) allow religious education to be offered in public schools. Therefore, religious education is nowadays (...) offered in many schools, spreaded around a country marked by extensive social, economical, ethnical and cultural diversity. A number of researches point to emerging issues of religious nature that are now present in classrooms of many school disciplines -among them, Biology. Article number 205 of Brazilian Federal Constitution reads that education is a right that assists to all, no matter which race, social class or religious affiliation, so that citizens' full development is a primordial objective of education, followed by preparation for the practice of citizenship and work qualification. Schools must be formal spaces for teaching, according to strong and universal ethical principles such as: equality, freedom for learning, pluralism of ideas, and investigating and disseminating art and knowledge, among others. It is a State duty, therefore, to promote and stimulate education with the collaboration of society. As Federal Constitution also reads that each family has this responsibility with children too, it is a matter of concern that, in last years, social and economical factors are forcing families to transfer these duties to schools and teachers. In schools, a number of Biology contents may bring up students' beliefs and worldviews impregnated of common sense, and also feelings of religiosity. These emergent elements may have a significant value for enriching pedagogical interactions, either with discussions about social and cultural plurality, or with challenging or even disrupting educational situations, in which conflicts and oppositions will be brought up as a result of diversity of opinions and views. It is our position that these are two possible ways that can be followed by a teacher, depending on his/her methodological direction and ethical position. We also understand that each teacher, especially Biology teachers working in secondary education, should welcome these discussions in classroom, organizing opportunities for ethical debates, including issues of religious nature, this way presenting scientific concepts of biological phenomena, but also respecting students' cultural and religious values. In official documents that guide the Biology teaching in basic Brazilian education -the directives, the directions and the national parameters -contents such as Ecology and Evolution play a central role due to their integrational power. However, Biology teachers often face a number of difficulties when trying to follow these directives. Problems in their own education, the reductionist and highly content-based nature of Biology education, as well as severe material restrictions for teachers' work in schools are some of the difficulties that may account for this situation. In spite of these difficulties, issues such as abortion, euthanasia, drugs, sexuality, Biological Evolution (BE) and origin of living beings always bring, in classroom, controversial questions that must be part of every teacher's pedagogical practice. Teaching BE has always raised a number of polemical issues, followed by deep conceptual and ethical implications. Therefore, any contribution aimed at helping its approach as a necessary content in Biology teaching is welcomed. This paper aims at showing some of the conditions, attitudes and arguments that may be useful for the teaching of BE. Among them, we point to nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) principle, an ethical and methodological principle proposed in 1997 by palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould. We understand that Gould's principle offers conditions and opportunities to develop what Brazilian educator Paulo Freire calls a dialogical, libertarian and dialectic education, and this paper will follow his educational perspective. Basically, NOMA principle states that both religion and science have their own separate domain. These separate domains should be respected, avoiding their overlapping in issues concerned with each of them separately. However, there are themes, as mentioned above, in which it is possible to identify elements for each of those domains. Biology teachers must then have a very clear view of the differences between explanations offered by each of these domains, when working with their students about contentious issues such as BE. Freire, when describing the necessary elements for educational practice, points that the act of teaching demands both ethics and corporification of words through practice. Opposing his view to simple Puritanism principles, he states that educational practices should be rigorous evidences of decency and purity. Freire also states that, as an act of respect towards any human being, school contents shouldn't be taught without respect to students' moral education. Therefore, according to Freire, to think "right" means to act "right". For Freire, a teacher that is genuinely concerned with moral and ethical development of his/her students will act accordingly in classroom, bringing into discussion issues that benefit both from science knowledge and also from students' non-scientific worldviews. We propose that Gould's NOMA principle can be developed by teachers as a fruitful strategy for teaching Biology contents as BE. Learning from some examples taken from school contents, we aim to show that the application of such principle in school would help clarifying the nature and foundations of evolutionary theories, mainly neo-Darwinism, as well as the non-overlapping domains of scientific and religious worlds. Therefore, it would be possible to maintain the necessary distance (demanded for ethical reasons) from subjective issues, without any harm for the necessary, objective and deep appreciation of scientific knowledge. In this perspective, we understand that well-known incompatibilities between science and religion could be clarified and discussed with students, since each of these domains have an important role in pupils' personal development. (shrink)

The need for research to advance scientific understanding must be balanced with ensuring the rights and wellbeing of participants are safeguarded, with some research topics posing more ethical quandaries for researchers than others. Moral injury is one such topic. Exposure to potentially morally injurious experiences can lead to significant distress, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and selfinjury. In this article, we discuss how the rapid expansion of research in the field of moral injury could threaten the wellbeing, dignity and integrity (...) of participants. We also examine key guidance for carrying out ethically responsible research with participants’ rights to self-determination, confidentiality, non-maleficence and beneficence discussed in relation to the study of moral injury. We describe how investigations of moral injury are likely to pose several challenges for researchers including managing disclosures of potentially illegal acts, the risk of harm that repeated questioning about guilt and shame may pose to participant wellbeing in longitudinal studies, as well as the possible negative impact of exposure to vicarious trauma on researchers themselves. Finally, we offer several practical recommendations that researchers, research ethics committees and other regulatory bodies can take to protect participant rights, maximise the potential benefits of research outputs and ensure the field continues to expand in an ethically responsible way. (shrink)

We present diverse evidence for the claim of Pullum and Rawlins (2007) that expressives behave differently from descriptives in constructions that enforce a particular kind of semantic identity between elements. Our data are drawn from a wide variety of languages and construction types, and they point uniformly to a basic linguistic distinction between descriptive content and expressive content (Kaplan 1999; Potts 2007).

El presente trabajo investiga las tesis sobre el poder civil de Alonso de la Veracruz que buscan incorporar en la comunidad política española a los habitantes autóctonos del Nuevo Mundo, tesis que suelen relacionarse con F. de Vitoria y el tomismo español, y que últimamente son consideradas parte del republicanismo novohispano elaborado desde la periferia americana. Se busca demostrar que su propósito era aplicar una teoría de derechos naturales, sin que ello implique participación política de los indios americanos. Se (...) analiza la postura del fraile frente a la diversidad cultural y la guerra contra los indios. The paper explores Alonso de la Veracruz's theses on civil power, which sought to integrate the native inhabitants of the New World into the Spanish political community. These theses, which have usually been associated with F. de Vitoria and Spanish Thomism, have recently come to be considered part of a Novohispanic republicanism developed in the American periphery. The article seeks to show that the purpose of such theses was to apply a theory of natural rights that did not entail the political participation of the indigenous population, as well as to analyze Veracruz's position regarding cultural diversity and the war against the indigenous peoples. (shrink)

The History of Political Ideas by the German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin is a monumental work of around 2,600 pages. It remained unpublished during his lifetime, and it came to light through the American edition and the now completed Portuguese edition. Being the author of the first world edition of an abridged version of the History of Political Ideas ; the translator of the first three volumes of the 2012-2018 Portuguese edition; and the author of The civil philosophy of (...) class='Hi'>Eric Voegelin I consider that the History of Political Ideas challenges the present climate of opinion: it subverts the dominant corrosive forces of moral relativism, intolerant neo-positivism, end-of-history obsessions, postmodernist deconstructions, agnosticism, nihilism, new age religions, and the all-pervasive ideology of money. Eric Voegelin achieves all this leading his readers from Antiquity to Modern Age. His monumental work begins with the “spiritual disintegration” of the Greek world, after the peak of Plato and Aristotle, a disintegration that ushered a long process of transition in the self-understanding of man in the Mediterranean world. The series goes through Middle Ages, R enaissance and Reformation as Voegelin analyzes the collapse of imperial Christianity, which led to the rise of autonomous reason and sectarian revolts that reached full development in later centuries. A new form of modern human consciousness replaced the Christian understanding of a divinely created closed cosmos. The collection ends - in a suspensive way - with “The Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man” focused on thinkers such as Comte, Bakunine and Marx; although they experienced true epiphanies, they become self-obsessed to the detriment of the world to which they refer. Such “Apocalypse of Man” must now be challenged, albeit with methodologies and hermeneutic principles other than those that Voegelin himself abandoned some decades ago. (shrink)

La rencontre du philosophe Éric Weil permet au théologien Henri Bouillard de mettre en oeuvre son concept de théologie fondamentale, notamment à propos du rapport entre l’infini de la pensée philosophique et le Dieu de la foi chrétienne; mais elle le conforte aussi à ne pas relever le défi des voies nouvelles ouvertes à la question de Dieu.

Reading Maurice Blondel the philosopher leads Henri Bouillard the theologian to claim, in his work on Karl Barth, a knowledge of God of philosophical origin. His acquaintance with the philosopher Éric Weil makes him advocate, in his later works, a knowledge of God of religious origin. His successive stances pass through an hermeneutic of the definition of the first Council of Vatican, and his final position is governed by presuppositions that will be confirmed subsequently.

Henri Bouillard est initié par Kant à un regard critique. Sa rencontre avec saint Thomas le solidarise avec la «nouvelle théologie», et l'ouvre à une démarche herméneutique. Sa rencontre avec Maurice Blondel l'amène à opérer le tournant anthropologique en théologie. Sa rencontre avec Karl Barth le conduit à se rallier avec réserve à la position de celui-ci. Sa rencontre avec Éric Weil l'entraîne à approfondir le tournant anthropologique, mais à récuser les théologies politiques, et à repousser le recours aux sciences (...) humaines en théologie. Bref, ces quatre rencontres l'engagent à passer d'une démarche dogmatique à une approche herméneutique, mais à écarter une méthode généalogique entée sur les sciences humaines. (shrink)

Le théologien Henri Bouillard confronte les conceptions weilienne et lévinasienne de Dieu, parce qu’il ne les partage pas entièrement: pour lui comme pour les deux philosophes, Dieu n’est pas un étant; mais pour lui contrairement à Éric Weil, Dieu transcende le monde; et pour lui contrairement à Emmanuel Lévinas, Dieu ne reste pas transcendant, il devient immanent au monde en s’incarnant en Jésus.

Haciendo uso de paquete informático Bibliometrix y de la Guía Prisma, se desarrolló un análisis bibliométrico de la literatura proveniente de la Web of Science sobre la competencia digital docente universitaria. Se delimita la investigación a través de tesauros de Eric. Se plantearon preguntas de investigación relacionadas con las fuentes de datos, los autores y las redes de colaboración. La investigación evidencia incrementos en la producción a partir del año 2019, la nacionalidad de los autores y la filiación de (...) instituciones resaltan a través de redes de investigaciones extendidas en Iberoamérica. Es necesario ampliar este estudio a otras bases científicas. (shrink)

Se realizó una revisión sistemática de la literatura localizada en Scopus sobre la competencia digital (CD) del profesorado universitario; con ayuda de la metodología PRISMA y operadores se delimitó la investigación a través de tesauros de Eric. Los autores/entidades españolas resaltan en la temática, existen esfuerzos orientados al diseño, validación y aplicación de rúbricas a nivel mundial. Los abordajes predominantemente son cuantitativos. La investigación fortalece el entendimiento sobre la CD, existe un efecto positivo otorgado por las CD docentes en (...) la formación de estudiantes, se requiere desarrollar planes de formación y emprender esfuerzos similares en otras bases de datos científicas. (shrink)

We extend epistemic stit theory with a modality \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$I_\alpha \varphi $$\end{document}, meant to express that at some moment agent \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\alpha $$\end{document} had a present-directed intention toward the realization of \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\varphi $$\end{document}. The semantics is based on the extension of stit frames with special topologies associated to agents. The open sets of the associated topology (...) are interpreted as present-directed intentions, that support whether an agent had an intention of realizing a specific state of affairs when it chose one of its available actions and executed it. As an important application, we use \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$I_\alpha \varphi $$\end{document} to formalize intentional action and intentional responsibility. We present an axiom system for our logic of intentionality, and prove that it is sound and complete. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo propone que la 31ª Bienal de Sao Paulo entraña un afán emancipador para los "sin tierra" - errantes, migrantes y viajeros. Para ello se conforma como un cuerpo sin órganos, que despliega estrategias liberadoras promoviendo: desarticulación, experimentación, vagabundeo y tránsito de sujetos y pueblos. Esta Bienal, en tanto CsO, mueve intensidades como flujos sensibles por los intersticios de los proyectos artísticos dispuestos en organismo. Acá el CsO es un conjunto de prácticas reservadas a desterritorializar los estratos (...) del "organismo social" y hacer estallar los órganos estructurados en dichos sistemas.: This article shows that the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial has an emancipatory affinity for the landless - wanderers, migrants, and travelers. As such it becomes a Body without Organs that displays liberating strategies, promoting disarticulation, experimentation, wandering, and the transit of subjects and peoples. This Biennial, as a BwO, moves intensities as sensible flows through the interstices of the artistic projects inside the organism. Here, the BwO becomes a set of practices that deterritorialize the strata of the "social organism", making the structured organs in these systems explode. (shrink)

In the digital age, the global software development sector has been a forerunner in implementing new ways and configurations for remote teamwork using information and communication technologies on a widespread basis. Crises and technological advances have influenced each other to bring about changes in the ways of working. In the 70’s of the last century, in the middle of the so-called oil crisis, the concept of teleworking was defined using remote computer equipment to access office equipment and thus avoid moving (...) around using traditional vehicles. Then from the 90s, with the advent of communications and the widespread use of the Internet, the first virtual work teams were implemented in software development companies that already had some of the important characteristics needed to work in this way, such as, cultural diversity, characterized tasks, geographical distribution of members, communication, interdependence of tasks, leadership, cohesion, empowerment, confidence, virtuality. This manuscript groups the main factors into different models proposed by the literature and also analyzes the results of a study conducted in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis on 317 software development teams that had to work in virtual teams. The results of the quantitative methodology with structural equation modeling based on variance using the partial least squares route method are analyzed. The results of the research focus on some determinants that can directly affect the performance of the virtual team. A first determinant is communication in relation to the tasks. The second is trust in relation to leadership, empowerment and cohesion. The results of virtual teams provide information that can serve as a basis for future research lines for the implementation of virtual work strategies in post-pandemic work. (shrink)

This paper takes the view that compensated donation and altruism are not incompatible. In particular, it holds that the arguments against giving compensation stand on weak rational grounds: the charge that compensation fosters “commodification” has neither been specific enough to account for different types of monetary transactions nor sufficiently grounded in reality to be rationally convincing; although altruism is commendable, organ donors should not be compelled to act purely on the basis of altruistic motivations, especially if there are good reasons (...) to believe that significantly more lives can be saved and enhanced if incentives are put in place, and offering compensation for organs does not necessarily lead to exploitation—on the contrary, it may be regarded as a necessity in efforts to minimise the level of exploitation that already exists in current organ procurement systems. (shrink)

The empirical relationship between a firm’s social performance and its financial performance is still not well established in the literature. Despite more than 30 years of research and more than 100 empirical studies on the issue, the results are still mixed. We argue that the heterogeneous results found in previous studies are not due exclusively to problems related with the measurement instruments or the samples used. Instead, we posit that a more fundamental problem related with the endogeneity of social strategic (...) decisions could be driving most of the empirical findings. We show that, using a panel data of 658 firms from 1991 to 2005, how some of the results found in previous research change, and some are even reversed when endogeneity is properly taken into account. (shrink)

In the last few decades, the study of terminology has undergone a cognitive shift that has led to the development of several approaches that study the social, linguistic, and cognitive dimension of terms, such as Communicative Theory of Terminology (CTT) and Frame-Based Terminology (FBT). CTT was developed in the early 1990s and argues that the study of terminology should be based on a communicative perspective, taking into account aspects such as the communicators and the context of communication. FBT has been (...) developed from 2007 and uses certain aspects of Frame Semantics to conceptualise specialised domains and create non-language-specific representations through the analysis of the domain event and on the study of the behaviour of the terminological units in texts. The two theories share many of the same premises and propose the representation of the concepts of a domain in an ontology. FBT also proposes a representation in frames. We explore how these two methods of domain representation can be used to represent the terminology of the domain of seafood in Germany and Spain. (shrink)

Ciencias sociales : saberes coloniales y eurocéntricos / Edgardo Lander / - Europa modernidad y eurocentrismo / Enrique Dussel / - La colonialidad a lo largo y a lo ancho : el hemisferio occidental en el horizonte colonial de la modernidad / Walter D. Mignolo / - Naturaleza del poscolonialismo : del eurocentrismo al globocentrismo / Fernando Coronil / - El lugar de la naturaleza y la naturaleza del lugar : ¿globalización o postdesarrollo? / Arturo Escobar / - Ciencias sociales, (...) violencia epistémica y el problema de la invención del otro / Santiago Castro-Gómez / - Superar la exclusión, conquistar la equidad : reformas, políticas y capacidades en el ámbito social / Alejandro Moreno / - Abrir, impensar, y redimesionar las ciencias sociales en América Latina y el Caribe. ¿Es posible una ciencia social no eurocéntrica en nuestra región? / Francisco López Segrera / - Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina / Aníbal Quijano. (shrink)

I criticize the widely accepted “practical” interpretation of the universality test contained in Kant’s first formula of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals – the formula of the universal law of nature. I argue that this interpretation does not work for contradictions in conception because it wrongly takes contradictions in the will as the model for them and, as a consequence, cannot establish a clear distinction between the two kinds of contradiction. This interpretation also assumes (...) an understanding of universality that departs from Kant’s own and, cannot, for this reason, capture the kind of contradiction that he explicitly claims to establish. I provide an alternative interpretation, which I call revised logical interpretation, that allows us to account for contradictions in conception, including those examples that the practical interpretation cannot handle, as well as to establish a clear distinction between the two kinds of contradiction. (shrink)

This paper examines undergraduate business students' perception of corporate social responsibility in cases in which they have not attended any specific course either dealing with CSR or providing training in ethics. A survey was conducted of 535 Spanish business students as future managers. The results show that the stakeholders' perspective deserves a huge attention for those students considering what the keys of business success are. Significant differences in perception were nevertheless identified when a multifactorial analysis was undertaken. Female students are (...) more concerned about CSR issues. The maximization of value for shareholders is less valued by second- and third-year students than by first-year ones. The findings point to a number of important orientations for the future development of university curriculum. (shrink)

A proposal to allow prisoners to save their lives or to be eligible for commutation of sentence by donating kidneys for transplantation has been a subject of controversy in the Philippines. Notwithstanding the vulnerabilities associated with imprisonment, there are good reasons for allowing organ donations by prisoners. Under certain conditions, such donations can be very beneficial not only to the recipients but to the prisoners themselves. While protection needs to be given to avoid coercion and exploitation, overprotection has to be (...) avoided. The prohibition on the involvement of prisoners in organ transplantation constitutes unjustified overprotection. Under certain conditions, prisoners can make genuinely independent decisions. When it can be reasonably ascertained that they are able to decide freely, society should recognise an obligation to help them implement their decisions, such as when they intend to donate an organ as a way of asserting their religious faith and performing a sacrifice in atonement for their sins. (shrink)

We offer an ethical assessment of the market for data used to generate what are sometimes called “consumer scores” (i.e., numerical expressions that are used to describe or predict people’s dispositions and behavior), and we argue that the assessment has ethical implications on how the market for consumer scoring data should be regulated. To conduct the assessment, we employ two heuristics for evaluating markets. One is the “harm” criterion, which relates to whether the market produces serious harms, either for participants (...) in the market, for third parties, or for society as a whole. The other is the “agency” criterion, which relates to whether participants understand the nature and significance of the exchanges they are making, if they can be guaranteed fair representation, or if there is differential need for the market’s good. We argue that consumer scoring data should be subject to the same sort of regulation as the older FICO credit scores. Although the movement in the 1990s that was aimed at regulating the FICO scores was not aimed at restraining a market per se, we argue that the reforms were underwritten by concerns about the same sorts of problems as those outlined by our heuristics. Therefore, consumer data should be subject to the same sort of regulation. (shrink)

Indefinites impose an anti-uniqueness condition on their domain of quantification. The sentence in (1), for instance, cannot be felicitously uttered when it is taken for granted that John has only one friend (Hawkins 1978, 1991, Heim 1991).

This book is about what Mark Rothko and Romy Castro think about painting. The bottom line placed here is: what is matter for a painter? What they want to communicate with their art? And how they do it? This book seeks to uncover some of the secrets that are in minds painters. In the backgrond, waht unites, apparently, two such different artists is the way they establish intimacy with matter, even that a concept of matter or intimacy may assume (...) and be used in different interpretations. (shrink)

The harms associated with wireless mobile devices (e.g. smartphones) are well documented. They have been linked to anxiety, depression, diminished attention span, sleep disturbance, and decreased relationship satisfaction. Perhaps what is most worrying from a moral perspective, however, is the effect these devices can have on our autonomy. In this article, we argue that there is an obligation to foster and safeguard autonomy in ourselves, and we suggest that wireless mobile devices pose a serious threat to our capacity to fulfill (...) this obligation. We defend the existence of an imperfect duty to be a ‘digital minimalist’. That is, we have a moral obligation to be intentional about how and to what extent we use these devices. The empirical findings already justify prudential reasons in favor of digital minimalism, but the moral duty is distinct from and independent of prudential considerations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to offer a version of the so-called conversational hypothesis of the ontogenetic connection between language and mindreading (Harris 1996, 2005; Van Cleave and Gauker 2010; Hughes et al. 2006). After arguing against a particular way of understanding the hypothesis (the communicative view), I will start from the justificatory view in philosophy of social cognition (Andrews 2012; Hutto 2004; Zawidzki 2013) to make the case for the idea that the primary function of belief and desire (...) attributions is to justify and normalize deviant patterns of behaviour. Following this framework, I elaborate upon the idea that development of folk psychological skills requires the subjects to engage in conversationally mediated joint and cooperative activities in order to acquire the conceptual capacity of ascribing propositional attitudes. After presenting the general version of the hypothesis, I present several testable sub-hypotheses and some psychological studies that give empirical plausibility to the hypothesis. (shrink)

Friends and foes of liberal neutrality assume that neutrality presupposes pluralism. On this view, the state should be neutral among the many permissible conceptions of the individual good that citizens affirm. I argue that neutrality need not be construed as a response to pluralism. I focus on the case of specifically religious neutrality and argue that it can be an appropriate political response to what I call “the fact of religious hegemony,” which is a social scenario in which a particular (...) religion is unanimously recognized as dominant. Religious neutrality, in this kind of context, requires the state to avoid all religious words and symbols that can be taken as an expression of endorsement or criticism of religion. I take this conception of religious neutrality from both political history and current political practice and discourse. Neutrality was originally conceived of as a proper political response in contexts of religious hegemony both in France and in Mexico. Today, and despite the growth of religious pluralism, this conception continues to be a live political posture in the places where it first originated. I call it “neutrality as independence from religion” and argue that it differs from liberal neutrality in crucial respects. (shrink)