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

Depression is a disorder of impaired emotion regulation. Consequently, examining individual differences in the habitual use of emotion-regulation strategies has considerable potential to inform models of this debilitating disorder. The aim of the current study was to identify cognitive processes that may be associated with the use of emotion-regulation strategies and to elucidate their relation to depression. Depression has been found to be associated with difficulties in cognitive control and, more specifically, with difficulties inhibiting the processing of negative material. We (...) used a negative affective priming task to assess the relations among inhibition and individual differences in the habitual use of rumination, reappraisal, and expressive suppression in clinically depressed, formerly depressed, and never-depressed participants. We found that depressed participants exhibited the predicted lack of inhibition when processing negative material. Moreover, within the group of depressed participants, reduced inhibition of negative material was associated with greater rumination. Across the entire sample, reduced inhibition of negative material was related to less use of reappraisal and more use of expressive suppression. Finally, within the formerly depressed group, less use of reappraisal, more use of rumination, and greater expressive suppression were related to higher levels of depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that individual differences in the use of emotion-regulation strategies play an important role in depression, and that deficits in cognitive control are related to the use of maladaptive emotion-regulation strategies in this disorder. (shrink)

In the present study we elucidate the emotional and executive control interactions that might underlie optimism and pessimism. Participants completed a self-report measure of optimism/pessimism and performed an emotion faces categorisation task and an emotion n-back task in which they indicated whether each of a series of faces had the same or a different emotional expression (happy, sad, neutral) as the face presented two trials before. Trials were structured to measure latency to update emotional content in working memory (WM). More (...) pessimistic individuals formed connections among positive stimuli, and broke connections among positive and sad stimuli, in WM more slowly than did less pessimistic individuals; levels of optimism/pessimism did not affect the rate with which individuals formed and broke connections among neutral representations in WM. It appears, therefore, that levels of pessimism are related to specific affective cognitive mechanisms in WM that may be involved in emotion regulation. (shrink)

Several decades of research converge on the formulation that individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder exhibit negative biases in their processing of emotional information. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that traditional between-group comparisons have obscured the substantial heterogeneity of cognitive and affective dysfunction that is associated with depressive symptomatology. In this article, we review the findings of research examining attention to and memory for negative emotional information using a more dimensional perspective on depression. Specifically, we explore studies that assess (...) cognitive biases along a continuum of depressive symptom severity and consider the influence of co-occurring dimensions of functioning, in particular the severity of anxiety symptoms. Finally, we identify critical empirical questions and issues in this growing literature. (shrink)

This section of the journal consists of reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic by feminist bioethicists. We wanted to have a record in IJFAB of the ways in which feminist bioethicists/feminist bioethics were and are affected by the pandemic and also record how our community sees feminist approaches to bioethics as providing resources for understanding and addressing ethical themes raised by the pandemic. The contributions we received cover a wide range of personal, professional, and theoretical issues and approach them in different (...) ways. We are deeply grateful to the authors for sharing their experiences, and hope that our readers find their contributions engaging and... (shrink)

The process of continuing education of paramedics is based on gaining educational credits during five-year educational periods. One of the forms of self-improvement are Internet-based educational programs. The lack of regulations concerning the organizational and technical aspects of e-learning made the authors attempt to analyze the phenomenon. The aim of the article is to present an initial analysis of the role of online educational programs in comparison with other forms of professional training of paramedics. One in three respondents has recently (...) used one of the methods of distance learning. Despite the low awareness of the effectiveness of e-learning, almost 70% of the interviewees expressed a positive opinion about it and over 50% were willing to use such forms in the future. The respondents preferred online trainings in the asynchronous version, containing audio-visual materials and providing the possibility to obtain a certificate issued to the participant after completing the course. The demand for topics in the area of professional training included mainly the fields of Drug Therapy, electrotherapy, electrocardiogram evaluation, medical segregation, and help in delivery in pre-hospital conditions. Modern forms of distance learning do not make it possible to acquire practical skills, yet their role in professional training of paramedics is still significant. According to the authors, online educational programs constitute an effective complement to traditional training through the performance of tasks in a mixed form, known as blended-learning. (shrink)

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

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

This book offers both an introduction to the methods and language of moral psychology as a philosophical field, and to sadness as an emotion.

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”The American election of 2016 was, in its vitriol, polarization, and outcome, unlike any in recent memory. This paper addresses and critiques the anti-refugee rhetoric and policies, as well as their uncritical uptake, which developed around the candidacy of Donald Trump. My intent is to examine and confront the fact that some of this election cycle’s cruelest, most violent, and most racist rhetoric was reserved for Syrian (...) refugees, and to consider some possible responses to such speech in the future. This anti-refugee rhetoric, I suggest, both contributed decisively to Donald Trump’s victory and created potentially lasting toxic... (shrink)

The Moral Psychology of Regret assembles scholars from several disciplines, including philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, law and neuroscience, to present regret not merely as a feeling or affect but as an emotion of great moral significance that underwrites how we understand ourselves and each other.

In "Neurotechnologies, Relational Autonomy, and Authenticity," Mary Walker and Catriona Mackenzie engage with discourses surrounding the morality of neurotechnologies, arguing that these debates have been largely mistaken in their focus on worries about the effects of emerging technologies on human authenticity. They offer an alternative, autonomy-centered approach that problematizes concerns about authenticity as necessarily "essentialist or existentialist views of the self" that "transcends socialization". Instead, they suggest that, although authenticity is a condition for self-governance, autonomy itself is the more helpful (...) way to frame current debates about neurotechnologies.The goals of their... (shrink)

BackgroundExposure to early life stress is alarmingly prevalent and has been linked to the high rates of depression documented in adolescence. Researchers have theorized that ELS may increase adolescents’ vulnerability or reactivity to the effects of subsequent stressors, placing them at higher risk for developing symptoms of depression.MethodsWe tested this formulation in a longitudinal study by assessing levels of stress and depression during the COVID-19 pandemic in a sample of adolescents from the San Francisco Bay Area who had been characterized (...) 3–7 years earlier with respect to exposure to ELS and symptoms of depression.ResultsAs expected, severity of ELS predicted levels of depressive symptoms during the pandemic [r = 0.26, p = 0.006], which were higher in females than in males [t = −3.56, p < 0.001]. Importantly, the association between ELS and depression was mediated by adolescents’ reported levels of stress, even after controlling for demographic variables.ConclusionsThese findings underscore the importance of monitoring the mental health of vulnerable children and adolescents during this pandemic and targeting perceived stress in high-risk youth. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic and its conflict with science denialism raises the question of how philosophers teaching bioethics should respond to debates concerning truth, scientific evidence, and medical treatment raised by their students. We suggest that philosophical responses to the spread of serious disinformation in the health care context can be effectively explored in bioethics courses through discussions of informed consent, patient autonomy, the nature of scientific evidence, and moral responsibly for one’s views in ways that are especially important in the (...) current pandemic era. Addressing these issues offers important epistemological grounding for students who will soon be making biomedical judgments and policies, as well as students who, like the rest of us, will be on the receiving end of those decisions. We argue that helping all of our students to understand the epistemological structures, and the moral consequences, of biomedicine and its detractors is a vital part of the professor’s responsibility. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic and its conflict with science denialism raises the question of how philosophers teaching bioethics should respond to debates concerning truth, scientific evidence, and medical treatment raised by their students. We suggest that philosophical responses to the spread of serious disinformation in the health care context can be effectively explored in bioethics courses through discussions of informed consent, patient autonomy, the nature of scientific evidence, and moral responsibly for one’s views in ways that are especially important in the (...) current pandemic era. Addressing these issues offers important epistemological grounding for students who will soon be making biomedical judgments and policies, as well as students who, like the rest of us, will be on the receiving end of those decisions. We argue that helping all of our students to understand the epistemological structures, and the moral consequences, of biomedicine and its detractors is a vital part of the professor’s responsibility. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the reasons for, and consequences of, expanding our notions of human embodiment to virtual worlds. Increasingly, it is within virtual environments that we seek to extend, and enhance, who we are. Yet, philosophical worries persist about what sorts of selves count as moral agents, and the extent to which self-enhancements affect personal identity and agency. This paper critiques and expands the discourse on embodiment and personal identity by locating it within the virtual environments of Second Life, (...) challenging the prevailing limitations of what counts as identity-constituting embodiment. I argue that more inclusive notions of embodiment make possible a deeper understanding of its moral and epistemic force that constitutes and locates our identities in a universe of shared moral understandings. Thus, by including enhanced virtual embodiments alongside the non-virtual, not only do we expand our ideas of what it might mean to be embodied, but we also deepen our moral vocabularies of the self. (shrink)

One of my favorite sentences in Hilde Lindemann’s lucid and remarkable book, Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities is this: “To have lived... as a person is to have taken my proper place in the social world that lets us make selves of each other”. With this phrase, as with the rest of her book, Lindemann manages to pull off that rarest of rare feats in academic philosophical writing: to say something that is at the same (...) time philosophically insightful and universally relevant for beings like ourselves—something that not just describes and categorizes the modes of being a person, but says why personhood matters morally, why it deserves closer philosophical attention, and in the.. (shrink)

The ongoing trauma of COVID-19 will no doubt mark entire generations in ways inherent in an unmanaged global pandemic. The question that I ask is why this ongoing trauma seems so particularly profound and so uniquely shattering, and whether there is anything that we could do now, while still in the midst of disaster, to begin the process of social and moral repair? I will begin by considering the trauma of isolation with unknown time-horizons, and argue that it not only (...) damages our experiences as social selves, but its languages of overwhelming grief rob us of hope of self-restoration. Second, I will examine some reasons for the “why us”-type of trauma experienced by so many in the Global North, and suggest that such laments are predicated on the misalignment among our socio-historical awareness, disaster-imagination, and our sense of ourselves as uniquely unfortunate. Finally, relying in part on Viktor Frankl’s notion of “tragic optimism,” I conclude by considering how we may begin to reconsider our traumas as not just endings of what is, but beginnings of what still might be —as repair without a master plan. (shrink)

Losing the sense of oneself is no trivial matter regardless of the reasons. But when these reasons have to do with the doubly-marginalizing circumstances of serious physical illness and subsequent hospitalization, the loss can be devastating in ways that extend beyond the patient’s release. Because the hierarchical practices and juridical moral theories that govern physician-patient hospital relationships in the United States largely disregard such losses by paying insufficient attention to power differentials and to the unique dilemmas presented by individual cases, (...) patient care calls for better, nonideal approaches to the well-being of this vulnerable population. Specifically, the medical and administrative norms that pervade patient care both harm and alienate those subject to their power by damaging whatever sense of personal identity that an otherwise seriously ill patient might still have. By stripping away not only patient self-trust and voice, but also any semblance of agency itself, the current normative models of hospital care mark those already burdened by illness as mere bodies—not as morally equal participants in the pursuit of healing. Moving toward any semblance of change requires a fundamental re-assessment of the relationship between the patient and the institutional arrangements and priorities. For such a reevaluation to take place, nothing less than an institutional shift toward nonideal, narratively-grounded approaches to the overall well-being of the patient is required. Only then might the status of the patient as a person begin to matter as an essential part of meaningful practices of hospital care. (shrink)

This book offers a unique collection of philosophers engaging in public philosophy, offering responses to, and reflections on, the moral, political, social, and medical dilemmas born of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this paper, I address the marginalization of Russian immigrant patients within the American medical system. I argue that their already vulnerable position as immigrants with serious illnesses or conditions is exacerbated by unfamiliar social, cultural, and psychological terrain. This complex situation calls for a revision of the clinician–patient model in favor of a more comprehensive approach that takes seriously their double marginalization and its effects. I claim that one such approach, narrative medicine, can begin to address their marginalized status (...) by attending to not only the symptoms of the body, but to the story of the illness experience. (shrink)

The Moral Psychology of Regret assembles scholars from several disciplines, including philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, law and neuroscience, to present regret not merely as a feeling or affect but as an emotion of great moral significance that underwrites how we understand ourselves and each other.