The bioethical principle of autonomy is problematic regarding the future of the embryo who lacks the ability to self-advocate but will develop this defining human capacity in time. Recent experiments explore the use of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats /Cas9 for germline engineering in the embryo, which alters future generations. The embryo’s inability to express an autonomous decision is an obvious bioethical challenge of germline engineering. The philosopher Joel Feinberg acknowledged that autonomy is developing in children. He advocated that (...) to reserve this future autonomy, parents should be guided to make ethical decisions that provide children with open futures. Here, Feinberg’s 1980 open future theory is extended to the human embryo in the context of CRISPR germline engineering. Although the embryo does not possess the autonomous decision-making capacity at the time of germline engineering, the parental decision to permanently change the unique genetic fabric of the embryo and subsequent generations disregards future autonomy. Therefore, germline engineering in many instances is objectionable considering Feinberg’s open future theory. (shrink)

The digital humanities represent, for many researchers, the potential for extending their research in terms of audience, scope, methods, and opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration. Ideally, this potential should also extend access to cultural engagement and preservation for marginalized groups. In practice, the reality may be quite different for projects that focus on diverse racial, gender, ethnic, and cultural heritage. In this short article we discuss preliminary findings from a study of patterns in U.S. federal funding for digital humanities projects, with (...) particular focus on cultural heritage and archival projects. Through the lens of funding and access, we raise some questions about whether the digital humanities can represent a shift from old hegemonies or run the risk of expressing them in a new technological paradigm. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine healthcare organizations’ responses to high profile cases of doctor–parent disagreement. We argue that, once a conflict crosses a certain threshold of public interest, the stakes of the disagreement change in important ways. They are no longer only the stakes of the child’s interests or who has decision‐making authority, but also the stakes of public trust in healthcare practitioners and organizations and the wide scale spread of medical misinformation. These higher stakes call for robust organization‐level responses. (...) There are responsible and thoughtful ways for healthcare organizations to directly engage with these cases. Hospitals should seek an alliance with the parents around the goal of public discussion and utilize web‐based platforms to provide the public with information about medical conditions, experimental treatments, and how clinical ethics deliberation in hospitals works. We outline five important lessons for healthcare organizations to keep in mind when responding to such cases. Approached with care, these cases could become “teachable moments” for both healthcare organizations and society. (shrink)

Studies of change detection suggest that people tend to overestimate their ability to detect visual changes. In a recent laboratory study of change detection and human intention, Beck et al., found that individuals have an inadequate understanding that intention can improve change detection performance and that its importance increases with scene complexity. We note that these findings may be specific to unfamiliar situations such as those generated routinely in studies of change detection. In two questionnaire studies, we demonstrate that when (...) participants consider real world scenarios such as driving, people are well aware that the intention to detect changes improves detection performance, especially in complex scenes. We suggest several reasons why change detection findings like Beck et al.’s do not generalize to real world situations. More broadly, we suggest a possible way to bridge the gap between lab and life. (shrink)

Living things can be classified by taxonomic similarity (lions and lynx), or shared ecological habitat (ducks and turtles). The present studies used card-sorting and triad tasks to explore developmental and experiential changes in conceptual flexibility–the ability to switch between taxonomic and ecological construals of living things–as well as two processes underlying conceptual flexibility: salience (i.e., the ease with which relations come to mind outside of contextual influences) and availability (i.e., the presence of relations in one’s mental space) of taxonomic and (...) ecological relations. We were also interested in the extent to which salience and availability of taxonomic and ecological relations predicted inductive inferences. Participants were 452 six to ten-year-olds from urban, suburban, and rural communities in New England. Across two studies, taxonomic relations were overwhelmingly more salient than ecological relations, although salience of ecological relations was higher among children from rural environments (Study 1) and those who engaged in unstructured exploration of nature (Study 2). Availability of ecological relations, as well as conceptual flexibility, increased with age, and was higher among children living in more rural environments. Notably, salience, but not availability, of ecological relations predicted ecological inferences. These findings suggest that taxonomic relations are a default way to organize intuitive biological knowledge and that environmental richness and relevant experience contribute to the salience and availability of ecological knowledge, and thereby, conceptual flexibility in biological thinking. More generally, they highlight important linkages between domain-specific knowledge and domain-general cognitive abilities. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine whether ethics officers are able to perform their assigned duties independently of organizational management. Specifically, we investigate whether inherent conflicts of interest with company management potentially hinder the ability of ethics officers to serve as an effective monitor and deterrent of unethical activity throughout the organization. As part of our analysis, we conducted 10 detailed phone interviews with current and retired ethics officers in order to determine whether practicing ethics officers feel the need for additional (...) independence protection from management. We propose that the current system in which ethics officers report to management must be changed in order for ethics officers to effectively perform their jobs. Specifically, we maintain that ethics officers should (1) be hired by, (2) be fired by, and (3) report directly to the corporate board of directors rather than company management. Such a change in the reporting environment would greatly enhance the independence of ethics officers. (shrink)

Dominic Wilkinson suggests that one of Schubert’s songs has relevance for neonatologists today. In the song, Schubert suggests that death sometimes comes as a friend. Wilkinson ponders whether the song has a message for doctors and parents, who sometimes struggle to figure out whether death is an enemy or a friend to a dying baby. Wilkinson reflects on the case of baby ‘Hal’, who was born with serious cardiomyopathy. Hal’s parents and doctors disagree about whether to withdraw life-support. Through his (...) recreations of their discussions, Wilkinson shows how hard it is to confront—and maybe even welcome—death for a child. While adults often frame their own decision to forego life-sustaining treatment with thoughts that they have lived a good life, death in childhood can seem unfair because it robs the child of their opportunity to live a good or completed life. Much as we try, we cannot really imagine what a critically ill neonate experiences or desires. We have very little insight into Hal’s interests or subjective experience. Without direct access to the child’s experience, it is impossible to know whether, like an adult, a child would choose to allow death to occur. We cannot verify the claim that the child’s death was good in the sense that it was good for them. Wilkinson proposes that a prolonged dying process …. (shrink)

What makes ethical accounts natural law ethical is, I argue, commonly misrepresented in teaching within much of the philosophical academy. Yet those immersed in the field of natural law and ethics rarely give definitions/brief characterisations of what makes ethical accounts natural law ethical. I suggest theoretical reasons for the lack. I argue that bringing natural law into ethics is best understood as leading to theoretically unitary accounts, not simply collections of positions detachable from each other: an overlooked and significant point (...) when defending natural law ethical accounts. My arguments throughout rely on the metaethical/normative ethical distinction, which is relatively little used in the natural law literature. I argue that the distinction helps clarify what is distinctive of natural law ethical accounts in general, especially to the secular contemporary philosophical academy, where appreciation of natural law ethical accounts is commonly appreciably lower than in philosophical contexts with a religious ethos. (shrink)

Humans naturally and effortlessly use a set of cognitive tools to reason about biological entities and phenomena. Two such tools, essentialist thinking and teleological thinking, appear to be early developmental cognitive defaults, used extensively in childhood and under limited circumstances in adulthood, but prone to reemerge under time pressure or cognitive load. We examine the nature of another such tool: anthropocentric thinking. In four experiments, we examined patterns of property attribution to a wide range of living and non-living objects, manipulating (...) time pressure, response type, and property in a total of 471 participants. Results showed no tendency toward increased similarity-based attribution patterns indicative of anthropocentric thinking under time pressure. However, anthropocentric thinking was consistently observed for unfamiliar properties. These findings suggest that anthropocentric thinking is not a developmentally persistent cognitive default, but rather a cognitive strategy deliberately employed in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

More than one third of the human brain is devoted to the processes of seeing - vision is after all the main way in which we gather information about the world. But human vision is a dynamic process during which the eyes continually sample the environment. Where most books on vision consider it as a passive activity, this book is unique in focusing on vision as an 'active' process. It goes beyond most accounts of vision where the focus is on (...) seeing, to provide an integrated account of seeing AND looking. The book starts by pointing out the weaknesses in our traditional approaches to vision and the reason we need this new approach. It then gives a thorough description of basic details of the visual and oculomotor systems necessary to understand active vision. The book goes on to show how this approach can give a new perspective on visual attention, and how the approach has progressed in the areas of visual orienting, reading, visual search, scene perception and neuropsychology. Finally, the book summarises progress by showing how this approach sheds new light on the old problem of how we maintain perception of a stable visual world. Written by two leading vision scientists, this book will be valuable for vision researchers and psychology students, from undergraduate level upwards. (shrink)

The current two-sample investigation explores the role of enactment as a boundary condition in the relationship between experienced incivility and workplace outcomes. We integrate the tenets of the transactional model of stress and sensemaking theory to explain why enactment is a psychological sensemaking capability that can neutralize the adverse effects of experienced incivility on workplace outcomes. The results across two samples of data supported the study hypotheses by demonstrating that experienced incivility had stronger adverse effects on employees’ job satisfaction, OCBs, (...) and turnover intent for employees who reported lower levels of enactment than employees who reported higher levels of enactment. This study’s results make three important contributions to theory and research. First, we make an empirical contribution by examining enactment as a psychological sensemaking capability that can neutralize the adverse effects of experienced incivility on workplace outcomes. Second, we make a theoretical contribution by integrating the tenets of the transactional model of stress and sensemaking theory in a novel way that explains why enactment is a psychological sensemaking capability that can neutralize the adverse effects of stress on strain. Third, we demonstrate that enactment is the boundary condition that explains why incivility does not have universally adverse effects on employees’ outcomes. (shrink)

Written by a distinguished international team of contributors, this volume explores Shakespeare's vivid depictions of moral deliberation and individual choice in light of Renaissance debates about ethics. Examining the intellectual context of Shakespeare's plays, the essays illuminate Shakespeare's engagement with the most pressing moral questions of his time, considering the competing claims of politics, Christian ethics and classical moral philosophy, as well as new perspectives on controversial topics such as conscience, prayer, revenge and suicide. Looking at Shakespeare's responses to emerging (...) schools of thought such as Calvinism and Epicureanism, and assessing comparisons between Shakespeare and his French contemporary Montaigne, the collection addresses questions such as: when does laughter become cruel? How does style reflect moral perspective? Does shame lead to self-awareness? This book is of great interest to scholars and students of Shakespeare studies, Renaissance studies and the history of ethics. (shrink)

This article focuses on the anxiety about whether God loves one or not. In the author's nearly 30-year ministry, this pastoral difficulty continues to perplex and afflict. While the presenting problem is what in theological parlance is 'a lack of assurance', a side difficulty is the poor and incorrect doctrine of God often associated with this. A Baylor University Study in 2006 characterises the kind of God that different groups of Americans believe in. While the phrase 'a lack of assurance' (...) is a part of dogmatic parlance, and has fallen out of use, the feeling of not belonging to God can be overwhelming for people. This feeling may be overwhelming. This makes it a pastoral issue. This article suggests a pastoral response to this issue and a proposal for a clarification in the nature and character of God using the therapeutic theology of 19th-century Scottish minister-theologian John McLeod Campbell. (shrink)

To account for a perceived distinction it is necessary to postulate a real distinction. Our process of experiencing the world is one of, mostly unconscious, interpretation of observed distinctions to provide us with a partial world-picture that is sufficient to guide action. The distinctions, themselves, are acorrigible (they do not have a truth value), directly perceived, structured, and capable of being interpreted. Interpreted experience is corrigible, representational and capable of guiding action. Since interpretation is carried out mostly unconsciously and in (...) real time, the two aspects are present in experience together so that it is difficult to separate them out. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The instructions put together below fall into three categories. The editor of the review would be grateful to authors for respecting these indications. At times, the length of this summary may attain a dozen lines. It is to be written in size 9 italic Times. An abstract in French will be joined.

Written in the form it discusses, _Reorienting Rhetoric _is both a narrative weaving out of a theme and a systematic treatment of a set of these ideas. The theme is the role of narration in the history of Western rhetoric. The ideas include the gradual tendency to privilege only systematic language, to discard all traditional modes of thinking, and to view narrative as an object but not as a means of thinking. _Reorienting Rhetoric_ argues that narration is a mode of (...) thinking as important as logic and that as narration goes, so goes rhetoric. O'Banion's perspective is heavily indebted to Quintilian, whose rhetorical question captures the essence of rhetorical thinking: "What difference is there between a proof and a statement of facts [narratio] save that the latter is a proof put forward in continuous form, while a proof is a verification of the facts as put forward in the statement?" Because narration has largely been ignored as a mode of thinking, O'Banion considers the gradually truncated role of narration in Western rhetorical, philosophical, and literary history; the resurgence of the importance of narrative in the twentieth century, especially in the work of Kenneth Burke; and the contributions of scholars in a variety of disciplines to understanding the importance of narrative and the limitations of logic for their fields of study and, inadvertently, for rhetoric. (shrink)

Current literature suggesting a shared endophenotype between individuals with anorexia nervosa and autism spectrum disorder related to executive functioning has several limitations: performance-based instead of ecologically valid measures of set-shifting are used, lack of comparisons between same-sex groups, and reliance on adult samples only. This was the first study directly comparing female youth with ASD to female youth with AN using an ecologically valid measure of EF. A secondary data analysis combined caregiver-reported EF on the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive (...) Functioning for 22 female adolescent youth with AN and 29 female adolescent youth with ASD. EF in each group was compared to population norms, and EF was compared between groups. Compared to population norms, adolescents with AN had elevated scores on shift, initiate, and emotional control scales, and adolescents with ASD had elevated scores on all scales of the BRIEF and were more likely to have scores in the clinical range. There were significant differences between groups on all but three scales. The cognitive profiles and clinical scores of AN females were not comparable to those of ASD females. The findings reveal a clear clinical impairment in females with ASD but not in females with AN. The results do not support the hypothesis of similar real-world EF profiles between these groups. The results encourage further exploration into the similarities and distinctions between these two disorders. (shrink)

An infinite lottery machine is used as a foil for testing the reach of inductive inference, since inferences concerning it require novel extensions of probability. Its use is defensible if there is some sense in which the lottery is physically possible, even if exotic physics is needed. I argue that exotic physics is needed and describe several proposals that fail and at least one that succeeds well enough.

Book reviewed in this article: Encounters Between Patients and Doctors: An Anthology. By John D. Stoeckle.

John D. Schaeffer shows how the seventeenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico synthesized Greek and Roman ideas of what "sensus communis" and what ...

The inaugural title in the new, Open Access series BSPS Open, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference. The fundamental burden of a theory of inductive inference is to determine which are the good inductive inferences or relations of inductive support and why it is that they are so. The traditional approach is modeled on that taken in accounts of deductive inference. It seeks universally applicable schemas or rules or a single (...) formal device, such as the probability calculus. After millennia of halting efforts, none of these approaches has been unequivocally successful and debates between approaches persist. The Material Theory of Induction identifies the source of these enduring problems in the assumption taken at the outset: that inductive inference can be accommodated by a single formal account with universal applicability. Instead, it argues that that there is no single, universally applicable formal account. Rather, each domain has an inductive logic native to it. Which that is, and its extent, is determined by the facts prevailing in that domain. Paying close attention to how inductive inference is conducted in science and copiously illustrated with real-world examples, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference. (shrink)

Loneliness in medicine is a serious problem not just for patients, for whom illness is intrinsically isolating, but also for physicians in the contemporary condition of medicine. We explore this problem by investigating the ideal physician-patient relationship, whose analogy with friendship has held enduring normative appeal. Drawing from Talbot Brewer and Nir Ben-Moshe, we argue that this appeal lies in a dynamic form of companionship incompatible with static models of friendship-like physician-patient relationships: a mutual refinement of embodied virtue that draws (...) both persons together. The ideal physician-patient relationship has a dialectical character that fosters each member's improvement of phenomenologically recognizing and embodying moral virtues. A key component of this dynamic is a commitment to the common goal of the patient's health, realized through joint interactivities and conversations over time. The physician's presence to the patient's suffering—understood best as an alienating phenomenological condition for the patient—orients and discloses possibilities for virtuous caregiving by structuring the meanings of the goals, conversations, and joint narrative constitutive of their relationship. Presence to suffering, paradoxically, is perhaps an important prerequisite for this dynamic partnership. These activities dialectically build an interpretive horizon of understanding through which moral goods and character refinement—in and for the other—may become revealed for both persons in their shared being-in-the-world. This analysis of suffering, mood, and revealing of (possible) moral goods has implications for addressing the modern problem of loneliness for patients and physicians, who are increasingly inhibited from building flourishing relationships with each other. (shrink)

Part I. Gnosticism and other religious movements of antiquity -- part II. Crossing boundaries : Gnosticism and Platonism.

Contemporary philosophical discussion of religion neglects dualistic religions: although Manichaeism from time to time is accorded mention, Zoroastrianism, a more plausible form of religious dualism, is almost entirely ignored. We seek to change this state of affairs. To this end we present the basic tenets of Zoroastrian dualism, argue that objections to the Zoroastrian conception of God are less strong than typically imagined, argue that objections to the Zoroastrian conception of the devil are less strong than typically imagined, and offer (...) some brief concluding thoughts. (shrink)

Ever since Copernicus, scientists have continually adjusted their view of human nature, moving it further and further from its ancient position at the center of Creation. But in recent years, a startling new concept has evolved that places it more firmly than ever in a special position. Known as the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, this collection of ideas holds that the existence of intelligent observers determines the fundamental structure of the Universe. In its most radical version, the Anthropic Principle asserts that (...) "intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and once it comes into existence, it will never die out." This wide-ranging and detailed book explores the many ramifications of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, covering the whole spectrum of human inquiry from Aristotle to Z bosons. Bringing a unique combination of skills and knowledge to the subject, John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler--two of the world's leading cosmologists--cover the definition and nature of life, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the interpretation of the quantum theory in relation to the existence of observers. The book will be of vital interest to philosophers, theologians, mathematicians, scientists, and historians, as well as to anyone concerned with the connection between the vastness of the universe of stars and galaxies and the existence of life within it on a small planet out in the suburbs of the Milky Way. (shrink)

Thought experiments in science are merely picturesque argumentation. I support this view in various ways, including the claim that it follows from the fact that thought experiments can err but can still be used reliably. The view is defended against alternatives proposed by my cosymposiasts.

Preface: This volume originated in a conference on "The Place of Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy" which was organized by us and held at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, April 18-20, 1986. The idea behind this conference was to encourage philosophers and scientists to talk to each other about the role of thought experiments in their various disciplines. These papers were either written for the conference, or were written after it by commentators and (...) other participants.... We hope that this volume will be of use to other philosophers and scientists who are interested in thought experiments, as well as inspire more work in this area.... (shrink)