Public health emergencies expose social injustice and health disparities, resulting in calls to address their structural causes once the acute crisis has passed. The COVID-19 pandemic is highlighting and exacerbating global, national, and regional disparities in relation to the benefits and burdens of undertaking critical basic public health mitigation measures such as physical distancing. In the United States, attempts to address the COVID-19 pandemic are complicated by striking racial, economic, and geographic inequities. These synergistic inequities exist in both urban and (...) rural areas but take on a particular character and impact in areas of rural poverty. Rural areas face a diverse set of structural challenges, including inadequate public health, clinical, and other infrastructure and economic precarity, hampering the ability of communities and individuals to implement mitigation measures. Public health ethics demands that personnel address both the tactical, real-time adjustment of typical mitigation tools to improve their effectiveness among the rural poor as well as the strategic, longer-term structural causes of health and social injustice that continue to disadvantage this population. (shrink)

In the dominant metaphor for organ transplantation, the organ is the ultimate gift, the dying donor's life‐giving bequest, conveyed and made possible by a heroic transplant team. The metaphor encourages donation and enforces recipients’ compliance with post‐transplant treatment. It is also inaccurate and sometimes deeply damaging for the recipient.

The circumstances of a public health emergency shape reasoning and decision-making in ways that deviate from routine circumstances, where adherence to established values, principles, and methodologies is expected. Understanding what drives these deviations is critical to assessing their ethical consequences. In this paper we describe four conditions that influence decision-making during PHEs, in particular regarding the deployment and conduct of research on experimental or novel biomedical interventions. These four conditions are politicization, urgency, uncertainty, and fear. We argue that taken together (...) these four conditions create pressure to address the most visible targets of immediate crisis events, driving emphasis on research and development of biomedical interventions. However, this emphasis raises ethical concerns regarding the extent to which attention to and investment in the underlying causes of PHEs, particularly impoverished global public health infrastructure, is diminished as a result. (shrink)

Health worker shortages in many countries are reaching crisis levels, exacerbated by factors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In New Zealand, the medical specialists union has called for a health workforce emergency to be declared, yet at the same time, many foreign-trained healthcare workers are unable to stay in the country or unable to work. While their health systems differ, countries such as New Zealand, the USA and the UK at least partially rely on international medical graduates (IMGs) to ensure (...) access to health services, particularly in underserved communities. This paper focuses on the challenges faced by many IMGs, particularly those that constrain their capacity to live and work in the countries that rely on their skills. These challenges give rise to two ethical problems. First, they represent a failure of reciprocity towards IMGs; second, they represent a source of harm, both to IMGs themselves and to communities whose healthcare service depends on contributions made by IMGs. We argue that brain waste and disvaluing the contributions of IMGs and other foreign-trained health professionals have significant costs for maintaining a functional healthcare system, costs which must be adequately recognised and counted. (shrink)

Against the background of current reforms in higher education, we analyze the traditional education of Japanese doctoral students in philosophy of education from Western and Japanese perspectives by focusing on learning as self-education, on being and learning with others, on the socialization into the profession, and on the study of the foreign subject. Imai's explication of the Japanese construction of the adult self as instrumental is compared to Gadamer's ideas on self-education and education with others. A significant element of doctoral (...) education in Japan involves the learning of certain forms ( kata ) of professional conduct: belonging to a group, occupying a clear position in the social hierarchy, and developing a close mentoring relationship that fosters strong feelings of loyalty, harmony and respect. Furthermore, reciprocal dependence ( amae ) is analyzed and contrasted with the Western ideal of autonomy and maturity. Finally, the study of the foreign subject is considered in light of Gadamer's and Hegel's notion of making a home in the alien. Saito affirms a cross-cultural reading of foreign philosophical texts, claiming that they destabilize the native culture and turn a teacher in philosophy of education into a translator and prophet of her own as well as the foreign culture. (shrink)

The articles in this volume are the outcome of the successful BRIDGE Workshop held in Düsseldorf in 2014. The workshop gathered a number of distinguished researchers from formal semantics and conceptual semantics and aimed to initiate a deeper conversation and collaboration instead of separating the two sides as competing views. The workshop provided a platform to further discuss parallelisms on specific semantic issues on the one hand and on the other hand to confront opposed claims from the two different perspectives. (...) This volume represents a selected number of high-quality papers presented at the workshop featuring various approaches to meaning from linguistics, logic and philosophy of language.0This series explores issues of mental representation, linguistic structure and representation, and their interplay. The research presented in this series is grounded in the idea explored in the Collaborative Research Center?The structure of representations in language, cognition and science? (SFB 991) that there is a universal format for the representation of linguistic and cognitive concepts. (shrink)

School-wide positive behavior support is a well-evaluated school approach to promoting a positive school climate and decreasing problem behaviors. Initial implementation is one of the most critical stages of program implementation. In this qualitative study, the initial implementation of SWPBIS in Swedish schools was studied using an implementation model of behavior change as guidance for interviews and analyses. The study makes significant contributions to previous research as little is known of the implementation of SWPBIS in Swedish context. Focus-group interviews were (...) conducted with 59 professionals on implementation teams from nine schools. Themes were extracted according to implementation team members' perceptions and descriptions of how the initial implementation was carried out. The results of this study revealed relevant themes within the three domains of Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation. Core features were found under the themes of knowledge and experience of similar evidence-based programs, process or result orientation, time, manual content, organizational prerequisites, team functioning, implementation leadership, program as a unifying factor, program aligning with staff beliefs, plausible expectations, and emotional reinforcement. Results are discussed in terms of how they can be used in continuing to develop the Swedish model of SWPBIS. Implications regarding implementation in Swedish schools are discussed, as is the applicability of the model of behavior change for studying implementation in schools. (shrink)

In the context of item response theory, linking the scales of two measurement points is a prerequisite to examine a change in competence over time. In educational large-scale assessments, non-identical test forms sharing a number of anchor-items are frequently scaled and linked using two− or three-parametric item response models. However, if item pools are limited and/or sample sizes are small to medium, the sparser Rasch model is a suitable alternative regarding the precision of parameter estimation. As the Rasch model implies (...) stricter assumptions about the response process, a violation of these assumptions may manifest as model misfit in form of item discrimination parameters empirically deviating from their fixed value of one. The present simulation study investigated the performance of four IRT linking methods—fixed parameter calibration, mean/mean linking, weighted mean/mean linking, and concurrent calibration—applied to Rasch-scaled data with a small item pool. Moreover, the number of anchor items required in the absence/presence of moderate model misfit was investigated in small to medium sample sizes. Effects on the link outcome were operationalized as bias, relative bias, and root mean square error of the estimated sample mean and variance of the latent variable. In the light of this limited context, concurrent calibration had substantial convergence issues, while the other methods resulted in an overall satisfying and similar parameter recovery—even in the presence of moderate model misfit. Our findings suggest that in case of model misfit, the share of anchor items should exceed 20% as is currently proposed in the literature. Future studies should further investigate the effects of anchor item composition regarding unbalanced model misfit. (shrink)

This volume offers insights into a unique philosophical landscape and enriches current Heidegger studies by offering fresh perspectives on his philosophy that are based on the traditions of Arabic and Persian Islamic philosophy.

For their deployment in human societies to be safe, AI agents need to be aligned with value-laden cooperative human life. One way of solving this “problem of value alignment” is to build moral machines. I argue that the goal of building moral machines aims at the wrong kind of ideal, and that instead, we need an approach to value alignment that takes seriously the categorically different cognitive and moral capabilities between human and AI agents, a condition I call deep agential (...) diversity. Domestication is the answer to a similarly structured problem: namely, how to integrate nonhuman animals that lack moral agency safely into human society and align their behavior with human values. Just like nonhuman animals, AI agents lack a genuinely moral agency; and just like nonhuman animals, we might find ways to train them to nevertheless assist us, and live and work among us – to “domesticate” them, in other words. I claim that the domestication approach does well in explaining many of our intuitions and worries about deploying AI agents in our social practices. (shrink)

Das Fundament der Rawls’schen Gerechtigkeitstheorie ist die moralische Gleichheit aller Gerechtigkeitssubjekte. Die symmetrische Positionierung der Parteien bei den Urzustands-Deliberationen stellt sicher, dass Subjekte mit gleichem moralischen Status das gleiche Recht auf faire Interessenberücksichtigung haben. Dabei fällt allerdings auf, dass Rawls nicht per se gegen unverdiente Ungleichheit argumentiert, sondern gegen unverdiente Ungleichheit zwischen moralisch Gleichen. Hier stellt sich die Frage: kann es Gerechtigkeit zwischen moralisch Ungleichen geben? Und wenn ja: ändert ein ungleicher moralischer Status der Gerechtigkeitssubjekte auch den Inhalt der, und (...) die Ansprüche auf, Gerechtigkeit? Wenn man annimmt, Gerechtigkeitsbeziehungen bestünden ausschließlich zwischen Menschen, dann erscheinen diese Fragen offensichtlich unsinnig. Ich argumentiere allerdings, dass die exklusive Anwendung von Gerechtigkeitstheorien auf Personen begrifflich kontingent ist – und dass die Einbeziehung von nichtmenschlichen Akteuren Rawls’ Gerechtigkeitstheorie zwar vor schwierige, aber möglicherweise produktive Herausforderungen stellt, die ich in diesem Beitrag untersuchen möchte. (shrink)

Il saggio si propone di mostrare la compresenza di aspetti collaborativi e competitivi all'interno della pratica del dialogo. Risalendo al di qua dell'esempio di Socrate, cui si riconosce in qualche modo l'invenzione di una ‘tecnica' del confronto tra interlocutori interessati alla ricerca della veritÀ, l'autrice intende mostrare le radici conflittuali della forma-dialogo e le implicazioni meno rassicuranti della dialettica discorsiva. Il tema del dialogo indica certo l'emergere di una possibilitÀ evolutiva nel cammino politico della civiltÀ: dalle passioni distruttive degli eroi (...) omerici all'impegno a perfezionare se stessi esponendosi a un pacifico confronto. Senza dimenticare, perň, che la natura dell'uomo si rispecchia in molti animali diversi e che il dialogo con lupi e sparvieri resta difficile. (shrink)

We would be wrong to state that Plato’s approach to the Golden Age in the Statesman occurs through nostalgia, even if he stresses the immense distance between our world and that blessed time. After evoking the shepherd-god as a ruler, Plato shows that the completely abandoned disposition of the ruled is only justifiable in presence of an unbridgeable chasm between the two, such as that between gods and men, or men and beasts. The real question in the Statesman is how (...) to single out the peculiar form of knowledge possessed by the few men that are truly capable to rule. (shrink)

What can international courts say when criminals ask, by what right do you try me? Some authors attempt to draw a connection between humanity's responsibility to call offenders to account and the harm humanity has suffered as a consequence of the offender's crimes. Others have argued that there need not be a special connection between those calling to account and the offenders, as the right to punish offenders is a general right each and every person has. Both lines of argument (...) are ultimately unconvincing. Instead, I argue for a modified version of the second position which proposes a democratically based theory of responsibility for punishment held by international criminal law institutions. (shrink)

This essay argues that secrets and lies are not forms of withholding information but forms by which information is valorized. Lies are constructed: what is to be lied about, what a lie is to consist of, how it is to be told, and whom it is to be told to, all reveal a social imaginary about who thinks what and what constitutes credibility. Secrets are negotiated: continual decisions about whom to tell, how much to tell, and whom not to tell (...) describe social worlds, and the shape and weight of interactions therein. All of this makes lies and secrets extraordinarily rich historical sources. We might not see the truth distorted by a lie or the truth hidden by a secret, but we see the ideas and imaginings by which people disclose what should not be made public, and how they should carry out concealing one narrative with another. Such insights involve a step back from the project of social history, in which an inclusive social narrative is based on experience and individuals' ability to report it with some reliability, and suggests that historians need to look at social imaginings as ways to understand the ideas and concerns about which people lie and with which people construct new narratives that are not true. The study of secrets, however, links the study of social imaginings with the project of social history, as the valorization of information that results in the continual negotiation and renegotiation of secrets shows individuals and publics imagining the experiences labeled as secret because of the imagined power of a specific version of events. (shrink)

På en let tilgængelig og anvendelig måde forsøger bogen Viden, videnskab og virkelighed at forklare studerende på videregående uddannelser, hvad det er de skal vide om videnskaben. Hvad er videnskab? Hvad er de videnskabelige idealer og normer? Hvordan fungerer videnskaben i samfundet i netværk af læreanstalter, virksomheder og andre institutioner? Hvordan vil de studerende selv komme i berøring med videnskaben og hvordan skal de forstå det videnskabelige i det som de laver? -/- Viden, videnskab og virkelighed forsøger at indkredse det (...) særlige ved moderne videnskab og præsenterer derfor også forskellige opfattelser af viden, virkelighed og videnskab inden for filosofi, videnskabsteori og samfundsvidenskab. Men samtidig giver bogen altså konkrete bud på, hvordan man som studerende mestrer refleksion, omsætter viden til praksis og samarbejder på tværs af faggrænser. -/- Bogen henvender sig til alle studerende på videregående uddannelser og til undervisning i videnskabsteori. (shrink)

Contribution for book symposium on Andrea Sangiovanni's Humanity without Dignity.

This essay is broadly conceived as a study of how the emotional experience of shame can play an important role in the construction of personal identity. It considers, on the one hand, the way in which Greek culture conceives the social meaning of this emotion and, on the other, the double representation that Plato provides in the Symposium of two very different forms of pedagogy of shame. Using the Platonic text as a phenomenological source, the author discusses the general validity (...) and relevance to the Greek world of the anthropological scheme that opposes «shame cultures» to «guilt cultures», attributing evolutionary primacy to the latter in terms of the acquisition of individual moral autonomy. (shrink)