The paper reports a study that investigated the relationship between students? self-predicted and actual General Certificate of Secondary Education results in order to establish the extent of over- and under-prediction and whether this varies by subject and across genders and socio-economic groupings. It also considered the relationship between actual and predicted attainment and attitudes towards going to university. The sample consisted of 109 young people in two schools being followed up from an earlier study. Just over 50% of predictions were (...) accurate and students were much more likely to over-predict than to under-predict. Most errors of prediction were only one grade out and may reflect examination unreliability as well as student misperceptions. Girls were slightly less likely than boys to over-predict but there were no differences associated with social background. Higher levels of attainment, both actual and predicted, were strongly associated with positive attitudes to university. Differences between predictions and results are likely to reflect examination errors as well as pupil errors. There is no evidence that students from more advantaged social backgrounds over-estimate themselves compared with other students, although boys over-estimate themselves compared with girls. (shrink)

The paper reports a study of children's attitudes to school based on a questionnaire survey of 845 pupils in their first year of secondary school in England, together with interviews with a sample of the children. A clearly structured set of attitudes emerged from a factor analysis which showed a distinction between instrumental and affective aspects of attitudes but also dimensions within these, including a sense of teacher commitment and school as a difficult environment. Virtually all children had a strong (...) sense of the importance of doing well at school. However, a substantial minority were not sure that they would stay on after 16. There were few differences between boys and girls or between children from different socio-economic backgrounds but children planning to leave at 16 enjoyed school less and were less sure that it had anything to offer them. There was an almost universal commitment to the value of education but, for a minority, an ambivalence about the experience and relevance of schooling for them. (shrink)

The sixteen essays in Gender Struggles address a wide range of issues in gender struggles, from the more familiar ones that, for the last thirty years, have been the mainstay of feminist scholarship, such as motherhood, beauty, and sexual violence, to new topics inspired by post-industrialization and multiculturalism, such as the welfare state, cyberspace, hate speech, and queer politics, and finally to topics that traditionally have not been seen as appropriate subjects for philosophizing, such as adoption, care work, and (...) the home. (shrink)

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a major public health concern in both civilian and military populations, across race, age, gender, and socio-economic status. While PTSD has been around for centuries by some name or another, its definition and description also continue to evolve. Within the last few years, the American Psychological Association has published the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which includes some major changes in the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Recent data on epidemiology, (...) etiological theories, and empirically supported methods of treatment, as well as implications for legal processes and criminal justice system personnel, are discussed. (shrink)

This paper explores how the "environmental turn" for the last 25 years has been shaping remembrance of the destruction of Europe's Jewish populations. I argue that climate change is not just one more catastrophe to pass into the broad analogical field of the Holocaust. In fact, international Holocaust consciousness and understandings of what we now call the Anthropocene have long been intertwined and mutually constitutive. The paper starts in the 1990s with acclaimed writers Anne Michaels and W.G. Sebald, who (...) sought to recast the Holocaust's significance to modernity against a long backdrop of geologic time. Their memorial fiction, which grounds the history of the Holocaust in the eroding landscapes of Europe, reflects a growing and urgent global concern for the vulnerability of the environment and a sense of man's responsibility for preserving human and biological life. The paper then moves through more contemporary examples of the sublimation of Holocaust memory in discourse about global warming—evident in terms like "climate change denial" and calls to "bear witness" to mass extinction events. For better or worse, journalists and scholars who write about environmental activism frequently call on memory of World War II and genocide in order to redefine what constitutes "grievable life." Example authors include historian Timothy Snyder, who has predicted that climate change may lead to new genocidal wars over Lebensraum ; scientist James Lovelock, who has urged nation states to consider how to limit the coming influx of climate refugees; theorist Bruno Latour, who has argued, via Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt, that we must "name our enemies" in the new climate wars; and essayist Ari Brostoff who has attempted to think climate catastrophe through Walter Benjamin's meditations on the angel of history. The implicit question in all of their work is this: What histories and philosophical traditions can help us redefine humanity's entangled relationship to nature in order to take political responsibility for saving life on Earth? In other words, the Anthropocene requires "a usable past"—but what will that usable past be? (shrink)

Once upon a time, an ugly duckling became famous in the history of European fairy tales. It was said of him that "… the poor duckling, who had come last out of his eggshell, and was so ugly, was bitten, pecked, and teased by both ducks and hens.… The poor thing scarcely knew what to do; he was quite distressed because he was so ugly."Today, in America—the mecca of MakeOver culture—that ugly duckling would know exactly what to do: tell (...) his pitiful tale and be accepted for an "Extreme Makeover" that would be televised around the world. This paper uses Foucault's rich and complex notion of an Apparatus to examine how weight-loss surgery is migrating into the repertoire of "normalized procedures" listed under .. (shrink)

The humanity-nature divide is a modern Western construction based on the notion that matter (nature) is dead, while consciousness (humanity) is alive, rational, and positioned to use matter (nature) to achieve its ends. In contrast, in the world views of the indigenous Maμori of New Zealand and Aborigines of Australia, nature is not separate from humanity and all is infused with consciousness. The ecofeminist and Goddess movements which emerged in the last decades of the twentieth-century, share with many indigenous (...) religions the perception that all of nature is alive and that human beings must respect other beings within the web of life. Yet these are postmodern rather than premodern movements with an explicit critique of the assumptions of modernity. Process philosophy, especially when understood through the “feminist process paradigm” proposed here, is a postmodern philosophical system that affirms the insights of indigenous peoples, as well as Goddess and ecofeminists, that humanity must situate itself within the web of life. At the same time, process philosophy provides the tools for reconciling “premodern” insights with the findings (but not the assumptions) of modern science. Each of these resources can help us to provide alternatives to the humanity-nature divide. (shrink)

The worldwide rise of the Value-Added Tax over the last half-century is emblematic of the paradox in modern tax systems: their remarkable similarity in the face of divergent political, cultural and social systems. However, efforts to introduce VAT-style taxes have frequently been accompanied by fierce localized resistance. The histories of VAT reform in Australia, Canada and the United States encapsulate the tension that arises from a tendency among developed tax systems to converge against frequent and often fierce localized opposition. (...) This tension speaks to a key debate in the public policy and comparative law literature concerning the transferability of policy ideas or legal instruments across jurisdictions. The Article details the history of VAT reform in Australia, Canada and the United States over a period of four decades, 1965-2005, where the global uptake of the VAT was at its highest, but where VAT reform in each jurisdiction was highly controversial. The Article concludes with an assessment of the factors that contribute towards tax policy convergence and localized resistance. (shrink)

This paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overreliance on the psychiatric patient “personal story” within mental health organizations. The sharing of experiences through stories by individuals who self-identify as having “lived experience” has been central to the history of organizing for change in and outside of the psychiatric system. However, in the last decade, personal stories have increasingly been used by the psychiatric system to bolster research, education, and fundraising interests. We explore how (...) personal stories from consumer/survivors have been harnessed by mental health organizations to further their interests and in so doing have shifted these narrations from “agents of change” towards one of “disability tourism” or “patient porn.” We mark the ethical dilemmas of narrative cooptation and consumption, and query how stories of resistance can be reclaimed not as personal recovery narratives but rather as a tool for socio-political change. (shrink)

The Monographs produced by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) apply rigorous procedures for the scientific review and evaluation of carcinogenic hazards by independent experts. The Preamble to the IARC Monographs, which outlines these procedures, was updated in 2019, following recommendations of a 2018 expert Advisory Group. This article presents the key features of the updated Preamble, a major milestone that will enable IARC to take advantage of recent scientific and procedural advances made during the 12 years since (...) the last Preamble amendments. The updated Preamble formalizes important developments already being pioneered in the Monographs Programme. These developments were taken forward in a clarified and strengthened process for identifying, reviewing, evaluating and integrating evidence to identify causes of human cancer. The advancements adopted include strengthening of systematic review methodologies; greater emphasis on mechanistic evidence, based on key characteristics of carcinogens; greater consideration of quality and informativeness in the critical evaluation of epidemiological studies, including their exposure assessment methods; improved harmonization of evaluation criteria for the different evidence streams; and a single-step process of integrating evidence on cancer in humans, cancer in experimental animals and mechanisms for reaching overall evaluations. In all, the updated Preamble underpins a stronger and more transparent method for the identification of carcinogenic hazards, the essential first step in cancer prevention. (shrink)

In this article, we comment upon and provide an arts-informed example of an emotive-focused reflection of a health care practitioner. Specifically, we use poetry and photographic imagery as tools to un-earth practitioners’ emotions within agonizing and traumatic clinical encounters. In order to recognize one’s own humanness and authentically engage in the art of medicine, we immerse ourselves in the first author’s poetic and photographic self-reflection. The poem and image are intended to inspire interpretation and meaning based on the reader’s own (...) professional and/or personal context. The last line of the poem is “I take off the gloves. My hands are marked.”. (shrink)

In this article, the authors introduce the concept of a “queer counter-mythology.” They do so by discussing a speculative song they wrote as an enactment of research-creation. Research-creation names an interdisciplinary scholarly praxis where artist-scholars create the artefacts they want to think-with, rather than analysing existing cultural productions. The song discussed in this article, “Cosmic Beavers,” proposes a queer counter-mythology that reimagines the historical, colonial archive by foregrounding the stories of giant, trans-dimensional beavers who shred Lewis and Clark and use (...) them to reinforce their Time-Dam. Drawing on this song, as well as queer theories of time and anti-colonial thinkers, the authors suggest that artistic interventions invoke speculative lures that, while not changing history, can complicate state-sanctioned archives and narratives of the past and future: they frame this intervention as a queer counter-mythology. (shrink)

The biopsychosocial model, which was deeply influential on psychiatry following its introduction by George L. Engel in 1977, has recently made a comeback. Derek Bolton and Grant Gillett have argued that Engel’s original formulation offered a promising general framework for thinking about health and disease, but that this promise requires new empirical and philosophical tools in order to be realized. In particular, Bolton and Gillett offer an original analysis of the ontological relations between Engel’s biological, social, and psychological levels of (...) analysis. I argue that Bolton and Gillett’s updated model, while providing an intriguing new metaphysical framework for medicine, cannot resolve some of the most vexing problems facing psychiatry, which have to do with how to prioritize different sorts of research. These problems are fundamentally ethical, rather than ontological. Without the right prudential motivation, in other words, the unification of psychiatry under a single conceptual framework seems doubtful, no matter how compelling the model. An updated biopsychosocial model should include explicit normative commitments about the aims of medicine that can give guidance about the sorts of causal connections to be prioritized as research and clinical targets. (shrink)

Kok?Chor Tan argues for a conception of Liberal Cosmopolitanism that seeks to reconcile ideals of global justice and national partiality. I provide two objections to his luck egalitarian model of global justice: first, it fails to provide adequate space for legitimate cultural variation with respect to the understanding of and valuing of natural resources; and second, that its account of ideas of collective responsibility is restricted to a point at which it becomes unrecognizable and inefficacious. I conclude with some reflections (...) on the implications of my analysis for the more general question of whether or how national partiality and global justice can be reconciled. (shrink)

Evidence-based practice in education involves basing decisions about what to do on evidence about the relative effectiveness of available interventions (e.g. programmes, products, practices). This article considers two influential critiques of evidence-based education (EBE) pertaining to its treatment of values. The ‘general critique’ condemns EBE for excluding values from decisions about what to do in education. The ‘specific critique’ condemns EBE for relying on a deterministic view of causality in education which disregards the complex, value-laden nature of educational contexts. I (...) argue that virtually all versions of EBE escape the general critique, including the dominant intervention-centred approach that relies on experimental research to discover ‘what works’, because the predictions EBE aims to support are only one premise in a broader normative argument. Further, intervention-centred EBE can avoid much of the specific values-based critique because it is consistent with a probabilistic, rather than deterministic, understanding of causality. However, I argue that only a context-centred approach to EBE that relies on evidence about the specific target setting from local sources in addition to evidence from theory and mixed methods research can fully address the specific critique by accommodating critics’ descriptive claims about the nature of educational contexts. (shrink)

In this introductory essay, I describe feminist ethics as a kind of approach to morality that says we ought to pay attention to the facts on the ground and empirical information in order to know whether and how a moral problem is a gendered problem. One of the best accounts of feminist ethics is by Hilde Lindemann, who wrote that feminist ethics aims “to understand, criticize, and correct how gender operates within our moral and social beliefs and practices.” She doesn’t (...) define feminism as a theory about women, and neither do I. The term 'feminist' has more to do with the sources of this approach to ethics than the ultimate goals of such theorists; women were influential and early advocates of the view that sometimes a moral problem is a problem because it is gendered. (shrink)

The Catholic Tradition requires the faithful to form and follow their conscience. This is the case even with the recognition that consciences can be malformed and one can make errors in practical judgments. Water Shaping Stone examines various aspects of this tradition regarding conscience by using, among other sources, twentieth-century magisterial documents, theologians' works, and Scripture. Kathryn Lilla Cox argues that while the Magisterium retains teaching authority, and a responsibility to help form consciences through its teaching, focusing only on (...) the Magisterium leads to incomplete formation. A more holistic vision of conscience formation means considering the formation of the moral agent to be a multifaceted process that draws on, for example, teaching, prayer, rituals, Scripture, practices, and virtues, along with relationships with the Triune God and communities of accountability. This vision of conscience formation retains the magisterial teaching authority while acknowledging discipleship as the theological basis for making and assessing practical judgments of conscience. (shrink)

The increasing complexity of human subjects research and its oversight has prompted researchers, as well as institutional review boards, to have a forum in which to discuss challenging or novel ethical issues not fully addressed by regulations. Research ethics consultation services provide such a forum. In this article, we rely on the experiences of a national Research Ethics Consultation Collaborative that collected more than 350 research ethics consultations in a repository and published 18 challenging cases with accompanying ethical commentaries to (...) highlight four contexts in which REC can be a valuable resource. REC assists: 1) investigators before and after the regulatory review; 2) investigators, IRBs, and other research administrators facing challenging and novel ethical issues; 3) IRBs and investigators with the increasing challenges of informed consent and risk/benefit analysis; and 4) in providing flexible and collaborative assistance to overcome study hurdles, mediate conflicts within a team, or directly engage with research participants. Institutions that have established, or plan to establish, REC services should work to raise the visibility of their service and engage in open communication with existing clinical ethics consult services as well as the IRB. While the IRB system remains the foundation for the ethical review of research, REC can be a valuable service for investigators, regulators, and research participants aligned with the goal of supporting ethical research. (shrink)

How Doctors Think defines the nature and importance of clinical judgment. Although physicians make use of science, this book argues that medicine is not itself a science but rather an interpretive practice that relies on clinical reasoning. A physician looks at the patient's history along with the presenting physical signs and symptoms and juxtaposes these with clinical experience and empirical studies to construct a tentative account of the illness. How Doctors Think is divided into four parts. Part one introduces the (...) concept of medicine as a practice rather than a science; part two discusses the idea of causation; part three delves into the process of forming clinical judgment; and part four considers clinical judgment within the uncertain nature of medicine itself. In How Doctors Think, Montgomery contends that assuming medicine is strictly a science can have adverse side effects, and suggests reducing these by recognizing the vital role of clinical judgment. (shrink)

In Moral Passages, Kathryn Pyne Addelson presents an original moral theory suited for contemporary life and its moral problems. Her basic principle is that knowledge and morality are generated in collective action, and she develops it through a critical examination of theories in philosophy, sociology and women's studies, most of which hide the collective nature and as a result hide the lives and knowledge of many people. At issue are the questions of what morality is, and how moral theories (...) (whether traditional or feminist) are implemented. Addelson takes up a large number of historical cases and contemporary social problems, including teen pregnancy, contraception and abortion, and gay rights. These cases allow her to see how the knowledge and lives of some people are declared deviant or immoral, while those of others appear to show the public consensus. One case she uses throughout the book is Margaret Sanger's early work on birth control with the anarcho-syndicalist movement--a revisionist history that reveals rather than hides the collective nature of morality and knowledge. Addelson shows how the usual individualist philosophies promote theories which hide the authority of the professionals who make them. A collectivist approach, she argues, must show the part professionals play in collective action. Her aim is to allow professional knowledge makers to be morally and intellectually responsible. Based on Addelson's twenty years of work in feminist philosophy and interactionist sociology as well as her long-standing involvement in women's community organization, Moral Passages investigates how morality and knowledge are collectively enacted in today's world. (shrink)

The article “Revive and Refuse: Capacity, Autonomy, and Refusal of Care After Opioid Overdose,” Marshall et al. (2024) highlights the critical issue of care after an opioid overdose. “Revive and Re...

The scientific, ethical, and policy issues raised by research involving the engraftment of human neural stem cells into the brains of nonhuman primates are explored by an interdisciplinary working group in this Policy Forum. The authors consider the possibility that this research might alter the cognitive capacities of recipient great apes and monkeys, with potential significance for their moral status.

From whence spring the sparks of creativity? It is to this very question that the field of depth psychology--especially that of C.G. Jung and his intellectual descendants--has much to contribute. Just as the Muses were the offspring of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, our memories are the ancestors of our creativity that finds its multifaceted expression in the written word, image, theater, dance, and music. The Unconscious Roots of Creativity seeks to push the investigation into that domain of memory that (...) is beyond our conscious reach. With articles from 16 contributors, the "red thread" running through each of the offerings in this volume is that, whatever its ultimate expression, the creative impulse has its roots deep in the psyche. Edited By Kathryn Madden, Leonard Cruz and Steven Buser with articles by Linda Carter, Anna Maria Costantino, Carol Thayer Cox, Leonard Cruz, Lisa Raye Garlock, James Hollis, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Ian Livingston, Kathryn Madden, Jordan S. Potash, Susan Rowland, Murray Stein, Ann Ulanov, Tjeu van den Berk, Robin van Loben Sels, and Heidi S. Volf. (shrink)

"Change is not merely necessary to life--it is life." That's Alvin Toffler, characteristically stating the profound in a profoundly direct way. And yes, even when we see change coming--as we're about to graduate from school, take a new job, get married--it's still not so easy to accept. And when we don't see it coming--oof, we have an even harder time. Here to help us embrace change and defuse its unsettling power is Change Happens, a full-color illustrated gift book to consult, (...) to share, to give, and to keep on a night table. Curated by Kathryn and Ross Petras, the ultimate connoisseurs of quotes whose books and calendars have over 4.5 million copies in print, these words of wisdom inspire us to be open to change and remind us that nothing positive in life ever happens without it. Arranged alphabetically by subject--including Adapting, Curveballs, Faith, Letting Go, Regrets, Second Chances, Vulnerability--it's a book to turn to in moments of need, when offering advice to a friend or loved one, when urging a child to find the courage to take a step, when marking an important occasion. (shrink)

There is conflicting experimental evidence about whether the “stakes” or importance of being wrong affect judgments about whether a subject knows a proposition. To date, judgments about stakes effects on knowledge have been investigated using binary paradigms: responses to “low” stakes cases are compared with responses to “high stakes” cases. However, stakes or importance are not binary properties—they are scalar: whether a situation is “high” or “low” stakes is a matter of degree. So far, no experimental work has investigated the (...) scalar nature of stakes effects on knowledge: do stakes effects increase as the stakes get higher? Do stakes effects only appear once a certain threshold of stakes has been crossed? Does the effect plateau at a certain point? To address these questions, we conducted experiments that probe for the scalarity of stakes effects using several experimental approaches. We found evidence of scalar stakes effects using an “evidence seeking” experimental design, but no evidence of scalar effects using a traditional “evidence-fixed” experimental design. In addition, using the evidence-seeking design, we uncovered a large, but previously unnoticed framing effect on whether participants are skeptical about whether someone can know something, no matter how much evidence they have. The rate of skeptical responses and the rate at which participants were willing to attribute “lazy knowledge”—that someone can know something without having to check—were themselves subject to a stakes effect: participants were more skeptical when the stakes were higher, and more prone to attribute lazy knowledge when the stakes were lower. We argue that the novel skeptical stakes effect provides resources to respond to criticisms of the evidence-seeking approach that argue that it does not target knowledge. (shrink)

How do we understand the roots of modern identities and subjectivities (citizen, labour migrant, artist, member of a global faith community) and the cosmopolitan imaginaries and practices embraced and generated in the Asia Pacific region? Writing from a range of disciplines, and diverse sites, the authors explore the ways in which identities are recognized and contested, subjectivities dislodged and reconstituted in the contemporary world, and the role of dialogic scholarly practices in engaging, stimulating and promoting emergent subjectivities and identities.

The nature of moral action versus moral judgment has been extensively debated in numerous disciplines. We introduce Virtual Reality (VR) moral paradigms examining the action individuals take in a high emotionally arousing, direct action-focused, moral scenario. In two studies involving qualitatively different populations, we found a greater endorsement of utilitarian responses–killing one in order to save many others–when action was required in moral virtual dilemmas compared to their judgment counterparts. Heart rate in virtual moral dilemmas was significantly increased when compared (...) to both judgment counterparts and control virtual tasks. Our research suggests that moral action may be viewed as an independent construct to moral judgment, with VR methods delivering new prospects for investigating and assessing moral behaviour. (shrink)

Indeterminate Bodies organizes a number of theoretical and empirical studies around the concept and actuality of indeterminacy, as it relates to body and society. Located within the struggle to apprehend different categories of ‘body’ in the volatile flows of late-capital, indeterminacy is considered through such multiple incarnations as economy, contingency, inheritance, question, force, uncertainty, materiality and affective resistance to determination. While indeterminacy is often positioned as the ‘trouble’ or friction in subject/object knowledge-formation (framed as ontological or empirical challenge), it also (...) engenders affects such that some subjects are both in and out of recognition. Questions of indeterminacy overlap with work on imperceptibility, giving rise to interlocked questions about the modes of representation, categorization, inclusion, exclusion and sensibility in the production of bodies. We address the hesitancies, difficulties and necessities of working with and through indeterminacy in order open up new descriptions, visions and modes of political work. (shrink)

This paper proposes that public health is the sort of institution that has a role in producing structures of virtue in society. This proposal builds upon work that describes how virtues are structured by the practices of institutions, at the collective or whole-of-society level. This work seeks to fill a gap in public health ethics when it comes to virtues. Mainstay moral theories tend to incorporate some role for virtues, but within public health ethics this role has not been fully (...) articulated. Two recent papers have proposed ways in which the virtues might be incorporated: working from a structural account, Rozier suggests that public health could work to instil virtues, like temperance, in the public in order to achieve its health-related goals; Nihlén Fahlquist suggests that compassion is among three virtues that practitioners of public health should cultivate in order to do their work well. In the end, both accounts recommend incorporating virtues at the level of individuals, among the public and among practitioners. I propose a third kind of role for virtue in public health that focuses on structures. Public health activities take place at the population level, and a public health virtue ethics must also be suitably population-focussed. (shrink)

Ethical sensitivity was introduced to caring science to describe the first component of decision making in professional practice; that is, recognizing and interpreting the ethical dimension of a care situation. It has since been conceptualized in various ways by scholars of professional disciplines. While all have agreed that ethical sensitivity is vital to practice, there has been no consensus regarding its definition, its characteristics, the conditions needed for it to occur, or the outcomes to professionals and society. The purpose of (...) this article is to explore the meaning of the concept of ethical sensitivity based on a review of the professional literature of selected disciplines. Qualitative content analysis of the many descriptors found within the literature was conducted to enhance understanding of the concept and identify its essential characteristics. Ethical sensitivity is considered to be an emerging concept with potential utility in research and practice. (shrink)