The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting countries across the globe. Only a globally coordinated response, however, will enable the containment of the virus. Responding to a request from policy makers for ethics input for a global resource pledging event as a starting point, this paper outlines normative and procedural principles to inform a coordinated global coronavirus response. Highlighting global connections and specific vulnerabilities from the pandemic, and proposing standards for reasonable and accountable decision-making, the ambition of the paper is two-fold: to (...) raise awareness for the justice dimensions in the global response, and to argue for moving health from the periphery to the centre of philosophical debates about social and global justice. (shrink)

Abstract The debate on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been going on for decades, without leading to a clearer understanding of the term. Furthermore, the current literature on the topic remains relatively silent on the actual impact of CSR, especially the impact on issues of international development, for example poverty reduction in the Global South. By developing a conceptual assessment framework with a bipolar differentiated definition of CSR and a Sen-based notion of poverty, the article analyses the effects and impact (...) of two different types of CSR-strategies on the reduction of poverty. For this, two case studies have been conducted in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The results imply that CSR measures which are built into the core business of a company (both transnational companies and small/medium sized companies) have larger effects on poverty than CSR measures which are located outside of the core business activities. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-33 DOI 10.1007/s13520-012-0016-6 Authors Maike J. Schölmerich, Institute for Development and Peace, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany Journal Asian Journal of Business Ethics Online ISSN 2210-6731 Print ISSN 2210-6723. (shrink)

The continuous revaluation of rewards lies at the core of Ainslie's account of willpower. Yet, he does not explicate the underlying experiential mechanisms. We draw upon theoretical, neuroscientific, and computational evidence to demonstrate that boredom evokes revaluation. By biasing behavior toward exploration, boredom necessitates effortful willpower to balance it against exploitation, thereby rendering suppression a highly adaptive function of willpower.

Despite its age, quantum theory still suffers from serious conceptual difficulties. To create clarity, mathematical physicists have been attempting to formulate quantum theory geometrically and to find a rigorous method of quantization, but this has not resolved the problem. In this article we argue that a quantum theory recursing to quantization algorithms is necessarily incomplete. To provide an alternative approach, we show that the Schrödinger equation is a consequence of three partial differential equations governing the time evolution of a given (...) probability density. These equations, discovered by Madelung, naturally ground the Schrödinger theory in Newtonian mechanics and Kolmogorovian probability theory. A variety of far-reaching consequences for the projection postulate, the correspondence principle, the measurement problem, the uncertainty principle, and the modeling of particle creation and annihilation are immediate. We also give a speculative interpretation of the equations following Bohm, Vigier and Tsekov, by claiming that quantum mechanical behavior is possibly caused by gravitational background noise. (shrink)

The book offers new answers to two central questions that have been heavily debated, especially in recent years, in the debate on so-called de se skepticism: Is there something special about first-person thinking? And how does it relate to other forms of self-consciousness? The answer to the first question is a resounding "yes." This assertion is justified by the double-reflexive structure, motivational force, and specific concern that first-personal thinking involves. Regarding the second question, the book concludes that there are non-linguistic (...) forms of self-consciousness. However, these should not be understood as representational contents or non-relational properties, but as mental relations that, without themselves being represented, can contribute to the phenomenal character of conscious states. In this respect, the book also provides a justification for the rarely considered impure intentionalism. (shrink)

There are cases such as climate change where the cumulative effects of the actions of several agents lead to grave harm but where no individual agent can make a perceptible difference for the better or worse. According to Derek Parfit, dealing with such imperceptible difference cases requires substantial changes to the way we think about morality. In On What Matters, Parfit builds on Kantian Ethics to address the problem of imperceptible differences, but the transformation that Kant's theory undergoes in his (...) hands is radical. I argue that Parfit's changes to Kant's theory are not only unnecessary but also detrimental to making sense of the ethical dimensions of action in collective contexts. Building on the notion of imperfect duties, I offer an alternative solution to the problem of imperceptible difference cases that remains closer to Kant's original theory and avoids the difficulties of Parfit's approach. (shrink)

A widely shared view in the literature on first-person thought is that the ability to entertain first-person thoughts requires prior non-conceptual forms of self-consciousness. Many philosophers maintain that the distinctive awareness which accompanies the use of the first person already presupposes a non-conceptual consciousness of the fact that oneself is the owner of a first-person thought. I call this argument The Argument for Non-Conceptual Self-Consciousness based on the Meaning of “I” and will demonstrate that most proponents of the presented argument (...) fail to establish their conclusion, even though I believe that the conclusion is actually true. The argument only justifies the claim that contextual information is needed in order to recognize oneself as the referent of an occurrence of the first person. However, it does not justify the thesis that this information needs to be given consciously and thus the existence of any non-conceptual self-consciousness. Finally, I shall present an argument for the assumption that some form of self-consciousness is needed to reflexively think about oneself via the first-person concept. In order to do so, I will draw on the general discussion about the functional role of consciousness. In particular, I will rely on results recently proposed by Frith and Metzinger (2016), Frith (Pragmatics & Cognition 18:497–551, 2010, Cognitive Neuroscience 2:117–118, 2011), Graziano (2013, Frontiers in Robotics and AI 4:article 60, 2017), and Graziano and Kastner (Cognitive Neuroscience 2:98–113, 2011), which suggest that one of the central functions of consciousness is to provide information about mental states for communication. (shrink)

Recent evidence indicates that transcriptional bursts are intrinsically amplified by messenger RNA cytoplasmic processing to generate large stochastic fluctuations in protein levels. These fluctuations can be exploited by cells to enable probabilistic bet‐hedging decisions. But large fluctuations in gene expression can also destabilize cell‐fate commitment. Thus, it is unclear if cells temporally switch from high to low noise, and what mechanisms enable this switch. Here, the discovery of a post‐transcriptional mechanism that attenuates noise in HIV is reviewed. Early in its (...) life cycle, HIV amplifies transcriptional fluctuations to probabilistically select alternate fates, whereas at late times, HIV utilizes a post‐transcriptional feedback mechanism to commit to a specific fate. Reanalyzing various reported post‐transcriptional negative feedback architectures reveals that they attenuate noise more efficiently than classic transcriptional autorepression, leading to the derivation of an assay to detect post‐transcriptional motifs. It is hypothesized that coupling transcriptional and post‐transcriptional autoregulation enables efficient temporal noise control to benefit developmental bet‐hedging decisions. (shrink)

The compound eyes of insects exhibit stunning variation in size, structure, and function, which has allowed these animals to use their vision to adapt to a huge range of different environments and lifestyles, and evolve complex behaviors. Much of our knowledge of eye development has been learned from Drosophila, while visual adaptations and behaviors are often more striking and better understood from studies of other insects. However, recent studies in Drosophila and other insects, including bees, beetles, and butterflies, have begun (...) to address this gap by revealing the genetic and developmental bases of differences in eye morphology and key new aspects of compound eye structure and function. Furthermore, technical advances have facilitated the generation of high‐resolution connectomic data from different insect species that enhances our understanding of visual information processing, and the impact of changes in these processes on the evolution of vision and behavior. Here, we review these recent breakthroughs and propose that future integrated research from the development to function of visual systems within and among insect species represents a great opportunity to understand the remarkable diversification of insect eyes and vision. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that moral principles are not sufficient to guide moral thought and action: they need to be supplemented by a capacity for judgement. However, why can we not rely on this capacity for moral judgement alone? Why do moral principles need to be supplemented, but are not supplanted, by judgement? So-called moral particularists argue that we can, and should, make moral decisions on a case-by-case basis without any principles. According to particularists, the person of moral judgement is (...) a person of empathy, sensibility and virtue, rather than a person of principle. In this paper I argue that this is a false dichotomy. The person of good moral judgement is a person of principle. I propose that we think of moral principles as internalised long-term commitments that form our moral character and sensitivity, and, as such, are constitutive of moral judgement. (shrink)

This article investigates the constructions of Hebrew, classical, and “Northern” antiquities put forward by an eighteenth-century network of Anglo-German scholars. It asks to what extent these constructions propose a cultural equality between these competing “antiquities”, how such equality relates to the contemporaneous conception of universal history, and to what extent this development is driven by emancipatory tendencies within Enlightenment thinking. By discussing the changing approaches to Homer, Old Testament texts, and “early” European literature, the article relates the emergence of primitivism (...) and orientalism to Enlightenment historicism and an interest in the sublime, which produces a growing focus on the importance of authentic culture and the role of the bard-poet. By discussing the connections between the work of Joseph Trapp, Thomas Blackwell, Robert Lowth, and Thomas Percy on the one hand, and Johann David Michaelis, Christian Gottlob Heyne, Johann Jakob Bodmer, and Johann Gottfried Herder on the other, the article illustrates the significance in this context of newly emerging Anglo-German scholarly networks and illuminates lesser-known aspects of Anglo-German relations in the second half of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

In this article, we present results from an interdisciplinary research project aimed at assessing consciousness in dreams. For this purpose, we compared lucid dreams with normal non-lucid dreams from REM sleep. Both lucid and non-lucid dreams are an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness, giving valuable insights into the structure of conscious experience and its neural correlates during sleep. However, the precise differences between lucid and non-lucid dreams remain poorly understood. The construction of the Lucidity and Consciousness in (...) Dreams scale was based on theoretical considerations and empirical observations. Exploratory factor analysis of the data from the first survey identified eight factors that were validated in a second survey using confirmatory factor analysis: INSIGHT, CONTROL, THOUGHT, REALISM, MEMORY, DISSOCIATION, NEGATIVE EMOTION, and POSITIVE EMOTION. While all factors are involved in dream consciousness, realism and negative emotion do not differentiate between lucid and non-lucid dreams, suggesting that lucid insight is separable from both bizarreness in dreams and a change in the subjectively experienced realism of the dream. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to outline the missionary self-perception that is mediated in meaningful stories about activities and experiences of Protestants while serving as missionaries abroad. Research is based on a model of narrative identity that aids for understanding the dilemmatic aspects of identity: continuity/change, sameness/difference, agency/non-agency. Findings of a cultural psychological analysis of missionaries’ autobiographical narratives are presented in form of these three types of identity dilemmas and discussed with respect to their implications for cultural psychology of (...) religion. In utilizing qualitative research, the present study enlarges the understanding of the diversity of cross-cultural experiences in mission. (shrink)

Collective migration is a key process that is critical during development, as well as in physiological and pathophysiological processes including tissue repair, wound healing and cancer. Studies in genetic model organisms have made important contributions to our current understanding of the mechanisms that shape cells into different tissues during morphogenesis. Recent advances in high‐resolution and live‐cell‐imaging techniques provided new insights into the social behavior of cells based on careful visual observations within the context of a living tissue. In this review, (...) we will compare Drosophila testis nascent myotube migration with established in vivo model systems, elucidate similarities, new features and principles in collective cell migration. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungAuf dem Wiesbadener Internistenkongress von 1949 forderten Alexander Mitscherlich und Viktor von Weizsäcker eine Erweiterung des naturwissenschaftlichen Kausalitätsbegriffs um die Suche nach dem Sinn von Krankheit in der Lebensgeschichte. Hiermit wurde ein traditionelles psychiatrisches Paradigma infrage gestellt: die vermutete somatische Ursache psychischer Erkrankungen. Damit standen auch psychiatrische Evidenzpraktiken auf dem Prüfstand. Im ersten Teil dieses Beitrags werden im Sinne eines Querschnitts drei psychiatrische Positionen rekonstruiert, die auf dem Kongress zur Darstellung kamen. Im zweiten Teil wird die Entwicklung eines der beteiligten (...) Psychiater, Jürg Zutt, im Längsschnitt untersucht, wobei der Fokus auf der Frage nach möglichen Auswirkungen der Wiesbadener Debatte auf seine wissenschaftliche Neuausrichtung sowie den Konsequenzen für seine Auffassung von psychiatrischer Evidenz liegt. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 371-397 [Access article in PDF] How the "New Science" of Cannons Shook up the Aristotelian Cosmos Mary J. Henninger-Voss [Figures]Approximately halfway through the "Second Day" of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Galileo's mouthpiece, the mathematician Salviati, scoffs at his Aristotelian colleague Simplicio: "I see that you have hitherto been of that herd who, in order to learn (...) how matters such as this [motion] take place, and in order to acquire a knowledge of natural effects, do not betake themselves to ships or crossbows or cannons, but retire to their studies... to see whether Aristotle has said anything about them."1 Silly, simple Simplicio! He has been searching for natural philosophical wisdom in the books of natural philosophers rather than in the world of docks and arsenals. Indeed this quotation appears near the outset of Day Two wherein Salviati offers cannonshot as proof for the opposing Aristotelian position that the experience of projectiles proves the motionless state of the earth. Obviously, if the earth rotates toward the east, cannonballs shot point-blank to the west ought to travel much further than to the east. And clearly this is not so. Simplicio agrees that the new arguments offered by the cannon are excellent, "and now I see with how many elegant experiments nature graciously wishes to aid us in coming to the recognition of the truth," Simplicio enthusiastically enjoins. "What a shame there were no cannons in Aristotle's time!" exclaims the third interlocutor, Sagredo. "With them he would indeed have battered down ignorance, and spoken without [End Page 371] [Begin Page 373] the least hesitation concerning the universe."2 The irony here is not only that Aristotle might have used cannons in order to explain the workings of the universe but also that Galileo does so in the following pages. His demonstrations with reference to artillery demolish the Aristotelian position, but he has had Simplicio open the door for him by recognizing this most violent of artifices as an elegant experiment provided by nature.3The cannon provides a primary referent for Galileo's new mathematical physics of motion from his very first dialogue to his very last. The early De Motu culminated in a series of questions about the shot of cannons, while the conversation in his final masterwork, Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences, was set in the Venetian arsenal, and to it Galileo appended a table of the parabolic paths that could be expected from cannons shot at various elevations.4 In some sense Galileo turned inside-out a much older problem, one that had haunted military engineers of sixteenth-century Italy—and Galileo had been trained, and trained others, in military engineering.5 State organizers of war and captain generals were less interested in the implications the arts of fortifications and artillery held for the existing science of natural motion than in the necessity to reduce to a science, that is, a coherent body of knowledge, the rules for manufacturing cannons, planting artillery battery, aiming guns, and fortifying camps, cities, and castles.What Galileo gives us is recognizable as early physics, as a sophisticated mechanical science, a neat triumph of mathematical method in natural philosophy. But the ways and means by which mathematics came together with natural philosophy to address problems of both technology and nature are by no means neat. My claim is that attention to the military sphere will help us sort out some of those ways and means. The curious thing about the historiography on the relationship between early modern science and warfare is that the fact of a connection seems to have been taken for granted, while the implications have seldom been investigated.6 This essay is an attempt to trace those implications by [End Page 373] looking at a mathematician who specifically tried to reduce to a mathematical science the military arts, Niccolò Tartaglia.7 Tartaglia's story shows how the minutia of Aristotelian philosophy was transmuted in early attempts to understand cannonshot... (shrink)

The history of moral philosophy has been dominated by attempts to find and defend the correct moral principle or set of principles. However, over the last two decades the assumption that morality can and should be understood in terms of principles has come under attack from several quarters. The most radical attack has come from so-called moral particularists according to whom principles are at best useless and at worst a hindrance to successful moral reasoning and action.Why should - and how (...) can - morality be based on principles? These are the leading questions of this book. Moral Principles offers a historically informed, in-depth examination of the current particularist/generalist debate and presents a novel account of the place of principles in our moral thought and action. (shrink)

Obgleich die Ausdrücke ‚moralische Pflicht’ und ‚moralische Verantwortung’ auf den ersten Blick nahezu austauschbar scheinen, ist in einigen Debatten dennoch fast ausschließlich von moralischer Verantwortung die Rede. Dies gilt insbesondere für die moralische Beurteilung von individuellen Handlungen in kollektiven Kontexten. Hier scheint die Rede von einer ‚kollektiven Verantwortung‘ besonders attraktiv zu sein. In diesem Aufsatz setze ich mich diesem Trend entgegen und argumentiere dafür, dem Pflichtbegriff in kollektiven Kontexten gegenüber dem Begriff der Verantwortung den Vorrang zu geben. Mein Fokus liegt (...) hierbei auf einer bestimmten Art von Handlungen in kollektiven Kontexten, nämlich auf Handlungen in sogenannten Aggregatkollektiven. Von Aggregatkollektiven verursachte Schäden sind häufig kumulative Schäden, bei denen die Handlungen der Mitglieder eines Aggregatkollektivs einzeln betrachtet keinen merklichen Unterschied für das Auftreten des Schadens machen. Die Rede von Verantwortung legt ein Haftbarkeitsmodell moralischer Verantwortung nahe, welches sich in Bezug auf Handlungen in Aggregatkollektiven als problematisch erweist. Ich zeige, dass Kants Konzeption unvollkommener Pflichten eine vielversprechende Alternative zu dem kausal gefärbten Begriff der moralischen Verantwortung darstellt. Durch den Spielraum, den unvollkommene Pflichten Akteuren lassen, bieten sie eine ähnliche Offenheit wie der Begriff der moralischen Verantwortung. Anders als die Zuschreibung von Verantwortung vermeidet die Rede von unvollkommenen Pflichten jedoch die in kollektiven Kontexten oft inadäquate und kontraproduktive Assoziation von Haftung und Schuld. (shrink)

The “self” shapes the way in which we process the world around us. It makes sense then, that self-related information is reliably prioritised over non self-related information in cognition. How mig...

The development of international human rights norms and law is an often-contentious process. Despite significant gains from recent research on the development and implementation of human rights law, little research has focused on strategies of contestation prior to final outcome documents like resolutions, declarations, or treaties. Amendments to UN Human Rights Council resolutions are a form of contestation, particularly validity contestation that happens prior to the passage of Council resolutions. This paper examines the use of amendments by states using descriptive (...) statistics from Council proceedings from 2006 through 2018 as well as case studies on women’s rights and civil society space to illustrate how states use amendments to frame their positions. Amendments are increasingly being used by states from the Global South to contest the validity of potential human rights norms at the Council. The long-term impacts of the use of amendments are an often overlooked but important part of the Council’s ability to promote and protect rights. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement among many contemporary philosophers of mind that, in addition to their qualitative character, phenomenally conscious states contain some kind of subjective character. The subjective character of experience is most commonly characterized as a subject’s awareness that it is currently undergoing a specific experience. This idea is nothing new, of course, and something similar has been proposed quite some time ago by Franz Brentano, among others, under the name of “secondary consciousness”. That fact hasn’t remained unnoticed. Indeed, (...) a number of competing contemporary accounts of subjective character refer to Brentano as an early proponent of their particular view. This article pursues two objectives. First, it argues that the so-called self-mode account of subjective character is, for systematical reasons, superior to self-representational and pre-reflective accounts. Second, the article briefly suggests a novel interpretation of Brentano’s concept of secondary consciousness that sets it in relation to the previously introduced self-mode account and bears some similarities with Thomasson’s adverbial interpretation of Brentano’s concept of secondary consciousness. (shrink)

This paper seeks to unveil the agency of widows in late antiquity beyond prevailing limits of asceticism and euergetism. Based on a Bourdieu’ian field-analysis this approach seeks to illustrate that some widows used their recently achieved liberty not for withdrawing from society, i.e. living an ascetic life among their peers, praying all night and day. They used their liberty to actively engage within this society, within the elite in particular, instead. In so doing, these (wealthy) widows constructed, contested, and negotiated (...) power relations by appropriating and nuancing communication strategies of allegedly male domains of practice, i. e. the daily business of the household. These widows, strictly speaking, set up new power relations with which they started negotiating and maintaining, indeed creating new field positions, through which new interactions occurred that rendered her agency. An exemplary context in this respect is that of inheritance hunting in the widows’ households. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungAuf dem Wiesbadener Internistenkongress von 1949 forderten Alexander Mitscherlich und Viktor von Weizsäcker eine Erweiterung des naturwissenschaftlichen Kausalitätsbegriffs um die Suche nach dem Sinn von Krankheit in der Lebensgeschichte. Hiermit wurde ein traditionelles psychiatrisches Paradigma infrage gestellt: die vermutete somatische Ursache psychischer Erkrankungen. Damit standen auch psychiatrische Evidenzpraktiken auf dem Prüfstand. Im ersten Teil dieses Beitrags werden im Sinne eines Querschnitts drei psychiatrische Positionen rekonstruiert, die auf dem Kongress zur Darstellung kamen. Im zweiten Teil wird die Entwicklung eines der beteiligten (...) Psychiater, Jürg Zutt, im Längsschnitt untersucht, wobei der Fokus auf der Frage nach möglichen Auswirkungen der Wiesbadener Debatte auf seine wissenschaftliche Neuausrichtung sowie den Konsequenzen für seine Auffassung von psychiatrischer Evidenz liegt. (shrink)