Researchers, when engaging with Māori communities, are in a process of relationship building and this process can be guided by the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, partnership, participation and protection. The main concerns for many indigenous peoples in research revolve around respect for their indigenous rights, control over research processes and reciprocity within research relationships to ensure that equitable benefits are realised within indigenous groups. Māori have identified similar issues and these concerns can be aligned with the principles of (...) the Treaty of Waitangi. The relevance of the Treaty of Waitangi to research ethics is discussed and this paper suggests a revised interpretation of the treaty principles to incorporate the range of ethical issues that Māori have expressed as important. (shrink)

Whakapapa is the foundation of traditional Māori social structure and it perpetuates a value base that locates people through their relationships to the physical and spiritual worlds. As part of a new envirogenomics research programme, researchers at the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR) are developing a study with an iwi (tribe) to identify combinations of genetic and environmental factors that may contribute to current health status. A major objective of this study is to utilise whakapapa (genealogical information) to (...) explore patterns of genetic variation unique to the iwi and to correlate these with potential disease or ill health. Genetic testing and screening raises numerous ethical issues, particularly when indigenous peoples are the subjects. This paper will outline ESR’s strategy for addressing indigenous concerns about genetic testing and how whakapapa forms an integral part of the envirogenomics research programme. (shrink)

One of the more interesting counter-intuitive findings in organizational research is that success breeds failure. This counter-intuitive has been described in termsof core rigidities, core incompetencies, and even the Icarus Paradox. The literature on these topics has concluded that success yields overconfidence and myopia in firms and their managers, and this eventually causes failure. We augment this literature by suggesting that success breeds not only internal pathologies that cause firms to misuse their established resources over time, but also external pathologies (...) that cause firms to lose access to new resources. In particular, success influences stakeholders’ perceptions of firms, causing firms to lose the benefits of underdog status and gain the problems of overlord status. We term this notion that success warps images of the successful, leading to their decline over time, the Helios Paradox, and suggest that dominant firms must counter natural tendencies to succumb to both the Icarus and Helios Paradoxes if they are to remain successful over time. (shrink)

It has been well documented how language-specific cues may be used for word segmentation. Here, we investigate what role a language-independent phonological universal, the sonority sequencing principle (SSP), may also play. Participants were presented with an unsegmented speech stream with non-English word onsets that juxtaposed adherence to the SSP with transitional probabilities. Participants favored using the SSP in assessing word-hood, suggesting that the SSP represents a potentially powerful cue for word segmentation. To ensure the SSP influenced the segmentation process (i.e., (...) during learning), we presented two additional groups of participants with either (a) no exposure to the stimuli prior to testing or (b) the same stimuli with pauses marking word breaks. The SSP did not influence test performance in either case, suggesting that the SSP is important for word segmentation during the learning process itself. Moreover, the fact that SSP-independent segmentation of the stimulus occurred (in the latter control condition) suggests that universals are best understood as biases rather than immutable constraints on learning. (shrink)

Thomas Hurka has recently proposed a utilitarian theory which would effect a compromise between Average and Total utilitarianism, the better to deal with issues in population ethics. This Compromise theory would incorporate the principle that the value which an extra happy person contributes to a possible world is a decreasing function of the total population of that world: that happy people are of diminishing marginal value. In spite of its initial plausibility I argue against this principle. I show that the (...) Compromise theory is actually no improvement over the two original versions of utilitarianism; in particular, it is subject to almost all the objections which are fatal to Average utilitarianism, and more besides. And I attempt to dispell the appearance that intuition supports the Compromise theory as against Total utilitarianism, by arguing that the latter's Repugnant Conclusion, when properly understood, is not intuitively unacceptable. Total utilitarianism remains a plausible ethical theory, while both the Average and the Compromise theories should be definitely rejected. (shrink)

We consider the moral and social ingredients in physicians' relationships with patients of diminished capacity by considering certain claims made about friendship and the physician's role. To assess these claims we look at the life context of two patients as elaborated examples provided in two novels: Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy, a radical feminist; and It's Hard to Leave While the Music's Playing (1977) by I. S. Cooper, a prominent physician-researcher. At issue is how the (...) doctor-patient relationship should be structured. In question is whether the physician's friendship and professional expertise, together with the diminished capacity of the patient, authorize medical paternalism. From our examination, we find compelling insights against appealing to friendship both in good doctor-patient relationships and in more typical, not-so-good ones. (shrink)

It is argued that the characterization of the states of an infinite system of indistinguishable particles satisfying Bose-Einstein statistics which follows from the quantum-mechanical analog of de Finetti's theorem (2) can be used to interpret the nonuniqueness of the resolution into a convex combination of pure states of a quantum-mechanical mixed state.

A notion of factorizability for vector-valued measures on a quantum logic L enables us to pass from abstract logics to Hilbert space logics and thereby to construct tensor products. A claim by Kruszynski that, in effect, every orthogonally scattered measure is factorizable is shown to be false. Some criteria for factorizability are found.

The central part of any cosmological argument for the existence of God is the inference of a conclusion of the form 1(ᴲx)-Fx from a premiss of the form 1 (ᴲx)Fx'. Since the premiss here is known only a posteriori, such an argument would ordinarily be classified as itself a posteriori. But I point out that any argument of this form may by a trivial modifi- cation be turned into an argument which requires no a posteriori premisses, and that the modified (...) version is in fact a less misleading presentation of the reasoning involved. I conclude that cosmological arguments are best viewed as a priori arguments. (shrink)

I show that Frege's statement (In the Epilogue to his Grundgesetze der Arithmetic v. II) of a way to avoid Russell's paradox is defective, in that he presents two different methods as if they were one. One of these "ways out" is notably more plausible than the other, and is almost surely what Frege really intended. The well-known arguments of Lesniewski, Geach, and Quine that Frege's revision of his system is inadequate to avoid paradox are not affected by the ambiguity (...) of Frede's statement. But a rectnt argument by Linsky and Schumm (Analysis 82 (1971-72), 5-7), intended as a very simple derivation of a contradiction within Frege's revised system, is valid only for the less plausible of the two versions of Frege's way out, and thus is not an effective attack on the revision that Frege intended to make. (shrink)

Thomas I-Iurka has recently proposed a utilitarian theory which would effect a compromise between Average and Total utilitarianism, the better to deal with issues in population ethics. This Compromise theory would incorporate the principle that the value which an extra happy person contributes to a possible world is a decreasing function of the total population of that world: that happy people are of diminishing marginal value. In spite of its initial plausibility I argue against this principle. I show that the (...) Compromise theory is actually no improvement over the two original versions of utilitaiianism; in particular, it is subject to almost all the objections which are fatal to Average utilitarianism, and more besides. And I attempt to dispell the appearance that intuition supports the Compromise theory as against Total utilitarianism, by arguing that the 1atter’s "Repugnant Conclusion," when properly understood, is not intuitively unacceptable. Total utilitarianism remains a plausible ethical theory, while both the Average and the Compromise theories should be definitely rejected. (shrink)

It has been well documented how language‐specific cues may be used for word segmentation. Here, we investigate what role a language‐independent phonological universal, the sonority sequencing principle (SSP), may also play. Participants were presented with an unsegmented speech stream with non‐English word onsets that juxtaposed adherence to the SSP with transitional probabilities. Participants favored using the SSP in assessing word‐hood, suggesting that the SSP represents a potentially powerful cue for word segmentation. To ensure the SSP influenced the segmentation process (i.e., (...) during learning), we presented two additional groups of participants with either (a) no exposure to the stimuli prior to testing or (b) the same stimuli with pauses marking word breaks. The SSP did not influence test performance in either case, suggesting that the SSP is important for word segmentation during the learning process itself. Moreover, the fact that SSP‐independent segmentation of the stimulus occurred (in the latter control condition) suggests that universals are best understood as biases rather than immutable constraints on learning. (shrink)