Current treatments for chronic pain have limited benefit. We describe a resilience intervention for individuals with chronic pain which is based on a model of viewing chronic pain as dysregulated homeostasis and which seeks to restore homeostatic self-regulation using strategies exemplified by survivors of extreme environments. The intervention is expected to have broad effects on well-being and positive emotional health, to improve cognitive functions, and to reduce pain symptoms thus helping to transform the suffering of pain into self-growth. A total (...) of 88 Veterans completed the pre-assessment and were randomly assigned to either the treatment intervention or control. Fifty-eight Veterans completed pre- and post-testing. The intervention covered resilience strengths organized into four modules: engagement, social relatedness, transformation of pain and building a good life. A broad set of standardized, well validated measures were used to assess three domains of functioning: health and well-being, symptoms, and cognitive functions. Two-way Analysis of Variance was used to detect group and time differences. Broadly, results indicated significant intervention and time effects across multiple domains: Pain decreased in present severity [F = 5.02, p < 0.05, η2p = 0.08], total pain over six domains [F = 14.52, p < 0.01, η2p = 0.21], and pain interference [F = 6.82, p < 0.05, η2p = 0.11]; Affect improved in pain-related negative affect [F = 7.44, p < 0.01, η2p = 0.12], fear [F = 7.70, p < 0.01, η2p = 0.12], and distress [F = 10.87, p < 0.01, η2p = 0.16]; Well-being increased in pain mobility [F = 5.45, p < 0.05, η2p = 0.09], vitality [F = 4.54, p < 0.05, η2p = 0.07], and emotional well-being [F = 5.53, p < 0.05, η2p = 0.09] Mental health symptoms and the cognitive functioning domain did not reveal significant effects. This resilience intervention based on homeostatic self-regulation and survival strategies of survivors of extreme external environments may provide additional sociopsychobiological tools for treating individuals with chronic pain that may extend beyond treating pain symptoms to improving emotional well-being and self-growth.Clinical Trial Registration: Registered with ClinicalTrials.gov. (shrink)

Based on the "Guide to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990", this volume reviews the regulation of assisted conception including complex moral issues such as abortion, embryo research and cloning.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Source code is a form of human communication, albeit one where the information shared between the programmers reading and writing the code is constrained by the requirement that the code executes correctly. Programming languages are more syntactically constrained than natural languages, but they are also very expressive, allowing a great many different ways to express even very simple computations. Still, code written by developers is highly predictable, and many programming tools have taken advantage of this phenomenon, relying on language model (...) surprisal as a guiding mechanism. While surprisal has been validated as a measure of cognitive load in natural language, its relation to human cognitive processes in code is still poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the relationship between surprisal and programmer preference at a small granularity—do programmers prefer more predictable expressions in code? Using meaning‐preserving transformations, we produce equivalent alternatives to developer‐written code expressions and run a corpus study on Java and Python projects. In general, language models rate the code expressions developers choose to write as more predictable than these transformed alternatives. Then, we perform two human subject studies asking participants to choose between two equivalent snippets of Java code with different surprisal scores (one original and transformed). We find that programmers do prefer more predictable variants, and that stronger language models like the transformer align more often and more consistently with these preferences. (shrink)

Background: COVID-19 pandemic has led to heightened moral distress among healthcare providers. Despite evidence of gendered differences in experiences, there is limited feminist analysis of moral distress. Objectives: To identify types of moral distress among women healthcare providers during the COVID-19 pandemic; to explore how feminist political economy might be integrated into the study of moral distress. Research Design: This research draws on interviews and focus groups, the transcripts of which were analyzed using framework analysis. Research Participants and Context: 88 (...) healthcare providers, based in British Columbia Canada, participated virtually. Ethical Considerations: The study received ethical approval from Simon Fraser University. Findings: Healthcare providers experienced moral dilemmas related to ability to provide quality and compassionate care while maintaining COVID-19 protocols. Moral constraints were exacerbated by staffing shortages and lack of access to PPE. Moral conflicts emerged when women tried to engage decision-makers to improve care, and moral uncertainty resulted from lack of clear and consistent information. At home, women experienced moral constraints related to inability to support children’s education and wellbeing. Moral conflicts related to lack of flexible work environments and moral dilemmas developed between unpaid care responsibilities and COVID-19 risks. Women healthcare providers resisted moral residue and structural constraints by organizing for better working conditions, childcare, and access to PPE, engaging mental health support and drawing on professional pride. Discussion: COVID-19 has led to new and heightened experiences of moral distress among HCP in response to both paid and unpaid care work. While many of the experiences of moral distress at work were not explicitly gendered, implicit gender norms structured moral events. Women HCP had to take it upon themselves to organize, seek out resources, and resist moral residue. Conclusion: A feminist political economy lens illuminates how women healthcare providers faced and resisted a double layering of moral distress during the pandemic. (shrink)

In this anthology of new and classic articles, fifteen noted feminist philosophers explore contemporary ethical issues that uniquely affect the lives of women. These issues in applied ethics include autonomy, responsibility, sexual harassment, women in the military, new technologies for reproduction, surrogate motherhood, pornography, abortion, nonfeminist women and others. Whether generated by old social standards or intensified by recent technology, these dilemmas all pose persistent, 'nagging,' questions that cry out for answers.

The use of Big Data—however the term is defined—involves a wide array of issues and stakeholders, thereby increasing numbers of complex decisions around issues including data acquisition, use, and sharing. Big Data is becoming a significant component of practice in an ever-increasing range of disciplines; however, since it is not a coherent “discipline” itself, specific codes of conduct for Big Data users and researchers do not exist. While many institutions have created, or will create, training opportunities to prepare people to (...) work in and around Big Data, insufficient time, space, and thought have been dedicated to training these people to engage with the ethical, legal, and social issues in this new domain. Since Big Data practitioners come from, and work in, diverse contexts, neither a relevant professional code of conduct nor specific formal ethics training are likely to be readily available. This normative paper describes an approach to conceptualizing ethical reasoning and integrating it into training for Big Data use and research. Our approach is based on a published framework that emphasizes ethical reasoning rather than topical knowledge. We describe the formation of professional community norms from two key disciplines that contribute to the emergent field of Big Data: computer science and statistics. Historical analogies from these professions suggest strategies for introducing trainees and orienting practitioners both to ethical reasoning and to a code of professional conduct itself. We include two semester course syllabi to strengthen our thesis that codes of conduct can be harnessed to support the development of ethical reasoning in, and a sense of professional identity among, Big Data practitioners. (shrink)

Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov consider how rapture resonate's both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being.

Bartky draws on the experience of daily life to unmask the many disguises by which intimations of inferiority are visited upon women. She critiques both the male bias of current theory and the debilitating dominion held by notions of "proper femininity" over women and their bodies in patriarchal culture.

Purpose The online economy has not resolved the issue of racial bias in its applications. While algorithms are procedures that facilitate automated decision-making, or a sequence of unambiguous instructions, bias is a byproduct of these computations, bringing harm to historically disadvantaged populations. This paper argues that algorithmic biases explicitly and implicitly harm racial groups and lead to forms of discrimination. Relying upon sociological and technical research, the paper offers commentary on the need for more workplace diversity within high-tech industries and (...) public policies that can detect or reduce the likelihood of racial bias in algorithmic design and execution. Design/methodology/approach The paper shares examples in the US where algorithmic biases have been reported and the strategies for explaining and addressing them. Findings The findings of the paper suggest that explicit racial bias in algorithms can be mitigated by existing laws, including those governing housing, employment, and the extension of credit. Implicit, or unconscious, biases are harder to redress without more diverse workplaces and public policies that have an approach to bias detection and mitigation. Research limitations/implications The major implication of this research is that further research needs to be done. Increasing the scholarly research in this area will be a major contribution in understanding how emerging technologies are creating disparate and unfair treatment for certain populations. Practical implications The practical implications of the work point to areas within industries and the government that can tackle the question of algorithmic bias, fairness and accountability, especially African-Americans. Social implications The social implications are that emerging technologies are not devoid of societal influences that constantly define positions of power, values, and norms. Originality/value The paper joins a scarcity of existing research, especially in the area that intersects race and algorithmic development. (shrink)

Children with innate variations of sex characteristics (also termed differences of sex development or intersex traits) are routinely subjected to medical interventions that aim to make their bodies appear or function more typically female or male. Many such interventions lack clear evidence of benefit, they have been challenged for thirty years, and they are now understood to violate children’s rights to bodily autonomy and bodily integrity. In this paper I argue that these persist in part due to epistemic injustices and (...) biomedical authority. Epistemic injustices include limited disclosure of current practices, the systemic marginalisation of community voices and psychosocial professionals, and attempts to discredit or misrepresent testimony. Bioethics has largely failed to change medical practice, and sometimes plays a role in perpetuating epistemic injustices. I find that the development of an intersex movement provides opportunities for epistemic justice and liberation by engaging with other disciplines and promoting oversight of medical decision-making. The paper draws particularly on Australian sources, including internationally influential ethical principles. (shrink)

This article reflects on the problem of false belief produced by the integrated psychological and algorithmic landscape humans now inhabit. Following the work of scholars such as Lee McIntyre (Post-Truth, MIT Press, 2018) or Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall (The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, Yale University Press, 2019) it combines recent discussions of fake news, post-truth, and science denialism across the disciplines of political science, computer science, sociology, psychology, and the history and philosophy of science that variously address (...) the ineffectiveness, in a digital era, of countering individual falsehoods with facts. Truth and falsehood, it argues, rather than being seen as properties or conditions attached to individual instances of content, should now be seen as collective, performative, and above all persuasive phenomena. They should be practically evaluated as networked systems and mechanisms of sharing in which individually targeted actions are combining with structural tendencies (both human and mechanical) in unprecedented ways. For example, the persuasive agency of apparent consensus (clicks, likes, bots, trolls) is newly important in a fractured environment that only appears to be, but is no longer ‘public’; the control of narratives, labels, and associations is a live, time-sensitive issue, a continuous contest, or ongoing cusp. Taking a social approach to truth yields observations of new relevance; from how current strategies of negative cohesion, blame, and enemy-creation depend crucially on binary ways of constructing the world, to how the offer of identity/community powerfully cooperates with the structural tendencies of algorithm-driven advertiser platforms towards polarisation. Remedies for these machine-learned and psychological tendencies lie in end-user education. So the Arts and Humanities, whether via comparisons with previous historical periods, or via principles of critical thinking and active reading, offer crucial resources to help counter what since 1997 silicon valley executives and scholars have called ‘persuasive technology’ (Fogg in Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What we Think and Do, Morgan Kaufmann, 2003; Hamari et al. (eds) in Persuasive Technology, Springer International Publishing, 2014; Harris in How a Handful of Tech Companies Control Billions of Minds Every Day, 2017; Lanier in Who Owns the Future? Simon & Schuster, 2014 and Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Picador, 2019). The article proposes a paradigm shift in public understandings of this new social environment: from a culture of discovery, where what matters is what exists or is in fact the case, to a culture of iteration, where what matters is what gets repeated. (shrink)

Biomedical engineering technologies such as brain–machine interfaces and neuroprosthetics are advancements which assist human beings in varied ways. There are exciting yet speculative visions of how the neurosciences and bioengineering may influence human nature. However, these could be preparing a possible pathway towards an enhanced and even posthuman future. This article seeks to investigate several ethical themes and wider questions of enhancement, transhumanism and posthumanism. Four themes of interest are: autonomy, identity, futures, and community. Three larger questions can be asked: (...) will everyone be enhanced? Will we be “human” if we are not, one day, transhuman? Should we be enhanced or not? The article proceeds by concentrating on a widespread and sometimes controversial application: the cochlear implant, an auditory prosthesis implanted into Deaf patients. Cochlear implantation and its reception in both the deaf and hearing communities have a distinctive moral discourse, which can offer surprising insights. The paper begins with several points about the enhancement of human beings, transhumanism’s reach beyond the human, and posthuman aspirations. Next it focuses on cochlear implants on two sides. Firstly, a shorter consideration of what technologies may do to humans in a transhumanist world. Secondly, a deeper analysis of cochlear implantation’s unique socio-political movement, its ethical explanations and cultural experiences linked with pediatric cochlear implantation—and how those wary of being thrust towards posthumanism could marshal such ideas by analogy. As transhumanism approaches, the issues and questions merit continuing intense analysis. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the ontological interpretation of the concepts of reduction and emergence is often misleading in the philosophy of science and should nearly always be eschewed in favor of an epistemological interpretation. As a paradigm case, an example is drawn from the philosophy of chemistry to illustrate the drawbacks of “ontological reduction” and “ontological emergence,” and the virtues of an epistemological interpretation of these concepts.

Will have appeal to a very diverse range of philosophers, across all traditional branches of philosophy (nearly all major areas are covered). Combines substantive philosophical work on the various philosophical areas, with detailed methodological work, and introductory chapters exploring the nature of public philosophy per se.

Mechanism design is a form of optimization developed in economic theory. It casts economists as institutional engineers, choosing an outcome and then arranging a set of market rules and conditions to achieve it. The toolkit from mechanism design is widely used in economics, policymaking, and now in building and managing online environments. Mechanism design has become one of the most pervasive yet inconspicuous influences on the digital mediation of social life. Its optimizing schemes structure online advertising markets and other multi-sided (...) platform businesses. Whatever normative rationales mechanism design might draw on in its economic origins, as its influence has grown and its applications have become more computational, we suggest those justifications for using mechanism design to orchestrate and optimize human interaction are losing traction. In this article, we ask what ideological work mechanism design is doing in economics, computer science, and its applications to the governance of digital platforms. Observing mechanism design in action in algorithmic environments, we argue it has become a tool for producing information domination, distributing social costs in ways that benefit designers, and controlling and coordinating participants in multi-sided platforms. (shrink)

In this paper I wish to examine in detail the arguments which Spinoza uses in a very brief section of the Ethics, the lemmas following Proposition 13 of Part II. My aim in this analysis will be twofold: to attempt a preliminary sketch of the nature of a physical system in Spinoza’s view, and to clarify what Spinoza means by speaking of certain items as “individuals.” At least a partial fulfillment of the first aim is a necessary condition for the (...) second, since most of what Spinoza has to say about individuation in the Ethics and elsewhere is expressed in terms of individual bodies. His own solution of the mind-body problem entails that there will be correlative statements true at the ideational level; but, unfortunately, he usually leaves such correlations to his reader. I use the term “ideational” herein in preference to “mental” to avoid any dualistic connotation. Ideational and extensional levels for Spinoza refer to a dualism of denoting complexes, but not to a dualism of objects denoted by these. (shrink)

Endosex, in contrast to intersex, refers to innate physical sex characteristics judged to fall within the broad range of what is considered normative or typical for ‘binary’ female or male bodies by the medical field, or to persons with such characteristics1 (p. 437). In this short contribution, we explain the origins and increasing use of this little-known term and discuss its practical and ethical relevance to medicine as well as to scholarship from a range of disciplines concerned with individuals’ sexed (...) embodiment. There is growing awareness in many quarters of the term intersex— used within some discourses to refer to clusters of bodily attributes (as in ‘intersex traits’, also termed differences of sex development or variations of sex characteristics)1 or more broadly to persons (as in ‘intersex persons’) whose bodily attributes differ from the dominant clinical, biological, or legal paradigms that categorise and differentiate female and male bodies. Intersex traits have historically been stigmatised as monstrous, morbid or tragic, justifying surgical and hormonal ‘fixing’.2 Persons born with the attributes named with these terms, even if physically healthy, therefore risk unnecessary pathologisation and medicalisation, prompting interventions, often non-voluntary, into their bodies to make them appear or function in ways that are deemed more typically female or male. In addition, some legal and social systems automatically associate persons with these traits with third categories of sex—neither female nor male—which may or may not align with their sex designation at birth, sex of rearing, personal experience or self-conception (see Coda). Being seen as intersex or being judged to have …. (shrink)

: In this paper I argue that belief in the greater confirmatory value of prediction over accommodation can best be understood as a function of the practice rather than the logic of science. Attempts to account for this asymmetry within the logic of science have revealed no non-arbitrary way to address the problem of underdetermination as it applies to prediction and thus have failed to account for the preference for prediction over accommodation on logical grounds. Instead, I propose a model (...) that not only justifies and explains this preference, but allows for a richer taxonomy of the types of evidential confirmation that are employed in scientific reasoning. (shrink)

This essay defends the role of law-like explanation in the social sciences by showing that the "argument from complexity" fails to demonstrate a difference in kind between the subject matter of natural and social science. There are problems internal to the argument itself - stemming from reliance on an overly idealized view of natural scientific practice - and reason to think that, based upon an analogy with a more sophisticated understanding of natural science, which makes use of "redescriptions" in the (...) face of obstacles like complexity, we have reason to be optimistic about the prospects for a nomological social science. (shrink)

This article explores the Polanyi brothers’ publicly-stated views--and private debates--concerning the nature and origin of fascism and communism. In that connection, it examines their rival estimates of the Soviet regime.

This article explores the Polanyi brothers’ publicly-stated views--and private debates--concerning the nature and origin of fascism and communism. In that connection, it examines their rival estimates of the Soviet regime.

What does it mean to be black in America, to exist as a dark physical body, a "colored" voice, a stigmatized being in a society that sees, hears, and acts according to a set of bleaching assumptions? Versions of that question have echoed across our historical landscape ever since James-town, but rarely have they figured so forcibly as in the 1890s, when the Supreme Court upheld Ferguson over Plessy, Jim Crow laws spread through the South, degenerationists elaborated the "problem of (...) the Negro," imperialists hoisted the "white man's burden" of "little brown brothers" abroad, and racial lynching peaked at an all-time high that incited a national scandal. Any radical hopes for Reconstruction after the Civil War had long since vanished by the years of the fin de siècle. And a century later, the gains of a "Second Reconstruction" movement for civil rights have likewise eroded, with unparalleled "hypersegregation" accentuating new patterns of black poverty, unemployment, family disintegration, homelessness, and addiction.1 Being black, in other words, has meant—and, to a considerable degree, continues to mean—being excluded from white society, white prerogatives, even white discourse itself, in a process whose effects insidiously appear to legitimate the very causes that produce them. 1. C. Vann Woodward first warned of this unsettling repetition of nineteenth-century patterns in his 1965 suggestion that the civil rights movement might constitute a "Second Reconstruction" . In his recent reassessment of the troubling implications of that prediction, he notes how ghetto speech is growing more distinct from standard English: "The result is a vicious circle in which the longer blacks are made victims of the white stereotypes that foster hypersegregation, the more they appear to conform to the stereotypes that were used to justify segregation in the first place, and the deeper victims sink in isolation" . Lee Clark Mitchell, professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response and Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism . He is currently working on the formula western in a book tentatively titled "Writing Westward: Imagining America beyond the Frontier.". (shrink)

The human animal feels fear: the ancient tranquil hordes, inhabitants of infinite plains where time stood still, have dissolved into a swarming, formless mass rushing into the future as if into the void: without a plan, without a leader, without roots; perhaps the only thing that guides it is the vague feeling of being a body whose limbs can not survive if separated.

Thomas More’s Utopia is made up of two books. Book One, quickly skimmed over by those who dream of the future and are bored by history, tells us about Europe in 1515 at the dawn of a revolution in every field of knowledge dominated by a political power that uses religion, fear and ignorance to satisfy an insatiable appetite for hegemony, infinitely corrupt but in public promoting moral, family values. Book Two gives us a glimpse of a future on a (...) human scale using new techniques, reason and good management of its resources to reconcile the common good with the pleasure of the individual. That book is the founding text for our modernity. It is the pagan bible adopted by the Enlightenment, which we have inscribed in the charter of our epoch’s institutions. Five hundred years later the books are being rewritten in reverse: the great human dream set in train by Book Two in 1516 is bogged down in the reality of 2005. The new promises of free-choice economism in 2005 are just a nightmare journey back in time to the postulates of Book One. (shrink)