The chapter introduces and characterizes the notion of fittingness. It charts the history of the relation and its relevance to contemporary debates in normative and metanormative philosophy and proceeds to survey issues to do with fittingness covered in the volume’s chapters, including the nature and epistemology of fittingness, the relations between fittingness and reasons, the normativity of fittingness, fittingness and value theory, and the role of fittingness in theorizing about responsibility. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of issues to (...) do with fittingness that aren’t covered extensively by the volume’s chapters in order to indicate avenues for further research. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Since the early 1980’s, with the clinical advent of in vitro fertilization resulting in so-called “test tube babies,” a wide array of ethical considerations and concerns regarding artificial womb technology (AWT) have been described. Recent breakthroughs in the development of extracorporeal neonatal life support by means of AWT have reinitiated ethical interest about this topic with a sense of urgency. Most of the recent ethical literature on the topic, however, pertains not to the more imminent scenario of a physiologically improved (...) method of neonatal care through AWT, but instead to the remote scenario of “complete ectogenesis” that imagines human gestation occurring entirely outside of the womb. This scoping review of the ethical literature on AWT spans from more abstract concerns about complete ectogenesis to more immediate concerns about the soon-to-be-expected clinical life support of what we term the fetal neonate or fetonate. Within an organizing framework of different stages of human gestational development, from conception to the viable premature infant, we discuss both already identified and newly emerging ethical considerations and concerns regarding AWT and the care of the fetonate. (shrink)

Overgeneralizations by psychologists of the research evidence on memory and eyewitness testimony, such as “memory decays with time” or “memories are fluid and malleable,” are beginning to appear in legal judgements and guidance documents, accompanied by unwarranted disparagement of lay beliefs about memory. These overgeneralizations could have significant adverse consequences for the conduct of civil and criminal law.

Some recent hostile responses to the rapid growth of Libertarianism have depicted it as a febrile spin-off from the post-hippy 'Me Decade'. In fact we are the inheritors of an illustrious centuries old tradition, largely overlooked by the myopic current fashions in the history of ideas. Liberals like J. S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham receive plenty of attention in college courses, but the libertarian tradition as a whole is largely ignored, and misrepresented where touched upon. Mill and Bentham constitute one (...) aspect - in many ways the feeblest - of liberalism. Dozens of thinkers and activists who embodied the most systematic or radical elements in Libertarianism have been consigned to the Memory Hole. (shrink)

This is a study involving three HIV clinics in the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Manitoba. We sought to identify ethical issues involving health care providers and clinic clients in these settings, and to gain an understanding of how different ethical issues are managed by these groups. We used an institutional ethnographic method to investigate ethical issues in HIV clinics. Our researcher conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews, compiled participant observation notes, and studied health records in order to document ethical (...) issues in the clinics, and to understand how health care providers and clinic clients manage and resolve these issues. We found that health care providers and clinic clients have developed work processes for managing ethical issues of various types: conflicts between client-autonomy and public health priorities, difficulties associated with the criminalization of nondisclosure of HIV positive status, challenges with non-adherence to HIV treatment, the protection of confidentiality, barriers to treatment access, and negative social determinants of health and well-being. Some ethical issues resulted from structural disadvantages experienced by clinic clients. The most striking findings in our study were the negative social determinants of health and well-being experienced by some clinic clients – such as experiences of violence and trauma, poverty, racism, colonization, homelessness, and other factors affecting well-being such as problematic substance use. These negative determinants were at the root of other ethical issues, and are themselves of ethical concern. (shrink)

While earlier work has emphasized Kant’s philosophy of religion as thinly disguised morality, this timely and original reappraisal of Kant’s philosophy of religion incorporates recent scholarship. In this volume, Chris L. Firestone, Stephen R. Palmquist, and the other contributors make a strong case for more specific focus on religious topics in the Kantian corpus. Main themes include the relationship between Kant’s philosophy of religion and his philosophy as a whole, the contemporary relevance of specific issues arising out of Kant’s (...) philosophical theology, and the relationship of Kant’s philosophy to Christian theology. As a whole, this book capitalizes on contemporary movements in Kant studies by looking at Kant not as an anti-metaphysician, but as a genuine seeker of spirituality in the human experience. (shrink)

Dissociation is an important aspect of responses to traumatic events. According to a number of influential theories, it negatively impacts cognitive performance including encoding of the trauma memories, leading to an increased risk of later conditions such as posttraumatic stress disorder . We tested this hypothesis experimentally in two studies by inducing dissociation in the laboratory and investigating the effects on several aspects of cognition, including time estimation, digit and spatial span, and story recall. Dissociation was related to decrements in (...) time estimation, digit span, and story retention, but did not affect perceptual attention, spatial span, or immediate story recall. The results are discussed in the context of theoretical models of PTSD and their implications for official questioning of traumatized individuals such as sexual assault survivors. (shrink)

Generalization does not come from repeatedly observing phenomena in numerous settings, but from theories explaining what is general in those phenomena. Expecting future behavior to look like past observations is especially problematic in psychology, where behaviors change when people's knowledge changes. Psychology should thus focus on theories of people's capacity to create and apply new representations of their environments.

In November 2018, the practice of health care ethics consultation crossed a major threshold when 138 candidates took the inaugural Healthcare Ethics Consultant Certification Examination. This accomplishment, long in the making, has had and continues to have both advocates and critics. The Healthcare Ethics Consultant Certification Commission, a functionally autonomous body created and funded by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, was charged with overseeing creation of the certification process, developing the exam, and formulating certification standards and policies to (...) assess candidates’ qualifications. In this essay, as members of the commission, we describe the process of developing, administering, and scoring the certification examination as well as the historical context and the outlook for certification. By detailing the decisions and actions of the commission, we aim to provide a transparent account of the commission's efforts to develop a psychometrically sound, reliable, and secure examination through a deliberative, fair, and data‐driven process. (shrink)

The majority of people show persistent poor performance in reasoning about “stock-flow problems” in the laboratory. An important example is the failure to understand the relationship between the “stock” of CO2 in the atmosphere, the “inflow” via anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and the “outflow” via natural CO2 absorption. This study addresses potential causes of reasoning failures in the CO2 accumulation problem and reports two experiments involving a simple re-framing of the task as managing an analogous financial budget. In Experiment 1 a (...) financial version of the task that required participants to think in terms of controlling debt demonstrated significant improvements compared to a standard CO2 accumulation problem. Experiment 2, in which participants were invited to think about managing savings, suggested that this improvement was fortuitous and coincidental rather than due to a fundamental change in understanding the stock-flow relationships. The role of graphical information in aiding or abetting stock-flow reasoning was also explored in both experiments, with the results suggesting that graphs do not always assist understanding. The potential for leveraging the kind of reasoning exhibited in such tasks in an effort to change people's willingness to reduce CO2 emissions is briefly discussed. (shrink)

Dissociation is a phenomenon common in a number of psychological disorders and has been frequently suggested to impair memory for traumatic events. In this study we explored the effects of dissociation on visual memory. A dissociative state was induced experimentally using a mirror-gazing task and its short-term effects on memory performance were investigated. Sixty healthy individuals took part in the experiment. Induced dissociation impaired visual memory performance relative to a control condition; however, the degree of dissociation was not associated with (...) lower memory scores in the experimental group. The results have theoretical and practical implications for individuals who experience frequent dissociative states such as patients with posttraumatic stress disorder. (shrink)

While psychopathy research has been growing for decades, a relatively new area of research is corporate psychopathy. Corporate psychopaths are simply psychopaths working in organizational settings. They may be attracted to the financial, power, and status gains available in senior positions and can cause considerable damage within these roles from a manipulative interpersonal style to large-scale fraud. Based upon prior studies, we analyze psychopathy research pertaining to 23 moral emotions classified according to functional quality and target. Based upon our review, (...) we suggest that psychopaths are high in moral emotions associated with other-directed negative signals, low in self-directed negative signals, and low in other-directed positive signals. We found no empirical articles related to self-directed positive signals. This understanding of the specific moral emotion deficits of corporate psychopaths provides greater theoretical understanding and practical implications of knowing which individuals not to promote, though more research is needed on moral emotions that are faked for manipulative reasons. (shrink)

We doubt that primary sociopathy is adaptive, for three reasons: First, its prevalence is too low to require an adaptive explanation. Second, a common sequela of damage to the orbito-frontal lobes is Any pattern of behavior that can be produced by brain damage is unlikely to be adaptive. Third, we argue that most human social behavior is not under tight genetic control, but is produced by open-ended calculation of fitness-contingencies.

Agroecology has been proposed as a key building block for food sovereignty. This article examines the meaning, practices and potentials of ‘transformative agroecology learning’ as a collective strategy for food system transformation. Our study is based on our qualitative and action research with the European Coordination of Via Campesina to develop the European Agroecology Knowledge Exchange Network. This network is linked to the global network of La Via Campesina and builds on the strong experiences and traditions of popular education in (...) Latin American peasant movements. Rather than focusing on agroecology education as a process of individual learning, we analyse how a transformative agroecology education can be strengthened as a critical repertoire of action used by social movements to advance food sovereignty. Our analysis contributes a new theory of transformative agroecology learning based on four key characteristics or qualities: horizontalism; diálogo de saberes ; combining practical and political knowledge; and building social movement networks. While these different elements of transformative agroecology learning were present across EAKEN, they were unevenly developed and, in many cases, not systematized. The framework can help to strategically and reflexively systematize and strengthen a transformative agroecology learning approach as a key building block for food sovereignty. (shrink)

Traditional representations of philosophy have tended to prize the role of reason in the discipline. These accounts focus exclusively on ideas and arguments as animating forces in the field. But anecdotal evidence and more rigorous sociological studies suggest there is more going on in philosophy. In this article, we present two hypotheses about social factors in the field: that social factors influence the development of philosophy, and that status and reputation—and thus social influence—will tend to be awarded to philosophers who (...) offer rationally compelling arguments for their views. In order to test these hypotheses, we need a more comprehensive grasp on the field than traditional representations afford. In particular, we need more substantial data about various social connections between philosophers. This investigation belongs to a naturalized metaphilosophy, an empirical study of the discipline itself, and it offers prospects for a fuller and more reliable understanding of philosophy. (shrink)