Telephone survey of 293 TV viewers in Minneapolis-St. Paul investigated how viewers evaluate ethical issues and problematic content in TV news and entertainment programs, and attitudes toward methods of controlling TV content. In rating eight hypothetical news and entertainment scenarios, viewers appeared more willing to accept ethical breaches in entertainment than in news programs. In evaluating the severity of general problems in TV programming, most viewers considered violence, adult themes, and a lack of family values to be big problems. Different (...) methods of controlling potentially problematic content were evaluated, with viewers overwhelmingly endorsing a system of ratings or warnings, as well as restricting content to certain times or channels. Governmental regulation as a form of controlling TV content was strongly rejected. This article demonstrates the usefulness and appropriateness of empirical research in involving the audience in an active role in the study of media ethics. (shrink)

In this article, we report findings from a qualitative study that explored how the relatives of intensive care unit patients experienced the nurses’ role and relationship with them in the end-of-life decision-making processes. In all, 27 relatives of 21 deceased patients were interviewed about their experiences in this challenging ethical issue. The findings reveal that despite bedside experiences of care, compassion and comfort, the nurses were perceived as vague and evasive in their communication, and the relatives missed a long-term perspective (...) in the dialogue. Few experienced that nurses participated in meetings with doctors and relatives. The ethical consequences imply increased loneliness and uncertainty, and the experience that the relatives themselves have the responsibility of obtaining information and understanding their role in the decision-making process. The relatives therefore felt that the nurses could have been more involved in the process. (shrink)

In this article, we report the findings from a qualitative study that explored how relatives of terminally ill, alert and competent intensive care patients perceived their involvement in the end-of-life decision-making process. Eleven family members of six deceased patients were interviewed. Our findings reveal that relatives narrate about a strong intertwinement with the patient. They experienced the patients’ personal individuality as a fragile achievement. Therefore, they viewed their presence as crucial with their primary role to support and protect the patient, (...) thereby safeguarding his values and interests. However, their inclusion in decision making varied from active participation in the decision-making process to acceptance of the physicians’ decision or just receiving information. We conclude that models of informed shared decision making should be utilised and optimised in intensive care, where nurses and physicians work with both the patient and his or her family and regard the family as partners in the process. (shrink)

Ethical sensitivity is a precursor to mora1 judgment in that a person must recognize the existence of an ethical problem before such a problem can be resolved. It is an important concept, yet it has received little attention from ethics scholars. This preliminary and exploratory study indicates that ethical sensitivity can be identified in viewers' reactions to and evaluations of ethically controversial television news stories, that diferent levels of ethical sensitivity are evident in discussions of television news stories, and that (...) there are at least 3 dimensions by which ethnic sensitivity may be evaluated: time, breadth, and depth. (shrink)

There are good reasons to believe that "making a statement," in a broader sense than Danto's, is a "necessary" condition of art. But phenomenological analysis tends to show that an artwork must be "aesthetic" as well as meaningful. Otherwise, what the artist has to say could not be distinguished from many "non"artistic forms of communication. Moreover, its meaning must "subserve" the aesthetic function of the artwork, in a role best described as "significance"." "Art" must therefore be defined in terms of (...) "the creation of significant aesthetic objects". (shrink)

~Et h i c a l sensitivity is investigated in an illustrative analysis of two female television nezos viewers. Transcripts of structured, in-depth interviews were analyzed according to four critical content dimensions of ethical sensitivity reflecting interviewees' mentions of story characteristics, ethical issues, consequences, and stakeholders. Cognitive maps illustrate the reasoning processes ofthe two viewers, one with relatively high and the other with relatively low ethical sensitivity. This study provides a detailed description of a new application of a research procedure, (...) and gives detailed examples of how subdimensions of ethical sensitivity interact and relate to a person's reasoning processes. The study is a pilot demonstration of a promising methodology and a precursor to more investigations on more viewers, more types of content, and more media. (shrink)

Background: ICU patients’ family members are in a new, uncertain, and vulnerable situation due to the patient’s critical illness and complete dependence on the ICU nurses and physicians. Family members’ feeling of being cared for is closely linked to clinicians’ attitudes and behavior. Aim: To explore ICU nurses’ and physicians’ bedside interaction with critically ill ICU patients´ families and discuss this in light of the ethics of care. Research design: A qualitative study using participant observation, focus groups, and thematic narrative (...) analysis. Participants and research context: Data were gathered from July 2017 to August 2019, in four ICUs in Norway through 270 h of fieldwork and seven focus groups with ICU nurses and physicians. Ethical considerations: The Regional Committee for Medical and Health Research Ethics and the Norwegian Centre for Research Data approved the study. Findings: Quality of ICU family care depends on nurses’ and physicians’ attitudes, behavior, and personality traits. Three main themes were identified: being attentive, an active approach, and degree of tolerance. Discussion: The findings are discussed in light of the ethics of care and empirical research from the intensive care environment. Conclusions: This study shows that attentive, active, and tolerant clinicians represent a culture of ethical care that gives families greater freedom of action and active participation in patient care. Clinicians must not bear sole responsibility for this culture; it must have a firm basis in the hospital and ICU and be established through training, interprofessional reflection, and support of clinicians. (shrink)

Interviews with 111 African-American and European-Americans investigated racial differences in viewer evaluations of ethically controversial TV news stories. The study focused on judgments of whether three news stories (Genniger Flowers's alleged affair with Bill Clinton, a hit-and-run accident, and racial discrimination by Realtors) should be aired, the criteria applied in reaching those judgements, and the indications of reasons to attend to or to reject each story. No simple relationship was found between race and judgments of whether the stories should be (...) aired, but when story relevance was considered, the relationship became clearer. There appears to be a complex relationship between the viewers' lived experience, story content, and story evaluation. (shrink)

IT is the major stumbling block to the claim that machines could one day possess true intelligence. The question is not whether machines would be able to produce outputs indistinguishable from those of a person, as proponents of “artificial intelligence” have traditionally maintained. Searle has shown, rather, that the real question is whether machines could ever be conscious of objects in the way we know ourselves to be. That would seem to make it, at least in part, a phenomenological problem. (...) By means of microphenomenology, then, I shall try to show that the basic structure of IT, as detected in reflection, can be analyzed in terms of an even more primitive factor, FA. Since attentional processes can be correlated with neurological selectivity, it will be argued that any machine constructed to perform such processes would be capable of IT. I shall, in short, attempt to support the possibility of creating automata capable of intentional activities by trying to describe how they occur in ourselves. (shrink)

IT is the major stumbling block to the claim that machines could one day possess true intelligence. The question is not whether machines would be able to produce outputs indistinguishable from those of a person, as proponents of “artificial intelligence” have traditionally maintained. Searle has shown, rather, that the real question is whether machines could ever be conscious of objects in the way we know ourselves to be. That would seem to make it, at least in part, a phenomenological problem. (...) By means of microphenomenology, then, I shall try to show that the basic structure of IT, as detected in reflection, can be analyzed in terms of an even more primitive factor, FA. Since attentional processes can be correlated with neurological selectivity, it will be argued that any machine constructed to perform such processes would be capable of IT. I shall, in short, attempt to support the possibility of creating automata capable of intentional activities by trying to describe how they occur in ourselves. (shrink)

Microphenomenology (the refelctive reconstruction of attentional processes operative in perception) explicates the distinction between aesthetic and nonaesthetic qualities in a way that avoids traditional objections. aesthetic qualities are identified as phenomenal manifestations of a specific sort of spontaneous attentional event. particular aesthetic qualities are show to fall within any of six different categories of features attributable to this event. some aesthetic predicates strictly imply such features while others only 'suggest' them.

“Consonance” and “dissonance” can be shown to denote a syndrome of relative characteristics falling within three distinct dimensions of experience: 1) tension-repose, 2) pleasure-displeasure, 3) coherence-incoherence. There is a demonstrable, complex relationship between the specific degree of each of those characteristics associated with a particular tonal interval and the degree of complication of the ratio of that interval. No extant theory is able to explain that correlation, including the currently popular theory of psychological expectation. Using micro-phenomenology, I hypothesize that a (...) consonant tonal interval is simply one that can be subliminally discriminated with relative ease and a dissonant interval is one that is relatively indiscriminable. Predictions implied by the hypothesis can be shown consistent with musical experience. If the theory is true, the affective character of harmonic progression is more the result of the need to discriminate tonal proportionality than the effect of expectation. (shrink)

“Consonance” and “dissonance” can be shown to denote a syndrome of relative characteristics falling within three distinct dimensions of experience: 1) tension-repose, 2) pleasure-displeasure, 3) coherence-incoherence. There is a demonstrable, complex relationship between the specific degree of each of those characteristics associated with a particular tonal interval and the degree of complication of the ratio of that interval. No extant theory is able to explain that correlation, including the currently popular theory of psychological expectation. Using micro-phenomenology, I hypothesize that a (...) consonant tonal interval is simply one that can be subliminally discriminated with relative ease and a dissonant interval is one that is relatively indiscriminable. Predictions implied by the hypothesis can be shown consistent with musical experience. If the theory is true, the affective character of harmonic progression is more the result of the need to discriminate tonal proportionality than the effect of expectation. (shrink)

According to Paul Ricoeur, the Freudian unconscious invalidates the ability of Husserlian phenomenology to explicate human psychology. The stumbling block is said to be the mechanism of repression, which can not only obviate conscious access to certain ideas and motives but also distort consciousness itself. The whole enterprise of phenomenology would seem to be at stake. But we must carefully distinguish being a conscious object from being a conscious process. By means of ?micro?phenomenology?, the reflective analysis of focal dynamics, I (...) shall try to reconstruct the so?called unconscious as certain conscious processes we are unable to reflect on as conscious objects. This reconstruction utilizes two motivational principles of attention, motive attraction and motive repulsion, which affect the manner in which attention addresses its object. The principles explain how reflective consciousness can be so repelled by certain directly conscious events that it withdraws with subliminal rapidity, leaving those events reflectively unconscious. Various sorts of evidence, including experimental results in subliminal psychology, can be used to support this phenomenological hypothesis. Though hypothetical, the theory at least demonstrates that the existence of unconscious processes is not an a priori basis for dismissing phenomenological methodology. (shrink)

It is argued that a radical relocation of subjectivity began several thousand years ago. A subjectivity experienced in the centric region of the heart, and in the body as a whole, began to be avoided in favor of the eccentric head as a new location of subjectivity. In ancient literature, for example in Homer's epics, the heart and various other bodily organs were described as centers of subjectivity and organs of perception for spiritual experience and communion with others and the (...) world. Mind and body were integrated. Bur also in the early historical record, as in the Old Testament, the heart and body were increasingly described as rebellious and rejected as impure. Head and heart, mind and body, became estranged. The body was judged an unsuitable, impure vessel for spiritual experience. This change in the location of subjectivity presaged the later development of Platonic, Gnostic, Christian, and Cartesian distinctions favoring mind over and against the body. It may also have contributed to some of the characteristic psychological and pathological processes (e.g., psychosomatic illnesses, repression, narcissism) currently attributed to the psychology of the modern Western, and specifically, North American self. (shrink)

The last two decades or so have borne witness to a modest revival of interest in the possibility that numerical relations are, at bottom, perceived properties or relations of some sort. In an earlier era writers as divergent as J. S. Mill and Edmund Husserl pursued just such a possibility, only to be swept out of the mathematical mainstream with a battery of broadsides from Gottlob Frege. Despite more recent arguments that numerical understanding is somehow derived from experience, however, no (...) analysis of quantitative perception yet offered seems able to account adequately for the perception of arithmetical equations as simple as 1 + 2 = 3. Without a satisfactory analysis of “equality”—clearly, the pivotal relation in arithmetic—we can expect the possible empirical foundations of mathematics to continue to be generally ignored. (shrink)

This study presents and develops test methods for assessing sensitivity to conflict of interest (COIsen). We are aware of no study assessing COIsen, but note that some popular methods for assessing ethical sensitivity and related constructs (which include COIsen) are flawed in that their presentation of stimulus material to subjects actually guides subjects to attend to ethical (or related) issues. The method tested here was designed to avoid this flaw. Using adaptations of two existing cases, a quota sample of 12 (...) students was interviewed. Our method used funnel-sequenced, open-ended interviews that were audiotaped and transcribed, then subjected to a form of cognitive mapping. These maps revealed the presence of “indicators” of COIsen. We found that COIsen can be measured and that the global COIsen score generated by our method is able to reveal much variation across subjects, making it a worthwhile candidate for further consideration. (shrink)

Hany metaethicists have all but abandoned the possibility that ordinary value language has any sort of universal logic. But careful phenomenological reflection indicates that we call something “good” only if we tacitly believe that it is disposed to be “pragmatically attractive” in some way. Conversely, “bad” things must be “pragmatically repellent”. Linguistic and phenomenological evidence supports these observations. Differences in the meanings of diverse value judgments seem to be due to variations in the practical context in which the attraction or (...) repulsion is judged. The fact that we can legitimately request clarification regarding each of five practical dimensions tends to indicate that a common structure underlies all senses in which something can be said “good” or “bad.”. (shrink)

Hany metaethicists have all but abandoned the possibility that ordinary value language has any sort of universal logic. But careful phenomenological reflection indicates that we call something “good” only if we tacitly believe that it is disposed to be “pragmatically attractive” in some way. Conversely, “bad” things must be “pragmatically repellent”. Linguistic and phenomenological evidence supports these observations. Differences in the meanings of diverse value judgments seem to be due to variations in the practical context in which the attraction or (...) repulsion is judged. The fact that we can legitimately request clarification regarding each of five practical dimensions tends to indicate that a common structure underlies all senses in which something can be said “good” or “bad.”. (shrink)

IT is the major stumbling block to the claim that machines could one day possess true intelligence. The question is not whether machines would be able to produce outputs indistinguishable from those of a person, as proponents of “artificial intelligence” have traditionally maintained. Searle has shown, rather, that the real question is whether machines could ever be conscious of objects in the way we know ourselves to be. That would seem to make it, at least in part, a phenomenological problem. (...) By means of microphenomenology, then, I shall try to show that the basic structure of IT, as detected in reflection, can be analyzed in terms of an even more primitive factor, FA. Since attentional processes can be correlated with neurological selectivity, it will be argued that any machine constructed to perform such processes would be capable of IT. I shall, in short, attempt to support the possibility of creating automata capable of intentional activities by trying to describe how they occur in ourselves. (shrink)