Focusing on the basic structure as the subject of justice has tended to lead theorists to make a choice: either there is no global basic structure and therefore obligations of justice remain domestic only or there is sufficient institutional basis at the global level to warrant affirming a basic structure global in scope, meaning that duties of justice must also be global. Recent literature, however, has pointed out that this might be a false choice between denying and asserting the existence (...) of a global basic structure. There are two main claims that I make in this paper. First, I claim that on a Rawlsian understanding of the basic structure, justice does not require one before its demands arise, but rather that under certain conditions, justice can require that a basic structure be established as an essential part of fulfilling its demands. This has the benefit of not restricting the scope of justice to the domestic sphere. Thus, the second claim is about determining, from a practice-dependent, non-ideal starting point, what those “certain conditions” are. Specifically, I argue that when currently existing global institutions begin impacting on the freedom of individuals to interact against a fair backdrop and pervasively impact on life chances, then the demands of justice will arise and we will need to establish a global basic structure. This paper, then, also has implications for the ideal/non-ideal theory debate, because I argue that the best way to globalize the basic structure is to begin from a non-ideal starting point.Article first published online: 9 NOV 2015. (shrink)

In her article the author shows the relevance of the concept of compromise for protestant ethics after 1945. Coming from the current discussion about the significance of compromise in the german society today she asks for the role of compromises for community building and as a guarantee for plurality in the civil society nowadays. The author illustrates the relation between compromise, plurality and democracy in protestant ethics after World War II by presenting an article of the German pastor Eberhard Müller, (...) who was the founder of the Protestant Academy of Bad Boll in Wuerttemberg/west-germany in 1945. In his article compromise, published in the Evangelisches Soziallexikon (Protestant Encyclopedia of social ethics, Kreuz-Verlag Stuttgart) 1954 Müller emphasizes his conviction, that after the ideology of Nazi-Germany only a culture of communication and exchance, a culture, that is based on compromises could anchor an understanding of democracy in the young German society. (shrink)

We discuss the implementation of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) within a project for the development of an AI-supported exergame for assisted movement training, outline outcomes and reflect on methodological opportunities and limitations. We adopted the responsibility-by-design (RbD) standard (CEN CWA 17796:2021) supplemented by methods for collaborative, ethical reflection to foster and support a shift towards a culture of trustworthiness inherent to the entire development process. An embedded ethicist organised the procedure to instantiate a collaborative learning effort and implement RRI (...) in a translational context. Within the interdisciplinary setting of the collaboration and with the support of a technoethicist, we successfully identified relevant, project-specific challenges and developed a roadmap with derived actions, thus meaningfully integrating RRI into the development process. We discuss the methodological procedure in terms of its effectiveness and efficiency, the allocation of responsibilities and roles, particularly regarding potential frictions in the interdisciplinary context with embedded ethics, and the challenges of the translational context. We conclude that the responsibility-by-design standard effectively established a productive workflow for collaborative investigation and work on ethical challenges. We reflect on methodological difficulties and propose possible avenues to our approach. (shrink)

Extant research provides compelling conceptual and empirical arguments that company-external as well as company-internal CSR efforts positively affect employees, but does so largely in studies assessing effects from the two CSR types independently of each other. In contrast, this paper investigates external–internal CSR jointly, examining the effects of consistent external–internal CSR strategies on employee attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. The research takes a social and moral identification theory view and advances the core hypothesis that inconsistent CSR strategies, defined as favoring external (...) over internal stakeholders, trigger employees’ perceptions of corporate hypocrisy which, in turn, lead to emotional exhaustion and turnover. In Study 1, a cross-industry employee survey indicates that inconsistent CSR strategies with larger external than internal efforts increase employees’ turnover intentions via perceived corporate hypocrisy and emotional exhaustion. In Study 2, a multi-source secondary dataset demonstrates that inconsistent CSR strategies increase firms’ actual employee turnover. Combined, the two studies demonstrate the importance of taking into account the interests of both external and internal stakeholders of the firm when researching and managing CSR. (shrink)

In June 2005, Italy held a referendum on repealing the law on medically assisted fertilization , which limits access to artificial reproduction to infertile couples, and prohibits the donation of gametes, the cryopreservation of embryos, preimplantation genetic diagnosis , and research on human embryos. The referendum was invalidated, and the law remained unchanged. The Italian political e bioethical debate on assisted reproduction was manipulated by the Catholic Church, which distorted scientific data and issues at stake with the help of Catholic (...) politicians and bioethicists. What happened in Italy shows that some perverse socio-cultural e political mechanisms are spreading the absurd and anti-historical view that scientific and technological advancements are threatening democracy and personal freedom. Scientists should not only contrast the political attempts at limiting freedom of scientific research, but also tell politicians, humanists and citizens that the invention of Western science with its view of scientific community as an “open society”, contributed and still contributes, through scientific education, to the construction and maintaining of the moral and political values underlying Western democracies. (shrink)

Pain continues to be one of the most controversial subjects in neurophilosophy. One focus of current debates is the apparent absence of an ideal brain‐based biomarker that could function as a coherent and distinct indicator for pain. One prominent reaction to this in the philosophical literature is scientific pain eliminativism. In this article, I argue for a non‐eliminative alternative that builds on family resemblances and provides a useful heuristic in the tradeoff between the idiosyncrasy of the neural processes corresponding to (...) different pain cases and the demand for generalizability in pain research. (shrink)

Em tempos de aceleração, de competição consigo mesmo e de uma linguagem instrumental e pragmática para se falar da educação, qual seria o valor de uma justificativa estética da existência em se tratando da formação de professores? Tendo tal problemática como motivadora, objetivamos, com este estudo, levantar a discussão acerca da relação entre literatura e docência, procurando aproximá-las de modo não utilitário, mas com vistas à estética da existência. Como um modo de resistência, optamos por perguntar pela formação de professores (...) pautada pelo exercício do pensamento, pela problematização dos valores e pelo cuidado consigo e com os demais. A partir disso, utilizamo-nos da pesquisa com inspiração arquegenealógica em Foucault, nos debruçando sobre autores que abordam ou a literatura ou a docência como possibilidades de entendimentos outros que não os conteudistas. Assim, tomamos a literatura, com inspiração nos estudos foucaultianos para problematizar a constituição docente. Mais especificamente, buscamos, nos estudos sobre a genealogia da subjetivação, a leitura, e a escrita tomadas como práticas possíveis do cuidado de si, quando da investigação de Foucault na Antiguidade greco-romana, especialmente nos primeiros séculos da nossa era. Todavia, não se trata de uma aplicação conceitual anacrônica, mas de tomarmos esse ferramental para pensar o que estamos nos tornando no presente, quais são os modos contemporâneos de dominação e quais são as possibilidades, em brechas, de criação de uma estilística da existência. Sendo um ensaio teórico, operamos com a literatura como possibilidade de dobra na linguagem tida como verdade, que poderia funcionar não fora da linguagem, mas fora da ordem do discurso. Seguindo essa perspectiva, entendemos que ela pode não ter apenas a função de revelar outra verdade, ser um passatempo, informar ou transmitir um saber, mas pode funcionar como uma prática de si num exercício de pensamento que problematiza o que estamos fazendo com nossa vida e com a vida dos demais no presente. Palavras-chave: Literatura. Docência. Práticas de si. Foucault. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 2 Seiten: 371-396.

Niche construction denotes the alteration, destruction, or creation of environmental features through the activities of an organism, modifying the relation between organism and environment. The concept of niche construction found application in various fields of research: evolutionary biology, enculturation, ontogenetic development, and local organism-environment coordination. This is because it provides a useful tool emphasizing different aspects of the dynamic interplay between organisms and their actively constructed environment. Traditionally, niche construction is considered a positive mechanism in the complementarity of organism and (...) environment. In contrast, this paper sheds light on the dark side of niche construction, that is, the different manners in which organisms may modify environmental features that are in some way or another harmful to them. First, the paper introduces a paradigmatic distinction of four kinds of niche construction as commonly addressed in recent literature, using more or less extended spatio-temporal scales as the distinguishing feature. Second, the paper elaborates on the concept of negative niche construction, providing normative criteria of (mal)adaptation that are suitable for the evaluation of environmental alterations, given the chosen spatio-temporal scale. Of particular interest are inter-scale conflicts: those cases of environmental constructions which appear adaptive concerning one spatio-temporal scale but maladaptive concerning another. Third, the paper distinguishes the concept of niche construction as a valuable instrument to better understand central aspects of modern medicine and the entangled contribution of evolutionary, socio-cultural, personal, and situational aspects to different health issues, using chronic pain as an illustrative case study. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the concept of environmental scaffolding can contribute to a better understanding of our affective life and the complex manners in which it is shaped by environmental entities. In particular, the concept of environmental scaffolding offers a more comprehensive and less controversial framework than the notions of embeddedness and extendedness. We contribute to the literature on situated affectivity by embracing and systematizing the diversity of affective scaffolding. In doing so, we introduce several distinctions that provide (...) classifications of different types of environmentally scaffolded affectivity. Furthermore, we differentiate eight dimensions that allow us to evaluate the quality and effectivity of scaffolds in particular applications. On that basis, we develop a taxonomy using paradigmatic examples of affective scaffolding. This taxonomy enriches the current debate by emphasizing distinctions that are often conflated and by identifying fields of application that are commonly overlooked. (shrink)

The framework proposed by Dupras and Bunnik was developed in response to their recognition that standard regulations are increasingly inadequate to address the complex privacy issues created by the...

Winner, 2020 Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological Association Honorable Mention, 2020 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor Black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat (...) Black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago. Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals—where fat bodies were once praised—showing that fat phobia, as it relates to Black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority. The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice. (shrink)

This article describes the results of qualitative research into the moral issues faced by social work professionals working in projects targeted at teenage mothers. The research is part of the tradition of empirical and practice-driven ethics. The main questions were: How does morality become visible in the social services for teenage mothers and how do social workers deal with the moral dimension of their work? (How) can education, training and peer review offer space for moral reflection? Interviews and group meetings (...) ('focus groups') were held to answer these questions. Nineteen professionals (front-line professionals as well as professionals in executive roles) participated in the research. The findings describe the moral issues and the moral actions of professionals and the organizational context respectively. The results reveal that the everyday practice of social work professionals can raise complex issues inherent to their work and that there is often no explicit reflection on the moral dimension of these issues. The authors argue that there needs to be greater focus on the complexity of moral issues and elaborate on three dimensions of this complexity. (shrink)

Drawing upon two independent national samples of 201 and 241 psychology graduate students, this article describes the development and psychometric evaluation of 4 Web-based student self-report scales tapping student socialization in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) with human participants. The Mentoring the Responsible Conduct of Research Scale (MRCR) is composed of 2 subscales assessing RCR instruction and modeling by research mentors. The 2 subscales of the RCR Department Climate Scale (RCR-DC) assess RCR department policies and faculty and student RCR (...) practices. The RCR Preparedness scale (RCR-P) and the RCR Field Integrity scale (RCR-FI) measure respectively students' confidence in their ability to conduct research responsibly and their belief in the RCR integrity of psychology as a discipline. Factor analysis, coefficient alphas, correlations, and multiple regression analyses demonstrated each of the scales had good internal consistency and concurrent and construct validity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theories of Emotion: Expressing, Feeling, Acting by Pia CAMPEGGIANISabrina B. LittleCAMPEGGIANI, Pia. Theories of Emotion: Expressing, Feeling, Acting. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023. xiv + 199 pp. Cloth, $80.89; paper, $21.60In Theories of Emotion, Pia Campeggiani provides a philosophical introduction to the emotions. The book is multidisciplinary and empirically informed. It is organized around three “groundbreaking intuitions” of emotion theory—(1) expression, (2) subjectivity, and (3) action. Each section (...) corresponds to a different thinker—Charles Darwin, William James, and John Dewey, respectively—and each section concludes with a discussion of relevant debates. This book is outstanding. It is clearly written, well organized, and impressive in its scope. In what follows, I outline key ideas and raise questions generated by each section, then conclude with general reflections on the text.Campeggiani begins with the “scandal” of emotion research: There is no agreement about what an emotion is. In part, this lack of consensus is due to the imprecise ways we employ concepts like feelings, emotions, affect, and passions in ordinary discourse. In part, it is due to empirical difficulties. For example, Campeggiani describes how implicit assumptions and a forced-choice format compromised an experiment about expression universality.Additionally, Campeggiani points out that the category “emotions” has an internal structure that lacks clear-cut boundaries. There are paradigmatic examples of emotions, such as fear and anger, but there are also ambiguous phenomena, such as respect and modesty, which we may or may not recognize as such. Throughout the text, Campeggiani introduces and evaluates numerous accounts of emotions, drawing our attention to the strengths, limitations, and empirical adequacy of each.Part 1 begins with Charles Darwin’s contributions to emotion theory—an emphasis on the biological origins of emotions and a focus on expression. This section examines emotions in connection to adaptive fitness, exploring phenomena such as blushing when we are ashamed and the biological bases of emotions. A highlight of this section is an exploration of the social or communicative character of the emotions, which Darwin described as “only a secondary effect” of expression. Campeggiani examines emotional contagion and imitation, as well as the [End Page 141] phenomenon of feeling more pain when we express pain on our faces. There is also a rich discussion about constructionism as an alternative to basic emotions theory.Part 2 opens with William James on subjective experience. Campeggiani describes the limitations of James’s position—of understanding emotions to be reducible to feelings. For starters, this position is not empirically well supported. Campeggiani cites Walter Cannon’s observation that “many of the autonomic changes that are symptomatic of a given emotion can also occur in its absence.” Additionally, James fails to “properly flesh out the link between emotions and evaluations.” Campeggiani then describes the cognitive turn in emotion theory that emerged in response to the lack of attention paid to evaluation. Cognitive accounts of emotion deemphasize the bodily dimensions of emotional experiences in favor of the intentional properties, or “aboutness,” of emotions. Emotions see things as things.From my vantage, this was the best part of the book. Campeggiani highlights Damasio’s point that decision-making depends on having a “correct affective perception of the values at stake in a given situation.” For instance, feeling outsized or misdirected fear may undermine our decision-making. Campeggiani also introduces debates about whether emotions are appraisals, and whether emotions entail judgments or make judgments more likely. In the introduction, she mentions that “decision-making processes are always and inevitably underpinned by emotions, for good and for ill.” We see what she means in this section. Emotions participate in reason, impede reason, and have cognitive content themselves.That emotions involve or participate in our judgments raises two kinds of concerns—epistemic and normative. The epistemic worry is that inaccurate appraisals may undermine our understanding of the world. This is especially worrisome for the class of emotions Campeggiani calls “recalcitrant,” or closed off to other mental states, and for the emotions she says are “heavily influenced by our needs and goals.” Emotions are imperfectly truth-tracking, as was made clear earlier, in part 1, regarding their adaptive nature. The normative worry is that certain emotional... (shrink)

Although pain is one of the most fundamental and unique experiences we undergo in everyday life, it also constitutes one of the most enigmatic and frustrating subjects for many scientists. This book provides a detailed analysis of why this issue is grounded in the nature of pain itself. It also offers a philosophically driven solution of how we may still approach pain in a theoretically compelling and practically useful manner. Two main theses are defended: (i) Pain seems inscrutable because there (...) exists no property that is commonly shared by all types of pain and that is at the same time particular to pain, setting it apart from other bodily sensations. This applies irrespective of whether we consider the psychological dimensions, neural networks, causal relations or biological functions of pain. Consequently, it is impossible to refer to ideal far-reaching and ideal distinct generalizations on the matter of pain. (ii) Despite this challenge, by focusing on the resemblance relations that hold across pains, we can generate scientific progress in explaining, predicting and treating pain. In doing so, the book aims to provide a clear conceptual basis for interdisciplinary communication and a useful heuristic for future research. (shrink)

This book showcases Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine, one of the foremost female minds of the 17th century. Best known today for her important correspondence with the philosopher René Descartes, Elisabeth was famous in her own time for her learning, philosophical acumen, and mathematical brilliance. She was also well-connected in the seventeenth-century intellectual circles. Elisabeth’s status as a woman philosopher is emblematic of both the possibilities and limitations of women's participation in the republic of letters and of their subsequent fate (...) in history. Few sources containing her own views survive, and until recently there has been no work on Elisabeth as a thinker in her own right. This volume brings together an international team of scholars to discuss her work from a cross-disciplinary perspective on the occasion of her fourth centenary. It is the first collection of essays to examine a range of her interests and to discuss them in relation to her historical context. The studies presented here discuss her educational background, her friendships and contacts, her interest in politics, religion, and astronomy, as well as her views on politics, her moral philosophy and her engagement with Cartesianism. The volume will appeal to historians of philosophy, historians of political thought, philosophers, feminists and seventeenth-century historians. (shrink)

Our commentary aims to show that the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified existing barriers to healthcare in England for ethnic minority and migrant women. We expose how the pandemic has affected the allocation of healthcare resources leading to the prioritisation of COVID-19 patients and suspending the equal access to healthcare services approach. We argue that we must look beyond this disruption in provision by examining existing barriers to access that have been amplified by the pandemic in order to understand the poorer (...) health outcomes for women in ethnic minority and migrant communities. The reflection focuses on racialised medical perceptions, gendered cultural norms including information barriers and stigma, and specific legal barriers. (shrink)

Bodily sensations, such as pain, hunger, itches, or sexual feelings, are commonly characterized in terms of their phenomenal character. In order to account for this phenomenal character, many philosophers adopt strong representationalism. According to this view, bodily sensations are essentially and entirely determined by an intentional content related to particular conditions of the body. For example, pain would be nothing more than the representation of actual or potential tissue damage. In order to motivate and justify their view, strong representationalists often (...) appeal to the reliable causal covariance between bodily sensations and certain kinds of bodily conditions or to the corresponding biological function that these bodily sensations are supposed to fulfill. In this paper, I argue on the basis of recent empirical research that arguments from reliable causal covariance and biological function cannot motivate the introduction of corresponding intentional content. In particular, I argue that bodily sensations are caused by a heterogeneous class of physiological and psychological factors and their biological functions are too diverse to be reduced to the representation of a particular bodily condition. Responses are available to strong representationalists, but they either require substantial alterations to their core assumptions or incur a significant empirical burden. (shrink)

This book is a conceptualization of the literary aesthetic in relation to ethics, in particular, an ethics for a concern for the Self. Bringing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's constructivist thinking into a practical domain, Sabrina Achilles rethinks the ways in which literature is understood and taught. Through an interdisciplinary approach, literature is viewed from the position of a problem without any pre-given frame.

Studies in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae have validated the major features of the double‐strand break repair (DSBR) model as an accurate representation of the pathway through which meiotic crossovers (COs) are produced. This success has led to this model being invoked to explain double‐strand break (DSB) repair in other contexts. However, most non‐crossover (NCO) recombinants generated during S. cerevisiae meiosis do not arise via a DSBR pathway. Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly clear that DSBR is a minor pathway for recombinational (...) repair of DSBs that occur in mitotically‐proliferating cells and that the synthesis‐dependent strand annealing (SDSA) model appears to describe mitotic DSB repair more accurately. Fundamental dissimilarities between meiotic and mitotic recombination are not unexpected, since meiotic recombination serves a very different purpose (accurate chromosome segregation, which requires COs) than mitotic recombination (repair of DNA damage, which typically generates NCOs). (shrink)

O estudo apresenta o resultado da experiência em mediação familiar desenvolvida em um Núcleo de Práticas Judiciárias numa instituição pública de ensino, através de projeto de extensão. O objetivo deste trabalho é compartilhar as vivências do serviço de psicologia inserido em um espaço eminentemente ..

Admiration is often described as having a singular motivational profile – the disposition to imitate. This article provides a developmental assessment of admiration’s action-potential, proposing a series of stages between (1) naïve imitation, a basic mimetic impulse, and (2) non-imitative virtuous actions. The process is marked by an increasing ability to represent the actions and desires of another, becoming the middle term between the learner and the exemplar. This developmental assessment is necessary because the leading accounts of moral development today (...) lean on the idea of imitation as essential to the process of virtue acquisition without providing an explanation of how imitation works, psychologically speaking. Moreover, these accounts treat imitation as a static disposition, rather than one that matures over time. Insight regarding this developmental progression can provide us with a better sense of how to educate using exemplars in order to advance a learner from admiration to moral virtue. This article also fills in gaps in the admiration literature concerning how we regard inimitable excellences and contends that it may not be beneficial to emulate an exemplar’s motivations, in addition to her actions. (shrink)

This is the first of two special issues and the articles are grouped according to two themes: This first issue will feature articles that share a theme we call Technologies and the Political, while the second issue will feature the theme Subjectivities. However, we could equally consider them exercises in provincialization in the (counter)factual register in the first issue, and by affective historiography as conceptual-empirical labor(atory) in the second issue. What we have generally asked of all authors is to consider (...) that the relation between science and society is often heavily influenced by and identified in the intermediary figurations portrayed in the genre of science fiction. (shrink)

According to pure imperativism, pain experiences are experiences of a specific phenomenal type that are entirely constituted by imperative content. As their primary argument, proponents of imperativism rely on the biological role that pain experiences fulfill, namely, the motivation of actions whose execution ensures the normal functioning of the body. In the paper, I investigate which specific types of action are of relevance for an imperative interpretation and how close their link to pain experiences actually is. I argue that, although (...) imperative theories constitute an apparently promising version of strong intentionalism, they cannot provide an imperative content that meets their own criteria of both sufficiency and necessity. I further argue that this issue cannot be solved by impure imperative theories either. (shrink)

In recent years, the societal and personal impacts of pain, and the fact that we still lack an effective method of treatment, has motivated researchers from diverse disciplines to try to think in new ways about pain and its management. In this paper, we aim to develop an enactive approach to pain and the transition to chronicity. Two aspects are central to this project. First, the paper conceptualizes differences between acute and chronic pain, as well as the dynamic process of (...) pain chronification, in terms of changes in the field of affordances. This is, in terms of the possibilities for action perceived by subjects in pain. As such, we aim to do justice to the lived experience of patients as well as the dynamic role of behavioral learning, neural reorganization, and socio-cultural practices in the generation and maintenance of pain. Second, we aim to show in which manners such an enactive approach may contribute to a comprehensive understanding of pain that avoids conceptual and methodological issues of reductionist and fragmented approaches. It proves particularly beneficial as a heuristic in pain therapy addressing the heterogenous yet dynamically intertwined aspects that may contribute to pain and its chronification. (shrink)