The article examines the possibilities of using the mechanisms of public-private partnership when implementing the projects on urban agglomerations development. Specific features of the urban agglomerations development are identified. They are based on combining the efforts of the territorial communities and aimed at implementing joint projects by attracting the appropriate resources, which allows to obtain an agglomeration effect and ensure the improvement of the quality of life of the population. It was proved that to implement joint projects on the basis (...) of using the mechanisms of public-private partnership it is necessary to attract private investors. The experience of using the mechanisms of public-private partnership in Ukraine is analyzed in two directions: by region and by type of activity. It was found that a significant part of projects with using public-private partnership mechanisms in the sphere of life support for large cities and agglomerations is carried out in the form of a concession. Concession allows to attract financial resources needed for the implementation of the development projects due to the ability to manage property over a long period of time, and also helps to prevent a monopolistic increase in the cost of services. The necessity of expanding the use of mechanisms of public-private partnership when implementing joint projects on the development of life support sphere for urban agglomerations was substantiated. Undoubtedly, it will be of great interest for private investors. In particular, it is the improvement of the tariff setting and tariff regulation policy, a strict control over the targeted use of funds, the transparency and economic certainty of costs, the balance of economic interests and the responsibility of those people who take part in the implementation of public-private partnership projects. Here, the scheme of the formation and implementation of joint projects on public-private partnership is presented that includes the observance of certain principles, the use of appropriate regulatory, economic and organizational methods, as well as the support of the economic security through risk management. Scientific approaches to improving the regulatory support for the use of public-private partnership mechanisms have been generalized, and the directions for making changes in the current legislation have been determined. The above measures will contribute to increased use of public-private partnership mechanisms when implementing joint projects aimed at developing the sphere of life support for urban agglomerations. (shrink)

At criminal trial, we demand that those accused of criminal wrongdoing be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. What are the moral and/or political grounds of this demand? One popular and natural answer to this question focuses on the moral badness or wrongness of convicting and punishing innocent persons, which I call the direct moral grounding. In this essay, I suggest that this direct moral grounding, if accepted, may well have important ramifications for other areas of the (...) criminal justice process, and in particular those parts in which we (through our legislatures and judges) decide how much punishment to distribute to guilty persons. If, as the direct moral grounding suggests, we should prefer under-punishment to over-punishment under conditions of uncertainty, due to the moral seriousness of errors which inappropriately punish persons, then we should also prefer erring on the side of under-punishment when considering how much to punish those who may justly be punished. Some objections to this line of thinking are considered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RusselL on Chinese Civilization 23 RUSSELL ON CHINESE CIVILIZATIONI Yu DONG Ph}losophy / McMaster University Hamilton, Ont., Canada L8s 4K1 1 I am indebted to Nicholas Griffin for his valuable comments and encouragement. I thank Marty Fairbairn and Perer Lovrick for many corrections in the paper. I am also greatly indebred to Ken Blackwell for his helpful criticisms and suggesrions. • (London: Allen & Unwin, 1922), p. 20. 3 (...) Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeron: Princeton U. P.), p. 173· B ertrand Russell arrived in China with Dora Black in October 1920. World War I had deepened his disillusionment with both the capitalist system and Western civilization in general. Seeking a socialist solution, he had visited Soviet Union just a few months before. But he had found that the Communist state there presented an unappealing alternative to the capitalist West in that it treated its citizens as slaves. The sad mood in which he "set out for China to seek a new hope"2 was described in his The Problem of China, published in 1922 after his nine-month visit: "It was on the Volga, in the. summer of 1920, that I first realized how profound is the disease in our Western mentality, which the Bolsheviks are attempting to force upon an essentially Asiatic population, just as Japan and the West are doing in China" (p. 18). The 1920S were a time when China, both as a nation and as a civilization, was in deep trouble. Her young people were eagerly looking outside their country to find a way of saving her. Since the 1840 Opium War, the Western Powers had poured into China, which had been a closed society, at least in Karl Popper's sense,3 for more than 3,000 years. With the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 19I1, China had been thrown into a state of anarchy by feuding warlords. The Great World Powers had both politically and economically dominated China through successive wars with her;4 through demanding indemnities, the cession of territory, fixed tariffs, etc.; and through controlling the corrupt and inept central government and warlords. Meanwhile, China was plagued by famine, piracy, brigandage, incipient rebellion,5 and the failures of various attempts at reform and revolution.6 China was well on the way toward disintegration, divided into "spheres of influence" by Britain, Germany, France, Russia and, especially, Japan. In the 1920S, China was also in the period of the May Fourth Movement-named after a popular student protest on 4 May 1919against foreign imperialism and an impotent Chinese government. It was agitated by the Treaty of Versailles which transferred, at the request ofJapan, the properties and privileges of the German sphere of influence in the Shandong Peninsula to Japan. This movement advocated learning science and adopting democratic principles in order to save China. It is important in Chinese history as a symbol of Chinese awareness of the need for the most profound changes in her tradition. All of these factors constituted the background to Russell's visit to China and thus affected the formation of his distinct view of the problem of China.? The invitation to him was a part of Chinese efforts in seeking methods from the West to save their country. Russell had already been known in China as a great philosopher, not only for his philosophy of logic and science, but also for his views on social problems. Some Chinese had access to his books: Principles ofSocial Reconstruction (1916), Political Ideals (1917), Roads To Freedom (1918), and magazine publication of parts of The Practice and Theory ofBolshevism (1920).8 Considering this background, it is quite understandable why 4 For example, Brirain and France 1856-60, Japan 1894-95, 1914-15. 5 For example, Taiping 1850-65, and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. 6 The revolution of 1911 actually just changed the name of the government, rather than the reality of society. 7 A detailed description of this background as "psychological roots" can be seen in S. P. Odgen, "The Sage in the Inkpot", Modern Arian Studies, 16 (1982): 529-600. 8 For example, Zhang Shenfu, a student originally majoring in mathematics in Beijing University, had read almost all of... (shrink)

The variety and complexity of the eight papers in this Symposium issue are evidence that immigration is a tough nut to crack both as a matter of policy and application. There is no way that any short summary can do justice to these papers, which take a variety of moral, economic, historical, and empirical approaches to some of the recurrent issues in the field, so it is best in this short issue to try to situate the problem in a general (...) classical liberal context, to show where the pressure points are most likely to appear.The initial way to approach this problem is to start with the simple proposition that the world today is divided into national territories where the practical norm is well-nigh universal: That each sovereign state has exclusive control over its own territory, which, among other things, allows it to decide which individuals are members of that state. These citizens have privileges that may be exercised, no questions asked, on such key matters as entering labor markets, owning property, voting, and otherwise participating in political affairs. All these activities may be denied or granted, at will, to any and all outsiders by the territorial sovereign.No one doubts the need for having some form of territorial control. The need to have some monopoly of force could not be achieved if the entire world, with its infinite diversity of locations and populations, were under a single sovereign. Indeed, in many cases, the divisions within a given country may be so pronounced that separation rather than aggregation is the norm. Thus, at the end of the British Raj, India split into India and Pakistan, and later Pakistan split into Pakistan and Bangladesh. Less dramatically, Czechoslovakia split into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, while the former Yugoslavia split into five nations, starting from the northwest: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Macedonia. Clearly, these ethic differences, be they large or small, are a major obstacle to the expansion of the size of the state. And today, the territorial instinct reasserts itself as the member states of the European Union impose more restrictions on immigration.Yet at the same time, the normative foundations of this system seem elusive. There is the following deep skepticism about the importance of these borders, expressed in these essays by Jeremy Waldron and Ilya Somin, that these national boundary lines should have such a pronounced role in political economy. Michael Blake pursues this theme further by asking the extent to which classical liberals can justify exclusion through the use of violence—or is it force? The inquiry into the dominant role of territoriality can then be expanded, as by Peter Margulies, to examine all sorts of negative externalities that could be created both by easy and strict rules of admission.Taken as a whole, there is no doubt that these national barriers are a serious obstacle to the free trade in goods and services between two individuals, one inside the boundary and one outside. The general view is that these barriers block the gains from trade, which is what drives economic progress, so that ideally all tariffs and quantitative restrictions should give way to a system of free trade in which petty objections by domestic competitors of foreign firms should not dictate local policies.It should, of course, be evident that powerful conflicting forces on free trade and protectionism ebb and flow over time. It should therefore come as no surprise that the stakes are even higher where what is at stake is the movement of people across national boundaries. The loss to any given country from keeping out potential citizens can be enormous, and we see powerful political forces clamp down on open immigration, so many of these gains from trade are lost. The situation can be even more heartbreaking when the ability to leave a country exposes innocent people to imprisonment or death.So what is the explanation for so many nations closing their borders? Much of the explanation comes from old-fashioned protectionism. Your computer programmers will take the jobs of our specialists. There is all sorts of occupational licensing and other barriers to entry within a domestic economy, so there is no reason to expect that these forces will not exert even greater influence against outsiders who do not, after all, have a voice in the local economy and who, therefore, as Alex Nowrasteh, Michael Howard, and Andrew Forrester observe, have little ability to influence domestic policy even after they enter a country. In addition, as Gabriel Chin discusses, strong racial prejudices also lead to exclusions from the domestic economy. Not only are there objections in, say, the United States and much of Western Europe, of exclusion on straight racial grounds, as exemplified by Chinese exclusion acts. The force of these exclusions are also subject to political change. Thus, the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) was part of a white supremacist program, which gave way two decades later to a very different legal regime with the Immigration Act of 1965, which put an end to the venerable system of national-origin quotas.Yet two other reasons for exclusion are constantly at issue. Immigrants not only bring in their labor but also their families, cultures, and traditions that, in public spaces, may clash with local norms and cultures on such elementary and critical matters as to whether women should dress modestly and wear head coverings. Will freewheeling Danes and Swedes feel comfortable if large numbers of Muslims continue their traditional practices with strong barriers between men and women? There are no obvious market mechanisms that will mitigate these issues, and the situation becomes even more fraught if there are large welfare or educational costs that fall, at least in the short run, on local citizens. These are compounded by the fact that immigrants will typically gain political rights that could easily skew the balance of political power between established and newly arrived ethnic groups by altering the outcome of national and local elections. And letting people in is not just done on a simple open-borders policy. Thus, in many countries, as Lance Pritchett discusses, there is the controversial option of letting foreigners in on short-term labor visas that require them to leave after a certain period. And there are further questions about whether people should be deported if they lied on their entry applications or committed some crime while in the new country, as has occurred in the United States. The numbers of cases can be high and their complexity great, so it is fair to ask, along with Jill Family, whether some self-conscious exceptions to the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, analogous statutes elsewhere, should be regarded as part of the new normal.It is therefore necessary to deal with the thrust and counterthrust on all these issues. It is also fair to ask whether classical liberalism has a distinctive view on these issues, or whether the combination of private gains and multidirectional externalities gives rise to empirical questions that, as always, require further reflection, even when certain situations—the major influx of illegal immigrants on the US southern border—will generate such powerful emotions that detached intellectual inquiry is ever more difficult. We cannot answer these questions, and thus offer to you a set of essays that take a stab at these difficult topics. (shrink)

The Belgian steel industry falls apart into four groups. The Flemish industry consists mainly of a very modern steel plant Sidmar near the port of Ghent controlled by the industrial holding Arbed. The Walloon industry falls apart into three basins : Cockerill in Liège; the holy triangleof Charleroi, controlled by Frère-Bourgeois, Cobepa and Bruxelles-Lambert ; the independents.In the Walloon industry the successive processes of steel making are distributed over a great number of plants, most of the equipment is outdated, labour (...) relations are bad and so is management.The finances required to renew this ancient industry are so large that the holdings cannot do so without the aid of the Belgian Government and the European Communities.Beginning of 1977, Davignon, proposes to freeze the production and market shares of the member countries, and to increase the European steel price by EEC tariff measures, in this way protecting the low productivity concerns ; not in the least the walloon concerns. The European Communities promise financial help for restructuring.The implicit condition is comparative advantage of enterprises. In the Belgian context, this would mean that Sidmar would be extended and part of the Walloon industry closed down. The next move of the Brussels-Walloon concerns is, therefore, to corner Sidmar.During the course of 1977 and the first half of 1978 the Government negotiates with employers and unions a restructuring plan and general steel agreement, the «Plan Claes». The plan foresees in a lasting ceiling imposed on Sidmar; in a very large fiow of restructuring aid,mainly from public funds and the set-up of an intricate network of semi-governmental institutions.The Plan Claes is a purely political compromise. From the economic point of view, the plan wilt only speed up the definite emigration of traditional steel making processes towards the semi-industrialized countries. (shrink)

The theoretical basis of criminal injuries compensation schemes is vague and, hence, the level at which awards should be set is unclear. Until recently, awards under the British Scheme were pegged at the level of common law damages but there now exists a ‘tariff’ system which sets out a standard award for each type of injury regardless of the recipient's individual losses. Up until now, it has been fairly clear that an award of compensation represents, in concrete form, an (...) expression of public sympathy with the victim. Under the new arrangements, it is probable that an award will also come to represent society's abhorrence of the offence. These two perceptions will sometimes come into conflict and the Scheme's shaky intellectual foundations mean that the tension between ‘victim-centred’ and ‘offence-centred’ approaches cannot easily be resolved. Future difficulties will be exacerbated by the fact that, in response to public criticism of the original Tariff Scheme, the new ‘hybrid’ Scheme continues to provide, in a very small number of the most serious cases, individualized ‘top-up’ payments to cover the victim's lost earnings and expenses. (shrink)

Multiple negotiating rounds of the GeneralAgreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and World TradeOrganization (WTO) since 1947 have conferred economicbenefits through liberalized international trade. Agrowing body of evidence also points to linkagesbetween liberalized trade and damage to the globalenvironment, ecology, and natural resource base.Ironically, the increased economic well-beingconferred by trade liberalization ultimately providesthe basis for improved environmental protection. It isthe interim environmental damage due to tradeliberalization that is controversial and needingamelioration. The proposition here is to promotefurther trade liberalization, but only (...) as long asenvironmental ethics and sustainability issues aresatisfactorily addressed. Trade liberalization shouldnot be permitted at the expense of adequateenvironmental protection and sustainability. FutureWTO rounds need to address both development benefitsand environmental ethics issues in a net socialwelfare maximization setting. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar a analogia básica entre arquitetura e retórica antiga a partir dos tratados De Architectura, de Vitrúvio, e o De Oratore, de Cícero. A analogia se verifica na definição do artífice, dos gêneros e partes das técnicas e dos fins de cada uma delas. Para tanto, tomaram-se como referência as fontes do tratado vitruviano, que menciona a influência de Varrão na gramática, de Lucrécio na filosofia e de Cícero no método oratório. A analogia com Cícero (...) serve tanto para conferir autoridade ao modelo de arquiteto vitruviano quanto para diferenciar a arquitetura das demais ciências, sobretudo a filosofia, objeto de debate na obra ciceroniana. (shrink)

Study, with text of the Yogasūtra of Patañjali, text on Yoga philosophy.

The vast majority of health research resources are used to study conditions that affect a small, advantaged portion of the global population. This distribution has been widely criticized as inequitable and threatens to exacerbate health disparities. However, there has been little systematic work on what individual health research funders ought to do in response. In this article, we analyze the general and special duties of research funders to the different populations that might benefit from health research. We assess how these (...) duties apply to governmental, multilateral, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations. We thereby derive a framework for how different types of funders should take the beneficiaries of research into account when they allocate scarce research resources. (shrink)

Listening to someone from some distance in a crowded room you may experience the following phenomenon: when looking at them speak, you may both hear and see where the source of the sounds is; but when your eyes are turned elsewhere, you may no longer be able to detect exactly where the voice must be coming from. With your eyes again fixed on the speaker, and the movement of her lips a clear sense of the source of the sound will (...) return. This ‘ventriloquist’ effect reflects the ways in which visual cognition can dominate auditory perception. And this phenomenological observation is one that you can verify or disconfirm in your own case just by the slightest reflection on what it is like for you to listen to someone with or without visual contact with them. (shrink)

This paper explores a middle way between realism and eliminativism about grounding. Grounding-talk is intelligible and useful, but it fails to pick out grounding relations that exist or obtain in reality. Instead, grounding-talk allows us to convey facts about what metaphysically explains what, and about the worldly dependence relations that give rise to those explanations.

This paper formulates a response to standard accounts of Kantian sexual morality, by first clarifying why sex should be understood as a case of using a person as a thing, rather than merely as a means. The author argues that Kant’s remedy to this problem is not sexual consent, but a model of setting and sharing sexual ends. Kant’s account of sexual morality, read in this way, is a critical framework for contemporary moves to think beyond consent, and to (...) grapple with concerns about sexual violation and “bad sex” that have gained uptake in the wake of the MeToo movement. The author defends an account of sex as a process of setting and sharing sexual ends in a Kantian key, which provides us with resources for thinking about the robust ongoing project of making our sexual selves in nonideal conditions, as well as for identifying the wrongs of both “bad” sex and sexual harassment. In doing so, they offer a critical middle ground between contemporary accounts of sexual morality that center questions of individual agency or autonomy, and those that foreground the intersubjective nature of sex. (shrink)

A phenomenon resulting from a computationally irreducible (or computationally incompressible) process is supposedly unpredictable except via simulation. This notion of unpredictability has been deployed to formulate recent accounts of computational emergence. Via a technical analysis, I show that computational irreducibility can establish the impossibility of prediction only with respect to maximum standards of precision. By articulating the graded nature of prediction, I show that unpredictability to maximum standards is not equivalent to being unpredictable in general. I conclude that computational irreducibility (...) fails to fulfill its assigned philosophical roles in theories of computational emergence. (shrink)

This electronic document serves as a guide on how to get a LAMP stack running on a Google Compute Engine virtual machine instance running Debian.

What are the criteria for reasonable clinical judgements? The reasonableness of macro-level decision-making has been much discussed, but little attention has been paid to the reasonableness of applying guidelines generated at a macro-level to individual cases. This paper considers a framework for reasonable clinical decision-making that will capture cases where relevant guidelines cannot reasonably be followed. There are three main sections. (1) Individual claims on healthcare from the point of view of concerns about equity are analysed. (2) The demands of (...) responsibility and equity on professional clinical performance are discussed, and how the combination of these demands emerges into seven requirements that constitute the framework is explored. Since this framework is developed to assist in reasonable clinical decision-making, practical implications of all these requirements are also suggested. (3) Challenges concerning the framework are discussed. First, a crucial presumption that the framework relies upon is considered—namely, clinicians’ willingness to justify their decisions as requested. Then how public deliberation may influence clinical decision-making is discussed. Next is a consideration of how clinicians’ need to have confidence in their own judgements in order to perform in a manner worthy of trust would be compatible with adherence to the framework supported by public deliberation. It is concluded that fair distribution in the interplay between macro- and micro-level considerations can be secured by legitimising procedures on each level, by ensuring well-organised and continuing public debate and by basing individual clinical judgements upon well-justified and principled normative bases. (shrink)

Substantial facts are not well-understood entities. Many philosophers object to their existence on this basis. Yet facts, if they can be understood, promise to do a lot of philosophical work: they can be used to construct theories of property possession and truthmaking, for example. Here, I give a formal theory of facts, including negative and logically complex facts. I provide a theory of reduction similar to that of the typed λ -calculus and use it to provide identity conditions for facts. (...) This theory validates truthmaker maximalism : it provides truthmakers for all truths. I then show how the usual truth-in-a-model relation can be replaced by two relations: one between models and facts, saying that a given fact obtains relative to the model, and the other between facts and propositions: the truthmaking relation. (shrink)

We commend the authors for their comprehensive discussion on consent and episiotomies.1 They correctly observe that informed consent for all proposed interventions in maternity care is always necessary. The claim that consent for maternity health services does not always have to be fully informed or explicit, however, is erroneous. We are especially concerned with, and surprised by, the endorsement of ‘opt-out consent’. ‘Opt-out consent’ (a.k.a. substitute decision making) is already standard practice in maternity healthcare, with obstetric violence a normalised response (...) to conclusive refusals or requests for explanations. Informed consent is based on the fundamental human rights to bodily autonomy and integrity, which healthcare providers are obliged to respect. Healthcare structured around human rights violations is not care. It is cruel and inhumane treatment—a violation of yet another fundamental human right—and a reflection of poor-quality care. To be valid, consent must always be informed, specific, timely, freely given and reversible. The provider must provide information specific to each and every proposed intervention in a timely manner. The consumer has the right to consider, freely accept or refuse before providers can act. They can also change their mind at any time. Provider attempts to substitute consumer decision-making rights constitute assault and battery. Whether the infraction was major or minor is of no consequence to human rights law. National courts create artificial …. (shrink)

This paper firstly distinguishes between principles of “global justice” that apply the same anywhere and everywhere – Tännsjö’s utilitarianism, egalitarianism, prioritarianism and such like – and principles of “local justice” that apply within the specific sphere of health-care. Sometimes the latter might just be a special case of the former – but not always. Secondly, it discusses reasons, many psychological in nature, why physicians might devote excessive resources to prolonging life pointlessly, showing once again that those reasons might themselves be (...) morally significant. (shrink)

Most public and non-profit organisations that fund health research provide the majority of their funding in the form of grants. The calls for grant applications are often untargeted, such that a wide variety of applications may compete for the same funding. The grant review process therefore plays a critical role in determining how limited research resources are allocated. Despite this, little attention has been paid to whether grant review criteria align with widely endorsed ethical criteria for allocating health research resources. (...) Here, we analyse the criteria and processes that ten of the largest public and non-profit research funders use to choose between competing grant applications. Our data suggest that research funders rarely instruct reviewers to consider disease burden or to prioritise research for sicker or more disadvantaged populations, and typically only include scientists in the review processes. This is liable to undermine efforts to link research funding to health needs. (shrink)

Goal-setting has become a popular and effective motivational tool, utilized by practitioners and substantiated with decades of empirical research. However, the potential for goal-setting to enhance performance may come at the cost of ethical behavior. I propose a theoretical model linking attributes of goals and goal-setting practices to unethical behavior through two psychological mechanisms – ethical recognition and moral disengagement; and addressing the moderating role of individual differences (e.g., goal-commitment and conscientiousness), as well as the broader organizational (...) ethical context. (shrink)

Business ethics as a field of academic endeavour has made significant progress over the past two or three decades. It now boasts a substantial body of scholarly literature, which is a major resource in which much time and effort have been invested and from which much can be gained. However, there is still much work to be done, and the dynamic nature of both academic life and the world beyond it ensures that new issues and opportunities will continue to emerge. (...) Business ethicists, individually and collectively, through the allocation of their limited research resources, will govern how well the field progresses and meets future challenges over the years to come. In particular, through our decisions about what we do or do not study and write about, we will determine the future shape of the scholarly literature – what it addresses successfully and on what it remains silent or inadequate. Implicitly or explicitly, individually and collectively, choices are made, and some are presumably better than others. This paper is a reflection on the progress of business ethics as an academic enterprise. Of course, the development of business ethics as a focus of academic interest has been marked by several review papers already, some reflecting underlying concerns consistent with Enderle’s comment that “in its present stage of development, business ethics appears to be far from being an established academic discipline”. Some might question whether something like business ethics can ever be an academic discipline as such, and for the purposes of this paper it will be helpful to distinguish between disciplines – such as philosophy, economics and psychology – and fields to which the concepts and methods of academic disciplines can be applied. Nevertheless, whatever kind of academic activity business ethics is taken to be, there are significant issues relating to its academic status. (shrink)

In this paper, we bring together research on complex problem solving with that on motivational psychology about goal setting. Complex problems require motivational effort because of their inherent difficulties. Goal Setting Theory has shown with simple tasks that high, specific performance goals lead to better performance outcome than do-your-best goals. However, in complex tasks, learning goals have proven more effective than performance goals. Based on the Zurich Resource Model, so-called motto-goals should activate a person’s resources through positive affect. (...) It was found that motto-goals are effective with unpleasant duties. Therefore, we tested the hypothesis that motto-goals outperform learning and performance goals in the case of complex problems. A total of N = 123 subject participated in the experiment. In dependence of their goal condition, subjects developed a personal motto, learning, or performance goal. This goal was adapted for the computer-simulated complex scenario Tailorshop, where subjects worked as managers in a small fictional company. Other than expected, there was no main effect of goal condition for the management performance. An unexpected gender effect revealed better performance for men than women, pointing to a potential stereotype threat. As hypothesized, motto goals led to higher positive and lower negative affect than the other two goal types. Even though positive affect decreased and negative affect increased in all three groups during Tailorshop completion, participants with motto goals reported the lowest rates of negative affect. Exploratory analyses investigated the role of affect in complex problem solving via mediational analyses and the influence of goal type on perceived goal attainment. (shrink)

An important approach to understand how the brain gives rise to consciousness is to probe the depth of unconscious processing, thus to define the key features that cause conscious awareness. Here, we investigate the possibility for subliminal stimuli to shape the context for unconscious processing. Context effects have generally been assumed to require consciousness. In the present experiment, unconscious context processing was investigated by looking at the impact of the context on the response activation elicited by a subliminal prime. We (...) compared the effects of the same subliminal prime on target processing when the prime was embedded in different unconscious contexts. Results showed that the same prime can evoke opposite responses depending on the unconscious context in which it is presented. Taken together, the results of this study show that context effects can be unconscious. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Sometimes, teams or players violate the rules of their leagues or associations. And sometimes, their leagues or associations respond by striking their wins from the official record. Especially in American college sports governed by the NCAA, this practice of vacating results is unpopular and widely decried. It should not be. Vacating wins can be an appropriate response to rules violations in higher-order competitions in the same way that it can be appropriate to call back a scoring play due to (...) a penalty. We outline the conceptual framework that makes sense of when, why, and how it is appropriate to vacate wins. (shrink)

Health care systems throughout the developed world face ‘crises’ of quality, financing and sustainability. These pressures have led governments to look for more efficient and equitable ways to allocate public resources. Prioritisation of health care services for public funding has been one of the strategies used by decision makers to reconcile growing health care demands with limited resources. Priority setting at the macro level has yet to demonstrate real successes. This paper describes international approaches to explicit prioritisation at the (...) macro-governmental level in the six experiences most published in the English literature; analyzes the ways in which values, principles and other normative concepts were presented in these international priority setting experiences; and identifies key elements of a more robust framework for ethical analysis which could promote meaningful and effective health priority setting. (shrink)

Some authors argue that the rule-of-law ideal gives judges a prima facie duty to provide a determinate formulation of the precedent’s general norm in all their precedent-opinions. I question that claim. I agree that judges have a duty to decide their cases based on reasons and that they should formulate these reasons in their opinions. I also agree that formulations of general norms should be the goal of common-law development and that judges have a duty to contribute to the realization (...) of this goal. However, I argue that judges may sometimes do so better if they do not provide a determinate formulation of a general norm in their opinion. Often, judges may not feel confident that they are able to formulate a good general norm for their precedent decision, even if they believe that their decision is both correct and justifiable through argument. In this case, various reasons speak against providing a determinate formulation of a general norm, including rule-of-law reasons. (shrink)

Setting goals in the workplace can motivate improved performance but it might also compromise ethical behavior. In this paper, we propose that individual differences in the dispositional tendency to morally justify behavior moderate the effects of specific performance goals on unethical behavior. We conducted an experimental study in which working participants, who were randomly assigned to a specific goal condition or to a condition with a vague goal that lacked a specific target, completed two tasks in which they had (...) the opportunity to act unethically. In an ethical dilemma task, participants in the specific goal condition were more likely to advocate using unethical methods. However, in an anagram task, only those with high moral justification overstated their performance to a greater degree in the specific goal condition. As such, individuals may not be equally susceptible to the ‘dark side’ of goal-setting. (shrink)

In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court made its first major pronouncement on the evaluation of scientific evidence, calling on judges to act as gatekeepers for scientific knowledge and validity, despite lack of scientific training among judges. Daubert offers the science studies community a case study for examining how judges engage in boundary-work and construct scientific validity. In constructing scientific validity under Daubert, judges must evaluate the scientific method behind a particular scientific claim, and will look (...) to the parties' experts and the relevant scientific community for assistance. To combat the oft-cited problem of the battle of the experts, judges may be tempted to obtain assistance from court-appointed neutral experts, an inquisitorial system in the civil law tradition of many European countries. The judicial evaluation of scientific evidence, the resulting construction of scientific validity, and the push for a greater use of court-appointed experts reveal judges' desire to segregate "objective" scientific facts from aspects of the legal process that are infused with adversaries' values. Yet the scientific and judicial construction of validity mixes empirical results and research methods with the personal, political, and institutional values of judges and scientists. (shrink)

In this commentary on Torbjörn Tännsjö’s Setting Health-Care Priorities, I argue that sufficientarianism provides a valuable perspective in considering how to set health care priorities. I claim that pace Tännsjö, sufficientarianism does offer a distinct alternative to prioritarianism. To demonstrate this, I introduce sufficientarianism and distinguish two forms: Tännsjö’s “weak sufficientarianism” and an alternative strong form of sufficientarianism that I call “revised lexical sufficientarianism.” I raise a problem for Tännsjö’s sufficientarianism, and advocate for the revised view on this basis. (...) I then demonstrate that in the area of population ethics, the revised view outperforms the other views Tännsjö considers. As such, I aim to demonstrate that sufficientarianism — understood as its own theory and not just as a form of prioritarianism — offers unique advantages in population ethics, and would have been a valuable complement to the other theories Tännsjö considers. (shrink)

How should governments balance saving people from very large individual disease burdens (such as an early death) against saving them from middling burdens (such as erectile dysfunction) and minor burdens (such as nail fungus)? This chapter considers this question through an analysis of a priority-setting proposal in the Netherlands, on which avoiding a multitude of middling burdens takes priority over saving one person from early death, but no number of very small burdens can take priority over avoiding one death. (...) It argues that there is some, albeit imperfect, evidence of substantial public support for such a policy. Furthermore, it provides a principled rationale for it in terms of respect for the person who faces the largest burden. (shrink)