Dynamic consent is increasingly recommended for longitudinal and biobanking research; however, the value of investing in such systems is unclear. We undertook a rapid review of the benefits and challenges of implementing dynamic consent by searching five databases (Ovid Medline, Ovid Embase, Scopus, Web of Science, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature – CINAHL) for articles published up to May 2023 that report on participants’ or researchers’ experience of dynamic consent. From 1611 papers screened, 12 met inclusion criteria. (...) Guided by thematic analysis with an inductive approach, we synthesised 31 benefits and 8 challenges. Benefits included: enhanced participant experience through improved consent management and tailoring; greater participant engagement and retention through increased autonomy, trust and communication; reduced costs and burden and increased accessibility and inclusivity. Participants and researchers also valued additional features that dynamic consent platforms facilitate such as two-way communication and return of research updates. The main challenges included the digital divide and consent fatigue. The papers gave recommendations to mitigate these challenges, for example by supplementing with other communication tools and allowing a broad consent approach, respectively. Overall, dynamic consent was described as a valuable consent approach with many benefits and some surmountable challenges. Most included literature was qualitative, so further research is needed to quantify the impact of dynamic consent on recruitment, retention, and participant experience. Further long-term investigations are necessary to explore whether participants want to and do change their consent over time, as well as the impact of dynamic consent on participant privacy. (shrink)

I begin with a note about moral goodness as a quality, disposition, or trait of a person or human being. This has at least two different senses, one wider and one narrower. Aristotle remarked that the Greek term we translate as justice sometimes meant simply virtue or goodness as applied to a person and sometimes meant only a certain virtue or kind of goodness. The same thing is true of our word “goodness.” Sometimes being a good person means having all (...) the virtues, or at least all the moral ones; then goodness equals the whole of virtue. But sometimes, being a good person has a narrower meaning, namely, being kind, generous, and so forth. Thus, my OED sometimes equates goodness with moral excellence as a whole and sometimes with a particular moral excellence, viz., kindness, beneficence, or benevolence; and the Bible, when it speaks of God as being good sometimes means that God has all the virtues and sometimes only that he is kind, mereiful, or benevolent. When Jesus says, “Why callest thou me good: None is good, save one, that is God,” he seems to be speaking of goodness in the inclusive sense, but when the writer of Exodus has God himself say that he is “merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,” God is using “goodness” in the narrower sense in which it means benevolence, for he goes on to make it clear that he is also just and severe. Similarly, “good will” may mean either “morally good will” in general, as it does in Kant, or it may mean only “benevolent will,” as it usually does; in “men of good will” it is perhaps ambiguous. (shrink)

This essay, one of the last that Frankena wrote, provides a scrupulously detailed exploration of the various possible meanings of one of Sidgwick's most famous footnotes in the Methods Long intrigued by what Sidgwick had in mind when he said that he would explain how it came about that for moderns it is not tautologous to claim that one's own good is one's only reasonable ultimate end, Frankena uses this note as a point of departure for a penetrating review of (...) Sidgwick's insights and ambiguities on the differences between ancient and modern ethics. (shrink)

I critically examine an argument, due to howard wettstein, purporting to show that sentences containing definite descriptions are semantically ambiguous between referential and attributive readings. Wettstein argues that many sentences containing nonidentifying descriptions--descriptions that apply to more than one object--cannot be given a Russellian analysis, and that the descriptions in these sentences should be understood as directly referential terms. But because Wettstein does not justify treating referential uses of nonidentifying descriptions differently than attributive uses of nonidentifying descriptions, his argument fails.

Although numerical systems have been regarded as static models of a symbolic system and treated as mythological behavior, it is postulated that these systems are more profitably analyzed as dynamic models, better understood as ritual behavior. As ritual, numerical systems, limited in number and expressive of rhythmicity, contribute to the biogenetic structuralist's notion of “equilibration” between the central nervous system and the environment.The relationship between concrete and abstract numeration is also examined, showing that counting behavior, requiring asymmetrical use of the (...) hands, may contribute to understanding the relationships between handedness and brain hemisphericity, as well as enumeration and memorization. (shrink)

Let us accept the quantum mechanical description of a free particle and one fact from special relativity: rest mass contributes to energy. If we add to this bare framework one additional fact—that time runs slower near the earth—we can account for our everyday experience of gravity.

This paper provides an analytical overview of the apostolic networks in Britain. There are several ways to understand the success of the apostolic networks. They can be seen as an extreme answer to an extreme problem an answer to a profound secularisation leading to declining church attendance and influence within society. The apostolic networks appear to fit into post-modern society better than conventional denominational structures. In terms of their organization, despite appearances, these networks are however hierarchical like the denominational structures (...) which they challenge. The difference is in the characteristic informality with which these networks can collaborate with each other even when they grow. (shrink)

This book is an introduction to three important philosophies of education. It's main purpose, however, is to help teach the the student how to do philosophy of education.

Taking reduction in the traditional deductive sense, the programmatic claim that most of genetics can be reduced by molecular genetics is defended as feasible and significant. Arguments by Ruse and Hull that either the relationship is replacement or at best a weaker form of reduction are shown to rest on a mixture of historical and logical confusions about the nature of the theories involved.

It is well known that Sidgwick finished his examination of “the methods of ethics” in some difficulty. Just what that difficulty was and how he came to be in it, we shall see in due course. This paper is written in the conviction that what he was doing is worth looking at again in the context of contemporary discussion.