BackgroundAmidst expanding roles in education and policy making, questions have been raised about the ability of Clinical Ethics Committees s to carry out effective ethics consultations. However recent reviews of CECs suggest that there is no uniformity to CECons and no effective means of assessing the quality of CECons. To address this gap a systematic scoping review of prevailing tools used to assess CECons was performed to foreground and guide the design of a tool to evaluate the quality of CECons.MethodsGuided (...) by Levac et al’s methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews, the research team performed independent literature reviews of accounts of assessments of CECons published in six databases. The included articles were independently analyzed using content and thematic analysis to enhance the validity of the findings.ResultsNine thousand sixty-six abstracts were identified, 617 full-text articles were reviewed, 104 articles were analyzed and four themes were identified – the purpose of the CECons evaluation, the various domains assessed, the methods of assessment used and the long-term impact of these evaluations.ConclusionThis review found prevailing assessments of CECons to be piecemeal due to variable goals, contextual factors and practical limitations. The diversity in domains assessed and tools used foregrounds the lack of minimum standards upheld to ensure baseline efficacy.To advance a contextually appropriate, culturally sensitive, program specific assessment tool to assess CECons, clear structural and competency guidelines must be established in the curation of CECons programs, to evaluate their true efficacy and maintain clinical, legal and ethical standards. (shrink)

IntroductionClinical ethics committees support and enhance communication and complex decision making, educate healthcare professionals and the public on ethical matters and maintain standards of care. However, a consistent approach to training members of CECs is lacking. A systematic scoping review was conducted to evaluate prevailing CEC training curricula to guide the design of an evidence-based approach.MethodsArksey and O’Malley’s methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews was used to evaluate prevailing accounts of CEC training published in six databases. Braun and Clarke’s thematic (...) analysis approach was adopted to thematically analyse data across different healthcare and educational settings.Results7370 abstracts were identified, 92 full-text articles were reviewed and 55 articles were thematically analysed to reveal four themes: the design, pedagogy, content and assessment of CEC curricula.ConclusionFew curricula employ consistent approaches to training. Many programmes fail to provide CEC trainees with sufficient knowledge, skills and experience to meet required competencies. Most programmes do not inculcate prevailing sociocultural, research, clinical and educational considerations into training processes nor provide longitudinal support for CEC trainees. Most CEC training programmes are not supported by host institutions threatening the sustainability of the programme and compromising effective assessment and longitudinal support of CEC trainees. While further reviews are required, this review underlines the need for host organisations to support and oversee a socioculturally appropriate ethically sensitive, clinically relevant longitudinal training, assessment and support process for CEC trainees if CECs are to meet their roles effectively. (shrink)

For repeatable motion of redundant mobile manipulators, the flexible base platform and the redundant manipulator have to be returned to the desired initial position simultaneously after completing the given tasks. To remedy deviations between initial position and desired position of each kinematic joint angle, a special kind of repeatable optimization for kinematic energy minimization based on terminal-time Zhang neural network with finite-time convergence is proposed for inverse kinematics of mobile manipulators. It takes the advantages that each joint of the manipulator (...) is required to return to the desired initial position not considering the initial orientation of itself for realizing repeatable kinematics control. Unlike the existed training methods, such an optimization of kinematic energy scheme based on TTZNN can not only reduce the convergent position error of each joint to zero in finite time, but also improve the convergent precision. Theoretical analysis and verifications show that the proposed optimal kinematic energy scheme accelerates the convergent rate, which is tended to be applied in practical robot kinematics. Simulation results on the manipulator with three mobile wheels substantiate the timeliness and repetitiveness of the proposed optimization scheme. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhat does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of (...) the representational practice within which the thought or utterance is located. In thus favoring a “relational model” in metasemantics, we share Ronald Dworkin's goal of explaining fundamental legal disagreements, and also his reliance on constructive interpretation. But what we delineate is a far more general and explanatorily resourceful metasemantics than what Dworkin articulated, which also bypasses some controversial implications for the nature of law that Dworkin alleged. (shrink)

This paper criticises Kevin Toh’s expressivist reconstruction of H. L. A. Hart’s semantics of legal statements on the grounds that two implications of Toh’s reading are arguably too disruptive to Hart’s theory of law. The first of these implications is that legal statements are rendered indistinguishable from statements of value. The second is that the concept of a rule of recognition is rendered dispensable. I argue for the unacceptability of these consequences from a Hartian standpoint in the first two sections (...) of this paper. The last two sections present an alternative view of Hart’s semantics of legal statements, according to which legal normativity is explained in terms of conformity to patterns of validity that by themselves neither provide objective reasons for action nor entail subjective acceptance of such reasons. (shrink)

According to H.L.A. Hart's analysis, to utter an internal legal statement is partly to express an acceptance of a set of norms. This article attempts to defend Hart's conception of internal legal discourse by responding to the following three lines of criticism that can be found in Joseph Raz's writings: (i) that Hart's analysis fails to account for what Raz calls ‘detached legal statements’; (ii) that Hart's deployment of the notion of acceptance in his analysis vitiates his legal positivist project (...) because such acceptance necessarily amounts to moral endorsement; and (iii) that Hart is wrong to assume that normative practices, including discursive legal practices, can be characterized satisfactorily by deploying only descriptive statements. I argue that Hart's theory, or at least a theory along the lines that Hart developed, has sufficient resources to handle satisfactorily these criticisms. His world is a noonday world in which sharply outlined figures, most of them more than a little singular, act in describable ways against perceptible backgrounds. Clifford Geertz, speaking of Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard. (shrink)

Understood one way, the branch of contemporary philosophical ethics that goes by the label “metaethics” concerns certain second-order questions about ethics—questions not in ethics, but rather ones about our thought and talk about ethics, and how the ethical facts (insofar as there are any) fit into reality. Analogously, the branch of contemporary philosophy of law that is often called “general jurisprudence” deals with certain second-order questions about law—questions not in the law, but rather ones about our thought and talk about (...) the law, and how legal facts (insofar as there are any) fit into reality. Put more roughly (and using an alternative spatial metaphor), metaethics concerns a range of foundational questions about ethics, whereas general jurisprudence concerns analogous questions about law. As these characterizations suggest, the two sub-disciplines have much in common, and could be thought to run parallel to each other. Yet, the connections between the two are currently mostly ignored by philosophers, or at least under-scrutinized. The new essays collected in this volume are aimed at changing this state of affairs. The volume collects together works by metaethicists and legal philosophers that address a number of issues that are of common interest, with the goal of accomplishing a new rapprochement between the two sub-disciplines. (shrink)

Is guanxi ethical? This question is largely ignored in the existing literature. This paper examines the ethical dimension of guanxi by focusing on the consequences of guanxi in business, from ethically misgiving behaviour to outright corruption. Guanxi may bring benefits to individuals as well as the organisations they represent but these benefits are obtained at the expenses of other individuals or firms and thus detrimental to the society. As guanxi has an impact on the wider public other than the guanxi (...) parties, it must be studied in the context of all stakeholders. It can be argued that guanxi is an inevitable evil under the current political and socio-economic systems in China. Its role and importance in business life will be diminished as the country moves towards an open market system. (shrink)

The nature of the relation between jurisprudential theories and first-order legal judgments is a strangely uncontroversial matter in contemporary legal philosophy. There is one dominant conception of the relation according to which jurisprudential theories are second-order or meta-legal theories that specify the ultimate grounds of first-order legal judgments. According to this conception, difficult first-order legal disputes are to be resolved by jurisprudential theorizing. According to an alternative conception that Ronald Dworkin has influentially advocated, jurisprudential theories are not second-order theories about (...) the nature of law, but instead covert first-order legal theories. These two conceptions of the relation between jurisprudential theories and first-order legal judgments dominate the contemporary legal philosophical scene and crowd out other possible conceptions. This article scrutinizes the two conceptions, and in the process raises the possibility of a different and arguably more credible conception. According to this new conception, our first-order legal views and a jurisprudential theory that we accept are supposed to form a mutually disciplining and supporting set of views that we accept in our pursuit of the epistemic ideal of wide reflective equilibrium. The two sets of views are supposed to constrain and discipline each other; but neither is meant to underwrite, certify, or ultimately determine the contents of the other. This new conception, which allows the relation between jurisprudential theories and first-order legal judgments to be much looser, untidier, and more complex than what the two dominant conceptions imply, should facilitate progress in legal philosophy and in first-order legal thinking. (shrink)

This paper seeks to uncover and rationally reconstruct four theoretical prescriptions that H. L. A. Hart urged philosophers to observe and follow when investigating and theorizing about the nature of law. The four prescriptions may appear meager and insignificant when each is seen in isolation, but together as an inter-connected set they have substantial implications. In effect, they constitute a central part of Hart's campaign to put philosophical investigations about the nature of law onto a path to a genuine research (...) program. The paper takes note of certain prevalent and robust trends in contemporary legal philosophy that detract its practitioners from the four prescriptions, and that have them revert to the some older modes of thinking from which Hart sought a decisive break. A number of contemporary legal philosophers' views and commitments are taken up and assessed, and in particular those of John Gardner and Leslie Green. ‘Yet the answer is a prosaic one: don’t ask what time is but how the word ‘time’ is being used’.Friedrich Waismann.I miss the future.Jaron Lanier. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the potential of “equitech”—AI technology that improves equity. Recently, interventions have been developed to reduce the harm of implicit bias, the automatic form of stereotype or prejudice that contributes to injustice. However, these interventions—some of which are assisted by AI-related technology—have significant limitations, including unintended negative consequences and general inefficacy. To overcome these limitations, we propose a two-dimensional framework to assess current AI-assisted interventions and explore promising new ones. We begin by using the case of human (...) resource recruitment as a focal point to show that existing approaches have exploited only a subset of the available solution space. We then demonstrate how our framework facilitates the discovery of new approaches. The first dimension of this framework helps us systematically consider the analytic information, intervention implementation, and modes of human-machine interaction made available by advancements in AI-related technology. The second dimension enables the identification and incorporation of insights from recent research on implicit bias intervention. We argue that a design strategy that combines complementary interventions can further enhance the effectiveness of interventions by targeting the various interacting cognitive systems that underlie implicit bias. We end with a discussion of how our cognitive interventions framework can have positive downstream effects for structural problems. (shrink)

L’érotisme très particulier de la pin-up, celui de la « fille d’à côté », fait de cette figure une icône américaine des années 40 dans l’imaginaire collectif. L’engouement populaire qu’elle suscite, dans ces années là, est réel, notamment aux États-Unis. Pourtant autour de cette simple image de légèreté et d’insouciance, de nombreux enjeux politiques se nouent. Employée de manière massive durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale pour « remonter le moral des troupes » sur le front et à l’arrière, la pin-up, (...) multipliant ses fonctions, devient bel et bien un instrument de stratégie militaire. (shrink)

The hermeneutical dimensions of Chinese philosophy from the Changes of Zhou through its Confucian, Daoist, and contemporary developments have been a creative inspirational source and guiding intellectual thread in the thought of Chung-ying Cheng. Cheng's extensive engagement with the Classic of Changes, its role in the formation of the Chinese philosophical tradition and its comparative interconnections with occidental philosophies, has disclosed its deep hermeneutical orientation. The Yijing encompasses processes of empirical observation, empathetic feeling, and self-reflection in the generation of (...) “images,” or prototypical models that are “form-objects” or “process-events,” which performatively enact a comprehensive ontological and situationally appropriate understanding of nature, society, and one self. I examine three issues in outline arising from Cheng's works in this situation: to what extent Chinese philosophy is hermeneutical with respect to modern European understandings of hermeneutics, and the possibility of the distinctive “onto-generative hermeneutics” that has been articulated for over forty years in the context of Chinese and Western thought in Cheng's prolific works concerning the Yijing. (shrink)

According to a widely held view, people's commitments to laws are dependent on the existence in their community of a conventional practice of complying with certain fundamental laws. This conventionalism has significantly hampered our attempts to explain the normative practice of law. Ronald Dworkin has argued against conventionalism by bringing up the phenomenon of persistent fundamental legal controversies, but neither Dworkin nor his legal positivist respondents have correctly understood the real significance of such controversies. This article argues that such controversies (...) pose a deep challenge to any conception of our legal practice as a genuinely normative, rule-mediated, practice. The article also argues that what is needed to deflect this challenge is a new understanding – different from the widely held conventionalist understanding – of how people's commitments to laws are predicated on their fellows’ like commitments. (shrink)

This paper seeks to uncover and rationally reconstruct four theoretical prescriptions that H. L. A. Hart urged philosophers to observe and follow when investigating and theorizing about the nature of law. The four prescriptions may appear meager and insignificant when each is seen in isolation, but together as an inter-connected set they have substantial implications. In effect, they constitute a central part of Hart’s campaign to put philosophical investigations about the nature of law onto a path to a genuine research (...) program. The paper takes note of certain prevalent and robust trends in contemporary legal philosophy that detract its practitioners from the four prescriptions, and that have them revert to the some older modes of thinking from which Hart sought a decisive break. A number of contemporary legal philosophers’ views and commitments are taken up and assessed, and in particular those of John Gardner and Leslie Green. (shrink)

We investigate whether female board representation and firms’ financial performance are related and whether the relationship differs for firms located in more prejudicial environments. As a proxy for prejudicial environment, we use two geographical indicators: whether a firm is headquartered in a conservative “red” state or in a liberal “blue” state and whether the firm is located in regions where residents possess more stereotypical attitudes about gender equality. We find that both financial performance and female board representation are lower for (...) firms headquartered in red states when compared to those in blue states, and we find similar results for firms located in regions where residents hold more gender-stereotypical views. However, financial performance improves when female directors are present regardless of the firm’s location. Evidence also shows that the incremental improvement in performance measured by Tobin’s q is greater in red-state than in blue-state companies and in regions where residents hold more gender-stereotypical views. The overall results imply that gender stereotyping holds back financial performance and that female directors help improve financial performance. (shrink)

Previous behavioral studies have identified the significant role of subliminal cues in creative problem solving. However, neural mechanisms of such unconscious processing remain poorly understood. Here we utilized an event-related potential approach and sandwich mask technique to investigate cerebral activities underlying the unconscious processing of cues in creative problem solving. College students were instructed to solve divergent problems under three different conditions . Our data showed that creative problem solving can benefit from unconscious cues, although not as much as from (...) conscious cues. More importantly, we found that there are crucial ERP components associated with unconscious processing of cues in solving divergent problems. Similar to the processing of conscious cues, processing unconscious cues in problem solving involves the semantic activation of unconscious cues in the right inferior parietal lobule , new association formation in the right parahippocampal gyrus , and mental representation transformation in the right superior temporal gyrus . The present results suggest that creative problem solving can be modulated by unconscious processing of enlightening information that is weakly diffused in the semantic network beyond our conscious awareness. (shrink)

High-quality faculties are the fundamental guarantee to achieving the connotation development of higher education. Hence, performing university faculties determines the quality of teaching and the level of talent cultivation. Facing the change in teaching demand and environment, faculties need to change their working methods spontaneously to achieve high-level performance. Relevant empirical studies have shown that empowering leadership positively affects adaptive performance. However, some researchers have found that leadership effectiveness even has a negative effect. There may be two reasons for the (...) inconsistency in the effectiveness of empowering leadership: There is a lack of in-depth research on the effectiveness of empowering leadership and employees’ performance in existing studies, and the exploration of its theoretical mechanism should be enriched. The effectiveness of empowering leadership may be subject to the conditions of the individual’s characteristics of the empowering. Therefore, the mechanism of empowering leadership on faculties’ adaptive performance still needs to be further explored. This study explores the impact of empowering leadership on adaptive performance. Based on Social Exchange Theory and Psychology Empowerment theory, this study explores the mediating role of the leadership-member exchange relationship and psychological empowerment in the relationship between them. According to Regulatory Focus Theory, the moderating role of promotion focus and prevent focus was studied. We adopted questionnaire survey data including 292 individuals in Changchun, Shijiazhuang, and other cities; STATA 15 was conducted to test the hypotheses. The results showed that: Empowering leadership was significantly and positively related to adaptive performance. Leader-member exchange relationship and psychological empowerment play a mediating chain role in empowering leadership and adaptive performance; empowering leadership promotes psychology empowerment by enhancing the leadership-member exchange relationship, enhancing their adaptive performance. Promotion focus positively regulates the relationship between psychological empowerment and adaptive performance. Individuals with a promotion focus have a significant positive impact on adaptive performance. Individuals with preventing focus do not weaken the positive impact of psychological empowerment on adaptive performance. (shrink)

Interactive Whiteboard has recently been used to replace the TWB, with many of its features being observed to help teachers in educational activities. This is based on effectively and efficiently increasing the teacher-student interaction. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the determinants of Behavioral Intention and the use of interactive whiteboards by K-12 teachers, in remote and rural Chinese areas. The Modified-Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 model was used in this analysis, as a learning medium to (...) deliver the subject matter to students. The sample and population were also the teachers in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China, where 171 voluntary respondents participated in this study. Furthermore, the obtained data were processed using a Structural Equation Model approach, through the Smart-PLS software. The results showed that Habit and Hedonic Motivation had a significant influence on the Behavioral Intention of teachers, toward the utilization of IWB in remote and rural areas. Besides this, Facilitating Conditions and BI also had a significant positive effect on Usage Behavior. Based on these results, important information was provided to school principals, local governments, and teachers for education quality improvement, regarding the patterns of increasing IWB utilization in remote and rural areas. (shrink)

The role of the primary detrital grain assemblage as a control on diagenetic pathways is reasonably well-understood in sandstones and limestones, but less so in mudrocks. We have documented diagenesis in mudstones from the Triassic Yanchang Formation that are dominated by grains derived from outside the basin of deposition. Major extrabasinal grains are K-rich clay, quartz, plagioclase, K-feldspar, lithic fragments, and micas. In terms of the quartz-feldspar-lithic grain compositions, the silt fraction in these samples is classified as arkose. Grains of (...) intrabasinal derivation include particulate organic matter, phosphatic debris, and rare carbonate allochems. The principal chemical diagenetic components in these mudrocks have strongly localized spatial distributions at micrometer to centimeter scales. Chemical diagenetic components include cone-in-cone structures, replacements of detrital feldspar, pore-filling precipitates within anomalously large pores, pore-filling solid hydrocarbon, and very minor quartz overgrowths associated with local packing flaws around silt-size detrital quartz grains. Matrix-dispersed intergranular cementation, as observed in well-known organic-rich marine mudstones, such as the Barnett Shale and the Eagle Ford Formation, is not observed in Yanchang Formation lacustrine mudstones. The authigenic features present are consistent with the thermal maturity of the units and are broadly similar to features observed in other mudstones that contain grain assemblages dominated by particles of extrabasinal derivation. The low porosity and the absence of significant amounts of intergranular cement indicate that compactional porosity loss and in-filling by migrated solid hydrocarbon were the major causes of porosity decline during diagenesis of Yanchang Formation mudrocks. Although the mudstones of the Yanchang Formation have a relatively high content of organic carbon and serve as source rocks in the Ordos Basin, the depositional grain assemblage is not conducive to creation of porosity, permeability, and mechanical properties that would make these mudrocks effective unconventional reservoirs. (shrink)

In this study, we draw on moral cleansing theory to investigate the consequence of unethical pro-organizational behavior from the perspective of the actors. Specifically, we hypothesize that after conducting UPB, people may feel guilty and tend to cleanse their wrongdoings by providing suggestions or identifying problems at work. We further hypothesize that the above relationship is moderated by the actor’s moral identity symbolization. We conducted three studies, including experiment and surveys, to test our hypotheses. Results of these studies show consistent (...) support to our hypotheses. In particular, individuals reported more felt guilt after conducting UPB, and they tended to compensate with more prohibitive and promotive voice subsequently. In addition, the indirect relationship from UPB acting to both voice behaviors via felt guilt was stronger for people with a high level of moral identity symbolization. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

This study investigates the association between work-family conflict and organizational citizenship behavior and examines the mediated role of subjective happiness between and the moderated part of family support. A moderated mediation model is established based on the Conservation of Resources theory. We collected data from 386 employees of nine companies in China. This study shows that the work-family conflict of female professional employees is negatively correlated with organizational citizenship behavior, and that the relationship is mediated by subjective well-being. Furthermore, female (...) professional employees’ family support moderates the effects of work-family conflict on subjective happiness and organizational citizenship behavior, with the relationship weaker when family support is higher. This study enriches the literature on work-family conflict by using family support as a mediating mechanism for work-family conflict. It enhanced our understanding of the influencing mechanisms of organizational citizenship behavior by constructing a more detailed model. (shrink)

Mathematical developments in probabilistic inference have led to optimism over the prospects for Bayesian models of cognition. Our target article calls for better differentiation of these technical developments from theoretical contributions. It distinguishes between Bayesian Fundamentalism, which is theoretically limited because of its neglect of psychological mechanism, and Bayesian Enlightenment, which integrates rational and mechanistic considerations and is thus better positioned to advance psychological theory. The commentaries almost uniformly agree that mechanistic grounding is critical to the success of the Bayesian (...) program. Some commentaries raise additional challenges, which we address here. Other commentaries claim that all Bayesian models are mechanistically grounded, while at the same time holding that they should be evaluated only on a computational level. We argue this contradictory stance makes it difficult to evaluate a model's scientific contribution, and that the psychological commitments of Bayesian models need to be made more explicit. (shrink)