The complexity of industrial reality, the plurality of legitimate perspectives on risks and the role of emotions in decision-making raise important ethical issues in risk management that are usually overlooked in engineering. Using a questionnaire answered by 200 engineering students from a major engineering school in Canada, the purpose of this study was to assess how their training has influenced their perceptions toward these issues. While our results challenge the stereotypical portrait of the engineer, they also suggest that the current (...) engineering education might fail to empower engineers to engage in ethical risk management. We therefore propose an active-learning method to help in this matter. Carried out through workshops with 34 students in chemical engineering, the effectiveness of this method has been evaluated using group interviews and questionnaires. Our results suggest that such an approach is effective, at least in the short run, to motivate students to engage in ethical risk management and to trigger reflectivity on what it means to be an engineer today. (shrink)

Risk management is certainly one of the most important professional responsibilities of an engineer. As such, this activity needs to be combined with complex ethical reflections, and this requirement should therefore be explicitly integrated in engineering education. In this article, we analyse how this nexus between ethics and risk management is expressed in the engineering education research literature. It was done by reviewing 135 articles published between 1980 and March 1, 2016. These articles have been selected from 21 major journals (...) that specialize in engineering education, engineering ethics and ethics education. Our review suggests that risk management is mostly used as an anecdote or an example when addressing ethics issues in engineering education. Further, it is perceived as an ethical duty or requirement, achieved through rational and technical methods. However, a small number of publications do offer some critical analyses of ethics education in engineering and their implications for ethical risk and safety management. Therefore, we argue in this article that the link between risk management and ethics should be further developed in engineering education in order to promote the progressive change toward more socially and environmentally responsible engineering practices. Several research trends and issues are also identified and discussed in order to support the engineering education community in this project. (shrink)

Cet article pointe certains rapprochements entre la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas et celle de Svetlana Alexievitch, à qui fut décerné le prix Nobel de littérature en 2015, et tout particulièrement à mettre au jour leur hostilité à l’histoire entendue comme histoire officielle des vainqueurs et la « résistance éthique », au sens que Levinas donne à cette expression, c’est-à-dire à l’immense difficulté pour un être humain d’en tuer un autre, quelles que soient les conditions dans lesquelles s’effectue cet acte.

Depuis ses traductions de jeunesse jusqu'aux dernières recherches de l'exil parisien, Walter Benjamin a reconnu dans l'œuvre poétique de Baudelaire une "clé confectionnée sans la moindre idée de la serrure où un jour elle pourrait être introduite". Laissé en plan au moment de sa mort, le Baudelaire porte la trace de la convergence des motifs extrêmes de sa philosophie, l'allégorie et le fétichisme de la marchandise. En montrant que la production lyrique s'approprie l'aura de la marchandise, transformée en objet poétique (...) avant même que ces "lubies théologiques" ne tombent sous l'exil de Marx, Benjamin a voulu défricher la charge politique du magasin de signes et d'images des Fleurs du mal. Par un geste parent du tikkun, du kintsugi ou de la correspondance baudelairienne, le présent ouvrage rouvre les manuscrits parisiens de Benjamin oubliés pendant près d'un demi-siècle pour restituer ce qu'aura été ce livre inachevé, cette immense compilation de fragments où s'éclairent les ambiguïtés constitutives de l'énigme de notre modernité. Il trace ainsi les grands axes d'un poème du Capital qui acte le cours catastrophique de l'histoire sans renoncer à sonder ses suites et ses floraisons inespérées."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Aux aléas de la vie répondent des accidents de la respiration. Interjections et onomatopées constituent en effet les premières formes d’expression de ce qui fait événement. À mi-chemin entre le son brut et le langage, elles permettent – c’est notre hypothèse – de signer ce qui n’est pas qualifiable et pensable. Ce faisant, elles ont une « vertu thérapeutique » qui consiste à exprimer que quelque chose arrive alors même que ce qui arrive tend à sidérer. L’usage des onomatopées peut (...) alors être envisagé comme une « option culturelle » de la prise en charge des catastrophes, ce que nous étudions au travers du champ d’expression japonais. (shrink)

The development of new approaches is critical to gain further insights into biological processes that cannot be obtained by existing methods or technologies. The detection of protein–protein interaction is often challenging, especially for weak and transient interactions or for membrane proteins. Over the last decade, several proximity‐tagging methodologies have been developed to explore protein interactions in living cells. Among those, the most efficient are based on protein partner modification, such as biotinylation or pupylation. Such technologies are based on engineered variants (...) of enzymes like peroxidases or ligases that release reactive molecules, in the presence of specific substrates, that bind surrounding proteins. Fusing a protein of interest (POI) to these enzymes allows the definition of an unbiased “proxisome,” that is, all of the proteins in interaction or in close vicinity of the POI. Here, the different proximity‐labeling tools available are described and comprehensive comparison to discuss advantages and limitations is provided. (shrink)

The idea of commercial‐assisted suicide lives a marginal existence in the bioethical literature, despite its significant presence in popular culture. The practice of commercial‐assisted suicide (CAS) is defined as suicide assistance performed for a financial reward through a contractual agreement between a customer and a service‐provider, who does not necessarily need to be a medical professional. While CAS does indeed offer some potential solutions regarding the moral controversies surrounding physician‐assisted suicide (PAS), I defend the idea that adopting it as policy (...) ultimately proves morally indefensible and practically inefficient. This is due to the fact that the commodification of a given good necessarily implies the creation of a market of said good; as such, what I propose in this paper is a moral and practical evaluation of a market of CAS. In order to do so, I first examine the arguments in favor of CAS as put forward by Roland Kipke, who argues that any liberal defense of PAS necessarily implies a defense of CAS. In the first section, I argue against this idea using the liberal values of autonomy and equality of opportunity. In the second section of the paper, I argue that a market of CAS would be gravely dysfunctional due to one particular characteristic of death, namely, that is not compensable ex post. I conclude by arguing that while the practice of CAS may not prove morally problematic, the inevitable market that it will create should it be legalized most certainly will. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 4, Page 381-387, May 2022.

L’œuvre deleuzienne ne traite pas directement de l’éducation, pourtant sa pensée semble parfaitement transposable aux sciences de l’éducation puis­qu’elle remet fondamentalement en cause l’idée de transmission, l’idée du maitre détenteur d’un savoir absolu, du vrai comme produit d’une transcen­dance mystique. Si la notion d’éducation n’est pas un objet deleuzien, il est possible de la faire émerger en tirant les implications de la pensée de ce dernier en matière d’éducation, travail entrepris...

Résumé Nous interrogeons la participation d’un individu à un collectif dans la pensée de Sartre. Bien qu’ils agissent de la même manière, les agents n’ont pas toujours conscience qu’ils participent à un collectif ou bien telle n’est pas leur intention. Il faut alors se demander à quelles conditions l’action des agents peut devenir commune. Pour traiter ces perspectives, l’article étudie la série avant d’expliquer comment elle peut devenir un véritable groupe. Ainsi, il est possible de montrer l’originalité de la pensée (...) sartrienne, comme forme d’individualisme qui met l’action au principe de la constitution du groupe. (shrink)

Depuis les années 1980, les mobilités, notamment nocturnes, ont connu des bouleversements sociaux d’ampleur, qui tendraient, selon différents observateurs, à une « colonisation » de la nuit. L’analyse des mobilités quotidiennes nocturnes présentée ici permet de discuter des thèses de la colonisation de la nuit et d’en comprendre les logiques de stratification sociale, si elles existent. La mobilité nocturne se diffuse-t-elle? Qui sont les Français qui se déplacent nuitamment? Leur visage a-t-il changé au cours des dernières décennies? Afin de répondre (...) à de telles questions, l’article exploite la série des enquêtes nationales transports réalisées par l’Insee (1981, 1992, 2007 et 2018). Nos analyses montrent que les mobilités quotidiennes des Français présentent des structures fortes et durables. Les déplacements nocturnes demeurent, depuis les années 1980, relativement rares et offrent à voir une tripartition de la nuit. Si la grande majorité des Français ne se déplacent pas nuitamm... (shrink)

Epistemic injustice has undergone a steady growth in the medical ethics literature throughout the last decade as many ethicists have found it to be a powerful tool for describing and assessing morally problematic situations in healthcare. However, surprisingly scarce attention has been devoted to how epistemic injustice relates to physicians’ professional duties on a conceptual level. I argue that epistemic injustice, specifically testimonial, collides with physicians’ duty of nonmaleficence and should thus be actively fought against in healthcare encounters on the (...) ground of professional conduct. I do so by fleshing out how Fricker’s conception of testimonial injustice conflicts with the duty of nonmaleficence as defined in Beauchamp and Childress on theoretical grounds. From there, I argue that testimonial injustice produces two distinct types of harm, epistemic and non-epistemic. Epistemic harms are harms inflicted by the physician to the patient qua knower, whereas non-epistemic harms are inflicted to the patient qua patient. This latter case holds serious clinical implications and represent a failure of the process of due care on the part of the physician. I illustrate this through examples taken from the literature on fibromyalgia syndrome and show how testimonial injustice causes wrongful harm to patients, making it maleficent practice. Finally, I conclude on why nonmaleficence as a principle will not be normatively enough to fully address the problem of epistemic injustice in healthcare but nevertheless may serve as a good starting point in attempting to do so. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 42-44.

In their address of structural racism in healthcare, Sabatello and colleagues provide both a remarkable review of the empirical literature regarding the disproportionate impacts of the COVID...

This paper seeks to investigate and assess a particular form of relationship between the State and its citizens in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely that of obedience to the law and its related right of protest through civil disobedience. We do so by conducting an analysis and normative evaluation of two cases of disobedience to the law: (1) healthcare professionals refusing to attend work as a protest against unsafe working conditions, and (2) citizens who use public demonstration and (...) deliberately ignore measures of social distancing as a way of protesting against lockdown. While different in many aspects, both are substantially similar with respect to one element: their respective protesters both rely on unlawful actions in order to bring change to a policy they consider unjust. We question the extent to which healthcare professionals may participate in civil disobedience with respect to the duty of care intrinsic to the medical profession, and the extent to which opponents of lockdown and confinement measures may reasonably engage in protests without endangering the lives and basic rights of non-dissenting citizens. Drawing on a contractualist normative framework, our analysis leads us to conclude that while both cases qualify as civil disobedience in the descriptive sense, only the case of healthcare professionals qualifies as morally justified civil disobedience. (shrink)

This paper seeks to investigate and assess a particular form of relationship between the State and its citizens in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely that of obedience to the law and its related right of protest through civil disobedience. We do so by conducting an analysis and normative evaluation of two cases of disobedience to the law: (1) healthcare professionals refusing to attend work as a protest against unsafe working conditions, and (2) citizens who use public demonstration and (...) deliberately ignore measures of social distancing as a way of protesting against lockdown. While different in many aspects, both are substantially similar with respect to one element: their respective protesters both rely on unlawful actions in order to bring change to a policy they consider unjust. We question the extent to which healthcare professionals may participate in civil disobedience with respect to the duty of care intrinsic to the medical profession, and the extent to which opponents of lockdown and confinement measures may reasonably engage in protests without endangering the lives and basic rights of non-dissenting citizens. Drawing on a contractualist normative framework, our analysis leads us to conclude that while both cases qualify as civil disobedience in the descriptive sense, only the case of healthcare professionals qualifies as morally justified civil disobedience. (shrink)

The Type VI secretion system is a multiprotein and mosaic apparatus that delivers protein effectors into prokaryotic or eukaryotic cells. Recent data on the enteroaggregative Escherichia coli T6SS have provided evidence that the TssA protein is a key component during T6SS biogenesis. The T6SS comprises a trans-envelope complex that docks the baseplate, a cytoplasmic complex that represents the assembly platform for the tail. The T6SS tail is structurally, evolutionarily and functionally similar to the contractile tails of bacteriophages. We have shown (...) that TssA docks to the membrane complex, recruits the baseplate complex and initiates and coordinates the polymerization of the inner tube with that of the sheath. Here, we review these recent findings, discuss the variations within TssA-like proteins, speculate on the role of EAEC TssA in T6SS biogenesis and propose future research perspectives. In the environment, bacteria have to cope with other microbial species and therefore have evolved anti-microbial mechanisms. The bacterial Type VI secretion system transports toxins into bacterial and/or eukaryotic cells using a contractile mechanism. At the architectural level, the T6SS could be viewed as a nano-speargun assembled in the bacterial cytoplasm and anchored to a trans-envelope complex. We describe and speculate on recent findings demonstrating that the TssA subunit is involved in the different stages of T6SS biogenesis. (shrink)

PHILOSOPHIQUE, 2016 NOTE : DELEUZE ET LES SCIENCES DE L’ÉDUCATION Yoann Barthod Malat Université de Franche-Comté L’œuvre deleuzienne ne traite pas directement de l’éducation, pourtant sa pensée semble parfaitement transposable aux sciences de l’éducation puis­qu’elle remet fondamentalement en cause l’idée de transmission, l’idée du maitre détenteur d’un savoir absolu, du vrai comme produit d’une transcen­dance mystique. Si la notion d’éducation n’est pas un objet deleuzien, il est possible d...

PHILOSOPHIQUE, 2016 NOTE : DELEUZE ET LES SCIENCES DE L’ÉDUCATION Yoann Barthod Malat Université de Franche-Comté L’œuvre deleuzienne ne traite pas directement de l’éducation, pourtant sa pensée semble parfaitement transposable aux sciences de l’éducation puis­qu’elle remet fondamentalement en cause l’idée de transmission, l’idée du maitre détenteur d’un savoir absolu, du vrai comme produit d’une transcen­dance mystique. Si la notion d’éducation n’est pas un objet deleuzien, il est possible d...