世界の三人宗教が祖、大預言者と仰ぐアブラハム。「すべての父なるアブラハム」の生涯を通した人間の在り方と信仰を、キリスト教的人間形成論という視点から考えていく。.

Nisbett et al. claim that East Asians are likely to use holistic thought to solve problems, whereas Westerners use analytic thought more, and discuss the differences in the frame of the individualism/collectivism distinction. The holistic versus analytic distinction has been the greatest point of interest of dual process theories, which imply that human thinking has two sub processes. We apply a revised dual process model that proposes meme-acquired goals in both systems to explain cultural differences in thought. According to this, (...) gene-installed goals are universal across cultures, whereas meme-acquired goals depend upon culture. To introduce a dual process model means that we discuss adaptation both in terms of culture and natural selection. Hence, we propose an interactive view that supports an adaptive relation between mind and culture. (shrink)

Background In current Western medical ethics, patient-centered medicine is considered the norm. However, the cultural background of collectivism in East Asia often leads to family-centered decision-making. In Japan, prior studies have reported that family-centered decision-making is more likely to be preferred in situations of disease notification and end-of-life decision-making. Nonetheless, there has been a recent shift from collectivism to individualism due to changes in the social structure. Various personal factors have also been reported to influence moral decision-making. Therefore, this study (...) examined whether the current trend in attitudes of healthcare decision-making in Japan is family-centered or patient-centered among the general public and physicians. In addition, the personal factors that influence this tendency were examined.Methods Three vignettes on disease notification and two vignettes on decision-making during end-of-life care were created, and 457 members of the public and 284 physicians were asked about their attitudes (behavioral intentions) regarding these vignettes.Results Approximately, 95% of physicians were patient-centered in explaining the patient’s severe medical condition. However, approximately 80% of physicians emphasized the wishes of the family over patient wishes when making life-sustaining decisions. Nearly half the general public emphasized the patient’s wishes in the explanation of a severe medical condition and in life-sustaining decisions. In both the public and physician groups, personal factors, particularly the presence or absence of a disease under treatment and prior caregiving experience, influenced ethical attitudes toward medical treatment decisions.Conclusions In relatively low-conflict situations, such as the announcement of a patient’s medical condition, physicians tended to be patient-centered, while they tended to be family-centered in situations of strong conflict in withholding life-sustaining treatment. The fact that personal factors influenced the family-centered response in situations of strong conflict highlights the importance of not only acquiring knowledge of medical ethics but also learning to fairly apply this knowledge in practice. (shrink)

In ‘Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands’, Gilles Deleuze presents a mythological and scientific vision in which new islands and new humanity emerge from the opposition between the land and sea in desert islands. However, what Deleuze cannot explain is how such new territory and people are produced and reproduced while rejecting old and conventional generational ways. To break this impasse, which is also present in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze and Guattari intend to retain the absolute movement of deterritorialisation, while (...) acknowledging that deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation always comingle. This theoretical project is found in the critique of Pierre Clastres on counter-state societies, and is taken up by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? In this latter work, by creating concepts and constituting a new plane, Deleuze and Guattari offer some conditions of a third reterritorialisation that, after the second reterritorialisation in the democratic states, presents a new way of forging a political and revolutionary philosophy. In this essay, we criticise the opinions that consider Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy as one version of radical democracy. Their political philosophy should be situated in the post-democratic era to come. (shrink)

生命科学、医学、社会学、経済学、そして、政治学。あらゆる知の最新の達成を渉猟し、法・政治・制度といった現実の問題を真正面から考え続けてきた哲学者が、研ぎ澄まされた言葉で「生」を描きだす。.

It has been reported as a robust effect that people are likely to select a matching case in the Wason selection task. For example, they usually select the 5 case, in the Wason selection task with the conditional "if an E, then a not-5". This was explained by the matching bias account that people are likely to regard a matching case as relevant to the truth of the conditional (Evans, 1998). However, because a positive concept usually constructs a smaller set (...) than its negative one does (a rarity assumption), it is more effective to get information on the truth of the conditional in a positive set than in a negative set. Thus the optimal data selection account can also explain the effect. The set size of Q and matching by introducing negation were manipulated independently in four experiments. From the results it was inferred that the so-called matching bias was an amalgam of two different cognitive components-relevance judgement by matching and optimal data selection. (shrink)

Proposes a provocative reinterpretation of poststructuralist theory of power The “structuralist” theories of power show that the subject is produced and reproduced by the investment of power: but how then can we then think of the subject’s resistance to power? Based on this fundamental question, Power and Resistance interprets critically the (post-)structuralist theory of power and resistance, i.e., the theories of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Althusser. It analyses also the mechanism of power and the strategies of resistance in (...) the era of neoliberalism. This meticulous analysis that completely renewed the theory of power is already published in French, Japanese, and Korean with success. (shrink)

Background According to some medical ethicists and professional guidelines, there is no ethical difference between withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatment. However, medical professionals do not always agree with this notion. Patients and their families may also not regard these decisions as equivalent. Perspectives on life-sustaining treatment potentially differ between cultures and countries. This study compares Japanese physicians’ and citizens’ attitudes toward hypothetical cases of withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatment.Methods Ten vignette cases were developed. A web-based questionnaire was administered to 457 (...) citizens and 284 physicians to determine whether they supported withholding or withdrawing treatment.Results In a case where a patient had an advance directive refusing ventilation, 77% of the physicians and 68% of the citizens chose to withhold treatment. In a case where there was an advance directive but the patient’s family requested treatment, 55% of the physicians and 45% of the citizens chose to withhold the ventilator. When a family requested withdrawal of the ventilator but patient wishes were unknown, 19% of the physicians and 48% of the citizens chose to withdraw the ventilator. However, when the patient had also indicated their wishes in writing, 49% of the physicians and 66% of the citizens chose to withdraw treatment. More physicians were prepared to withdraw dialysis (84%) and artificial nutrition (81%) at a patient’s request than mechanical ventilation (49%).Conclusions A significant proportion of Japanese physicians and citizens were reluctant to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment, even in cases where the patient had indicated their wishes in writing. They were more likely to withhold than withdraw treatment, and more likely to withdraw artificial nutrition than mechanical ventilation. Japanese physicians gave significant weight to family views about treatment but were less likely to agree to withdraw treatment than citizens, indicating a potential source of conflict in clinical settings. (shrink)

While some studies suggest cultural differences in visual processing, others do not, possibly because the complexity of their tasks draws upon high-level factors that could obscure such effects. To control for this, we examined cultural differences in visual search for geometric figures, a relatively simple task for which the underlying mechanisms are reasonably well known. We replicated earlier results showing that North Americans had a reliable search asymmetry for line length: Search for long among short lines was faster than vice (...) versa. In contrast, Japanese participants showed no asymmetry. This difference did not appear to be affected by stimulus density. Other kinds of stimuli resulted in other patterns of asymmetry differences, suggesting that these are not due to factors such as analytic/holistic processing but are based instead on the target-detection process. In particular, our results indicate that at least some cultural differences reflect different ways of processing early-level features, possibly in response to environmental factors. (shrink)

When building personal relationships, it is important to select optimal partners, even based on the first meeting. This study was inspired by the idea that people who smile are considered more trustworthy and attractive. However, this may not always be true in daily life. Previous studies have used a relatively simple method of judging others by presenting a photograph of one person’s face. To move beyond this approach and examine more complex situations, we presented the faces of two people confronted (...) with each other to participants and asked them to judge them from a third-person perspective. Through three experiments, participants were asked to judge which of the two persons was more appropriate for forming alliances, more trustworthy, or more attractive, respectively. In all experiments, images were shown for a short or a long time. In all three experiments, the results showed that participants were more likely to choose persons with happy faces than those with neutral, sad, or angry faces when the image presentation was short. Contrarily, the facial expressions did not affect those judgments when the image presentation was long. Instead, judgments were correlated with personality estimated from the model’s neutral face in a single-person presentation. These results suggest that although facial expressions can affect the judgments of others when observing two-person confrontations from a third-person perspective, when participants have more time to elaborate their judgments, they go beyond expressions. (shrink)

This article proposes a methodological schema for engaging in a productive discussion of ethical issues regarding human brain organoids, which are three-dimensional cortical neural tissues created using human pluripotent stem cells. Although moral consideration of HBOs significantly involves the possibility that they have consciousness, there is no widely accepted procedure to determine whether HBOs are conscious. Given that this is the case, it has been argued that we should adopt a precautionary principle about consciousness according to which, if we are (...) not certain whether HBOs have consciousness—and where treating HBOs as not having consciousness may cause harm to them—we should proceed as if they do have consciousness. This article emphasizes a methodological advantage of adopting the precautionary principle: it enables us to sidestep the question of whether HBOs have consciousness and, instead, directly address the question of what kinds of conscious experiences HBOs can have, where the what-kind-question is more tractable than the whether-question. By addressing the what-kind-question, we will be able to examine how much moral consideration HBOs deserve. With this in mind, this article confronts the what-kind-question with the assistance of experimental studies of consciousness and suggests an ethical framework which supports restricting the creation and use of HBOs in bioscience. (shrink)

In this paper we study selected argument forms involving counterfactuals and indicative conditionals under uncertainty. We selected argument forms to explore whether people with an Eastern cultural background reason differently about conditionals compared to Westerners, because of the differences in the location of negations. In a 2x2 between-participants design, 63 Japanese university students were allocated to four groups, crossing indicative conditionals and counterfactuals, and each presented in two random task orders. The data show close agreement between the responses of Easterners (...) and Westerners. The modal responses provide strong support for the hypothesis that conditional probability is the best predictor for counterfactuals and indicative conditionals. Finally, the grand majority of the responses are probabilistically coherent, which endorses the psychological plausibility of choosing coherence-based probability logic as a rationality framework for psychological reasoning research. (shrink)

Yama (2001) argued that the matching bias effect was an amalgam of a genuine matching effect and a set size effect. However, Evans (2002) pointed out some problems with Yama's argument. One was on the matching index used in Yama (2001). The others concerned a gap between Yama's (2001) interpretation of matching bias and Evans' (1998) recent discussions that had placed emphasis on the problem of implicit negation. I reply to these claims taking Oaksford (2002) into (...) consideration. Further, I propose a framework connecting context, goal, utility, and relevance, and including a hierarchical structure of goals. I argue that theories of reasoning can be developed and extended with the framework. (shrink)

During clinical ethics consultation training, hands-on practice after acquiring the necessary knowledge under an experienced clinical ethics consultant's supervision is an effective method of obtaining technical and practical skills. However, in regions where clinical ethics consultation is still nascent, few experienced clinical ethics consultants exist. The number of clinical ethics consultation cases is small, making on-the-job training significantly difficult. To address this problem, this study developed a remote supervision program using e-mail and ZOOM and evaluated its effectiveness using Kirkpatrick's learning (...) effectiveness model. The findings confirmed the good learning effects of both programs. In particular, ZOOM's learning effectiveness was greater than e-mail's in Level 2 learning effects. Nevertheless, remote supervision may be an effective method when in-person training is difficult, such as in countries with developing clinical ethics consultations or during the outbreak of infection. (shrink)

This study aims to develop guidelines of key concepts and specific considerations to make the research more ethical when conducting neurological examinations and treatment interventions in mentally ill patients. We analyzed guideline development theory and literature, previous issues, and discussions with specialists of philosophy, medicine, sociology, and bioethics. The selection of research participants, drafting of intervention plans, and informed consent process were examined with reference to the dual burden; the minimal risk as a general rule of ethical allowance levels, assent (...) and dissent to assess the individual’s judgment capacity for consent, relational autonomy for personal consent with assistance by the proxy, and risk/benefit assessments. When conducting studies, this guideline requires that these three processes be set up appropriately on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

Many fields of study have shown that group discussion generally improves reasoning performance for a wide range of tasks. This article shows that most of the population, including specialists, does not expect group discussion to be as beneficial as it is. Six studies asked participants to solve a standard reasoning problem—the Wason selection task—and to estimate the performance of individuals working alone and in groups. We tested samples of U.S., Indian, and Japanese participants, European managers, and psychologists of reasoning. Every (...) sample underestimated the improvement yielded by group discussion. They did so even after they had been explained the correct answer, or after they had had to solve the problem in groups. These mistaken intuitions could prevent individuals from making the best of institutions that rely on group discussion, from collaborative learning and work teams to deliberative assemblies. (shrink)