Within the popular consciousness, Emma Goldman has become something of an icon, a symbol for rebellion and women’s rights. But there has been surprisingly little substantive analysis of her influence on social, political, and feminist theory. In _Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman,_ Weiss and Kensinger present essays that resist a simplistic understanding of Goldman and instead attempt to examine her thinking in its proper social, historical, and philosophical context. Only by considering the sources, influences, and specific significance of Goldman’s ideas (...) can her proper place in feminist theory be truly understood. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Martha A. Ackelsberg, Kathryn Pyne Addelson, Lynne M. Adrian, Berenice A. Carroll, Voltairine de Cleyre, Janet E. Day, Candace Falk, Kathy E. Ferguson, Marsha Aileen Hewitt, Lori Jo Marso, Jonathan McKenzie, Alix Kates Shulman, Craig Stalbaum, Jason Wehling, and Alice Wexler. (shrink)

Inherent in providing healthcare for youth lie tensions among best interests, decision-making capacity, rights, and legal authority. Transgender youth experience barriers to needed gender-affirming care, often rooted in ethical and legal issues, such as healthcare provider concerns regarding youth capacity and rights to consent to hormone therapy. Even when decision-making capacity is present, youth may lack the legal authority to give consent. The aims of this paper are therefore to provide an empirical analysis of minor trans youth capacity to consent (...) to hormone therapy and to address the normative question of whether there is ethical justification for granting trans youth the authority to consent to this care. Through qualitative content analysis of interviews with trans youth, parents, and healthcare providers, we found that trans youth demonstrated the understandings and abilities characteristic of the capacity to consent to hormone therapy and that they did consent to hormone therapy with positive outcomes. Employing deontological and consequentialist reasoning and drawing on a foundation of empirical evidence, human rights, and best interests we conclude that granting trans youth with decisional capacity both the right and the legal authority to consent to hormone therapy via the informed consent model of care is ethically justified. (shrink)

Three experiments explored the effects of word problem cueing on debiasing versions of the bat-and-ball problem. In the experimental condition order, participants solved a simpler isomorphic version of the problem prior to solving a standard version that, critically, had the same item-and-dollar amounts. Conversely, in the control condition order, participants solved the standard version prior to solving the isomorph. Across the first 2 experiments, participants cued with the isomorph were more likely to correctly solve the standard version of the problem. (...) In the third experiment, this cueing effect was not replicated, but importantly cued participants were more likely to correctly solve the standard version of the problem with other item-and-dollar amounts, indicating near transfer. Far transfer was evident in faster response times to other problems in the Cognitive Reflection Test following practice. Along with providing converging evidence for the cueing account, these results are consistent with recent attentional debiasing findings. (shrink)

As major clothing suppliers are being forced by competition to cut costs, is this inevitably leading their suppliers to cut corners in working conditions, and what ethical considerations are relevant? The author is completing her MBA at London Business School and has a background in the textile industry.

Research on evaluative conditioning (EC) shows that attitudes can emerge from co-occurrences of stimuli, and accumulating evidence suggests that EC usually depends on memory for these stimulus contingencies. Therefore, processes known to aid memory retention may be relevant for the development of stable attitudes. One such process may be memory consolidation, assumed to be promoted by waking rest and sleep. In two pre-registered experiments, we investigated whether waking rest (vs. cognitive activity, Experiment 1) and sleep (vs. wakefulness, Experiment 2) in (...) between conditioning and measurement of EC, consolidate contingency memory and EC. Contrary to our predictions, waking rest (vs. cognitive activity) promoted neither contingency memory nor EC effects. Sleep (vs. wakefulness) decreased forgetting of contingency memory but crucially, it did not attenuate the impact of counterconditioning on contingency memory. Sleep also did not influence EC effects, nor the reduction of EC by counterconditioning. EC effects in both experiments were predicted by contingency memory. Yet, unexpectedly, EC effects occurred in the absence of contingency memory after waking rest, but neither after sleep nor in the active control conditions. Our findings emphasise a role of contingency memory in EC, but it remains unclear whether this role changes during waking rest. (shrink)

This article examines Charles Wright Mills’ sociological works and political thought : it shows how they provide the basis of a reflection on the social conditions of democratic conflict. First Mills’ work questions the impact of social stratification on democratic conflict. Second Mills’ approach of the notion of « mass society » puts emphasis on the way the decline of the autonomy of social orders contributes to a weakening of democratic conflict. Finally, we compare the way Mills and Pierre Bourdieu (...) defend a « politics of truth » : such an analysis emphazises that the autonomy of social orders or social fields is a condition and a stake at once pivotal and ambivalent of democratic struggles. (shrink)

Much indirect evidence supports the hypothesis that transformations of mental images are at least in part guided by motor processes, even in the case of images of abstract objects rather than of body parts. For example, rotation may be guided by processes that also prime one to see results of a specific motor action. We directly test the hypothesis by means of a dual-task paradigm in which subjects perform the Cooper-Shepard mental rotation task while executing an unseen motor rotation in (...) a given direction and at a previously learned speed. Four results support the inference that mental rotation relies on motor processes. First, motor rotation that is compatible with mental rotation results in faster times and fewer errors in the imagery task than when the two rotations are incompatible. Second, the angle through which subjects rotate their mental images, and the angle through which they rotate a joystick handle are correlated, but only if the directions of the two rotations are compatible. Third, motor rotation modifies the classical inverted V-shaped mental rotation response time function, favoring the direction of the motor rotation; indeed, in some cases motor rotation even shifts the location of the minimum of this curve in the direction of the motor rotation. Fourth, the preceding effect is sensitive not only to the direction of the motor rotation, but also to the motor speed. A change in the speed of motor rotation can correspondingly slow down or speed up the mental rotation. (shrink)

BackgroundAn increasing number of studies utilize intracranial electrophysiology in human subjects to advance basic neuroscience knowledge. However, the use of neurosurgical patients as human research subjects raises important ethical considerations, particularly regarding informed consent and undue influence, as well as subjects’ motivations for participation. Yet a thorough empirical examination of these issues in a participant population has been lacking. The present study therefore aimed to empirically investigate ethical concerns regarding informed consent and voluntariness in Parkinson’s disease patients undergoing deep brain (...) stimulator (DBS) placement who participated in an intraoperative neuroscience study.MethodsTwo semi-structured 30-minute interviews were conducted preoperatively and postoperatively via telephone. Interviews assessed participants’ motivations for participation in the parent intraoperative study, recall of information presented during the informed consent process, and participants’ postoperative reflections on the research study.ResultsTwenty-two participants (mean age = 60.9) completed preoperative interviews at a mean of 7.8 days following informed consent and a mean of 5.2 days prior to DBS surgery. Twenty participants completed postoperative interviews at a mean of 5 weeks following surgery. All participants cited altruism or advancing medical science as “very important” or “important” in their decision to participate in the study. Only 22.7% (n = 5) correctly recalled one of the two risks of the study. Correct recall of other aspects of the informed consent was poor (36.4% for study purpose; 50.0% for study protocol; 36.4% for study benefits). All correctly understood that the study would not confer a direct therapeutic benefit to them.ConclusionEven though research coordinators were properly trained and the informed consent was administered according to protocol, participants demonstrated poor retention of study information. While intraoperative studies that aim to advance neuroscience knowledge represent a unique opportunity to gain fundamental scientific knowledge, improved standards for the informed consent process can help facilitate their ethical implementation. (shrink)

As early-career neuroethicists, we come to the field of neuroethics at a unique moment: we are well-situated to consider nearly two decades of neuroethics scholarship and identify challenges that have persisted across time. But we are also looking squarely ahead, embarking on the next generation of exciting and productive neuroethics scholarship. In this article, we both reflect backwards and turn our gaze forward. First, we highlight criticisms of neuroethics, both from scholars within the field and outside it, that have focused (...) on speculation and lack of skepticism; the dearth of consideration of broader social issues such as justice and equality, both with regard to who speaks for neuroethics as a field and who benefits from its recommendations and findings; and the insufficient focus on the practical impact of our ethical work. Second, we embrace the concept of “translational neuroethics” to outline a vision for neuroethics that is integrated, inclusive, and impactful. Integration can help us identify more pertinent, real-world issues, and move away from speculation; inclusivity can help ensure that the questions we attend to are not merely relevant to a single subgroup but aim toward just distribution of benefits; and impact can help us think beyond guidelines and recommendations to focus on implementation. Our goal is for this call to action to help shape neuroethics into a discipline that develops rigorous research agendas through relationships with interdisciplinary partners, that is broadly inclusive and attends to issues beyond novel neurotechnologies, and that is devoted to the translation of scholarship into practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis work explores financial edgework by professional speculative traders as an explanation for the persistence of rogue trading in financial markets. The article joins in the scholarly application of “edgework,” the social psychological study of voluntary risk, to speculative trading. The discussion focuses on the origins and persistence of that subset of behavior wherein the trader knowingly creates the condition in which he or she endangers the brokerage house that employs them and even, at times, threatens the public's perception of (...) the integrity of the securities industry. Going over the edge between risk taking and unauthorized rogue trading is explained by looking at five inducements to escalate risk taking provided in the securities industry. This examination of financial edgework demonstrates how and, to a lesser degree, why rogue trading is a result of the security industry's pursuit of and desire to capitalize upon yet not publicize an occupational culture stressing a “risk‐and‐win” ethos. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 6, June 2019, Page 41-42.

The paper explores whether the method of reflective equilibrium (RE) in ethics and political philosophy should be individual or public in character. I defend a modestly public conception of RE, in which public opinion is used specifically as a source of considered judgments about cases. Public opinion is superior to philosophical opinion in delivering judgments that are untainted by principled commitments. A case-based approach also mitigates the methodological problems that commonly confront efforts to integrate philosophy with the investigation of popular (...) attitudes. This conception of RE is situated in relation to alternative accounts, including those of Daniels, Rawls, and Wolff and de-Shalit. (shrink)

We present evidence that preschool children oftentimes understand disjunctive sentences as if they were conjunctive. The result holds for matrix disjunctions as well as disjunctions embedded under every. At the same time, there is evidence in the literature that children understand or as inclusive disjunction in downward-entailing contexts. We propose to explain this seemingly conflicting pattern of results by assuming that the child knows the inclusive disjunction semantics of or, and that the conjunctive inference is a scalar implicature. We make (...) two assumptions about implicature computation in the child: that children access only a proper subset of the adult alternatives, and that children possess the adult capacity to strengthen sentences with implicatures. As a consequence, children are expected to sometimes not compute any implicatures at all, but in other cases they are expected to compute an implicature that is different from the adult implicature. We argue that the child’s conjunctive strengthening of disjunctive sentences realizes the latter possibility: the adult infers that the conjunction is false but the child infers that the conjunction is true. This behaviour is predicted when our assumptions about child development are coupled with the assumption that a covert exhaustive operator is responsible for strengthening in both the child and the adult. Specifically, children’s conjunctive strengthening is predicted to follow from the same mechanism used by adults to compute conjunctive free choice implicatures in response to disjunctive permission sentences. We furthermore argue that this parallel between the child and the adult extends to disambiguation preferences. In particular, we present evidence that children prefer to strengthen disjunctions to conjunctions, in matrix and embedded positions ; this result mirrors previous findings that adults prefer to compute free choice, at the root and under every. We propose a disambiguation strategy that explains the preference for conjunctive strengthening – by both the child and the adult – even though there is no general preference for exhaustification. Specifically, we propose that the preference for a conjunctive strengthening follows from a pragmatic preference for a complete answer to the Question Under Discussion. (shrink)

While the influence of emotion on individuals'' ethical decisions has been identified by numerous researchers, little is known about how emotions influence individuals'' ethical decision process. Thus, it is not clear whether different emotions promote and/or discourage ethical decision-making in the workplace. To address this gap, this paper develops a model that illustrates how emotion affects the components of individuals'' ethical decision-making process. The model is developed by integrating research findings that consider the two dimensions of emotion, arousal and feeling (...) state, into an applied cognitive-developmental perspective on the process of ethical decision-making. The model demonstrates that certain emotional states influence the individual''s propensity to identify ethical dilemmas, facilitate the formation of the individual''s prescriptive judgments at sophisticated levels of moral development, lead to ethical decision choices that are consistent with the individual''s prescriptive judgements, and promote the individual''s compliance with his or her ethical decision choices. In particular, the model suggests that individuals experiencing arousal and positive affect resolve ethical dilemmas in a manner consistent with more sophisticated cognitive moral structures. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Nurses and physicians may experience ethical conflict when there is a difference between their own values, their professional values or the values of their organization. The distribution of limited health care resources can be a major source of ethical conflict. Relatively few studies have examined nurses' and physicians' ethical conflict with organizations. This study examined the research question ‘What are the organizational ethical conflicts that hospital nurses and physicians experience in their practice?’ We interviewed 34 registered nurses, 10 nurse managers, (...) and 31 physicians as part of a larger study, and asked them to describe their ethical conflicts with organizations. Through content analysis, we identified themes of nurses' and physicians' ethical conflict with organizations and compared the themes for nurses with those for physicians. (shrink)