El objetivo de este artículo es describir el fenómeno del autoconocimiento desde una perspectiva wittgensteiniana. En la obra tardía de Wittgenstein gran parte de sus reflexiones se centra en el análisis de expresiones de estados fenomenológicos y actitudes proposicionales. A partir del análisis de las autoadscrip-ciones de estados mentales, muchos filósofos han intentado construir una imagen de lo que sería el autoconocimiento para el filósofo austríaco en sus últimos escritos. En este artículo pretendemos mostrar que Wittgenstein tiene una posición dual (...) en lo que se refiere al significado de los verbos psicológicos en primera persona. En unas ocasiones tendría un uso expresivo; en otras, un uso informativo y que ninguno de los tres intentos que mostraremos es acertado, aunque los tres parecieran encontrar apoyo textual en la obra del filósofo austriaco. The aim of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of self-knowledge from a Wittgensteinian perspective, subject of great interest to the philosophy of psycholo-gy. In Wittgenstein's later work, much of his thoughts are focused on the analysis of phenomenological states expressions and propositional attitudes. From the analysis of self-ascriptions of mental states, many philosophers have tried to build an image of what would be the self-knowledge for the Austrian philosopher in his later writings.In this article we show that Wittgenstein has a dual position in regard to the meaning of psychological verbs in the first person. On some occasions would use expressive in other, informational use. And that none of the three attempts that we will show is successful, although all three appear to find textual support in the work of Austrian philosopher. (shrink)

En la actualidad, los desarrollos teóricos acerca de la justicia desde una perspectiva lingüística giran alrededor de la teoría de la justicia de John Rawls y la teoría de la acción comunicativa de Jürgen Habermas. Empero, aunque un estudio detallado del funcionamiento del lenguaje hace parte de estas teorías no pueden concebirse propiamente como filosofías del lenguaje. La filosofía del lenguaje propende por la construcción de una teoría del significado que permita explicar diferentes fenómenos lingüísticos entre los que se encuentran (...) aquellos donde es usado el concepto de justicia. Mientras estas teorías permiten comprender las dinámicas pragmáticas de estos fenómenos, quedan cortas en la comprensión del contenido semántico del concepto. Este contenido semántico es lo que en última instancia aclara la naturaleza del mismo y, por tanto, una teoría del significado que permita dar cuenta tanto de las dinámicas pragmáticas como del contenido semántico será de vital importancia en la aclaración del concepto de justicia. Según este panorama, una salida más viable podría encontrarse en el pensamiento de Robert Brandom y Charles Travis, cuyas teorías del significado están basadas en el pensamiento expuesto en la obra tardía del filósofo Ludwig Wittgenstein. Según este autor, las prácticas de la justicia hacen parte de nuestras formas de vida y si el contenido semántico del concepto de justicia ha de ser buscado en algún lugar, es allí, en esas prácticas, donde será encontrado. La trama de la vida misma es la luz adecuada que puede iluminar la oscuridad en la que se ha sumido el concepto de justicia. Currently, the theoretical developments about justice from a linguistic perspective revolve around the theory of justice of John Rawls and the theory of communicative action of Jürgen Habermas. However, although a detailed study of the functioning of language is part of these theories, they can not be properly conceived as philosophies of language. The philosophy of language tends to the construction of a theory of meaning that allows explaining different linguistic phenomena among which are those where the concept of justice is used. While these theories allow to understand the pragmatic dynamics of these phenomena, they are short in the understanding of the semantic content of the concept. This semantic content is what ultimately clarifies the nature of it and, therefore, a theory of meaning that allows to account both the pragmatic dynamics and the semantic content will be of vital importance in the clarification of the concept of justice. According to this panorama, a more viable exit could be found in the thought of Robert Brandom and Charles Travis, whose theories of meaning are based on the thought expressed in the later work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. According to this author, the practices of justice are part of our forms of life and if the semantic content of the concept of justice has to be sought somewhere, it is there, in those practices, where it will be found. The plot of life itself is the adequate light that can illuminate the darkness in which the concept of justice has been submerged. (shrink)

The language of ethics expertise has become particularly important in bioethics in light of efforts to establish the value of the clinical ethics consultation, to specify who is qualified to function as a clinical ethics consultant, and to characterize how one should evaluate whether or not a person is so qualified. Supporters and skeptics about the possibility of ethics expertise use the language of ethics expertise in ways that reflect competing views about what ethics expertise entails. We argue for clarity (...) in understanding the nature of expertise and ethics expertise. To be an ethics expert, we argue, is to be an expert in knowing what ought to be done. Any attempt to articulate expertise with respect to knowing what ought to be done must include an account of ethics that specifies the nature of moral truth and the means by which we access this truth or a theoretical account of ethics such that expertise in another domain is linked to knowing or being better at judging what ought to be done and the standards by which this “knowing” or “being better at judging” is determined. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our analysis for the literature on ethics expertise in CEC. We do think that there are clear domains in which a clinical ethics consultant might be expert but we are skeptical about the possibility that this includes ethics expertise. Clinical ethics consultants should not be referred to as ethics experts. (shrink)

The theory of mental models postulates that meaning and knowledge can modulate the interpretation of conditionals. The theory's computer implementation implied that certain conditionals should be true or false without the need for evidence. Three experiments corroborated this prediction. In Experiment 1, nearly 500 participants evaluated 24 conditionals as true or false, and they justified their judgments by completing sentences of the form, It is impossible that A and ___ appropriately. In Experiment 2, participants evaluated 16 conditionals and provided their (...) own justifications, which tended to be explanations rather than logical justifications. In Experiment 3, the participants also evaluated as possible or impossible each of the four cases in the partitions of 16 conditionals: A and C, A and not-C, not-A and C, not-A and not-C. These evaluations corroborated the model theory. We consider the implications of these results for theories of reasoning based on logic, probabilistic logic, and suppositions. (shrink)

Collaborative cross-sector business models for sustainability innovation (CCSBMSI) in response to grand challenges are rich foci for tensions. This is the case of CCSBMSI targeting independent living through Information and Communication Technology–enabled care. This research aims at identifying the relevant tensions, understanding their interactions, and assessing how they can be effectively managed so that CCSBMSI become more valuable for partners and transformative for society. A conceptual framework that understands the management of interrelated institutional and interorganizational tensions as a dynamic capability (...) is substantiated through in-depth, qualitative analysis of the long-term dynamics of a four-sector CCSBMSI in telecare—including government, businesses, nonprofits, and informal actors. Its effects on the transition of business models in terms of value creation, delivery, and capture; on relevant stakeholders—particularly nonprofits and beneficiaries; and on the development of the sustainability innovation are discussed. The conceptualization, tension categories, and management capabilities of CCSBMSI are amplified. (shrink)

Socio-cultural shifts during the 1960s and 1970s included widespread secularization, challenges to authority and tradition, and an emphasis on individual choice. Healthcare and biomedical research advances accompanied these social changes, giving rise to numerous ethical and policy questions. The contemporary bioethics project emerged in this context with (at least) three aims: (1) to offer practical answers to these questions (often) in ways that (2) facilitate or support particular practices or goals (e.g., organ donation or human research) and that (3) appear (...) broadly applicable and legitimately enforceable. Philosophical thinking, which involves investigating and disambiguating concepts and categories, articulating conceptually clear definitions, and mapping arguments to identify premises, detect fallacies, and describe their logical implications, can undermine the practical goals of the bioethics project. This tension between the goals of bioethics and philosophical thinking might help to explain what some scholars see as a disinterest in philosophical thinking in bioethics today. (shrink)

The nature, possibility, and implications of ethics expertise in general and of bioethics expertise in particular has been the focus of extensive debate for over thirty years. What is ethics expertise and what does it enable experts to do? Knowing what ethics expertise is can help answer another important question: What, if anything, makes a claim of expertise legitimate? In other words, how does someone earn the appellation “ethics expert?” There remains deep disagreement on whether ethics expertise is possible, and (...) if so, what constitutes such expertise and what it entails and legitimates. Discussion of bioethics expertise has become particularly important given the growing presence of bioethicists in the clinical setting as well as efforts to professionalize bioethics through codes of ethics and certification efforts. Unlike in the law or in engineering, where there may be a body of knowledge that professional organizations or others have articulated as important for education and training of experts, ethics expertise admits of no such body of knowledge or required experience. Nor is there an entity seen as having the authority to articulate the necessary scope of knowledge. Questions about whether there is such a body of knowledge for particular areas within bioethics have emerged and played a central role in professionalization efforts in recent years, especially in the area of clinical ethics. (shrink)

In this study we examined whether parents’ perceptions of students’ anxiety as well as perceived support from both teachers and classmates were predictive of changes in students’ academic motivation during the first wave of COVID-19. To this end, we used a retrospective pretest-posttest design together with a latent change score model to analyze our data. From April to May of 2020, 394 Portuguese parents of students in grades 1–9 participated in this study. Our results showed that students’ anxiety and teachers’ (...) social support, as perceived by parents, were highly significant predictors of academic motivation changes. Specifically, we found a negative effect of anxiety and a positive effect of teachers’ social support on students’ academic motivation. Our results did not show, however, a significant predictive role of classmates’ social support. This study provides an important contribution to further understand the intrapersonal and interpersonal factors that are associated with the decline of students’ academic motivation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pivotal role of teachers in sustaining students’ academic motivation and other relevant educational implications for the ongoing pandemic are discussed. (shrink)

This article argues that thinking about entrepreneurship as a potential instrument for relief from endemic poverty and disadvantage, especially among the Indigenous, has all too often been captive to a concept of entrepreneurship that is built out of constrained economic and cultural assumptions. The authors develop this argument from a critical discussion of contributions by Karl Polanyi and Robert Heilbroner. The result is that approaches to venture have been encouraged that are sometimes a poor fit for the circumstances of those (...) they are meant to benefit, and other forms that could have considerable promise have gone unexplored. This article outlines some features of Indigenous culture and build on the analysis of David Harper to construct an improved notion of entrepreneurship that allows for these distinctive features. The article concludes that research and policy making concerning entrepreneurship as an instrument of development among the Indigenous need to be undertaken with this reconstructed understanding of entrepreneurship that is a better fit for the realities of Indigenous culture. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to investigate human spatiality and perception in general, with the experience of adventure sports as its background. These activities highlight especially our strong relationship with the world when we consider the specific way in which the environment participates in the development of human potential. We first analyse the notions of risk and instability as important elements in adventure sports. Then we explore the notion of experience and spatiality, considering the way in which we establish (...) our relationship with the world. The theoretical background is found in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard’s phenomenology of imagination to investigate perspectives of space among adventurers. We hold that more than a different range of corporeal techniques, adventure sports can teach us a way of interrogating and looking at the world. They require a peculiar sensibility that allows our body to experience the environment in favour of a corporeal wisdom. Alternative sports indicate the possibility that we have to build up different ways of inhabiting the world and comprehending it. (shrink)

I argue that valid informed consent is ethically required for organ donation from individuals declared dead using neurological criteria. Current policies in the U.S. do not require this and, not surprisingly, current practices inhibit the possibility of informed consent. Relevant information is withheld, opportunities to ensure understanding and appreciation are extremely limited, and the ability to make and communicate a free and voluntary decision is hindered by incomplete disclosure and other practices. Current practices should be revised to facilitate valid informed (...) consent for organ donation. (shrink)

Decisions regarding clinical procedures or research participation typically require the informed consent of individuals. When individuals are unable to give consent, the informed permission of a legally authorized representative or surrogate is required. Although many proposed procedures are aimed primarily at benefiting the individual, some are not. I argue that, particularly when individuals are asked to assume risks primarily or exclusively for the benefit of others, family members ought to be engaged in the informed consent process. Examples of procedures in (...) which individuals are asked to assume risks primarily or exclusively for the benefit of others include living organ donation and research participation. (shrink)

The contemporary confluence of globalization and ethical pluralism is at the origin of many ethical challenges that confront business nowadays, both in practice and in theory. One of the challenges arising from the development of globalization has to do with respect for cultural diversity. It is often said that the success of economic globalization tends towards social and cultural homogeneity. To the extent that cultural diversity is usually seen as a valuable reality, that global trend seems to contradict our efforts (...) to respect ethical pluralism, both personal and cultural, within society. In this paper I argue that (a) ethical minimalism, despite its emphasis on tolerance and justice, does not take pluralism seriously into account in present-day society, and (b) ethical minimalism is not suited to balancing the homogenizing trend of globalization. Certainly ethical norms are necessary, but by no means are they sufficient in themselves to encourage either justice or tolerance; nor are they sufficient to inspire and encourage good practices and sound regulations. Instead, virtue-based ethics has the capacity of inspiring and encouraging good practices. Particularly, virtue-based ethics is able to inspire a serious dialogue about ethical and legal issues both in the public arena and within organizations. (shrink)

Within and among societies, there are competing understandings of the status of children, including debates over whether they can bear rights and, if so, which rights they bear and against whom, and their capacity to make decisions and be held responsible and accountable for actions. There also are different understandings of what constitutes a family; what authority parents have over and regarding their children; and what should happen to children who are without parents because of death, desertion, or imprisonment. These (...) and other related debates reflect deep differences in worldviews, in how one understands the legitimate role of the state, in how one comes to know the proper way to raise children, and so on. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child purports to reflect international convergence on the rights of children, on how decisions concerning children should be made, and on how children ought to be treated by the state and by their parents. This paper examines whether the Convention's framework for decision making concerning children is an appropriate framework for pediatric bioethics. Questions about how to make health care decisions for children ultimately are questions of who is in authority to make and judge such decisions. Establishing who is in authority, determining whether there are any limits to that authority and, if so, defining those limits should be the focus of efforts to develop and implement a pediatric decision-making framework. (shrink)

A current issue in psycholinguistic research is whether the language difficulties exhibited by children with developmental language disorder [DLD, previously labeled specific language impairment ] are due to deficits in their abilities to pick up patterns in the sensory environment, an ability known as statistical learning, and the extent to which explicit learning mechanisms can be used to compensate for those deficits. Studies designed to test the compensatory role of explicit learning mechanisms in children with DLD are, however, scarce, and (...) the few conducted so far have led to inconsistent results. This work aimed to provide new insights into the role that explicit learning mechanisms might play on implicit learning deficits in children with DLD by resorting to a new approach. This approach involved not only the collection of event-related potentials, while preschool children with DLD [relative to typical language developmental controls] were exposed to a continuous auditory stream made of the repetition of three-syllable nonsense words but, importantly, the collection of ERPs when the same children performed analogous versions of the same auditory SL task first under incidental and afterward under intentional conditions. In each of these tasks, the level of predictability of the three-syllable nonsense words embedded in the speech streams was also manipulated to mimic natural languages closely. At the end of both tasks’ exposure phase, children performed a two-alternative forced-choice task from which behavioral evidence of SL was obtained. Results from the 2-AFC tasks failed to show reliable signs of SL in both groups of children. The ERPs data showed, however, significant modulations in the N100 and N400 components, taken as neural signatures of word segmentation in the brain, even though a detailed analysis of the neural responses revealed that only children from the TLD group seem to have taken advantage of the previous knowledge to enhance SL functioning. These results suggest that children with DLD showed deficits both in implicit and explicit learning mechanisms, casting doubts on the efficiency of the interventions relying on explicit instructions to help children with DLD to overcome their language difficulties. (shrink)

There are competing accounts of the birth of bioethics. Despite the differences among them, these accounts share the claim that bioethics was not born in a single disciplinary home or in a single social space, but in numerous, including hospitals, doctors' offices, research laboratories, courtrooms, medical schools, churches and synagogues, and philosophy classrooms. This essay considers the interdisciplinarity of bioethics and the contribution of new disciplines to bioethics. It also explores the implications of interdisciplinarity for bioethics education. As bioethics develops, (...) it will be helpful to identify essential elements in the education of bioethicists and to distinguish between members of other disciplines who make important contributions to bioethics and bioethicists. (shrink)

Vardanyan’s Theorems [36, 37] state that $\mathsf {QPL}(\mathsf {PA})$ —the quantified provability logic of Peano Arithmetic—is $\Pi ^0_2$ complete, and in particular that this already holds when the language is restricted to a single unary predicate. Moreover, Visser and de Jonge [38] generalized this result to conclude that it is impossible to computably axiomatize the quantified provability logic of a wide class of theories. However, the proof of this fact cannot be performed in a strictly positive signature. The system $\mathsf (...) {QRC_1}$ was previously introduced by the authors [1] as a candidate first-order provability logic. Here we generalize the previously available Kripke soundness and completeness proofs, obtaining constant domain completeness. Then we show that $\mathsf {QRC_1}$ is indeed complete with respect to arithmetical semantics. This is achieved via a Solovay-type construction applied to constant domain Kripke models. As corollaries, we see that $\mathsf {QRC_1}$ is the strictly positive fragment of $\mathsf {QGL}$ and a fragment of $\mathsf {QPL}(\mathsf {PA})$. (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between argumentation and persuasion. It defends the idea that these two concepts are not as opposed as all too often said. If it is important to recognize their differences (there are argumentative discourses without persuasion and persuasive discourses without argumentation), there is nevertheless an overlap, in which characteristics are taken from both. We propose to call this overlap “persuasive argumentation”. In order to bridge argumentation and persuasion, we will first distinguish the latter from manipulation. (...) In the second part of this article, we will analyze four cases of persuasive argumentation: the enthymeme, a few rhetorical figures, narration and visual argumentation. (shrink)

Prominent tuberculosis (TB) actors are invoking solidarity to motivate and justify collective action to address TB, including through intensified development and implementation (D&I) of technologies such as drugs and diagnostics. We characterize the ethical challenges associated with D&I of new TB technologies by drawing on stakeholder perspectives from 23 key informant interviews and we articulate the ethical implications of solidarity for TB technology D&I. The fundamental ethical issue facing TB technological D&I is a failure within and beyond the TB community (...) to stand in solidarity with persons with TB in addressing the complex sociopolitical contexts of technological D&I. The failure in solidarity relates to two further ethical challenges raised by respondents: skewed power dynamics that hinder D&I and uncertainties around weighing risks and benefits associated with new technologies. Respondents identified advocacy and participatory research practices as necessary to address such challenges and to motivate sustained collective action to accelerate toward TB elimination. We present the first empirical examination of bioethical accounts of solidarity in public and global health. Our study suggests that solidarity allows us better to understand and address the ethical challenges that arrest the D&I of new TB technologies. Solidarity lends credence to policies and practices that address the relational nature of illness and health through collective action. (shrink)

We investigated the feasibility of a short intervention using the Method of Loci, a well-known visuospatial mnemonic, to improve episodic memory recall performance in schizophrenia. The MoL training protocol comprised encoding and recall of two lists of items, a training session and practice with MoL. Then, participants had the opportunity to put into practice the newly learned MoL and were instructed to encode and recall two new lists of items using. This approach was first validated with healthy individuals. Subsequently, five (...) individuals with schizophrenia completed the protocol. Improvement in healthy individuals was observed for the word list. No significant memory improvement was denoted in the schizophrenia group, possibly due to participants' difficulties using the method efficiently and due to fatigue. The MoL seems to require episodic memory, working memory monitoring and executive functions, making it suboptimal for a population with impairments in all those domains. Future research should examine the use of other strategies, better suited for individuals with cognitive impairments like those found in schizophrenia. (shrink)

We report two new phenomena of deontic reasoning: (1) For conditionals with deontic content such as, "If the nurse cleaned up the blood then she must have worn rubber gloves", reasoners make more modus tollens inferences (from "she did not wear rubber gloves" to "she did not clean up the blood") compared to conditionals with epistemic content. (2) For conditionals in the subjunctive mood with deontic content, such as, "If the nurse had cleaned up the blood then she must have (...) had to wear rubber gloves", reasoners make the same frequency of all inferences as they do for conditionals in the indicative mood with deontic content. In this regard, subjunctive deontics are different from subjunctive epistemic conditionals: reasoners interpret subjunctive epistemic conditionals as counterfactual and they make more negative inferences such as modus tollens from them. The experiments show these two phenomena occur for deontic conditionals that contain the modal auxiliary "must" and ones that do not. We discuss the results in terms of the mental representations of deontic conditionals and of counterfactual conditionals. (shrink)

Online education has become an essential component of education. Thus, several factors, such as the student’s learning strategy and motivation, generally contribute to their academic success. This study investigates the relationship between learning strategies, motivation, and online learning environment among 150 first-year college students. Employing correlational design, the statistical findings of the study reveal that the r coefficient of 0.59 indicates a moderate positive correlation between the variables. The p-value of 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision (...) to reject the null hypothesis. Hence, a significant relationship exists between learning strategies, motivation, and the online learning environment. (shrink)

Recent work calls for excluding clinical ethics consultants’ religious ethical commitments from formulating recommendations about particular cases and communicating those recommendations. I demonstrate that three arguments that call for excluding religious ethical commitments from this work logically imply that consultants may not use their secular ethical commitments in their work. The call to sever clinical ethics consultation from the ethical commitments of clinical ethics consultants has implications for the scope of work consultants may do and for the competencies required for (...) such work. (shrink)

From an early age, exposure to a spoken language has allowed us to implicitly capture the structure underlying the succession of speech sounds in that language and to segment it into meaningful units. Statistical learning, the ability to pick up patterns in the sensory environment without intention or reinforcement, is thus assumed to play a central role in the acquisition of the rule-governed aspects of language, including the discovery of word boundaries in the continuous acoustic stream. Although extensive evidence has (...) been gathered from artificial languages experiments showing that children and adults are able to track the regularities embedded in the auditory input, as the probability of one syllable to follow another syllable in the speech stream, the developmental trajectory of this ability remains controversial. In this work, we have collected Event-Related Potentials while 5-year-old children and young adults were exposed to a speech stream made of the repetition of eight three-syllable nonsense words presenting different levels of predictability to mimic closely what occurs in natural languages and to get new insights into the changes that the mechanisms underlying auditory statistical learning might undergo through the development. The participants performed the aSL task first under implicit and, subsequently, under explicit conditions to further analyze if children take advantage of previous knowledge of the to-be-learned regularities to enhance SL, as observed with the adult participants. These findings would also contribute to extend our knowledge of the mechanisms available to assist SL at each developmental stage. Although behavioral signs of learning, even under explicit conditions, were only observed for the adult participants, ERP data showed evidence of online segmentation in the brain in both groups, as indexed by modulations in the N100 and N400 components. A detailed analysis of the neural data suggests, however, that adults and children rely on different mechanisms to assist the extraction of word-like units from the continuous speech stream, hence supporting the view that SL with auditory linguistic materials changes through development. (shrink)

Recently, the pandemic context in which the world finds itself has inspired studies that sought to evaluate to mental health and the way people are relating to the purpose of understanding and promoting improvements psychological health. The epidemiological and public health literature shows that social connection protects and promotes mental health, being an important clinical tool for reducing anxiety, depression, and stress. Thinking in the broad sense of connection, that is, feeling and perceiving oneself connected with the environment, applied to (...) the context of sport, it is suggested that social connection could be related to the interactions in the practice of sport. Although playing sports can promote mental health, there are few findings on the topic in the context of a pandemic and with physical sports and electronic sports players. In this sense, the present study aims to assess the extent to which social connection and mental health indicators are correlated in a sample of sports and e-sports players. The participants were 401 Brazilian physical sports and e-sports players, mostly male and single, who filled in the Social Connectedness Scale, the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale, and demographic questions. The results indicated that social connection was negatively correlated and also predict the anxiety, depression, and stress. When comparing sports and e-sports players, a statistically significant difference was identified in the levels of social connection [t = −3.41; sportsmean = 4.53 ; e-sportsmean = 4.14 ] and depression [t = 2.90; sportsmean = 1.10 ; e-sportsmean = 0.85 ]. These findings can serve as a theoretical basis for the development of intervention programs and promoting discussions that focus on the analysis of aspects promoting psychological health in sports context. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume brings together specialists from different backgrounds to deliver expert views on the relationship between morality and emotion, putting a special emphasis on issues related to emotional shocks. One of the distinctive aspects of social existence today is our subjection to traumatic events on a global scale, and our subsequent embodiment of the emotional responses these events provoke. Covering various methodological angles, the contributors ensure careful and heterogeneous reflection on this delicate topic. With eleven original essays, the collection (...) spans a wide variety of fields from philosophy and literary theory, to the visual arts, history, and psychology. The authors cover diverse themes, including philosophical approaches to political polarization; the impact of negative emotions such as anger on inter-relational balance; humour and politics; media and the idea of progress; photography and trauma discourse; democratic morality in modern Indian society; emotional olfactory experiences; phenomenological readings of spatial disorientation, and the significance of moral shocks. This timely volume offers crucial perspectives on contemporary questions relating to ethical behaviours, and the challenges of a globalized society on the verge of political, financial and emotional collapse. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Persons generally must give their informed consent to participate in research. To provide informed consent persons must be given information regarding the study in simple, lay language. Consent must be voluntary, and persons giving consent must be legally competent to consent and possess the capacity to understand and appreciate the information provided. This paper examines the relationship between the obligation to disclose information regarding risks and the requirement that persons have the capacity to understand and appreciate the information. There (...) has been insufficient attention to the extent to which persons must be able to understand and appreciate study information in order to have their consent deemed valid when the information is provided in simple, lay language. This paper argues that (1) the capacity to understand and appreciate information that should be deemed necessary to give valid consent should be defined by the capacity of the typical, cognitively normal adult and (2) the capacity of the typical, cognitively normal adult to understand and appreciate the concept of risk is limited. Therefore, (3) all things being equal, potential subjects must possess a limited capacity to understand and appreciate risk to be deemed competent to consent to research participation. (4) In some cases investigators ought to require that persons possess a greater than typical capacity to understand and appreciate risk. (shrink)

Contemporary bioethics is, at least in part, the product of biomedical and sociopolitical changes in the middle to latter part of the 20th century. These changes prompted reflection on deep moral questions at a time when traditional sources of moral guidance no longer were widely respected and, in some cases, were being rejected. In light of this, scholars, policy makers, and clinicians sought to identify a common morality that could be used among persons with different moral commitments to resolve disputes (...) and guide clinical practice and health policy. The concept of the common morality remains important in bioethics. This essay considers the common morality in light of the work of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. (shrink)

Croatia is a transitional society in that it is a country emerging from a socialist command economy toward a market-based economy with ensuing structural changes of a social and political nature—some extending into the healthcare system. A legacy from our past is that, until now, Croatian healthcare institutions have had no real experience with clinical ethics support services. When clinical cases arise presenting complex ethical dilemmas in treatment options, the challenges presented to the medical team are substantial. The case described (...) below recently occurred on a ward in a university hospital in Croatia. An unexpected request from the patient’s parents created a number of issues that needed to be addressed by the medical team, which was made more difficult by the lack of clinical ethics support services. Such cases press the question currently being debated as to what type of ethics support services would be suitable for Croatia and why. (shrink)

“Outsiders” addressing ethical issues in medicine—Strangers at the Bedside —became “bioethicists.” Bioethicists providing research ethics consultation have been described as “stranger...

The tendency to get involved in helping one’s family, friends, school, and community has many potential benefits such as greater compassion, concern for others, and social responsibility. Research interest in the benefits of contribution in adolescents has increased recently, but there are not many studies examining the effect of contribution on adolescents’ mental health. The present study focused on whether the contribution is associated with fewer self-rated depression symptoms in adolescents. We further tested whether self-regulation and academic performance can have (...) a mediating role in this association. A total of 423 secondary school students (233 female) from eastern Croatia participated in the study. Mean age was 16.78 (SD= 1.21). Students completed measures of self-regulation, depression symptoms, and contribution (helping one’s family, friends, or neighbors, mentoring peers, volunteering in one’s community, and participating in school organizations or boards), and gave information about age, gender, and academic performance. A hierarchical regression analysis revealed that contribution, self-regulation, and academic performance were related with lower levels of self-rated depression symptoms. Furthermore, mediation analysis indicated a significant indirect effect through two mediators, self-regulation and academic performance, which was stronger than a path containing only self-regulation. Academic performance alone was not a significant mediator. Our findings suggest that contribution could protect against depression by promoting self-regulation, leading to higher academic performance, and consequently fewer depression symptoms. (shrink)

The execution of critical thinking depends on a set of skills and dispositions. It is unanimously accepted that skills represent the cognitive component, but consensus varies with regard to dispositions. Although most theoreticians admit that this is a complex construct integrated by motivations and mental habits, they don’t explain further. We have performed a study attempting to explore the internal structure of dispositions. We suggest a possible hypothesis of “Motivational Genesis of Dispositions,” according to which disposition would be formed by (...) motivation and by mental habits, although the contribution of each of these factors would change depending on the practice gained in critical thinking. Thus, when a person is not practised in critical thinking, motivation makes a greatercontribution than mental habits. Nevertheless, with practice and motivated exercise of the skills of critical thinking, the influence of these mental habits increases. The regression analyses carried out support such a hypothesis. (shrink)

The Fourth Industrial Revolution based on digitalization, the development of AI, robotics, big data, and increasing automation is dredging up older debates on the end of human work. This article contributes to this debate arguing that these changing circumstances represent an opportunity to advance a renewed consideration of human work. By emphasizing its most distinctively human dimensions, including gratuitousness, relationality, and meaningfulness, we propose the articulation of a social model that recognizes relational goods as a specific contribution of human work (...) in an attempt to overcome the state and the market's monopoly of public life built around the dichotomy between the private and the public. Such a social model is based on the concept of circular subsidiarity, which represents a departure from traditional notions of subsidiarity by promoting a dynamic and reciprocal interplay between three essential societal spheres: the state, the market, and organized civil society, all of which have their role to fulfill by providing security, efficiency, and relational goods. Ultimately, this article suggests that circular subsidiarity can lead to a more inclusive and equitable social model by acknowledging how relational goods not only humanize civil society but also sustain the functioning of both the market and the state. (shrink)

This research study aims to determine the ontological arguments related to the existance of God. Some recent studies also proposed the argument that God is not a person, and this argument in pantheism and Swinburnian is mismatched with the statement that God is a person. Some people believe in pantheism and think that God is a part of the world, but in Swinburnian, people think that God is not a part of the world as these two thoughts conclude that God (...) is not a person. Based on these two ideas, the religious philosophers have choices, and they do not evidence that pantheism and Swinburnian reject the argument that God is a person. This philosopher also thinks that they cannot believe anymore in God. Some philosophers also believed this idea was new and not accepted by most religions. Overall research concluded that the existence of God and ontological arguments related to it are complex research and have glinted debate for centuries. Earlier, Anselm's argument against current debates on God's existence faced abundant criticism. In philosophy, the existence of God remains a challenging question. These topics endure lies to discuss about God's existence, and this conversation continues for argument and criticism by different philosophers and religious leaders. (shrink)

This paper will address the collaborative networks and the gendered organization of the scientific work at the first Unit on Human Genetics of the Mexican Institute for Social Security. There, women and men had different tasks, duties and authority according to their gender and individual and professional skills. I will focus on physician Susana Kofman, who specialized in cytogenetics with Jérôme Lejeune and Jean de Grouchy in France, and physician Leonor Buentello, who graduated in virus genetics in Germany. This narrative (...) intends to return them to the forefront of the history of cytogenetics and to illustrate the contribution of women to scientific developments when research on human genetics was becoming a medical domain for diagnosis at an international level. (shrink)