De senere år har pleie- og omsorgstjenesten i mange norske kommuner startet med ulike former for etikkarbeid, oftest initiert av KS’ prosjekt “Samarbeid om etisk kompetanseheving”. Hensikten med vår studie var å evaluere innsatsen i de kommunene som deltok i prosjektet fra starten av, med vekt på hvilke tiltak som var iverksatt, hvilke virksomheter dette omfattet, og om tiltakene har fortsatt utover prosjektperioden. Studien har et kvalitativt design. Materialet er hovedsakelig basert på telefonintervjuer med kontaktpersoner for etikksatsingen i 34 kommuner. (...) Det transkriberte materialet er analysert ved kvalitativ innholdsanalyse. Med unntak av fem kommuner som aldri kom i gang med etikkarbeidet, hadde de fleste startet etikkrefleksjon innenfor flere tjenester, oftest i sykehjem og hjemmetjenester. Noen kommuner hadde imidlertid ikke klart å videreføre etikkarbeidet utover en prosjektperiode. Det var stor variasjon både i etikkarbeidets forankring i kommunen, omfang, hyppighet og metoder. Et gjennomgående funn er vektlegging av behovet for etikkkompetanse og oppfølging av dem som skal lede etikkarbeidet. Flertallet av kommunene som fortsatt gjennomfører etikkrefleksjon, tar utgangspunkt i egen praksis, men et mindretall anvender strukturerte metoder. Dersom etikkarbeidet i kommunen skal være levedyktig over tid, bør arbeidet forankres på flere nivåer i organisasjonen, og de som skal lede dette arbeidet, bør få styrket sin kompetanse i etikk og etikkrefleksjon.Nøkkelord: etikk, evaluering, kommunehelsetjenestenEnglish summary: Building ethical competence in Norwegian municipalities: What has been done and what has been sustainable?“Cooperation for building ethics competence” is a national project aimed to stimulate moral reflection and build competence in ethics in community health services in Norway. This article is based on an evaluation of the activities implemented by the first 34 participating municipalities, exploring which measures were implemented, which services and employees were involved, and if the measures are sustainable. The study has a qualitative design, and the data mainly consists of telephone interviews with “key” persons in 34 municipalities. With the exception of five municipalities that never really started ethics work, the majority had implemented ethical reflection in several areas, most often in nursing homes and home care services. There was great variation with regard to the implementation. Many had tried a variety of reflection models, and only a minority of the municipalities were using a structured method of ethical reflection. A consistent finding is the need for more competence; many of those who run ethical reflection are reported to need more competence both in ethics and methods for systematic reflection. There were also great variations in how well the ethics projects were anchored within the municipality. To make ethical interventions sustainable, this study indicates the importance of strong anchoring within the municipality, the need for ethical competence, as well as good methods for structuring ethical reflection. (shrink)

Because of the transfer of responsibility from hospitals to community-based settings, providers in home-based care have more responsibilities and a wider range of tasks and responsibilities than before, often with limited resources. The increased responsibilities and the complexity of tasks and patient groups may lead to several ethical challenges. A systematic search in the databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, and SveMed+ was carried out in February 2019 and August 2020. The research question was translated into a modified PICO worksheet. A total of (...) 40 articles were included. The review is conducted according to the Vancouver Protocol. The main findings from the systematic literature review show that ethical challenges experienced by healthcare and social care providers in home-based care are related to autonomy and balancing ethical principles, decisions regarding intensity of care, challenges related to priority settings, truth-telling, and balancing the professional role. Findings regarding ethical challenges within home-based care are in line with findings from institutional healthcare and social care settings. However, some significant differences from the institutional context are also highlighted. (shrink)

New technologies provide new forums for the expression and challenging of racism. This article explores the potential of an interactive blog about asylum-seekers to serve as part of the Habermasian ‘public sphere’, facilitating debate between those with opposing views. We offer evidence that pro- and anti-asylum seeker arguments made in blogs construct a binary between those in favour and those against. Arguments are collectively constructed producing relatively coherent discourses, despite being articulated by different individuals. We then explore the ways in (...) which pro-asylum seeker postings utilize strategies which social scientists have identified as effective in challenging racism. As such, the blog is a site where what has come to be called ‘bystander anti-racism’ is being practised, producing a counter-hegemonic discourse. Our evidence suggests that despite arguments to the contrary, blogs are potentially useful sites for the development of communicative consciousness in relation to race issues, particularly the challenging of racism. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001713191; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 836-849.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 849.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

Anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark and cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style.

The Covid-19 pandemic creates an unprecedented threatening situation worldwide with an urgent need for critical reflection and new knowledge production, but also a need for imminent action despite prevailing knowledge gaps and multilevel uncertainty. With regard to the role of research ethics in these pandemic times some argue in favor of exceptionalism, others, including the authors of this paper, emphasize the urgent need to remain committed to core ethical principles and fundamental human rights obligations all reflected in research regulations and (...) guidelines carefully crafted over time. In this paper we disentangle some of the arguments put forward in the ongoing debate about Covid-19 human challenge studies (CHIs) and the concomitant role of health-related research ethics in pandemic times. We suggest it might be helpful to think through a lens differentiating between risk, strict uncertainty and ignorance. We provide some examples of lessons learned by harm done in the name of research in the past and discuss the relevance of this legacy in the current situation. (shrink)

Ann Whittle offers a fresh approach to questions about whether our actions are free and whether we are morally responsible for them. She argues that the answers to these questions depend on the contexts in which we make claims about our abilities and our control over our actions.

Michel Foucault’s _History of Sexuality_ has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of _History of Sexuality_ in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom (...) issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault’s history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In _Race and the Education of Desire, _Stoler challenges Foucault’s tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of _History of Sexuality_ contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race. Drawing on Foucault’s little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as “racisms of the state.” In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault’s insights have in the past constrained—and in the future may help shape—the ways we trace the genealogies of race. _Race and the Education of Desire_ will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault. (shrink)

The essence of religion was once widely thought to be a unique form of experience that could not be explained in neurological, psychological, or sociological terms. In recent decades scholars have questioned the privileging of the idea of religious experience in the study of religion, an approach that effectively isolated the study of religion from the social and natural sciences. Religious Experience Reconsidered lays out a framework for research into religious phenomena that reclaims experience as a central concept while bridging (...) the divide between religious studies and the sciences. Ann Taves shifts the focus from "religious experience," conceived as a fixed and stable thing, to an examination of the processes by which people attribute meaning to their experiences. She proposes a new approach that unites the study of religion with fields as diverse as neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to better understand how these processes are incorporated into the broader cultural formations we think of as religious or spiritual. Taves addresses a series of key questions: how can we set up studies without obscuring contestations over meaning and value? What is the relationship between experience and consciousness? How can research into consciousness help us access and interpret the experiences of others? Why do people individually or collectively explain their experiences in religious terms? How can we set up studies that allow us to compare experiences across times and cultures? Religious Experience Reconsidered demonstrates how methods from the sciences can be combined with those from the humanities to advance a naturalistic understanding of the experiences that people deem religious. (shrink)

I consider a grand, yet neglected proposal put forward by Shoemaker—a functionalist theory of all properties. I argue that two possible ways of developing this proposal meet with substantial objections. However, if we are prepared to endorse an ontology of tropes, one of these functionalist analyses can be developed into an original and informative theory of properties.

Dispositional compatibilists argue that a proper understanding of our abilities vindicates both compatibilism and the principle of Alternate Possibilities (the claim that the ability to do otherwise is required for freedom and moral responsibility). In this paper, I argue that this is mistaken. Both analyses of dispositions and abilities should distinguish between local and global dispositions or abilities. Once this distinction is in place, we see that neither thesis is established by an analysis of abilities.

Through a phenomenological study of horse-human relations, this article explores the ways in which, as embodied beings, we live relationally, rather than as separate human identities. Conceptually this challenges oppositional logic and humanist assumptions, but where poststructuralist treatments of these issues tend to remain abstract, this article is concerned with an embodied demonstration of the ways in which we experience a relational or in-between logic in our everyday lives.

Does the sense of smell involve the perception of odor objects? General discussion of perceptual objecthood centers on three criteria: stimulus representation; perceptual constancy; and figure-ground segregation. These criteria, derived from theories of vision, have been applied to olfaction in recent philosophical debates about psychology. An inherent problem with such framing of olfactory objecthood is that philosophers explicitly ignore the constitutive factors of the sensory systems that underpin the implementation of these criteria. The biological basis of odor coding is fundamentally (...) different from the coding principles of the visual system. This article analyzes the three measures of perceptual objecthood against the biological background of the olfactory system. It contrasts the coding principles in olfaction with the visual system to show why these criteria of objecthood fail to be instantiated in odor perception. The argument demonstrates that olfaction affords perceptual categorization without the need to form odor objects. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the phenomenology of hunger in reference to work by Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. Considering the wealth of references to hunger in phenomenological literature, very little has been written that acknowledges the importance of hunger in French existential phenomenology in particular. With reference to work by the above authors, this essay examines how hunger alters one’s basic experience of space and time, no less one’s sense of social belonging. Phenomenology illuminates dimensions of the human (...) experience of hunger that remain veiled in other discourses, and it is vital that efforts to understand hunger engage the profound narratives of disorientation, illness and shame that come to the fore in this body of work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wild LoveCynthia Willett’s Biosocial Eros EthicsAnn V. MurphyI’ll frame my comments in honor of Cynthia Willett’s work in light of two recent anecdotes:Anecdote I: It happened that one evening as I was reading Willett’s most recent monograph Interspecies Ethics—in particular the chapter on animals’ capacity for laughter and humor—my wonderful (if somewhat insubordinate) Airedale terrier, Nora Mae Murphy, heard me laughing, trotted into the living room, jumped on the (...) couch, looked at me with concern, stared down at the book in my hand, then placed her paw on my arm as if to check my pulse, eyes wide and ears slicked back. Nora is used to me reading philosophy at night; but she is not used to me laughing loudly while doing so. Clearly, she was curious. I smiled in recognition of what Nora’s behavior had enabled me to realize: I don’t often laugh when I read philosophy, not like I did that night while reading Willett’s work.Anecdote II: Cindy came out to New Mexico last spring to give the keynote address at our department’s annual graduate student conference. The afternoon she arrived, a few graduate students had arranged to take her on a hike in a nature preserve, a beautiful tract of land alongside the Rio Grande, which winds through Albuquerque. The next day, two of [End Page 50] the graduate students were in my office and I asked how the hike went. The students looked at each other, shuffled a bit, and stared at the floor until one announced, “Well, we kind of got locked in the preserve.” Me: “You got locked in the nature preserve?” “Yep, but it all worked out okay. She was cool with it,” one student reported. The other added: “Yeah, she’s pretty wild.”That conversation happened months before I was asked to speak on and to Willett’s work, but that conversation, that compliment, that word—“wild”—came to mind many times as I was preparing these comments in her honor. And I mean “wild” in the best sense: as rowdy and irreverent and joyful. There is a wildness to Willett’s texts in their performative aspect, one that marks them as singular. Bucking certain philosophical tendencies to overindulge a metaphorics of war and violence, Willett’s own work evinces an entirely different philosophical orientation, one that takes love, and more specifically eros, as its bedrock. The wildness of Willett’s ethical philosophy comes into play in the truly variable scenes in which Willett locates eros and its promise. It’s a wild kind of love that informs Willett’s ethics, one that refuses domestication, refuses to be hemmed in by the borders between species, refuses to be fixed. The scope that Willett assigns eros is broad, countering the tendency to reduce it to the sexualized and sentimental contexts in which it is often placed.1At the heart of Willett’s deliberations across her four monographs and many articles is an abiding concern with, and celebration of, eros as a site of social, political, and ethical promise. A preoccupation with eros is evident in her work from the very beginning. In her first monograph, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (1995), Willett frames her project in reference to Audre Lorde’s claim (in Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”) that European American culture has perpetuated an understanding of power that parses the erotic from the spiritual and political and as a consequence has “suppressed the deepest source of power and knowledge in our lives” (Lorde 1984, 55, cited in Willett 1995, 7). This first book suggests new conceptions of freedom and ethical subjectivity based on social eroticism, a project furthered in her second monograph The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (2001), where hubris is understood with and against the Greeks as an assault on this primary sociality. “In response to the Greeks we might say that the person is born, not of honor, but of love. Sociality, or social eros, and not honor is the origin and the goal of the person and the positive core of freedom... (shrink)

The co-instantiation thesis is pivotal to a significant solution to the problem of causal exclusion. But this thesis has been subject to some powerful objections. In this paper, I argue that these difficulties arise because the thesis lacks the necessary metaphysical framework in which its claims should be interpreted and understood. Once this framework is in place, we see that the co-instantiation thesis can answer its critics. The result is a rehabilitated co-instantiation solution to the troubling problem of causal exclusion. (...) But questions remain concerning the viability of certain of its applications. (shrink)

One hypothesis of isocortical evolution requires tangential migration of glutaminergic neurons. A second requires invasion of collothalamic afferents into the dorsal pallium, a territory that in sauropsids is solely lemnopallial. A third alternative is noted here – duplication of the original collopallial territory. The duplicated region would be formed by radial migration of excitatory neurons and would maintain its collothalamic innervation.

Wales uses languages with both regular (Welsh) and irregular (English) counting systems. Three groups of 6- and 8-year-old Welsh children with varying degrees of exposure to the Welsh language—those who spoke Welsh at both home and school; those who spoke Welsh only at home; and those who spoke only English—were given standardized tests of arithmetic and a test of understanding representations of two-digit numbers. Groups did not differ on the arithmetic tests, but both groups of Welsh speakers read and compared (...) 2-digit numbers more accurately than monolingual English children. A similar study was carried out with Tamil/English bilingual children in England. The Tamil counting system is more transparent than English but less so than Welsh or Chinese. Tamil-speaking children performed better than monolingual English-speaking children on one of the standardized arithmetic tests but did not differ in their comparison of two-digit numbers. Reasons for the findings are discussed. (shrink)

That there is no substance causation is often treated as the default position. My aim in this paper is primarily one of burden shifting: opponents of substance causation must do more to defend their position. After outlining the thesis I wish to defend, I present a simple argument for substance causation, arguing that opponents of substance causation owe us an explanation of why this argument is unsound. I end by answering objections to the view that substances can be causes.

Theories of perception have traditionally dismissed the sense of smell as a notoriously variable and highly subjective sense, mainly because it does not easily fit into accounts of perception based on visual experience. So far, philosophical questions about the objects of olfactory perception have started by considering the nature of olfactory experience. However, there is no philosophically neutral or agreed conception of olfactory experience: it all depends on what one thinks odors are. We examine the existing philosophical methodology for addressing (...) our sense of smell: on the one hand appeals to phenomenology that focus on the experiential dimensions of odor perception and on the other approaches that look at odor sources and their material dimensions. We show that neither strategy provides enough information to account for the human sense of smell and argue that the inclusion of the missing dimension of biology, with its concern for the function (or functions) of olfaction, provides the means to develop a satisfactory and empirically informed philosophy of smell. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 7-8, November - December 2019, Page 693-694.