This paper interprets the British legislative process that initiated the first comprehensive national regulation of embryo research and fertility services and examines subsequent efforts to restrain the assisted reproduction industry. After describing and evaluating British regulatory measures, I consider successive failures to control the assisted reproduction industry in the US. I discuss disparities between UK and US regulatory initiatives and their bearing on regulation in other countries. Then I turn to the political and social structures in which the assisted reproduction (...) industry is embedded. I argue that regulatory bodies are seldom neutral arbiters. They tend to respond most readily to special interests and neglect strategies that could more effectively meet the health needs of the people they represent. Neither national nor international bodies have aggressively pursued policies to harness the industry, reduce infertility rates, or meet the needs of people whose fertility is threatened by substandard healthcare and environmental neglect. In conclusion, I consider recent initiatives by activist groups to mount an alternative response to the industry's current practices and build a transnational reproductive justice movement. (shrink)

Principle-based formulations of bioethical theory have recently come under increasing scrutiny, particularly insofar as they give prominence to personal autonomy. This essay critiques the dominant conceptualization of autonomy and urges an alternative formulation freed from the individualistic assumptions that pervade the prevailing framework. Drawing on feminist perspectives, I discuss the need for a vision of patient autonomy that joins relational experiences to individuality and acknowledges the influence of patterns of power and authority on the exercise of patient agency. Deficiencies in (...) the current models of science and social relations guiding medical practice are analyzed, particularly (1) the tendency to disregard the patients self-knowledge and (2) failure to recognize limitations on the generalizability of medical knowledge. Models of social relations such as mothering and friendship are explored to advance a conception of autonomy better suited to the practical activities of medicine. In conclusion, I consider how acknowledgement of the specificity and complexity of social relations can contribute to reconfiguration of other principles comprising the standard framework of bioethics, particularly beneficence, justice, and equality. (shrink)

Reproductive tourism is a manifestation of a larger, more inclusive trend toward globalization of capitalist cultural and material economies. This paper discusses the development of cross-border assisted reproduction within the globalized economy, transnational and local structural processes that influence the trade, social relations intersecting it, and implications for the healthcare systems affected. I focus on prevailing gender structures embedded in the cross-border trade and their intersection with other social and economic structures that reflect and impact globalization. I apply a social (...) connection model of responsibility for unjust outcomes and consider strategies to counter structural injustices embedded in this industry. The concluding section discusses policy reforms and proposals for collaborative action to preclude further injustices and extend full human rights to all. (shrink)

This study aimed to explore the conditions for nurses' daily patient education work by focusing on managers' way of speaking about the patient education provided by nurses in hospital care. An explorative, qualitative design with a social constructionist perspective was used. Data were collected from three focus group interviews and analysed by means of critical discourse analysis. Discursive practice can be explained by the ideology of hegemony. Due to a heavy workload and lack of time, managers could ‘see’ neither their (...) role as a supporter of the patient education provided by nurses, nor their role in the development of nurses' pedagogical competence. They used organisational, financial, medical and legal reasons for explaining their failure to support nurses' provision of patient education. The organisational discourse was an umbrella term for ‘things’ such as cost‐effectiveness, which were prioritised over patient education. There is a need to remove managerial barriers to the professional development of nurses' patient education. Managers should be responsible for ensuring and overseeing that nurses have the prerequisites necessary for providing patient education as well as for enabling continuous reflective dialogue and opportunities for learning in practice. (shrink)

Debates in metaethics about metanormative realism, quasi-realism, anti-realism, and nihilism mostly focus on epistemic reasons for beliefs about values. Very little has been said about our practical reasons for metaethical beliefs, and even less is said about practical reasons for other attitudes we might take toward metaethical views. This paper shows why a recent argument bucking that trend fails to show that we have practical reasons to believe realism over nihilism, but that for many of us, we do have practical (...) reason to hope that what I call Optimistic Realism is true. (shrink)

This article proposes that the urgent task for feminist sociology is to recuperate those lost or residual `body matters' which lurk, unattended to, on the sidelines of the social. Feminist sociology must carefully negotiate the complex space between sociality and corporeality. The new feminist philosophies of the body tend sometimes to grate against this project by valorizing the body but de-valorizing gender. The new sociology of the body is recuperating the body within sociology, but pays insufficient attention to the ways (...) in which gendered bodies have always enjoyed varying degrees of absence or presence in the sociological imaginary - in the guise of `female corporeality' and `male embodiment'. By revisiting the classical texts of sociology, such as those of Durkheim, Weber and particularly Simmel, I explore the textual strategies whereby `the body' and `the social' were dissociated in the first place and how, simultaneously, woman is saturated with, while man is divested of, corporeality and she is divested while he is invested with sociality. The absent women in sociology were the women in the body excluded from the social. It is male bodies which animate the social - they appear for a fleeting moment, only to disappear immediately, in the space between `corporeality' and `sociality'. Thus, it is not simply a case of recuperating bodies into the social, but of excavating the gendered subtexts whereby gendered bodies were differently inscribed into and out of the social in the first place. The crucial point here is not the more familiar story of her saturation with corporeality but the less familiar one of what happened to his body - how, that is, did male sociologists effect the disappearance of their own bodies in the textual strategies of sociology? (shrink)

Stimuli that resemble humans, but are not perfectly human-like, are disliked compared to distinctly human and nonhuman stimuli. Accounts of this “Uncanny Valley” effect often focus on how changes in human resemblance can evoke different emotional responses. We present an alternate account based on the novel hypothesis that the Uncanny Valley is not directly related to ‘human-likeness’ per se, but instead reflects a more general form of stimulus devaluation that occurs when inhibition is triggered to resolve conflict between competing stimulus-related (...) representations. We consider existing support for this inhibitory-devaluation hypothesis and further assess its feasibility through tests of two corresponding predictions that arise from the link between conflict-resolving inhibition and aversive response: 1) that the pronounced disliking of Uncanny-type stimuli will occur for any image that strongly activates multiple competing stimulus representations, even in the absence of any human-likeness, and 2) that the negative peak of an ‘Uncanny Valley’ should occur at the point of greatest stimulus-related conflict and not (in the presence of human-likeness) always closer to the ‘human’ end of a perceptual continuum. We measured affective responses to a set of line drawings representing nonhuman animal-animal morphs, in which each continuum midpoint was a bistable image (Exp. 1), as well as to sets of human-robot and human-animal computer-generated morphs (Exp. 2). Affective trends depicting classic Uncanny Valley functions occurred for all continua, including the nonhuman stimuli. Images at continua midpoints elicited significantly more negative affect than images at endpoints, even when the continua included a human endpoint. This illustrates the feasibility of the inhibitory-devaluation hypothesis and the need for further research into the possibility that the strong dislike of Uncanny-type stimuli reflects the negative affective consequences of cognitive inhibition. (shrink)

The current pandemic period has triggered a series of changes in society, at both individual and collective behavioral levels. These changes were perceived as either positive or negative by the impacted bodies, leading to both social change and positive interactions in a tense context. In this paper, the authors will deal with Pandemica Panotpica, subjugation infiltrating all levels of society, and the approach adopted by several countries in trying to find countermeasures to combat the virus' proliferation. Our research scope began (...) at the onset of the pandemic and ended on early January 2021. (shrink)

Research has established that the burdens of externalities associated with industrial production are disproportionately borne by socially and politically vulnerable groups, and this is particularly true for farmworkers who are at high risk for environmental exposures and illnesses. The impacts of these risks are often compounded by farmworker communities’ social vulnerability. Yet, less is known about how the intersection of race, class, and gender can position some farmworkers to be at higher risk for particular types of oppressions. We extend the (...) literature by analyzing the case of Black women farmworkers in Apopka, Florida, which was historically home to a large agricultural community. Drawing on the concept of critical environmental justice, we investigate the lived experiences of these women in the context of racialized, gendered, and economic oppressions during their time working on the farms. We use the case of Apopka to ask: how the policies and socio-historical context of the agricultural industry in the American South contributed to injustices experienced by Black women farmworkers in Apopka, Florida; and how race, gender, and class intersected and intersect to create and legitimize environmental injustices in the workplace for these farmworkers. Our data include semi-structured in-depth interviews, newspaper and media coverage, and archival materials. Our analysis advances work on critical environmental justice and intersectionality by mapping the relationship between structural and environmental intersectional oppressions for Black women farmworkers. (shrink)

This paper addresses the significance of the general class of diffeomorphisms in the theory of general relativity as opposed to the Poincaré group in a special relativistic theory. Using Anderson's concept of an absolute object for a theory, with suitable revisions, it is shown that the general group of local diffeomorphisms is associated with the theory of general relativity as its local dynamical symmetry group, while the Poincaré group is associated with a special relativistic theory as both its global dynamical (...) symmetry group and its geometrical symmetry group. It is argued that the two groups are of equal significance as symmetry groups of their associated theories. (shrink)

Much attention in philosophy of religion has been devoted to the question of whether faith is epistemically rational. But is it morally and practically permissible? This paper explores a response to a family of arguments that Christian faith is morally impermissible or practically irrational, even if epistemically justified. After articulating the arguments, I consider how they would fare if they took seriously the traditional notion that genuine faith is always accompanied by Christian hope. I show how the norms of hope (...) regulate Christian faith in such a way that it does not involve, and certainly does not entail, the morally and practically problematic attitudes and behaviors with which it is associated. (shrink)

This article is a contribution to the critical sociology of science perspective introduced and developed by Pierre Bourdieu. The paper proposes a transversalist theory of science and technology production and diffusion. It is here argued that science and technology are comprised of multiple regimes where each regime is historically grounded, possesses its own division of labour, modes of cognitive and artifact production and has specific audiences. The major regimes include the disciplinary regime, utilitarian regime, transitory regime and research-technology regime. Though (...) each regime is autonomous, they are simultaneously closely interlaced. In science and technology, autonomy is not antithetical to interdependence and reciprocity. This study demonstrates for the four specified regimes of production and diffusion that differentiation is not contrary to interaction. In science, differentiation and interaction comprise two sides of the same coin. All regimes exhibit a measure of transversality. (shrink)

Humanistic management requires an expansion of economistic management to focus on flourishing for all at work through dignity and well-being. A dignity framework engaging the humanistic management perspective is used to explore mattering in organizational contexts. The framework acknowledges moral and spiritual levels of the human experience and incorporates transcendent and religious motivations, representing a more fully humanistic conception. Existential and interpersonal mattering are linked to various levels of the dignity experience at work, providing a practical way of understanding a (...) highly philosophical concept. Implications of mattering at work for humanistic management research, theory, and practice are discussed. Dignity and mattering provide important, human-centered, relationally-oriented concepts to help us understand how people live and experience their lives at work. (shrink)

The disruptions of life in late modernity render self-identity fragile. Consequently, individuals must reflexively manage their emotions and periodically reinvent themselves to maintain a coherent narrative of the self. The rise of psychology as a discursive regime across the 20th century, and its intersections with a plethora of wellness industries, has furnished a new language of selfhood and greater public attention to emotions and personal narratives of suffering. Celebrities, who engage in public identity work to ensure their continued relatability, increasingly (...) provide models for navigating emotional trials. In this article we explore representations of selfhood and identity work in celebrity interviews. We focus on media veterans Nigella Lawson and Ruby Wax, both of whom are skilled in re-storying the self after personal crises. We argue that interpretive capital as a peculiarly late modern resource confers emotional advantages and life chances on individuals as they navigate upheavals, uncertainties, and intimate dilemmas. (shrink)

Management and organization researchers are being called to conduct research that is more caring, yet the concept of care and how to practice it within the profession is undertheorized. Adopting a feminist epistemology and methodology, we develop the concept of care by weaving the personal, ethical, and political into the research process. First, we reflect critically on how aspects of care—attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness (Tronto, Moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care, Routledge, 1993; Tronto, Caring democracy: (...) markets, equality, and justice, New York University Press, 2013)—unfolded in our personal research experiences, and secondly, we conduct a review of articles published in management and organization studies and analyse expressed or concealed conceptions of care in scholars’ accounts of research purpose and ethics. We find three ethical sensibilities at the heart of enacting care: encountering the ‘other’, interpreting roles and responsibilities, and deliberating needs and resources. We contribute to a feminist research ethics by highlighting issues related to care that are concealed in dominant ethos guiding management and organization research. Further, we develop methodological insights for implementing an ethic of care as an alternative ethical standpoint in business research ethics. Finally, we provide suggestions for how to embed more care within research ethics practices in academic institutions. (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 (Population, Intervention, Comparison, and (...) Outcome) 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)

Background: Due to the major changes occurring in the demographic composition of the world’s population, the number of older individuals is increasing, which puts pressure on the healthcare systems in many different countries. The involvement of volunteers and family members may become necessary to fulfil a patient’s needs for follow-up treatments and long-term care in their homes. Aim: This study aimed to explore how nurses and physicians experienced and addressed ethical challenges when they dealt with relatives in what have traditionally (...) been one-on-one consultations at two Norwegian hospital outpatient clinics. Research Design and Methods: A total of eight nurses and two physicians from two different hospitals participated in individual in-depth interviews. The transcribed interviews were analysed using an eclectic approach called ‘bricolage’ inspired by Kvale and Brinkmann. We combined cross-case thematic and theoretical normative analyses. Ethical considerations: The principles of voluntariness, confidentiality, withdrawal and anonymity were respected throughout the research process. In addition, the Norwegian Social Science Data Services approved this study. Findings: The findings showed that respect for a patient’s autonomy was used as an argument for delimiting the relatives’ access to the patient’s consultations. We found that there were insufficient routines in place for inviting and involving relatives in the patient consultations in the outpatient clinics. Discussion: The traditional Western attitudes towards the principles of patient autonomy will likely be challenged due to the growing need for family involvement in the care of a patient in the future. Conclusion: This study’s description of the nurses and physicians’ interpretations of ‘patient autonomy’ as a phenomenon uncover the need for systematic ethical deliberation in the clinical setting. On an organisational level, there is a strong indication of the need to discuss the routines that are in place to invite the next of kin to participate in such patient’s healthcare consultations. (shrink)

Intergroup and long-distance relationships are both central features of human social life, but because intergroup relationships are emphasized in the literature, long-distance relationships are often overlooked. Here, we make the case that intergroup and long-distance relationships should be studied as distinct, albeit related, features of human sociality. First, we review the functions of both kinds of relationship: while both can be conduits for difficult-to-access resources, intergroup relationships can reduce intergroup conflict whereas long-distance relationships are especially effective at buffering widespread resource (...) shortfalls. Second, to illustrate the importance of distinguishing the two relationship types, we present a case study from rural Bolivia. Combining ethnography and two different experimental techniques, we find that the importance of intergroup relationships—and the salience of group membership itself—varies across populations and across methods. Although ethnography revealed that participants often rely on long-distance relationships for resource access, we were unable to capture participant preferences for these relationships with a forced-choice technique. Taken together, our review and empirical data highlight that (1) intergroup and long-distance relationships can have different functions and can be more or less important in different contexts and (2) validating experimental field data with ethnography is crucial for work on human sociality. We close by outlining future directions for research on long-distance relationships in humans. (shrink)

In recent years, critics of modern obstetrics have cited technology as responsible for women's discontent regarding childbirth. In this essay, I investigate and pry apart the connection between the quality of childbirth experience and technology. After identifying three factors considered constitutive of a ‘good birth,’ I demonstrate how technology can either facilitate or hinder each, but how dominant strains of birthing practice that reinforce female shame consistently undermine them all. It is not technology per se, but its sensitive application, which (...) may most effectively promote an optimal and affirming birth experience. (shrink)

A common practice in textbooks is to introduce concepts or strategies in association with specific people. This practice aligns with research suggesting that using “real-world” contexts in textbooks increases students’ motivation and engagement. However, other research suggests this practice may interfere with transfer by distracting students or leading them to tie new knowledge too closely to the original learning context. The current study investigates the effects on learning and transfer of connecting mathematics strategies to specific people. A total of 180 (...) college students were presented with an example of a problem-solving strategy that was either linked with a specific person or presented without a person. Students who saw the example without a person were more likely to correctly transfer the novel strategy to new problems than students who saw the example presented with a person. These findings are the first evidence that using people to present new strategies is harmful for learning and transfer. (shrink)

This pilot study had two purposes: (1) to review recent Japanese nursing literature on nursing advocacy; and (2) to obtain data from nurses on advocacy. For the second purpose, 24 nurses at a nursing college in Japan responded to a questionnaire. The concept of advocacy, taken from the West, has become an ethical ideal for Japanese nurses but one that they do not always understand, or, if they do, they find it difficult to fulfil. They cite nursing leadership support as (...) necessary to enacting this role. Discussion on the meaning of and the rationale for advocacy in a society where goodness or badness is relative to social situations and its impact may reveal two parallel but overlapping views of morality. Such a situation would not only influence notions of advocacy but also possibly render them more complex. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to encourage and help inform active discussion of authorship policies among members of scientific societies. The article explains the history and rationale of the influential criteria for authorship developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, examines questions about those criteria that emerge from authorship policies adopted by several U.S. medical schools, and summarizes the arguments for replacing authorship with the contributorguarantor model. Finally, it concludes with a plea for scientific societies to play (...) a prominent role in the ongoing debates about authorship and the alternatives as part of their efforts to encourage ethical conduct among their members. Whether or not scientific societies develop authorship policies of their own, they should undertake vigorous educational efforts to keep their new members adequately informed about the importance of authorship practices in ethical scientific research and publication. (shrink)

The principled approach to theory building that has been a conspicuous mark of bioethical theory for the past generation has in recent years fallen under considerable critical scrutiny. Although some critics have confined themselves to reordering the dominant principles, others have rejected a principled approach entirely and turned to alternative paradigms. Prominent among critics are antiprin-ciplists, who want to jettison the principle-based approach altogether and adopt a casuistic model, and communitarians, who favor an eclectic model combining features of both the (...) casuistic model and a modified principled approach. Particularly conspicuous in virtually all such critiques is their challenge to the preeminence of the principle of autonomy. Critical barbs have been aimed not only at theories favoring a hierarchical ordering of moral principles that give first place to autonomy, but also at those that include autonomy among a set of ostensibly coequal principles. Though these critics have performed a valued function by displacing bioethical principles from their Olympian perch beyond actual decision-making contexts, some version of the principle of autonomy may, nonetheless, be well worth defending but for very different reasons than those put forward by its supporters. (shrink)

Until the mid-20th century, biomedical research centered on the study of specific diseases, concerned with short periods of time and small groups of living research participants. However, the growth of longitudinal population studies and long-term biobanking now forces the research community to examine the possibility of the death of their research participants.The death of a research participant raises numerous ethical and legal issues, including the return of deceased individuals’ research results to related family members. As with the return of individual (...) research results for living research participants, the question of the obligation to return a deceased person’s research results to family members has yet to be settled. This question is particularly acute in the context of genetic research since the research results from one individual may have health implications for all biological relatives. (shrink)

This article examines the ethical dilemmas faced by professional and academic researchers in the health field who undertake nonclinical or social research among patients or staff. The experiences of health researchers and health professionals in the UK are directly relevant to those undertaking similar health-related research in other parts of the world at a time when nonclinical research in health care is becoming widespread in all countries and cultures. This article addresses ethical dilemmas as they relate to researchers’ ability to (...) maintain confidentiality, their commitment to the welfare of respondents, and the tensions that arise from undertaking research for an employer. In addition, the danger of conducting covert research inadvertently may present unexpected ethical problems, which are discussed. Although it is impossible to provide a policy document to address all ethical dilemmas, this article does attempt to address the question of how best to approach health-related research in order to minimize the possibility of running into ethical problems at a later stage. (shrink)

In 1720, Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande wrote Physicis elementa mathematica, experimentis confirmata. Sive introductio ad philosophiam Newtonianam. Although he was undoubtedly one of the most important popularizers of Newtonian physics, experimental methodology and epistemology in the 1720s, his empirical claim somehow backfired: in applying tenets of Newtonian methodology, he was ultimately led to validate the Leibnizian principle of the conservation of living forces, contrary to the Newtonians. This conclusion invited a great deal of anger, particularly from Samuel Clarke who, in (...) a volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from 1729, accused ’s Gravesande of having written the book with the aim of “darkening Newton’s philosophy”. In a reply, which ’s Gravesande published as a supplement to his Essay upon a New Theory of the Collision of Bodies, he developed a hybrid methodology that relied upon both experimentation and reason. In my paper, I shall thoroughly analyse this interesting combination. (shrink)

Are emotion-producing processes modular? Jerry Fodor, in his classic introduction of the notion of modularity, holds that its most important feature is cognitive impenetrability or information encapsulation. If a process possesses this feature, then, as standardly understood, “what we want or believe makes no difference to how [it] works”.In this paper, we will start with the issue of the cognitive impenetrability of emotion-producing processes. It turns out that, while there is abundant evidence of emotion-producing processes that are not cognitively impenetrable, (...) some nonetheless are. We will look at two sorts of case. The first concerns emotional reactions to observed faces, and the second involves what we can call “primitive emotions,” emotions that can be activated by non-doxastic input into regions of the brain we share with more primitive animals.In seeing how some emotion-producing processes can be cognitively impenetrable while others are not, we need to use two commonsensical theses. First, a discussion of modularity must in general operate with a taxonomy that allows for sub-processes or stages of processes. (shrink)

Essentialist and postmodern feminisms are often regarded as incompatible. I propose that Buddhist theories of subjectivity change the nature of the tension between them as presently construed because Buddhist traditions describe a mind not wholly governed by language, and a subjective mental dimension that is entirely integrated with the body and its sensations. A corollary is the compatibility Buddhists perceive between conditioned subjective states (akin to postmodern feminisms) and the unconditioned (akin to essentialist feminisms).

Everett’s main claim is that language is a “cultural tool”, created by hominids for communication and social cohesion. I examine the meaning of the expression “cultural tool” in terms of the influence of language on culture or of the influence of culture on language. I show that these hypotheses are not well-supported by evidence and that language and languages, rather than being “cultural tools” as wholes are rather collections of tools used in different language games, some cultural or social, some (...) cognitive. I conclude that the coincidence between language and culture is due to the fact that both originate from human nature. (shrink)