The emphasis on the unique self in the Romantic period resulted in representations of romantic love as an aspect of psychological depth. However, in Maria Edgeworth’s novel, Belinda (1901), love is represented as a function of visceral sensation and at best as automatic rather than reflective psychological processes. To some degree, Edgeworth was influenced by the scientific culture of her time in viewing love as a product of the external, observable world rather than of the interior mind. More surprisingly, (...) perhaps, Edgeworth considers love as a function of high society, thus breaking down symptomatic associations of love and domesticity. In Belinda, love is a product of both the logical scientific method and the questionable morality characteristic of fashionable sociability. Standing partially outside the Romantic emphasis on psychological depth and the empirical insistence on rationality, Edgeworth theorises a love that questions the foundational concepts of subject/object and feeling/reason through which love has been understood from the Romantic era to the present day. (shrink)

Understanding positive emotions' shared and differentiating features can yield valuable insight into the structure of positive emotion space and identify emotion states, or aspects of emotion states, that are most relevant for particular psychological processes and outcomes. We report two studies that examined core relational themes (Study 1) and expressive displays (Study 2) for eight positive emotion constructs—amusement, awe, contentment, gratitude, interest, joy, love, and pride. Across studies, all eight emotions shared one quality: high positive valence. Distinctive core relational theme (...) and expressive display patterns were found for four emotions—amusement, awe, interest, and pride. Gratitude was associated with a distinct core relational theme but not an expressive display. Joy and love were each associated with a distinct expressive display but their core relational themes also characterised pride and gratitude, respectively. Contentment was associated with a distinct expressive display but not a core relational theme. The implications of this work for the study of positive emotion are discussed. (shrink)

Donation after cardiac death (DCD) is associated with many problems, including ischemic injury, high rates of delayed allograft function, and frequent organ discard. Furthermore, many potential DCD donors fail to progress to asystole in a manner that would enable safe organ transplantation and no organs are recovered. DCD protocols are based upon the principle that the donor must be declared dead prior to organ recovery. A new protocol is proposed whereby after a donor family agrees to withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments, (...) premortem nephrectomy is performed in advance of end-of-life management. Since nephrectomy should not cause the donor's death, this approach satisfies the dead donor rule. The donor family's wishes are best met by organ donation, successful outcomes for the recipients, and a dignified death for the deceased. This proposal improves the likelihood of achieving these objectives. (shrink)

Advances in DNA sequencing technology open new possibilities for public health genomics, especially in the form of general population preventive genomic sequencing. Such screening programs would sit at the intersection of public health and preventive health care, and thereby at once invite and resist the use of clinical ethics and public health ethics frameworks. Despite their differences, these ethics frameworks traditionally share a central concern for individual rights. We examine two putative individual rights—the right not to know, and the child’s (...) right to an open future—frequently invoked in discussions of predictive genetic testing, in order to explore their potential contribution to evaluating this new practice. Ultimately, we conclude that traditional clinical and public health ethics frameworks, and these two rights in particular, should be complemented by a social justice perspective in order adequately to characterize the ethical dimensions of general population PGS programs. (shrink)

AbstractClimate change is a complex, multilevel challenge with implications of failure unimaginable for current and future generations. However, despite the Paris Agreement supporting the imperative for action in an atmosphere of scientific consensus, organisations are failing to take the decisive action required. We argue that this lack of organisational action needs to be addressed by examining the cognitive foundations of managerial decisions on climate change and sustainability. A systematic review of research on cognition, sensemaking and managerial interpretation where it is (...) linked to climate change or sustainability is presented within this article. The results detail a multilevel analysis highlighting key themes and the core concepts from the literature including factors shaping the cognitive process, to elucidate reasons for inaction and potential for promoting change. Through this research, an integrated model is presented demonstrating the interaction of factors, cognitive processes and outcomes. Based on this analysis, potential reasons for inaction are proposed and countered by three potential solutions linked to leadership, social norms and structural reform. (shrink)

A 55-year-old man, admitted to the hospital after an episode of aphasia due to transient ischemic attack, underwent ultrasound imaging that showed near occlusion of the left carotid artery. A carot...

This paper argues that stoicism as a central element of whiteness shapes, controls, and ultimately limits the experience and expression of emotion in public space. I explore how this may play out in particular medical settings like hospitals in Aotearoa New Zealand. I argue that working in conjunction with other values of whiteness identified by Myser —hyper-individualism, a contractual view of relationships, and an emphasis on personal control and autonomy—this makes hospitals emotionally unsafe spaces for Māori and other groups who (...) place high importance in the collective sharing of emotion. Using death and bereavement as an example, I suggest that challenging and addressing stoicism in the structure and performance of whiteness in hospital settings may provide an important point of entry for anti-racism measures and health equity. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

The extent to which we generalize a novel property from a sample of familiar instances to novel instances depends on the sample composition. Previous property induction experiments have only used samples consisting of novel types (unique entities). Because real‐world evidence samples often contain redundant tokens (repetitions of the same entity), we studied the effects on property induction of adding types and tokens to an observed sample. In Experiments 1–3, we presented participants with a sample of birds or flowers known to (...) have a novel property and probed whether this property generalized to novel items varying in similarity to the initial sample. Increasing the number of novel types (e.g., new birds with the target property) in a sample produced tightening, promoting property generalization to highly similar stimuli but decreasing generalization to less similar stimuli. On the other hand, increasing the number of tokens (e.g., repeated presentations of the same bird with the target property) had little effect on generalization. Experiment 4 showed that repeated tokens are encoded and can benefit recognition, but appear to be given little weight when inferring property generalization. We modified an existing Bayesian model of induction (Navarro, Dry, & Lee, 2012) to account for both the information added by new types and the discounting of information conveyed by tokens. (shrink)

Background: Discussion of the influence of money on bioethics research seems particularly salient in the context of research on the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of human genomics, as this research may be financially supported by the ELSI Research Program. Empirical evidence regarding the funding of ELSI research and where such research is disseminated, in relation to the specific topics of the research and methods used, can help to further discussions regarding the appropriate influence of specific institutions and institutional (...) contexts on ELSI and other bioethics research agendas. Methods: We reviewed 642 ELSI publications (appearing between 2003 and 2008) for reported sources of funding, forum for dissemination, empirical and nonempirical methods, and topics of investigation. Results: Most ELSI research is independent of direct grant-based funding sources; 66% reported no such sources of funding. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is the most dominant source of funding; 16% of publications acknowledged at least one source of NHGRI grant funding. Funding is acknowledged more frequently in empirical than nonempirical publications and more frequently in publications in public health journals than in any other ELSI research dissemination forums. Dominant research topics vary by publication forum and by reported funding. Conclusions: ELSI research is surprisingly independent of direct grant-based funding, yet correlations are apparent between this type of funding and publication placement, topics addressed, and methods used, implying a not insignificant influence on ELSI research agenda setting. However, given the relatively low percentage of publications acknowledging external grant-based funding, as well as other significant correlations between publication placement and topics addressed, additional institutional contexts, perhaps related to professional advancement or valuation, may shape research agendas in ways that potentially exceed the direct influences of grant-based funding in this area. In some cases, grant-based funding may actually counter other potentially problematic institutional influences. (shrink)

The breaking of bad news in a hospital setting, particularly to patients in a terminal condition, highlights some complex and often emotive ethical issues for nurses. One theory that examines the way in which individuals react to bad news such as a terminal illness, is the theory of awareness contexts. However, this theory may be limited by failing to recognize the complexity of the situation and the ethical issues involved for nurses caring for terminally ill patients. Furthermore, contexts of awareness (...) are influenced to a much greater extent by relationships with nurses than simply by the delivery of medical information. Even when information is given to the client and the family, the nurse is involved in helping them to know the meaning of this information. In a hospital, the nurse is faced with emotional demands by clients, families and colleagues, complex issues of advocacy, and professional boundaries and responsibilities. It is the author’s wish to examine the reality of clinical practice for nurses, thus further extending the theory of awareness contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Model for the Many Senses of ScriptureFrom the Literal to the Spiritual in Genesis 22 with Thomas AquinasChristopher S. Morrissey (bio)Introduction: Many Senses Require Many TranslationsOn the mountain the Lord appeared (NETS, Gen. 22:14b)On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided (RSV)1In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen (KJV)On the mountain the LORD will see (NAB)ἐν τῷ ὄρει κύριος ὤφθη (LXX)in monte (...) Dominus videtur (Nova Vulgata)in monte Dominus videbit (St. Jerome’s Vulgate)In his book Abraham’s Curse, Bruce Chilton argues that in Gen. 22:14b, “the Septuagint’s Greek renders the Hebrew text” correctly (i.e., “with Yahweh as the subject of the verb”), whereas English translations like the King James Version (KJV) prefer to imply that the ram is the verbal subject. Chilton contends that “This is a case of translators caring more about doctrine than wording, and attempting to legislate what the Bible can say.”2Chilton’s textual exegesis does have some value. He notes that “Contextually [End Page 231] as well as grammatically, God is the subject: Yahweh ‘was seen’ on Moriah, liberating Isaac by means of divine intervention.”3 But with his polemics against the KJV, he fails to affirm the rich polysemy of the passage. He replaces one literal reading with another and then argues as if the two are at odds. But Scripture has many senses, a truth famously expressed in the medieval distich of Augustine of Dacia, best known in the version of Nicholas of Lyra: “The literal sense teaches what happened; what you believe, the allegorical; the moral, what you should do; where you are going, the anagogical.”4 Therefore Chilton is wrong to impute bad motives to anyone who would attempt to unfold the spiritual sense of a passage (“caring more about doctrine”), or even to anyone who would note that a passage has more than one literal meaning.Chilton’s own insistence on uncovering the univocal original meaning of a passage (through his preferred historical method of “generative exegesis”)5 is excessively literal, as if recourse to grammar would allow one “to legislate what the Bible can say.” When Chilton says “Yahweh ‘was seen’ on Moriah,” he is not contending that God was seen directly, literally, but rather interpreting the metaphorical or parabolical sense of the phrase “Yahweh was seen” (in Gen. 22:14b), because he glosses the meaning of the metaphor as “liberating Isaac by means of divine intervention”;6 that is, God is seen indirectly, cognitively, rather than literally with the eyes. Because literally seeing a ram is not opposed to cognitively understanding God’s action, the KJV, pace Chilton, can be defended contextually. To my mind, the Revised Standard Version (RSV), echoing the KJV, does the best job of rendering the Hebrew text literally, with “On the mount of the lord it shall be provided,” because this leaves open the many senses of the third person singular “it,” to be unfolded by exegesis. Thus more than one translation is required in order to appreciate all the significations being deployed in the treatment of “seeing” in Gen. 22:8 and 22:14. “It shall be provided”: More than one univocal sense of the “it” has to be uncovered by exegesis in this Scripture, in order to see what “it” is all about.To justify my opinion that the RSV most felicitously translates the Hebrew, I would like to prepare the way to a conclusion in which I compare the Septuagint’s translation (which follows Chilton’s preferred rendering of the context) with the Vulgate Latin translations. The path toward this conclusion will show that Chilton’s polemics, indicative of an exegetical attitude that is hostile to an appreciation of the many senses of Scripture, fail to see how the RSV translation is also defensible as keeping the reader’s mind open to the many senses of the Scriptural passage. But first things first. With the help of St. Thomas Aquinas, let me distinguish the various senses of Scripture and then point out how they are all exemplified here, all being signified by the text. [End Page 232] Click for larger view View... (shrink)

While much has been written about Islam, particularly over the twenty-five years, few books have explored the full range of the ideas that have defined the faith over a millennium and a half. Fitzroy Morrissey provides a clear and concise introduction to the origins and sources of Islamic thought, from its beginnings in the 7th century to the current moment. He explores the major ideas and introduces the major figures--those who over the centuries have broached life's major questions, from (...) the nature of God and the existence of free will to gender relations and the ordering of society, and in the process defined Islam. Drawing on Arabic and Persian primary texts, as well as the latest scholarship, A Short History of Islamic Thought explains the key teachings of the Qur'an and Hadith, the great books of Islamic theology, philosophy, and law, as well as the mystical writings of the Sufis. It evaluates the impact of foreign cultures-Greek and Persian, Jewish and Christian-on early Islam, accounts for the crystallization of the Sunni and Shi'i forms of the faith, and accounts for the rise of such trends as Islamic modernism and Islamism. Above all, it reveals the fundamental principles of Islamic thought, both as a source of inspiration for Muslims today and as illuminating and rewarding in their own right. (shrink)

Facial race and sex cues can influence the magnitude of the happy categorisation advantage. It has been proposed that implicit race or sex based evaluations drive this influence. Within this account a uniform influence of social category cues on the happy categorisation advantage should be observed for all negative expressions. Support has been shown with angry and sad expressions but evidence to the contrary has been found for fearful expressions. To determine the generality of the evaluative congruence account, participants categorised (...) happiness with either sadness, fear, or surprise displayed on White male as well as White female, Black male, or Black female faces across three experiments. Faster categorisation of happy than negative expressions was observed for female faces when presented among White male faces, and for White male faces when presented among Black male faces. These results support the evaluative congruence account when both positive and negative expressions are presented. (shrink)

Cultural differences exist in the use of emotion regulation (ER) strategies, but the focus to date has been on intrapersonal ER strategies such as cognitive reappraisal. An emerging literature highlights the importance of interpersonal ER, which utilizes social cues to facilitate the regulation of emotional states. In cultures that place high value on social interconnectedness as integral to their collectivistic self-construal, including East Asian cultures, interpersonal ER strategies may be particularly effective in reducing negative affect but this has not been (...) previously tested. In this study, two groups comprising East Asian ( n = 48) and Western European ( n = 38) participants were randomly assigned to receive a priming narration depicting the use of either interpersonal (e.g., social modeling, perspective taking) or intrapersonal (e.g., cognitive reappraisal) ER strategies during a stressful experience. They were then instructed to utilize similar ER strategies in an emotion reactivity task during which they viewed high arousing negative pictorial stimuli while their heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (high frequency power – HF-HRV) and subjective affective states were measured. First we found that the East Asian group reported higher use of interpersonal ER strategies of social modeling and perspective taking in daily life. During the experimental interpersonal prime exposure, the East Asian group showed elevated HF-HRV (relative to baseline) compared to the Western European group, indicating more adaptive ER, but this pattern was not sustained during the reactivity or recovery phases. Instead, the East Asian group demonstrated increased HF-HRV and decreased HR across both prime conditions. The East Asian group also showed greater decreases in positive affect across the course of the experiment. Furthermore, individual differences in social modeling and individualistic self-construal moderated the effect of the ER prime in the East Asian group at trend levels, and main effects for perspective taking and reappraisal were observed in the Western European group. The findings support the notion that engaging in interpersonal ER strategies may be more beneficial for East Asian groups when immediately exposed to a stressful situation, as these strategies are congruent with cultural context and preferences, but our priming methodology may have limited the longer-term benefits. (shrink)

This critical essay responds to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown in Victoria from the perspective of a retired Aboriginal academic and reflects on personal responsibility, Indigenous history, and resilience.

Adults with dysphagia experience difficulties swallowing food and fluids with potentially harmful health and psychosocial consequences. Speech pathologists who manage patients with dysphagia are frequently required to address ethical issues when patients' food culture and/ or preferences are inconsistent with recommended diets. These issues incorporate complex links between food, identity and social participation. A composite case has been developed to reflect ethical issues identified by practising speech pathologists for the purposes of illustrating ethical concerns in dysphagia management. The case examines (...) a speech pathologist's role in supporting patient autonomy when patients and carers express different goals and values. The case presents a 68-year-old man of Australian/Italian heritage with severe swallowing impairment and strong values attached to food preferences. The case is examined through application of the dysphagia algorithm, a tool for shared decision-making when patients refuse dietary modifications. Case analysis revealed the benefits and challenges of shared decision-making processes in dysphagia management. Four health professional skills and attributes were identified as synonymous with shared decision making: communication, imagination, courage and reflection. (shrink)

Reflection on the state of business ethics as academic field in Africa has been largely neglected, partly because there existed no overall picture of what is happening in this field of study. This paper reports the findings of the first comprehensive survey on the state of business ethics as academic field on the African continent. It has both a descriptive and reflective component. In the descriptive part of the paper the research strategy and methodology used to conduct this survey is (...) outlined as well as the difficulties encountered in the research project. Then the findings with regard to how academics perceived the purpose of this field of study, what academic activity there is within this field, where it is being done, and how it is institutionalised are reported. In the reflective part of the paper, the implications of these findings are considered and some directives for the further development of business ethics as academic field are proposed. (shrink)

Dieter Grimm's accessible introduction to the concept of sovereignty ties the evolution of the idea to historical events, from the religious conflicts of sixteenth-century Europe to today's trends in globalization and transnational institutions. Grimm wonders whether recent political changes have undermined notions of national sovereignty, comparing manifestations of the concept in different parts of the world. Geared for classroom use, the study maps various notions of sovereignty in relation to the people, the nation, the state, and the federation, distinguishing between (...) internal and external types of sovereignty. Grimm's book will appeal to political theorists and cultural-studies scholars and to readers interested in the role of charisma, power, originality, and individuality in political rule. (shrink)

Explores the complex issues of personhood, prenatal life and reproductive rights, international perspectives on the regulation of abortion, health professionals and the provision of abortion services, and prenatal diagnosis and abortion. Belinda Bennett is from The University of Sydney, Australia.

This analysis explores the phenomenology of suffering and temporal, genetic and social developmental aspects of suffering for seriously ill older adults. A phenomenological account of suffering is advanced using oral history data from in-depth interviews with a seriously ill, frail elderly woman. The analysis evaluates how a phenomenological account of suffering may inform ethics in end-of-life decision making, and may provide a further basis for an integrated ethical and gerontological response to suffering in palliative social work practice with seriously ill (...) older adults at the end of life. Levinas’s ethical philosophy and conceptualizations of the non-totalizing relation of self to other, disinterest, and radical passivity are employed to help reframe an approach to the ethical relation and the nature of obligation in end-of-life care, expanding consciousness of suffering and its meanings in an intersubjectively experienced world. Differences in Husserl’s account of the other and the concept of alterity in Levinas’s ethics are explored in the context of phenomenology as a descriptive science that respond directly to the pragmatic concerns of the analysis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The novel coronavirus pandemic is throwing into relief traditional notions and rhetorics of witness, visibility, recognition, and violence in human rights discourse. This essay articulates the ways in which the current pandemic is being framed rhetorically as a spectacular war, using rhetoric that obfuscates the structural violations that leads to the virus disproportionately impacting the precarious. It argues for a reframing of traditional paradigms of representation, recognition, and resistance toward a notion of everyday violence that accounts for the accumulation (...) of structural and material conditions of precarity as a human rights violation. (shrink)

Reducing non-core food advertising to children is an important priority in strategies to address childhood obesity. Public health researchers argue for government intervention on the basis that food industry self-regulation is ineffective; however, the industry contends that the existing voluntary scheme adequately addresses community concerns. This paper examines the operation of two self-regulatory initiatives governing food advertising to children in Australia, in order to determine whether these regulatory processes foster transparent and accountable self-regulation. The paper concludes that while both codes (...) appear to establish transparency and accountability mechanisms, they do not provide for meaningful stakeholder participation in the self-regulatory scheme. Accordingly, food industry self-regulation is unlikely to reflect public health concerns or to be perceived as a legitimate form of governance by external stakeholders. If industry regulation is to remain a feasible alternative to statutory regulation, there is a strong argument for strengthening government oversight and implementing a co-regulatory scheme. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 12, December 2024, Page 48-51.

Embedding research ethics education into apprenticeship-model undergraduate research experiences can contribute to creating, and maintaining, ethical and inclusive research cultures. Occidental College’s Biology and Philosophy Departments collaborated to develop a model for undergraduate ecological field research ethics education focused on promoting students’ understanding of ethics as embedded within scientific research practices. The model has two primary components: (a) a philosophical reading, reflective journaling, and discussion group for both philosophy and ecology undergraduate researchers about ecological research ethics; and (b) philosophy faculty (...) and undergraduate researchers embedded within and assisting with ecological fieldwork, while also pursuing their philosophical fieldwork projects. This project highlights a range of ways of embedding ethics in research experiences that can be adapted to other contexts, including sustained and structured reflective journaling focused one’s scientific practice and regular philosophical discussions involving the entire research group. (shrink)

This paper describes a novel approach to teaching introductory-level students how to engage with philosophical texts, developed in the context of a philosophy of art course. We aimed to enhance students’ motivation to read philosophy well by cultivating habits of active reading. To this end we created a structured set of three assignments: instructor created digitally annotated reading assignments, a student digital annotation assignment, and required student participation in a collective GoogleDoc “repository of artworks, examples, ideas, and questions.” Student feedback (...) suggests that this set of teaching tools enhanced their sense of agency in approaching philosophical texts. (shrink)

Thanks to a helpful tetradic diagram found in the expanded fifth edition of John Deely’s Basics of Semiotics, in which the context and circumstances of a sign’s utterance (in addition to the sign-vehicle itself and the immediate object of the sign) is distinguished from all that is explicit in the sign itself apart from the context and circumstances of its utterance, it is possible to bring Deely’s insights to bear upon the semiotically suggestive work of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan’s implicitly semiotic (...) understanding of analogy is structurally present in his efforts to visually articulate the “laws of media” with his own “tetrad” diagrams. Deely’s discussion of the irreducible triadicity of signs therefore illuminates McLuhan’s attempt to understand how analogical thought actually works on the most fundamental structural level in the cognition of the semiotic animal. There is a unique cognitive syntax to analogy, which is operative in the animal that Deely has most appropriately identified as “the semiotic animal”. This article discusses McLuhan’s understanding of analogy in terms of its figure/ground structure, by using the example of the thermometer from Deely’s Basics of Semiotics. In relating this example to McLuhan’s tetrad, it is shown how McLuhan’s implicitly semiotic analysis can also increase our semiotic understanding of other technological tools, such as Skype videoconferencing. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Ahead of Print. Deliberative democrats have abandoned the ideal of consensus in favour of a range of different, more realistic alternatives. But these alternatives provide little anchorage to guide or even evaluate deliberative practice – something acutely problematic given the contemporary context of accelerating polarization in many advanced liberal democracies. In this article, we turn to Stalnaker’s account of the ‘common ground’ – the shared pool of information that is agreed upon by the parties to (...) a discourse – to reassert a distinct ideal standard for democratic deliberation which remains malleable enough to apply across messy contexts of real-world political contestation and debate. Our account offers an appropriate normative yardstick by which to assess deliberative practices across different discursive contexts, as well as impetus for further experimentation and innovation in efforts towards democratic renewal and reform. (shrink)