What kind of equality should we value and why? Current debate centres around whether distributive equality is valuable. However, it is not the only (potentially) morally significant form of equality. David Miller and T. M. Scanlon have emphasised the importance of social equality—a strongly egalitarian notion distinct from distributive equality, and which cannot be reduced to a concern for overall welfare or the welfare of the worst-off. However, as debate tends to focus on distribution, social equality has been neglected and (...) we do not have a clear understanding of what it is and why it might be valuable. This paper aims to address this gap. (shrink)

Much research is currently being conducted on health care practitioners' experiences of moral distress, especially the experience of nurses. What moral distress is, however, is not always clearly delineated and there is some debate as to how it should be defined. This article aims to help to clarify moral distress. My methodology consists primarily of a conceptual analysis, with especial focus on Andrew Jameton's influential description of moral distress. I will identify and aim to resolve two sources of confusion about (...) moral distress: the compound nature of a narrow definition of distress which stipulates a particular cause, i.e. moral constraint, and the distinction drawn between moral dilemma and moral distress, which implies that the two are mutually exclusive. In light of these concerns, I argue that the definition of moral distress should be revised so that moral constraint should not be a necessary condition of moral distress, and that moral conflict should be included as a potential cause of distress. Ultimately, I claim that moral distress should be understood as a specific psychological response to morally challenging situations such as those of moral constraint or moral conflict, or both. (shrink)

This volume brings together a collection of ten original essays which present new analyses of social and relational equality in philosophy and political theory. The essays analyze the nature of social equality and its relationship with justice and with politics.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the collected volume. In the first section, we aim to provide background on important themes in social egalitarianism and to set the context for understanding which significant questions the chapters in this book pose and attempt to answer. In this section we focus especially on what could be said to characterize socially egalitarian relationships, on which relationships are of concern, and on what might make social egalitarianism distinct. In the second section, we provide (...) a brief explanation of the structure of the book and each of its chapters. (shrink)

In this chapter, I propose that conceptions of justice in bioethics must be feminist, meaning they must be able to capture how the domains of health, healthcare and medicine exacerbate the subordination of those perceived to be women and girls and how injustice impacts their health. After providing context in the first section, I identify three problems with conceptions of justice in the bioethics literature that interfere with their potential to be feminist. They tend to adopt the ahistoricism and distributivism (...) characteristic of theories of justice that have been dominant in political philosophy, and they often rely on gendered conceptions of health that result in troubling comparisons of men and women’s health. My argument is primarily “negative”: it is a critique of generalist conceptions of justice in bioethics. However, in the final section I present characteristics of what a feminist conception of justice needs to look like and indicate how feminist bioethicists are using such a conception in assessing issues of injustice in bioethics. I emphasize the centrality of actual structural injustices, relational egalitarianism, and the assessment of values in conceptions of health and the health sciences. (shrink)

Benzodiazepines and antidepressants have been shown to change responses to unfairness; however, the effects of their combined use on unfairness evaluation are unknown. This study examines the effects of concomitant benzodiazepines and antidepressants long-term use on the evaluation of fair and unfair offers. To analyze behavioral changes on responses to unfairness, we compared the performance of medicated participants and healthy controls in the Ultimatum Game, both in the proposer and in the respondent role. The results showed that long-term psychotropic users (...) had the worse economic strategy by accepting less offers than control subjects. However, in the proposer role, the unfair offers made by participants were similar between groups. The present results suggest that long-term use of psychotropic medication, specifically the combination of benzodiazepines and antidepressants, may increase the sensitivity to unfairness, resulting in higher rejection rates in conditions where this strategy is the most disadvantageous. (shrink)

El presente art í culo analiza el sentimiento de verg ü enza en la experiencia escolar de j óvenes indígenas de una escuela secundaria rural-albergue del Norte de Argentina. Los testimonios recuperados expresan el dolor social y la búsqueda de reparaci ón simbó lica de la subjetividad herida.

Practices of exclusion towards deviance based on prejudices or ideologies have been present in every age and in every cultural context, often taking the stigmatization process. Recently UNESCO in 2015 released its latest report indicating that despite the efforts of governments, civil society and the international communities, the Education for All was not yet a reality in the world. The poor, people with mental or physical disabilities, children with learning disabilities “are not in a position” to grow and develop as (...) the others. In particular as regards students with Special Educational Needs, to still a challenge to find a teaching that is “common denominator” for all students without leaving anyone out is still a “inclusive” rather than a “special” that favours the relationship within whole class and relationships outside it. (shrink)

BackgroundResearch has demonstrated that personality characteristics, such as optimism are associated with placebo/nocebo responding. The present study investigated whether written information about the optimism of a placebo/nocebo provider can influence the occurrence of reported placebo/nocebo side effects.MethodWe analyzed data from 201 females who participated in a “clinical study on a new massage oil with stone clover extract.” The oil was introduced as either eliciting a negative side effect or a positive side effect. The administration of the oil was combined with (...) written information about the maker of the product. The oil maker was either portrayed as a very optimistic person or no personal information was provided. The participants had no personal contact with the experimenter and received all materials and instructions per post.ResultsThe participants reported more frequent and intense itching when they received a nocebo suggestion compared to a placebo suggestion. Positive tingling sensations were reported more frequently than itching but did not differ between the placebo/nocebo conditions. Information about the optimism of the oil maker was associated with a lower frequency of reported side effects.ConclusionThis study demonstrated that it is sufficient to provide participants with written information about an inert substance to elicit the suggested side effect. Information about the provider’s optimistic personality did not specifically influence reported side effects. Future studies should focus on how to adapt written information about a drug/product to minimize adverse side effects and to maximize positive side effects. (shrink)

What is a just way of spending public resources for health and health care? Several significant answers to this question are under debate. Public spending could aim to promote greater equality in health, for example, or maximize the health of the population, or provide the worst off with the best possible health. Another approach is to aim for each person to have "enough" so that her health or access to health care does not fall under a critical level. This latter (...) approach is called sufficientarian. Sufficientarian approaches to distributive justice are intuitively appealing, but require further analysis and assessment. What exactly is sufficiency? Why do we need it? What does it imply for the just distribution of health or healthcare? This volume offers fresh perspectives on these critical questions. Philosophers, bioethicists, health policy-makers, and health economists investigate sufficiency and its application to health and health care in fifteen original contributions. (shrink)

Autonomy is a core value that is deeply entrenched in the moral, legal, and political practices of many societies. The development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) have raised new questions about AI’s impacts on human autonomy. However, systematic assessments of these impacts are still rare and often held on a case-by-case basis. In this article, I provide a conceptual framework that both ties together seemingly disjoint issues about human autonomy, as well as highlights differences between them. In the first (...) part, I distinguish between distinct concerns that are currently addressed under the umbrella term ‘human autonomy’. In particular, I show how differentiating between autonomy-as-authenticity and autonomy-as-agency helps us to pinpoint separate challenges from AI deployment. Some of these challenges are already well-known (e.g. online manipulation or limitation of freedom), whereas others have received much less attention (e.g. adaptive preference formation). In the second part, I address the different roles AI systems can assume in the context of autonomy. In particular, I differentiate between AI systems taking on agential roles and AI systems being used as tools. I conclude that while there is no ‘silver bullet’ to address concerns about human autonomy, considering its various dimensions can help us to systematically address the associated risks. (shrink)

This book is written for middle and high school students, for teachers and for those with a passion for math, containing 150+1 problems (which are followed by solutions) to make it more accessible to the reader. The last problem (150+1), a very interesting one, leaves some space for comments and generalizations. The book is a collaboration between a multi-awarded student at Romania’s National Mathematics Olympiad (Carina Maria Viespescu, student in year 10 at Liceul International of Informatics Bucuresti), a teacher (...) from Colegiul National “Fratii Buzesti” din Cravoia and prof. Dr. Emeritus Florentin Smarandache from the University of New Mexico. A couple of problems are proposed by colleagues, and their names indicated in footnotes. (shrink)

In 1932, John von Neumann argued for the equivalence of the thermodynamic entropy and −Trρlnρ, since known as the von Neumann entropy. Meir Hemmo and Orly R. Shenker recently challenged this argument by pointing out an alleged discrepancy between the two entropies in the single-particle case, concluding that they must be distinct. In this article, their argument is shown to be problematic as it allows for a violation of the second law of thermodynamics and is based on an incorrect calculation (...) of the von Neumann entropy. (shrink)

Word co‐occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs’ semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common events. Here, we test whether five pretrained LLMs (from 2018's BERT to 2023's MPT) assign a higher likelihood to plausible descriptions of agent−patient interactions than to minimally (...) different implausible versions of the same event. Using three curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (total n = 1215), we found that pretrained LLMs possess substantial event knowledge, outperforming other distributional language models. In particular, they almost always assign a higher likelihood to possible versus impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher). However, LLMs show less consistent preferences for likely versus unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow‐up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface‐level sentence features, (ii) LLM scores generalize well across syntactic variants (active vs. passive constructions) but less well across semantic variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some LLM errors mirror human judgment ambiguity, and (iv) sentence plausibility serves as an organizing dimension in internal LLM representations. Overall, our results show that important aspects of event knowledge naturally emerge from distributional linguistic patterns, but also highlight a gap between representations of possible/impossible and likely/unlikely events. (shrink)

Se analizará el papel de la iglesia católica como detentora de poder en el siglo X, sus íntimas relaciones con la forma de construcción del poder político, permitiendo su fortalecimiento en un tiempo de fragmentación territorial. Se perseguirá la interpretación de la interrelación poder temporal-esp..

This article conveys some of the findings from a hermeneutic-phenomenological study on lived experiences of school failure. The informants were students in Swedish senior high schools and teenagers in Swedish juvenile institutions. Contrary to the common belief that school failure is related to low grades or failing exams, the students’ descriptions of lived experiences of failure had little to do with intellectual shortcomings. The students’ interpretation of my research question did not encompass cognitive deficiencies. They rarely spoke of failure to (...) understand, or failure to meet scholastic demands. Instead, the students offered stories about failure to behave according to expectations and the way in which they experienced their teachers’ reactions to this ‘deviant’ behaviour. Thus, the question of school failure did not revolve around the students’ cognitive knowledge and proficiency – or lack of thereof – but around the hidden curriculum. The feelings the students lived through while experiencing failure included lack of trust, confidence, belief, joyfulness, patience, hope, and serenity. The study has moral implications for pedagogical practice and the formative relationship between teachers and students. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 12, Special Edition May 2012. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that stimulus–response (SR) binding and retrieval processes also occur when responses are only observed in another person ( Giesen et al., 2014 ). Importantly, this effect depends on the two individuals interacting interdependently during the task (e.g., competition or cooperation). Interdependence, however, must not necessarily result from task-related demands, but can also reflect an intrinsic feature of a given relationship. The present study examines whether observing responses of one’s romantic partner also produces stimulus-based retrieval of observed (...) responses even if the task itself does not involve interdependence. Participants performed a task pairwise, either with their romantic partner or with a stranger. In a sequential prime-probe design, both participants of a pair gave color responses themselves (actors) or merely observed these (observers) in alternating fashion. As expected, stimulus-based retrieval of observationally acquired SR-bindings occurred only in romantically involved pairs; participants interacting with a stranger showed no retrieval effects. We conclude that mental representations of self and other are more closely intertwined in romantic couples, which produces automatic retrieval of observationally acquired SR binding effects even independently of the task itself. (shrink)

Mikhail Bakhtin aimed to invent a phenomenology of the self-experience and of the experience of the other in his early work. In order to realize such a phenomenology he combined different approaches he called idealism and materialism / naturalism. The first one he linked to Edmund Husserl, but did hardly name him directly concerning his phenomenology. Does this intersubjective phenomenology give a hint that Bakhtin used Husserlian ideas more than considered yet? Or did they both invent similar ideas independently from (...) each other? Both thinkers dealt with the issue of intersubjectivity. Husserl judged statements on other psycho-physical realities as metaphysics in the Logical Investigations II, but in his Ideas I he described the others as enhancing one’s experience through their “experiential surpluses”. In the same way Bakhtin described the unique perspective of the other as a mandatory and valuable part of the world of the act in his Philosophy of the Act and his investigations on Author and Hero. In order to understand the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology for Bakhtin’s early philosophy we need to take a look closer at those contentual parallels as well as some paraphrases yet unnoticed. This gives hint for the question if for Bakhtin Husserl was more than just a name dropped. In this article I reconstructed the relations between both thinkers and answered the question if the dating of Bakhtin’s early work until 1928 has to be re-considered. (shrink)

One of the most controversial issues in many health care systems is health care rationing. In essence, rationing refers to the denial of - or delay in - access to scarce goods and services in health care, despite the existence of medical need. Scarcity of financial and medical resources confronts society with painful questions. Who should decide which medicine or new treatment will be covered by social security and on which criteria such decisions must be based? Can age, for example, (...) be justified as a selection criterion? Should decision-making be left to health care policymakers, hospital administrators, or rather, to treating physicians? And finally: is there a role for individual patients? These are difficult questions that suggest the need for transparent and democratic decision-making. In reality, however, the rationing debate occurs in a sub rosa world, based on imperfect information, distorted interpretations of effectiveness, and hidden cost concerns. This book explores these and other questions from various perspectives. Each of the book's contributors analyzes the debate from a different angle, in search of fair and just rationing decisions. (shrink)

Andrew Walton argues that, a Rawlsian property-owning democracy (POD) requires a fraternal ethos and certain forms of social interaction, such as high trade union membership. The basic structure objection could be used to challenge these claims as it indicates that Rawls’s principles of justice should only be applied to the basic structure of society, and not, for example, to an ethos. Walton has two responses to the objection: firstly, that it does not apply to his argument, and, secondly, even if (...) it were to apply, the objection itself is unconvincing. In this article I argue however that (1) the basic structure objection does apply as a fraternal ethos is difficult to reconcile with Rawls’s understanding of what should be included as part of the basis structure, and (2) although I do not defend the basic structure objection, it is not made explicit in Walton’s argument why the objection should be dismissed as unconvincing. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene por objeto interpretar los sentimientos de muerte que construyen jóvenes estudiantes de sectores populares frente a la negación de la subjetividad. Los testimonios recogidos sobre las agresiones contra el propio cuerpo expresan un dolor y la búsqueda de una restitución simbólica en la producción de la estima social.

Viele moralphilosophische Konzepte haben sich aus kolonialen Legitimationsdiskursen heraus entwickelt. Um diesbezüglich Philosophie als Selbstkritik zu praktizieren, werde ich das Begriffspaar „Scham(kulturen) und Schuld(- kulturen)“ als konkretes Beispiel diskutieren und die (un)moralischen Emotionen Scham und Schuld in der deutsch- und englischsprachigen Philosophie von Immanuel Kant bis hin zur Debatte um die moral emotions kritisch beleuchten. Der diesem Begriffspaar zugrundeliegende Ethnozentrismus kann durch einen interkulturellen Polylog zwischen Nordamerika, Europa und Japan aufgedeckt werden. Der Blick auf japanische Scham- und Schuldphänomene sowie der (...) japanische Blick auf europäische Varianten deckt eine ethnozentrische Verkürzung der europäischen Begriffe auf. Dadurch kann nicht nur das kolonialistische Konzept der „Scham- und Schuldkulturen“ korrigiert, sondern auch das eigene moralphilosophische Vokabular präzisiert werden. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that certain ways in which the relationship among discrimination, emotions and health is presented can undermine equity. I identify a model of this relationship the discrimination-emotion-health model - and claim that while the model is important for understanding the detrimental impact that discrimination and oppression can have on emotions and health, certain implications of the model are troubling. I identify six critiques of the model, and show that equity could be undermined, for example, when stereotypes (...) of the oppressed are reinforced and the experiences of the privileged are normalized. I then assess the implications of my analysis of the model and its critique for a framework of health equity, demonstrating what such a framework would need to look like in order for it to best represent discrimination as a psychosocial determinant of health. (shrink)

This article explores safety and politics of space in two ways. First, it reviews research on women’s fear and calls for safer cities, identifying four contradictions in the geography of fear discourse. Second, it elaborates on how including various forms of fear may repoliticize the contemporary depoliticized and co-opted safety discussion by focusing on sexist and racist threats rather than exclusively on the white middle classes. Here, threats to veiled Muslim women and their experiences in public spaces are, in particular, (...) emphasized as exemplifying fears that are neglected in the safety debate. The article concludes that, rather than the whole safety issue being dismissed as ‘neoliberal’, there is an urgent need to strengthen the analysis of power and illuminate experiences of pain and fear in sexist and racist violence. (shrink)

In the fifteenth century, idolatry could be understood as one in a diversity of religious rites. Nicholas of Cusa and subsequent Platonists emphasized that no rite was necessary, only love, and drew on prisca theologia to understand religion throughout the world. By the turn of the sixteenth century, cosmographers such as Peter Martyr Anglerius incorporated these ideas into descriptions of religious and cultural practice. Early Reformation concerns about removing superstitious rites and images, and the Counter-Reformation response to that critique, led (...) to a vilification of heterodox religion as idolatrous and the increasing location of idolatry in cultures outside of Europe. (shrink)

Many social gradients in health appear steeper for men than for women. I refer to this as the “Steepness Puzzle.” This paper explores the ethical implications of this Puzzle. First, it identifies potential explanations for the Steepness Puzzle, including methodological problems. Second, it highlights two harms associated with the methodological explanation: the consequences of biased epistemic practices and the marginalization of women. It also demonstrates how attempts to flatten the gradients in health could disproportionately favor men or reinforce troubling gendered (...) norms. Finally, I suggest ways to address the methodological problems underlying the Puzzle. (shrink)

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have rippled across the United States’ (US) agri-food system, illuminating considerable issues. US seed systems, which form the foundation of food production, were particularly marked by panic-buying and heightened safety precautions in seed fulfillment facilities which precipitated a commercial seed sector overwhelmed and unprepared to meet consumer demand for seed, especially for non-commercial growers. In response, prominent scholars have emphasized the need to support both formal (commercial) and informal (farmer- and gardener-managed) seed systems to (...) holistically aid growers across various contexts. However, limited attention to non-commercial seed systems in the US, coupled with a lack of consensus surrounding what exactly a resilient seed system looks like, first warrants an exploration into the strengths and vulnerabilities of existing seed systems. This paper seeks to examine how growers navigated challenges in seed sourcing and how this may reflect the resilience of the seed systems to which they belong. Using a mixed-methods approach which includes data from online surveys (n = 158) and semi-structured interviews (n = 31) with farmers and gardeners in Vermont, findings suggest that growers were able to adapt – albeit through different mechanisms depending on their positionality (commercial or non-commercial) within the agri-food system. However, systemic challenges emerged including a lack of access to diverse, locally adapted, and organic seeds. Insights from this study illuminate the importance of creating linkages between formal and informal seed systems in the US to help growers respond to manifold challenges, as well as promote a robust and sustainable stock of planting material. (shrink)