A corpus of 60 articles published in Spanish, English, and Portuguese was analyzed to account for the integrative literature review on the concept of vulnerability from bioethics, identifying the following thematic trends: risk, susceptibility, autonomy, and culture in people and communities. The methodological approach has been mainly qualitative. We found that the disciplines that most addressed the concept belong to the human and social sciences. The authors recommend conducting studies of the concept from people’s perspectives and that ethics committees review (...) the informed consent and information guides according to these results. The categories give way to the concept of vulnerability, which must be analyzed beyond principlism in bioethics. (shrink)

I investigate the reciprocal relationship between social accounts of knowledge production and efforts to increase the representation of women and some minorities in the academy. In particular, I consider the extent to which feminist social epistemologies such as Helen Longino’s critical contextual empiricism can be employed to argue that it is in researchers’ epistemic interests to take active steps to increase gender diversity. As it stands, critical contextual empiricism does not provide enough resources to succeed at this task. However, considering (...) this view through an employment equity lens highlights areas where such theories need to be further developed. I argue that views such as Longino’s ought to attend to nuances of community structure and cultural features that inhibit critical social interactions, if we are to maximize the epistemic as well as the ethical improvements associated with a social approach to knowing. These developments advance these epistemic theories for their own sake. They also help develop these theories into a tool that can be used by those calling for increased diversity in the academy. (shrink)

On Kant's view, the feeling of respect is the mark of moral agency, and is peculiar to us, animals endowed with reason. Unlike any other feeling, respect originates in the contemplation of the moral law, that is, the idea of lawful activity. This idea works as a constraint on our deliberation by discounting the pretenses of our natural desires and demoting our selfish maxims. We experience its workings in the guise of respect. Respect shows that from the agent's subjective perspective, (...) morality is the experience of being bound and necessitated, but also of being free and emancipated from inclinations. (shrink)

The concept of testimonial injustice (TI) has been expanded considerably since Fricker's groundbreaking original formulation. Testimonial void (TV), as well as other kinds of TI identified in the last decade, encourage the idea that the virtue of testimonial justice (TJ) is not the appropriate remedy to battle against injustice in our testimonial exchanges. This paper contributes to the existing literature on the limitations of TJ as the remedy for TI by drawing attention to its shortcomings in the context of other (...) kinds of TI. By contrast, I propose further engaging epistemically with the other (EE) as a corrective to injustice in our testimonial exchanges. I understand EE as a practice in which information regarding epistemic injustice, strategies to fight it and skills training play the leading roles. If the problem lies in lack of appropriate epistemic interaction between knowers, we need to train ourselves to do what we fail to do. Given that we are in the domain of testimony, EE essentially amounts to engaging further with the other in conversation. In the process, EE sheds light on the need for second-order change to fight TI, as enacting EE would require the transformation of our concepts of testimony and credibility. (shrink)

In this paper, I ask feminist philosophers and science studies scholars to consider the goals of developing critical analyses of evolutionary psychology. These goals can include development of scholarship in feminist philosophy and science studies, mediation of the uptake of evolutionary psychology by other academic and lay communities, and improvement of the practices and products of evolutionary psychology itself. I evaluate ways that some practices of feminist philosophy and science studies facilitate or hinder meeting these goals, and consider the merits (...) of critical engagement with some of the scientists themselves. Finally, I describe a community of feminist evolutionary psychologists with whom it might be both fruitful and interesting to engage, and identify ways that these interactions may benefit the science and the study of the science. (shrink)

A lack of diversity remains a significant problem in many STEM communities. According to the epistemic approach to addressing these diversity problems, it is in a community’s interest to improve diversity because doing so can enhance the rigor and creativity of its work. However, we draw on empirical and theoretical evidence illustrating that this approach can trade on the epistemic exploitation of diverse community members. Our concept of epistemic exploitation holds when there is a relationship between two parties in which (...) one party accrues epistemic benefits from another party’s knowledge and epistemic location and, in doing so, harms the second party or sets back their interests. We demonstrate that the ironic outcome of this nominal application of the epistemic approach is that it undermines the epistemic benefits which it promises. Indeed, we show that epistemic exploitation undermines the relationships and interactions among community members that produce rigor and creativity. Our central argument is that for communities to reap the benefits of an epistemic approach to diversity, to implement a genuine epistemic approach, they need to develop cultures that ameliorate the harms faced by, and protect the interests of, their diverse community members. (shrink)

This article explores twelve short narrative films created by women and trans people living with disabilities and embodied differences. Produced through Project Re•Vision, these micro documentaries uncover the cultures and temporalities of bodies of difference by foregrounding themes of multiple histories: body, disability, maternal, medical, and/or scientific histories; and divergent futurities: contradictory, surprising, unpredictable, opaque, and/or generative futures. We engage with Alison Kafer's call to theorize disability futurity by wrestling with the ways in which “the future” is normatively deployed in (...) the service of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, a deployment used to render bodies of difference as sites of “no future”. By re-storying embodied difference, the storytellers illuminate ongoing processes of remaking their bodily selves in ways that respond to the past and provide possibilities for different futures; these orientations may be configured as “dis-topias” based not on progress, but on new pathways for living, uncovered not through evoking the familiar imaginaries of curing, eliminating, or overcoming disability, but through incorporating experiences of embodied difference into time. These temporalities gesture toward new kinds of futures, giving us glimpses of ways of cripping time, of cripping ways of being/becoming in time, and of radically re-presencing disability in futurity. (shrink)

This article argues that cruelty, as a willingness to see or orchestrate the suffering of others, is not an unfortunate side-effect of neoliberal theories put into practice but is constitutive of the neoliberal project from its theoretical inception. Drawing on Lisa Duggan’s concept of ‘optimistic cruelty’ and treating the canonical texts of neoliberal economic theory as literary artefacts, the article develops this argument through a close reading of one of the central architects of the neoliberal project, the philosopher and economist (...) Friedrich Hayek. The first part of the article examines how Hayek attempts to justify the brutality of the market order he imagines – the catallaxy – by arguing that this brutality is the natural consequence of the spontaneous evolutionary processes that move civilisation forward. The second part brings to the fore the eugenicist undertones that suffuse this vision, despite Hayek’s apparent rejection of Social Darwinism. I analyse how Hayek’s market order operates through a series of disciplinary and biopolitical technologies that use pain, frustration, punishment and stigmatisation to eliminate bad habits, practices and subjectivities. These cruel mechanisms enable the catallaxy to sort between productive and unproductive lives to ensure that available resources are directed towards the former – even if it means that the others might be left to die. As such, cruelty is an affective atmosphere that permeates the catallaxy. (shrink)

Transgender individuals and families throw existing taxonomic classification systems of identity into perplexing disarray, illuminating sociolegal dilemmas long overdue for critical sociological inquiry. Using interview data collected from 50 cisgender women from across the United States and Canada, who detail 61 unique partnerships with transgender and transsexual men, this work considers the pragmatic choices and choice-making capacities of this social group as embedded within social systems, structures, and institutions. Proposing the analytic constructs of “normative resistance” and “inventive pragmatism” to situate (...) the interactional processes between agency and structure in the everyday lives of this understudied group of cisgender women, this work theorizes the liminal sociolegal status of an understudied family form. In so doing, it exposes the increasingly paradoxical consolidation and destabilization of sociolegal notions of identity, marriage, normativity, and parenthood—challenging, contributing to, and extending current theoretical and empirical understandings of agency and structure in twenty-first-century families. (shrink)

This paper characterizes a phenomenon I call ‘binarism grammatical lacuna’ (BGL). BGL occurs when non-binary sex and gender identities are forced to choose between being he or she by the grammar of a language owing to the sex/gender binary. Although hermeneutical injustice (HI) lies at its core, given that non-binary communities come up with hermeneutical devices to overcome unintelligibility and these tools are discredited, a variety of epistemic injustices, besides HI, intertwine in BGL. I address contributory injustice, pragmatic competence injustice, (...) testimonial injustice, and testimonial smothering. Section 1 introduces the phenomenon by portraying it as an ensemble of epistemic injustices. Section 2 elucidates the variety of HI at the core of BGL by examining the case of mainstream Spanish, and section 3 reveals it as producing the primary harm of HI. Section 4 studies the relationship between grammar, ideology, and language use, calling attention to the fact that grammatical lacunae are performatively reenacted in daily speech acts. Section 5 explores the agential dimension of BGL, examining responsibilities. In addition to addressing some of the forms of epistemic injustice that might intertwine in BGL besides HI, I portray non-marginalized users of binary grammar when addressing non-binary people as hermeneutical misfirers. (shrink)

Capitolo I Il rispetto e l'ideale morale 1.1. Angeli, bruti e agenti 1.2. Il rispetto dell'altro 1.3. Il rispetto di sé 1.4. Auto−riflessione e auto−legislazione 1.5. Autonomia e individualità 1.6. Il rispetto e l'attenzione 1.7. Il rispetto e l'amore.

The main purpose of this study is to understand the demographic, personal and situational determining factors leading to academic misconduct among undergraduate students by comparatively analyzing the differences among Economics and Business students and other major students. Two thousand four hundred ninety-two undergraduate students from different Portuguese Public Universities answered a questionnaire regarding their propensity to commit academic fraud, 640 of whom were Economics and Business students. Results concluded that Economics and Business students can be distinguished from others regarding the (...) likelihood of copying from the other Major students. Younger students admit more readily to the possibility of cheating than older students. Results indicate a greater probability of acceptance of dishonest practices outside the area of Economics and Management and a greater probability of condemnation of improper practices by students of Economics and Management. This indicates that students of Economics and Management are aware that their behavior is incorrect and unacceptable; peer-pressure and the learning process itself constitute the main justifications provided by Economics and Business students for their fraudulent actions. Implications for this practice are discussed. (shrink)

Developments in the field of neuroscience, according to its proponents, offer the prospect of an enhanced understanding and treatment of addicted persons. Consequently, its advocates consider that improving public understanding of addiction neuroscience is a desirable aim. Those critical of neuroscientific approaches, however, charge that it is a totalising, reductive perspective–one that ignores other known causes in favour of neurobiological explanations. Sociologist Nikolas Rose has argued that neuroscience, and its associated technologies, are coming to dominate cultural models to the extent (...) that 'we' increasingly understand ourselves as 'neurochemical selves'. Drawing on 55 qualitative interviews conducted with members of the Australian public residing in the Greater Brisbane area, we challenge both the 'expectational discourses' of neuroscientists and the criticisms of its detractors. Members of the public accepted multiple perspectives on the causes of addiction, including some elements of neurobiological explanations. Their discussions of addiction drew upon a broad range of philosophical, sociological, anthropological, psychological and neurobiological vocabularies, suggesting that they synthesised newer technical understandings, such as that offered by neuroscience, with older ones. Holding conceptual models that acknowledge the complexity of addiction aetiology into which new information is incorporated suggests that the impact of neuroscientific discourse in directing the public's beliefs about addiction is likely to be more limited than proponents or opponents of neuroscience expect. (shrink)

Understanding the role of emotion in moral judgment has been an active area of investigation and debate. Here we comment on this topic by examining the interaction between emotion and moral judgment in certain psychopathological groups that are characterized by abnormalities in emotion processing, such as psychopaths and sexual offenders with paraphilic disorders.

Feminist philosophers of biology bring the tools of feminist theory, and in particular the tools of feminist philosophy of science, to investigations of the life sciences. While the critical examination of the categories of sex and gender (which will be explained below) takes a central place, the methods, ontological assumptions, and foundational concepts of biology more generally have also enjoyed considerable feminist scrutiny. Through such investigations, feminist philosophers of biology reveal the extent to which the theory and practice of particular (...) scientific disciplines and research programs (and, indeed, their philosophical study) are intertwined with both value judgments and social hierarchies. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 30-32.

El Foro Global de Bioética en Investigación (GFBR por sus siglas en inglés) se reunió el 3 y 4 de noviembre en Buenos Aires, Argentina, con el objetivo de discutir la ética de la investigación con mujeres embarazadas. El GFBR es una plataforma mundial que congrega a actores clave con el objetivo de promover la investigación realizada de manera ética, fortalecer la ética de la investigación en salud, particularmente en países de ingresos bajos y medios, y promover colaboración entre países (...) del norte y del sur.a Los participantes en el GFBR provenientes de Latinoamérica incluyeron a eticistas, investigadores, miembros de comités de ética y representantes de autoridades sanitarias provenientes de Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panamá, Perú, Nicaragua y la República Dominicana. Una legítima preocupación por la protección de las mujeres embarazadas y sus embriones o fetos ha llevado a la mayoría de los países de la Región de las Américas a limitar la realización de estudios con mujeres embarazadas exclusivamente a aquellos estudios específicos sobre el embarazo, y a requerir la exclusión sistemática de las mujeres embarazadas o de las mujeres que quedan embarazadas en el curso del estudio. Ciertamente, a lo largo de la historia de la ética de la investigación, se ha creído erróneamente que proteger a una población es sinónimo de excluirla de los estudios. Se sabe ahora que proceder así implica exponer a riesgos mucho mayores a la población que se busca proteger. El embarazo implica cambios fisiológicos sustantivos e impacta profundamente la manera como el cuerpo metaboliza los medicamentos. Sin embargo, por evitar hacer investigación con mujeres embarazadas, no se ha producido la evidencia científica necesaria para tomar decisiones sobre tratamientos e intervenciones preventivas con dosis eficaces y seguras para ellas y sus embriones o fetos. A manera de ilustración, en el 2001 había en los Estados Unidos apenas más de una docena de medicamentos aprobados para uso en el embarazo (1) y en el 2011 la Food and Drug Administration (FDA) aprobó por primera vez en 15 años un medicamento para su uso en el embarazo (2). Como consecuencia de no haber producido la evidencia necesaria, se pone en riesgo la salud de las mujeres embarazadas cada vez que se les da atención médica. Las mujeres embarazadas se enferman y las mujeres enfermas se embarazan, y no se sabe si los medicamentos que se les da son eficaces o siquiera seguros para ellas y sus embriones o fetos. (shrink)

Theory of Mind (ToM, also referred to as mentalising; Fonagy, 1991; Frith & Frith, 2006) was coined by primatologists, Premack and Woodruff (1978) and adapted in developmental psychology to refer t...

Background: Publication of ethically uncertain research occurs despite well-published guidelines set forth in documents such as the Declaration of Helsinki. Such guidelines exist to aide editorial staff in making decisions regarding ethical acceptability of manuscripts submitted for publication, yet examples of ethically suspect and uncertain publication exist. Our objective was to survey journal editors regarding practices and attitudes surrounding such dilemmas. Methods: The Editor-in-chief of each of the 103 English-language journals from the 2005 Abridged Index Medicus list publishing original research (...) were asked to complete a survey sent to them by email between September-December 2007. Results: A response rate of 33% (n = 34) was obtained from the survey. 18% (n = 6) of respondents had published ethically uncertain or suspect research within the last 10 years. 85% (n = 29) of respondents stated they would always reject ethically uncertain articles submitted for publication on ethical grounds alone. 12% (n = 4) of respondents stated they would approach each submission on a case-by-case basis. 3% (n = 1) stated they would be likely to publish such research, but only with accompanying editorial. Only 38% (n = 13) give reviewers explicit instruction to reject submissions on ethical grounds if found wanting. Conclusions: Editorial compliance with the Declaration of Helsinki in rejecting research that is conducted unethically was difficult to ascertain because of a poor response rate despite multiple attempts using different modalities. Of those who did respond, the majority do reject ethically suspect research but few explicitly advise reviewers to do so. In this study editors did not take advantage of the opportunity to describe their support for the rejection of the publication of unethical research. (shrink)

Moral philosophers aside, people sustain a vital interest in the results of ethical theorizing only on the hope that these results will eventually provide satisfying, clear, and univocal answers to essential moral questions like: What is Right Action? What is Good? But whatever else might be said of this century’s labors in moral philosophy, they have failed utterly to nurture this hope. Instead, the overwhelming perception has been that this sort of answer to these questions is beyond our ken, or (...) else that the questions themselves are somehow unintelligible. It would not be unrealistic to forecast a dismal and lonely future for the discipline of ethics should this perception continue to be the dominant one. (shrink)

This study reports an analysis using the conversation analytical approach of the use of laughter within a corpus of cognitive therapy sessions. The results relating to eight first encounter sessions reveal that a client’s laughter may accompany disagreement as well as agreement with the therapist. In both cases, the therapist does not reciprocate the client’s laughter and replies by investigating the client in question’s condition, and this approach to the client’s laughter produces significant results in therapeutic work. This article focuses (...) on the asymmetry that characterizes the roles of the psychotherapist and the client in psychotherapy sessions and, in particular, on the part that laughter plays in this type of scenario. (shrink)

There is a widespread assumption in Construction Grammar (but also before and elsewhere) that the meanings of verbs correlate with or even determine their complementation forms and patterns. There is much less research on noun complementation, however, although this category is even more interesting for a number of reasons such as the potential for valency reduction, nominal topicalization constructions, and additional complementation options, e.g.of-PPs and existential constructions.In this paper we focus on the class of nouns reporting commissive illocutionary acts (promise, (...) offer, pledge, refusal, bet, threat, etc.), and address the question of whether there is a correlation (i) between the meaning of these nouns and their preferred complementation patterns, and (ii) between their semantic similarity and their similarity in the distribution of complementation patterns.We report the results of a study of a set of 17 commissive nouns chosen from a wider collection of illocutionary nouns. Two types of analysis were carried out in order to compare the semantic and grammatical characteristics of these nouns. The semantic analysis was based on insights from speech act theory and the philosophy of language. We developed a framework for a systematic comparative description of the nouns in our word field. The results were tallied with a corpus-based grammatical analysis. Two hundred tokens of each noun type were randomly sampled from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Using these data, the 17 nouns were subjected to an analysis of the relative frequencies of their complementation patterns.Results indicate a general match between noun meanings and complementation patterns. More specifically, however, they indicate that the closeness of this match depends on the prototypicality of nouns as members of the class of commissives.The study, then, contributes to our understanding of the relation between lexis and syntax. At the same time, it confirms the need for a close semantic analysis to account for the great extent to which item-specific information, i.e. properties of individual nouns, have to be taken into consideration at the expense of large-scale generalizations. (shrink)

Serious mental health disorders are increasing among college students and university counseling services are often overburdened. Mobile applications for mental health have been growing exponentially in the last decade and they are emerging in university settings as a promising tool to promote and intervene in college students' mental health. Additionally, considering the recent covid-19 pandemic, mHealth interventions, due to its nature and possibilities, may play an important role in these institutions. Our main objectives are to explore mhealth interventions in universities, (...) regarding its conceptual framework, acceptability and efficacy outcomes and understand its impact and contributions to address treatment delivery and psychological difficulties resulting from covid-19 pandemic. The literature search was conducted in scientific databases, namely, Web of Science, Pubmed, and Scopus. A search in app stores was not conducted, thus regarding commercially available apps, only those found in our database search were included in our review. We selected studies with mobile applications addressing psychological interventions for college students. A total of 2,158 participants were included in the 8 selected studies and most interventions were delivered through mobile apps only and based in cognitive behavioral therapy. Results suggested that college students accept and adhere to these interventions and preliminary evidence of efficacy was demonstrated in different disorders, such as stress, anxiety, depression and risky behaviors such as alcohol and tobacco abuse and sexual knowledge. We conclude that universities, particularly college counseling services, may benefit from mhealth interventions, not only to address college students' mental health but to decrease some of its difficulties related to lack of human resources. Specifically in covid-19 pandemic context, these interventions may contribute significantly by promoting and delivering psychological interventions at a safe distance. (shrink)

Two senses of ‘ontology’ can be distinguished in the current literature. First is the sense favored by information scientists, who view ontologies as software implementations designed to capture in some formal way the consensus conceptualization shared by those working on information systems or databases in a given domain. [Gruber 1993] Second is the sense favored by philosophers, who regard ontologies as theories of different types of entities (objects, processes, relations, functions) [Smith 2003]. Where information systems ontologists seek to maximize reasoning (...) efficiency even at the price of simplifications on the side of representation, philosophical ontologists argue that representational adequacy can bring benefits for the stability and resistance to error of an ontological framework and also for its extendibility in the future. In bioinformatics, however, a third sense of ‘ontology’ has established itself, above all as a result of the successes of the Gene Ontology (hereafter: GO), which is a tool for the representation and processing of information about gene products and their biological functions [Gene Ontology Consortium 2000]. We show how Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) has established itself as an overarching ontology drawing on all three of the strands distinguished above, and describe applications of BFO especially in the treatment of biological granularity. (shrink)

In this study I focus on the complementation patterns of commissive shell nouns in Ghanaian English (GhE). Commissive shell nouns are a type of illocutionary shell noun, i.e. a noun that encapsulates a content that is usually expressed in a complement or even separate clause or sentence thereby ascribing it an illocutionary force. I use the usage-based approach to the study of language and investigate the behavioral profile of these nouns in GhE. I apply descriptive statistics to data that have (...) been collected from theCorpus of Global Web-based English(GloWbE). The study provides evidence for the characterization of GhE usage norms, and thus contributes to the scholarly knowledge on this variety of English. It also sheds light on the contribution that the meaning-related and ultimately cognitive perspective can offer in describing the complementation patterns of illocutionary nouns in Postcolonial Englishes (PCEs). (shrink)

The articles of this volume address only some aspects of Nozick's philosophy: his conception of argument, knowledge, rationality, and identity. In examining Nozick's approach to these topics, one has to take issue, ultimately, with his peculiar conception of philosophy whose manifesto appears at the outset of Philosophical Explanations and is echoed in the introduction to philosophical method of Invariances . To transform philosophy into a science or build an impeccable deductive system was not Nozick's dream. He thought of philosophy as (...) aiming at explanation rather than proof. The goal in pursuing philosophy is not to establish one view, but to elaborate theories that can make us understand some phenomena better. (shrink)

Sembra esserci almeno un punto di accordo tra i filosofi morali: i giudizi etici, così come li usiamo nelle nostre conversazioni quotidiane, condividono una certa aspirazione all’oggettività. Vi è invece un disaccordo piuttosto acerbo rispetto alla questione se questa aspirazione sia giustificata o non sia invece una mera pretesa. Il disaccordo filosofico riguarda, cioè, la questione se i giudizi etici debbano e possano aspirare all’oggettività. Ma ancor più fondamentale è il disaccordo rispetto ai criteri con cui valutare se questa aspirazione (...) all’oggettività sia legittima. (shrink)

A constructivist account of moral dilemmas and integrity.

: The purpose of this paper is to highlight some difficulties of Neil Sinhababu’s Humean theory of agency, which depend on his radically reductivist approach, rather than to his Humean sympathies. The argument is that Sinhababu’s theory builds upon a critique of reflective agency which is based on equivocation and misunderstandings of the Kantian approach. Ultimately, the objection is that his reductivist view is unequipped to address the rclassical problems of rational deliberation and agential authority. Keywords: Humean Theory; Rational Deliberation; (...) Agency; Authority; Christine Korsgaard Efficacia riflessiva Riassunto: Questo articolo mette in luce alcune difficoltà della teoria proposta da Neil Sinhababu, che dipendono daun approccio radicalmente riduttivista. Si argomenta che la teoria di Sinhababu è basata su alcuni fraintendimenti a proposito dell'approccio kantiano alla teoria dell'azione. L'obiezione fondamentale è che questa posizione riduttivista non riesce a rendere conto adeguatamente della deliberazione razionale e dell'autorità dell'agente. Parole chiave: Teoria humeana; Deliberazione razionale; Agentività; Autorità; Christine Korsgaard. (shrink)