In order to improve our understanding of the components that reflect functionally important processes during reward anticipation and consumption, we used principle components analyses (PCA) to separate and quantify averaged ERP data obtained from each stage of a modified monetary incentive delay (MID) task. Although a small number of recent ERP studies have reported that reward and loss cues potentiate ERPs during anticipation, action preparation, and consummatory stages of reward processing, these findings are inconsistent due to temporal and spatial overlap (...) between the relevant electrophysiological components. Our results show three components following cue presentation are sensitive to incentive cues (N1, P3a, P3b). In contrast to previous research, reward‐related enhancement occurred only in the P3b, with earlier components more sensitive to break‐even and loss cues. During feedback anticipation, we observed a lateralized centroparietal negativity that was sensitive to response hand but not cue type. We also show that use of PCA on ERPs reflecting reward consumption successfully separates the reward positivity from the independently modulated feedback‐P3. Last, we observe for the first time a new reward consumption component: a late negativity distributed over the left frontal pole. This component appears to be sensitive to response hand, especially in the context of monetary gain. These results illustrate that the time course and sensitivities of electrophysiological activity that follows incentive cues do not follow a simple heuristic in which reward incentive cues produce enhanced activity at all stages and substages. (shrink)

We wholeheartedly agree with Schmidt and colleagues’ efforts to promote equity in intensive care unit triage. We also take issue with their characterisation of the New Jersey allocation framework for ICU beds and ventilators, which is modelled after the multi-principle allocation framework we developed early in the pandemic. They characterise it as a two-criterion allocation framework and claim—without evidence—that it will ‘compound disadvantage for black patients’. However, the NJ triage framework—like the model allocation policy we developed—actually contains four allocation criteria: (...) the two criteria that the authors mentioned and two criteria that they failed to mention which we included to promote equity: giving priority to frontline essential workers and giving priority to younger patients. These omissions are problematic both for reasons of factual accuracy and because the two criteria they failed to acknowledge would likely mitigate rather than exacerbate racial disparities during triage. (shrink)

Popper and Eccles present two different notions of Interactionism. Popper's arguments arise out of the traditional philosophical debate, whereas Eccles' arguments arise out of a mixture of neurophysiology and personal belief. Popper's three-world ontology is the philosophical foundation of both their positions. However, it is precisely against the background of the three Worlds that the considerable differences between their positions are apparent. Despite these defects, Interactionism is a productive notion since it does not place the Self beyond experimental investigation. Indeed, (...) both Popper and Eccles have made implicit suggestions as to experimental procedure which might contribute to the investigation of the Self. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper reports on a multidisciplinary meeting held to discuss ethical issues in medical research in the developing world. Many studies, including clinical trials, are conducted in developing countries with a high burden of disease. Conditions under which this research is conducted vary because of differences in culture, public health, political, legal and social contexts specific to these countries. Research practices, including standards of care for participants, may vary as a result. It is therefore not surprising that ethical issues (...) emerge. This meeting sought to identify and discuss these issues from the perspectives of the many actors in such research, including community representatives, with a view to finding ethical and pragmatic solutions to these issues. Dialogue between these actors was also promoted, with a view to identifying the need to develop such dialogue in future. Drawing from the experiences of the speakers, the colloquium attempted to outline some answers to several key questions characterising the field today. Experiences related to epidemiologic research, vaccine trials, drug trials, diagnostic tests and to some fundamental ethical issues in health research. Speakers were from different countries, disciplines and professions. The meeting provided a forum for consultation and debate between different ethics actors. Both encouraging findings and challenges emerged. (shrink)

We appreciate the opportunity to respond to Schneiderman and colleagues’ opinions on the recent Multiorganization Policy Statement, “An Official ATS/AACN/ACCP/ESICM/SCCM Policy Statement: Responding to Requests for Potentially Inappropriate Treatments in Intensive Care Units”. We will first point out three areas in which Schneiderman and colleagues seem to perceive a disagreement where there is none, then we will respond to their main criticisms of the Multiorganization Policy Statement. In doing so, we will point out areas in which we believe Schneiderman and (...) colleagues have either misunderstood or misrepresented the statement. First, we agree with Schneiderman and... (shrink)

Douglas Sturm, a major ethical thinker, here presents ten intriguing essays that lay the groundwork for a communitarian political theory. Drawing on the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Bernard E. Meland, Sturm brings the implications of process thought, especially its principle of internal relations, to bear on the interpretation and evaluation of our social and political life. He argues that American individualism, including its curious transmutations into the forms of corporativism, racism, and nationalism is a constraint that (...) deprives us of a deeper, more complex understanding of ourselves and a richer sense of the goodness of our lives. The essays contrast a communitarian political theory with alternative traditions of social thought, particularly those forms of individualism generated by Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham. Political realities of power, rights, and interests are not to be dismissed, according to Sturm, but they need to be cast within a concept of politics that sustains a community as a whole; thus public good and justice are defined as the central principles of public life. He isolates alternative theoretical perspectives and demonstrates how they deal with several current social and political dilemmas. Sturm applies the principles of the communitarian political theory to a broad range of contemporary concerns: the character and legitimacy of the modern business corporation; the idea of democratic capitalism; legal realism as the prevailing jurisprudence of the practicing lawyer; the scope and focus of bioethics as a discipline. In doing so, he affirms both the inescapability of public life in our existence and the radical character of the evil that it often creates. (shrink)

RationaleSurrogates of critically ill patients often have inaccurate expectations about prognosis. Yet there is little research on how intensive care unit clinicians should discuss prognosis, and existing expert opinion-based recommendations give only general guidance that has not been validated with surrogate decision makers.ObjectiveTo determine the perspectives of key stakeholders regarding how prognostic information should be conveyed in critical illness.MethodsThis was a multicenter study at three academic medical centers in California, Pennsylvania, and Washington. One hundred eighteen key stakeholders completed in-depth semistructured (...) interviews. Participants included 47 surrogates of adult patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome; 45 clinicians working in study ICUs, including physicians, nurses, social workers, and spiritual care providers; and 26 experts in health communication, decision science, ethics, family-centered care, geriatrics, healthcare disparities, palliative care, psychology, psychiatry, and critical care.Measurements and main resultsThere was broad support among surrogates for existing expert recommendations, including truthful prognostic disclosure, emotional support, tailoring the disclosure strategy to each family's needs, and checking for understanding. In addition, stakeholders offered suggestions that add specificity to existing recommendations, including: In addition to conveying prognostic estimates, clinicians should help families "see the prognosis for themselves" by showing families radiographic images and explaining the clinical significance of physical manifestations of severe disease at the bedside. Many physicians did not support using numeric estimates to convey prognosis to families, whereas many surrogates, clinicians from other disciplines, and experts believed numbers could be helpful. Clinicians should conceptualize prognostic communication as an iterative process that begins with a preliminary mention of the possibility of death early in the ICU stay and becomes more detailed as the clinical situation develops. Although prognostic information should be initially disclosed by physicians, other members of the multidisciplinary team-nurses, social workers, and spiritual care providers-should be given explicit role responsibilities to reinforce physicians' prognostications and help families process a poor prognosis emotionally.ConclusionsFamily members, clinicians, and experts identified specific communication behaviors that clinicians should use to discuss prognosis in the critical care setting. These findings extend existing opinion-based recommendations and should guide interventions to improve communication about prognosis in ICUs. (shrink)

Nuclear War, edited by Fox and Groarke, is one of five recent anthologies containing new essays by philosophers on the subject of nuclear war. The Blake and Pole volumes, containing essays mainly by British philosophers, are distinguished by unrelenting and comprehensive opposition to British and American policy, and by the fame of the contributors, which include Anthony Kenny, Michael Dummett, and Bernard Williams. The Chicago volume contains a number of excellent papers by philosophers and the added bonus of nine (...) papers by established specialists in national security issues; it attempts, with partial success, to cover the full range of strategic nuclear options. The Cohen and Lee and the Fox and Groarke volumes consist largely of papers by strategic outsiders far from the centres of political power; the debate in these volumes is not between the principal versions of nuclear deterrence but between nuclear deterrence in any form and some scheme that transcends the present arrangement of mutually deterring superpowers. Of these last two books, Cohen and Lee contains relatively longer and more detailed essays. (shrink)

This letter to the editor responds to commentaries in the September‐October 2021issue of the Hastings Center Report by Douglas B. White and Bernard Lo, by Govind Persad, and by Virginia A. Brown, which were themselves responding, in part, to the article “Life‐Years and Rationing in the Covid‐19 Pandemic: A Critical Analysis,” by MaryKatherine Gaurke, Bernard Prusak, Kyeong Yun Jeong, Emily Scire, and Daniel P. Sulmasy.

In his book Economics as a Moral Science , Bernard Hodgson argues that economics is not value neutral as is often claimed, but is a value-laden discipline. In the long argument for this in his book, Hodgson never discusses or even mentions corporations. This article explains that corporations are absent from Hodgson’s discussion because he considers only the consumption side of general equilibrium theory (GET), and it shows that if Hodgson had included corporations and the production side, his overall (...) argument would have been more complete and convincing. This article shows that Hodgson’s methodology, when applied to the production side of GET, has value implications for CEOs of large corporations, for shareholders and members of Boards of Directors, and for legislators and regulators of business. Hodgson’s claim that economics must consider the ability of economic agents to create or change the institutional, cultural, and organizational conditions of their own economic actions is supported and expanded. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Religio-Political Narratives in the United States: From Martin Luther King Jr. to Jeremiah Wright by Angela D. Sims, F. Douglas Powe Jr., Johnny Bernard HillOluwatomisin OredeinReligio-Political Narratives in the United States: From Martin Luther King Jr. to Jeremiah Wright Angela D. Sims, F. Douglas Powe Jr., and Johnny Bernard Hill New York: Palgrave, 2014. 216PP. $90.00In a world where racial identity can serve as (...) a means to power or disempowerment, privilege or disadvantage, Christian prophetic speech can offer a corrective to subjugative realities. In Religio-Political Narratives in the United States: From Martin Luther King Jr. to Jeremiah Wright, Angela Sims, F. Douglas Powe Jr., and Johnny Bernard Hill attend to prophetic speech and its direct impact on the political through examining the politico-spiritual discourse and work of three storied black figureheads with roots in the black church: Martin Luther King Jr., Jeremiah Wright, and Barack Obama.It is not surprising that black ecclesial rhetoric is found within the orations of these prominent leaders, but what this work reveals is the relationship between social location, religious constitution, and political alignment. Black identity connected to the prophetic expressive tradition directly confronts any model of relationality that constructs injurious sociality. The prophetic, expressed through particular bodies, makes impossible the separation of church and state. As black identity was historically discoursed through deformation, devaluation, and dehumanization, black prophetic speech sought religious premise to speak back to and refute these ill-constructed social and political “realities.” Religiosity and sociality are affixed, adjoined in, on, and through the tongues of these three black influential figureheads of justice. The voices of King, Wright, and Obama move discursively between the religious and the political, using prophetic speech toward active political policy and toward recognizing those who are invisible in the United States and in the world. Employing the language and ideology of citizenry and community, their work and words ultimately move to emphasize human interconnectedness.Religio-Political Narratives in the United States reaches far and wide within academic discourse. A seminal work for black church studies, politics courses, ethics studies, courses in racial discourse, and Christian theological studies, it traces how the prophetic-political “verse” of these black leaders speaks back to the sinister forces that directly shape the experiences of many in the United States and the world. Blackness, an “invisibilized” identity, is ironically the space from which visibility and justice can materialize. Black identity, then, is prophetic in itself; it teaches audacious sight and visionary speech. [End Page 207]The brilliance of Religio-Political Narratives in the United States is in its characterization under one of its series headings, “Womanist Thought.” This identification is its most subtle yet forceful claim. Arguably grounded in the prophetic, womanist thought seeks to engage in “speaking back” to modes of oppressive practices within the black community and Christian context as a whole. Strangely, though, black women are absent from the text. Sims, Powe, and Hill honor womanist thought through recognizing its prophetic tone but overlook its advocates. Its womanist commitment is thus only partially seen, and questions emerge, such as: How did black women influence King, Wright, and Obama, and how can this be accounted for? How did black women historically influence other black women across time? Cannot voices such as those of Ida B. Wells and Pauli Murray be connected to the cadence of Loretta Lynch or Michelle Obama?The presence of black women’s voices is especially important in order to grant stability to the narration of political influence in the United States from within the black community. What must be avoided is the potential alignment of some sort of messianic imagery (and imagination) onto black male figures—and further, and arguably most importantly—aligning political and social change primarily with black males. Messianic mediation must be distinguished from prophetic illumination. Religio-Political Narratives in the United States wisely illumines the connections between body and policy; now we are prompted to ask: whose bodies are storied as legendary, influential, and worth giving account of?Oluwatomisin OredeinDuke Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2016 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This is a volume of philosophical studies, centred on problems of personal identity and extending to related topics in the philosophy of mind and moral philosophy.

Explanation-Aware Computing: Papers from the 2007 AAAI Workshop, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Technical Report WS-07-06, Menlo Park California, AAAI Press, 2007, 1-9.

This paper considers how the terms ‘objection,’ ‘rebuttal,’ ‘attack,’ ‘refutation,’ ‘rebutting defeater’ and ‘undercutting defeater’ are used in writings on argumentation and artificial intelligence. The central focus is on the term ‘rebuttal.’ A provisional classification system is proposed that provides a normative structure within which the terms can be clarified, distinguished from each other, and more precisely defined.

We study computability theoretic properties of and equivalence structures and how they differ from computable equivalence structures or equivalence structures that belong to the Ershov difference hierarchy. Our investigation includes the complexity of isomorphisms between equivalence structures and between equivalence structures.

The basic question for risk assessment is not "What are the risks?" but "How safe is safe enough?" Its ambitious goal is to make risk management a scientific enterprise. In order to succeed, not only must risks be quantified but also the many kinds of costs and benefits associated with technology and its control must be quantified and we must find a common metric for comparing these different factors. The risks of risk assessment include the possibility of distorting values in (...) the quest for general comparability and also the problem of responding rationally to different kinds of uncertainty. The problems discussed include comparing novel events to statistically frequent events, comparing different distributions of risk, and quantifying the value of saving human lives. (shrink)