ObjectivesIn 2015, the Province of Quebec, Canada passed a law that allowed voluntary active euthanasia. Palliative care stakeholders in Canada have been largely opposed to euthanasia, yet there is little research about their views. The research question guiding this study was the following: How do palliative care physicians in Quebec position themselves regarding the practice of VAE in the context of the new provincial legislation?MethodsWe used interpretive description, an inductive methodology to answer research questions about clinical practice. A total of (...) 18 palliative care physicians participated in semistructured interviews at two university-affiliated hospitals in Quebec.ResultsParticipants positioned themselves in opposition to euthanasia. Their justifications were framed within their professional commitment to not hasten death, which sat in tension with the value of patients’ autonomy to choose how to die. Participants described VAE as unacceptable if it impeded opportunities to evaluate and alleviate suffering. Further, they contested government rhetoric that positioned VAE as a way to improve end-of-life care. Participants felt that VAE would diminish the potential of palliative care to relieve suffering. Dilemmas were apparent in their narratives, about reconciling respect for patient autonomy with broader palliative care values, and the value of accompanying and not abandoning patients who make requests for VAE while being committed to neither prolonging nor hastening death.ConclusionsThis study provides insight into nuanced positions of experienced palliative care physicians in Quebec and confirms expected tensions between an important stakeholder and the practice of VAE as guided by the new legislation. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the new millennium, initiatives known as roundtables have been developed to create voluntary sustainability standards for agricultural commodities. Intended to be private and voluntary in nature, these initiatives claim their legitimacy from their ability to ensure the participation of all categories of stakeholders in horizontal participatory and inclusive processes. This article characterizes the political and material instruments employed as the means of formulating agreement and taking a variety of voices into consideration in these arenas. Referring to (...) the specific case of the “Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil”, I undertake a detailed analysis of the tensions relating to different forms of participation, which create a gap between “local minority voices” and international stakeholders—either non-governmental organizations or industries. Local communities and small-scale farmers face difficulties when making their voices heard in the form of debate proposed. Firstly, some participants attempt to re-impose a vertical hierarchical relationship between small-scale farmers or affected communities and company managers/directors in order to deprive the former of their powers of representation and of being able to transform reality. Secondly, the liberalism of interest groups in the roundtable accords value to experts, global knowledge, strategy, and detachment, at the expense of other capabilities of rooted or attached people who come to defend their real lives with a desire to raise critical issues of injustice. In this context, I highlight the capacity of local NGOs to relieve some of those tensions and to help locally affected communities and small-scale farmers introduce public stages for debates, by accommodating other forms of participation apart from the liberal one. By being close to and by restoring their dignity through a specific work of solicitude and care, local NGOs prepare affected people for public speaking. (shrink)

Five years ago, an article co-written by some of us presented an emerging trend to disclose some individual genetic results to research participants within the international research community. At the time, ethical norms and scholarly publications on the return of results often did not distinguish between the return of research results in general and the return of unexpected results. Both technologies and research practices have evolved significantly. Today whole genome and exome sequencing are increasingly affordable and frequently used in genetic (...) research. Because these techniques produce a vast amount of interpretable and non-interpretable data about an individual, the issue of how to manage information generated by such technologies needs to be considered. However, the development of international ethical guidelines has not kept up with the rapid pace of technological progress. Indeed developments in genomic biobanking also challenge the duty to disclose research results. (shrink)

La 9e Conférence Alter organisée par l’École des Hautes Études en Santé Publique (EHESP-Rennes, France) et la Société Alter les 8 et 9 avril 2021 proposait d’interroger la construction de la normalité. Plus précisément, nous voulions questionner le système de pensée qui structure plus ou moins implicitement nos sociétés, selon lequel être “valide” serait la norme, et cela aux deux sens, souvent assimilés, de la situation la plus répandue et la plus souhaitable. Ce phénomène est pointé par la...

Formal approaches that aim at representing human reasoning should be evaluated based on how humans actually reason. One way of doing so is to investigate whether psychological findings of human reasoning patterns are represented in the theoretical model. The computational logic approach discussed here is the so-called weak completion semantics which is based on the three-valued ᴌukasiewicz logic. We explain how this approach adequately models Byrne’s suppression task, a psychological study where the experimental results show that participants’ conclusions systematically deviate (...) from the classical logically correct answers. As weak completion semantics is a novel technique in the field of computational logic, it is important to examine how it corresponds to other already established non-monotonic approaches. For this purpose we investigate the relation of weak completion with respect to completion and three-valued stable model semantics. In particular, we show that well-founded semantics, a widely accepted approach in the field of non-monotonic reasoning, corresponds to weak completion semantics for a specific class of modified programs. (shrink)

The 9th Alter Conference organised by the EHESP School of Public Health (Rennes, France) and Alter Society, on April 8 and 9, 2021, was devoted to questioning the construct of the concept of normality. More specifically, we wanted to challenge the common view which, rather covertly structures our societies, according to which being “valid” is the norm, in two often compounded ways, of being the most widespread and the most desirable situation. This view is expounded in the notion of “ableism”...

We study a class of representation mechanisms, based on reports made by a random subset of agents, called representatives, in a collective choice problem with quasi-linear utilities. We do not assume the existence of a common prior probability describing the distribution of preference types. In addition, there is no benevolent planner. Decisions will be carried out by an individual who cannot be assumed impartial, a self-interested executive. These assumptions impose new constraints on Mechanism Design. A robust mechanism is defined as (...) maximizing expected welfare under a vague prior probability distribution, and over a set of mechanisms which is at the same time immune from opportunistic manipulations by the executive, and compatible with truthful revelation of preferences by representatives. Robust mechanisms are characterized and their existence is shown. Sampling Groves mechanisms are shown to be robust. (shrink)

Ces livres semblent à première vue assez similaires puisqu’ils se consacrent tous les deux à l’étude de la maternité, de l’époque moderne jusqu’à nos jours, et accordent une place importante à la littérature. Les mutations importantes de la maternité ces dernières décennies rendent pertinentes l’étude des représentations et du vécu des mères dans le temps long. Ce champ historiographique est cependant loin d’être vierge en France ; de nombreux travaux lui ont été consacrés depuis les années 1...

La mesure d'audience, comme toute statistique, est une construction qui tente de rendre compte du réel. Elle constitue une application des sondages et doit son originalité à ses implications économiques, puisque les résultats d'audience constituent la clé de répartition de la manne publicitaire et conditionnent la viabilité de la plupart des supports. Si la notion d'audience est simple , la définition de cette «exposition» et la manière de la relever sont problématiques. D'où un certain nombre de conventions, différentes selon les (...) médias, pour aboutir à une délimitation plausible des faits d'audience, malgré la multiplicité des modalités selon lesquelles un individu est susceptible d'entrer en contact avec un média et les contraintes inhérentes au recueil d'information.Audience measurement, like any other form of statistics, is a construction which tries to report reality. It consists of an application of surveys and owes its originality to its economical involvement, since audience results are seen as the key to the distribution of advertising revenue and also condition the economical viability of most media. The notion of audience is relatively simple but the definition of this "exposure" and the methods required to survey it remain problematical. Thus one may conclude that a certain amount of conventions exist to help reach a plausible delimitation of audience facts, despite the multiplicity of means by which an individual is likely to come into contact with a media and the constraints inherent to the information collected. (shrink)

En considérant les occurrences orales de différents emplois de la périphrase en aller + infinitif décrits par Bres et Labeau (2012a), cet article illustre la contribution positive des corpus oraux, et particulièrement du nouveau Corpus de français parlé à Bruxelles (CFPB) – au rassemblement d’occurrences authentiques de phénomènes linguistiques peu étudiés, au test de leurs descriptions théoriques, mais aussi à l’enrichissement de celles-ci.

Cet article s�attèle à montrer comment les notions principales de 1'herméneutique de Ric�ur (monde du texte/monde du lecteur, distanciation - appropriation, compréhension de soi, trois mimèsis) ont permis de penser de façon systématique la question du statut du texte biblique et de sa traduction dans un mémoire de licence de la Faculté de théologie de Neuchâtel, réalisé en 2006. Après une présentation du mémoire et de son contexte, les apports de la pensée de Ric�ur sont énumérés en quatrepoints: la théorie (...) de la traduction, la notion de lecture non utilisatrice, la notion de canon et celle de «texte inspiré». (shrink)

For centuries, philosophy has been considered as an intellectual activity requiring complex cognitive skills and predispositions related to complex (or critical) thinking. The Philosophy for Children (P4C) approach aims at the development of critical thinking in pupils through philosophical dialogue. Some contest the introduction of P4C in the classroom, suggesting that the discussions it fosters are not philosophical in essence. In this text, we argue that P4C is philosophy.

Using the lens of positive organizational ethics, we theorized that empathy affects decisions in ethical dilemmas that concern the well-being of not only the organization but also other stakeholders. We hypothesized and found that empathetic managers were less likely to comply with requests by an authority figure to cut the wages of their employees than were non-empathetic managers. However, when an authority figure requested to hold wages constant, empathy did not affect wage cut decisions. These findings imply that empathy can (...) serve as a safeguard for ethical decision making in organizations during trying times without generally undermining organizational effectiveness. We conclude by discussing the implications of our research. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethical issues of the inclusion of workers with disabilities in the workplace with a cross-fertilization approach between organization studies, the ethics of care, and a movement from the field of architecture and design that is called Universal Design (UD). It explores how organizations can use UD to develop more inclusive workplaces, first by applying UD principles to workspaces and second by showing how UD implies an integrative understanding of inclusion from the workspace to the workplace. Moreover, (...) this paper discusses the ethical challenges and complexities that this design practice faces in regard to its applicability to diverse organizations and industries. Finally, this paper demonstrates that inclusion requires abandoning any notion of a perfect, productive body and, therefore, recognizing our shared vulnerability and fundamental interdependence in the workplace. (shrink)

Steeve Bélanger,Frédérique Bonenfant | : Le concept d’« innovation religieuse » est rarement, mais surtout particulièrement mal défini dans la recherche actuelle. De plus, il est souvent associé aux nouveaux mouvements religieux qui ont émergé à l’époque contemporaine, ce qui limite indéniablement son utilisation comme outil et catégorie d’analyse des phénomènes de changement, de nouveauté, de transformation et de mutation religieux d’hier comme d’aujourd’hui. Afin de la distinguer d’une nouveauté, d’une mode ou d’une tendance religieuse passagère, nous proposons de considérer (...) que l’innovation religieuse consiste en un processus collectif qui, par volonté et/ou par désir de changement face à une situation considérée comme ne répondant pas ou plus aux besoins ou aux aspirations actuelles, introduit une nouveauté religieuse et qui conduit, par négociation ou par imposition au moyen d’un réseau de communication, à un changement socioreligieux significatif, effectif et durable des pratiques et/ou du système de significations. Cette proposition de définition, qui se veut ouverte et englobante, permet de considérer que toute nouveauté introduite dans le domaine religieux peut se transformer en innovation religieuse à condition de traverser les quatre phases qui caractérisent, selon nous, les processus d’innovation religieuse, soit celle de proposition d’une nouveauté, celle de diffusion de la nouveauté, celle d’appropriation de la nouveauté puis celle d’adoption de la nouveauté par changement des pratiques et/ou du système de significations. | : The concept of “religious innovation” is seldom, but most of all very badly defined in current research. Furthermore, it is often associated to new religious movements that have emerged in the contemporary period. This undeniably limits its use as a tool and a category of analysis of the phenomena of religious change, novelty, transformation and mutation yesterday as today. With a view to distinguish it from a novelty, a fashion or a passing religious tendency, we propose to consider that religious innovation consists in a collective process which, either willingly or through a desire for change in the face of a situation deemed not or no longer to answer to actual needs or aspirations, introduces a religious novelty, and which leads, through negotiation or imposition by means of a network of communication, to a socio-religious change, significant, effective and durable, of practices and/or of the system of meanings. This proposed definition, intended as it is to be open and inclusive, allows one to consider that every novelty introduced into the religious domain may be transformed into a religious innovation provided it passes through the four phases characterizing, according to us, the processes of religious innovation, namely that of a proposition of novelty, that of a diffusion of the novelty, that of an appropriation of the novelty and that of an adoption of the novelty through a change of practices and/or of the system of meanings. (shrink)

The following is an early, previously untranslated essay by Emmanuel Levinas concerning “the metaphysics of antisemitism.” This essay, published originally in 1938 for Paix et Droit, concerns the shared history and destiny of Jews and Christians, religious groups who maintain a relation of essential “foreignness” to, and so “do not belong” to, the “pagan” world. Levinas distinguishes between the long history of Jewish-Christian antagonism and the newer Nazi-style antisemitism, a particularly insidious “racism” that threatens both Jews and Christians. Levinas calls (...) for a renewed appreciation of the “vocation” common to Jews and Christians to advance Judeo-Christian “solidarity,” a solidarity that Levinas believes is increasingly necessary. (shrink)

This study examines to what extent perceived corporate social responsibility reduces employee cynicism, and whether trust plays a mediating role in the relationship between CSR and employee cynicism. Three distinct contributions beyond the existing literature are offered. First, the relationship between perceived CSR and employee cynicism is explored in greater detail than has previously been the case. Second, trust in the company leaders is positioned as a mediator of the relationship between CSR and employee cynicism. Third, we disaggregate the measure (...) of CSR and explore the links between this and with employee cynicism. Our findings illustrate that the four distinct dimensions of CSR of Carroll are indirectly linked to employee cynicism via organizational trust. In general terms, our findings will help company leaders to understand employees’ counterproductive reactions to an organization, the importance of CSR for internal stakeholders, and the need to engage in trust recovery. (shrink)

We study the weak truth table degree spectra of first-order relational structures. We prove a dichotomy among the possible wtt degree spectra along the lines of Knight’s upward-closure theorem for Turing degree spectra. We prove new results contrasting the wtt degree spectra of finite- and infinite-signature structures. We show that, as a method of defining classes of reals, the wtt degree spectrum is, except for some trivial cases, strictly more expressive than the Turing degree spectrum.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Newly Veiled Woman: Irigaray, Specularity, and the Islamic VeilAnne-Emmanuelle Berger (bio)In 1995, in a piece published in a special issue of Les temps modernes devoted to the Algerian “Guerre des frères,” the late Monique Gadant, a sociologist of postcolonial Algeria, called for a dispassionate reflection on the reasons why a sizable number of Algerian women, in Algeria but also in France, decided to wear the hijab, or (...) “Islamic veil,” without, she said, being coerced into doing it. Warning against a naive French ethnocentrism which may have led people to mistake the hijab too quickly for a sign of women’s oppression, she wrote:C’est s’aveugler que de ne pas voir qu’il y a de très nombreuses femmes qui portent le hidjab sans y être forcées par personne.... Avant de se dresser contre le hidjab, réduit à un symbole d’oppression (les femmes qui le portent étant jugées en contradiction avec ce qui est censé être leurs intérêts et la vérité sur elles-mêmes dites par d’autres), on devrait prendre un peu de temps pour réfléchir aux motivations de ces femmes.[”Femmes alibi” 228][One would be blind not to see that numerous women are wearing the hijab without being forced to do it by anybody.... Before denouncing the hijab, reductively conceived as a symbol of oppression—the women wearing it being found to contradict what are supposed to be their interests and the truth about themselves as told by others—one should take some time to reflect on these women’s motivation.]Indeed, a growing number of women have adopted the hijab in the past decade, in Muslim or predominantly Muslim countries where the “Islamic veil” has not yet been made state law, as is the case in Iran. One thinks of Egypt or Indonesia, for instance, as two other examples where—against weak attempts by the governments in place to curb the powerful development of Islamism, after they helped foster it—the hijab has enjoyed considerable though unequal success. One should not underestimate coercion as a factor, especially within the last few years, when terrorism directed against civilians in Algeria and ever-growing intimidation stemming from Islamism’s social success in Egypt have undeniably led tens of thousands of scared, weary, or energetically “persuaded” women to wear the veil. Nonetheless, I want to take up Monique Gadant’s suggestion that we seriously try to think through at least some of the stakes of the phenomenon she identifies: an impressive number of women today affirm that they want to wear the hijab, and they do it. This raises at least two series of questions: (1) if the hijab fulfills a wish, rather than indicating a state of oppression or alienation, one has to reflect on the nature and structure of this wish or desire, and perhaps ask what the relation might be between desire and the veil, or rather this veil. For the hijab, as it is called in Arabic, is indeed a new kind of veil, or rather a new way of using an old Koranic precept, one intended to replace traditional modes of dressing and veiling. (2) If the hijab, and sometimes even the nikab and the jelbab, which cover women’s faces and bodies entirely, are willingly worn, should one [End Page 93] take this as a particularly blatant testimony to the radical relativity of cultures, which would in turn preclude any “Westerner” or non-Muslim individuals or groups, beginning with women, from making any assumptions concerning the condition of women or the hermeneutics of gender relations across cultures? This is indeed what Gadant hints at when she denounces the “naive [French] ethnocentrism” [228] at work in the negative response to the hijab. 1 One encounters here, as we know, a most divisive, philosophically crucial, and politically decisive issue, one that not only pitches non-Westerners against Westerners, but sometimes equally forcefully, as in this case, “Westerners” against “Westerners.” Ethnocentrism, as a tendency to (mis)understand a different culture in terms of one’s own, hence as a veiled form of cultural imperialism, should be uncovered and indeed denounced... (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) is at the center of the renewed debate over the question of the ethical. In the context of the phenomenological tradition, Levinas defines ethics as an originary response to the face of the other. Between 1982 and 1992, Levinas gave numerous interviews, closing a distinguished sixty-year career. Of the twenty interviews collected in this volume, seventeen appear in English for the first time. In the interviews Levinas sets forth the central features of his ethical philosophy. He underlies (...) his dedication to the phenomenological search for the concrete and the nonformal signification of alterity. He also elaborates on issues that do not receive extensive treatment in his formal philosophical works, including the question of pre-philosophical experiences, the ethical signification of money, justice, and the State. The informality of the interviews prompt Levinas to address matters about which he is reticent in his published works. (shrink)

“Qu’est-ce que la reconnaissance de droits par l’action publique change à l’expérience sociale du handicap? (p. 5), voici la question posée par cet ouvrage. Quinze ans après l’adoption de la loi du 11 février 2005 “pour l’égalité des droits et des chances, la participation et la citoyenneté des personnes handicapées,” la France est-elle véritablement sortie d’une logique assistantielle “en faveur” des personnes handicapées? Celles-ci jouissent-elles de leurs droits à égalité avec les autres?...

Présentation Le dossier de la soutenance de thèse d’Emmanuel Levinas tel qu’il se trouve dans les archives déposées à l’IMEC contient des textes préparés à l’avance, notamment l’intervention initiale d’Emmanuel Levinas pour la présentation de son travail, mais également des réponses à partir du rapport de Gabriel Marcel reçu avant la soutenance. Il y a sans doute également des textes écrits au moment même de la soutenance. Tels qu’il...

Research suggests that the experience of meaningless work is prevalent in various occupations, and that it is destructive for organizations and individuals, making this an issue of major ethical importance. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study based on interviews with Canadian public servants who self-identified as experiencing meaninglessness at work. Our main goal is to better understand participants' responses to the experience of meaningless work and the broader implications their experiences had on the rest of (...) their lives. We surface and explore the harms inflicted on participants through their experiences with meaningless work and suggest that these harms may have been made worse by structural features of our study's public-sector setting. We contribute to organization studies literature by showing the intersection of meaningless work with three related concepts: bullshit jobs, empty labour, and functional stupidity and argue that our empirical findings complement and complicate these frameworks by presenting the complex but hidden emotional experiences that can accompany outwardly observable workplace behaviours. (shrink)

Qui connaît aujourd'hui le philosophe français Emmanuel Mounier et sa révolution personnaliste? Les pages de cet ouvrage lui rendent hommage et donnent le goût de découvrir son extraordinaire aventure en faveur de l'homme. Visionnaire et engagé, sa brève et intense existence (1905-1950) fut consacrée à remettre la Personne au centre de la pensée et de l'agir dans une crise historique sans précédent. L'écriture vive et sensible d'Emannuel Pic et l'étonnante recherche graphique de Fred Bourguignon accompagnent le fondateur de la revue (...) Esprit dans la contemplation et la traversée d'un surprenant mur blanc. "J'ai souhaité à travers ce bref récit rendre aimable Emmanuel Mounier à une nouvelle génération d'hommes et de femmes confrontés à des questions anthropologiques inédites. Pour y parvenir, je n'ai pas voulu faire une nouvelle étude biographique car d'autres l'ont fait de merveilleuses manières avant moi (Domenach, Lurol). Il s'agit davantage d'un récit où défilent les moments clés de la vie du philosophe personnaliste et la progression de sa pensée sur la personne. Ainsi progressivement émerge sa vision de la personne en relation à travers les multiples visages qui l'ont poussé à se libérer et à s'engager contre tout ce qui peut réduire et contraindre la sublime vocation des êtres humains à expérimenter de vraies communions. (shrink)

Les stratégies matrimoniales élitaires entraînent des migrations d’individus des deux sexes, non seulement du conjoint qui rejoint l’autre, mais aussi de toutes sortes de personnes de milieux sociaux différents qui l’accompagnent. Ces migrations ne touchent cependant pas de la même manière hommes et femmes, même si certains aspects présentent des points communs. Il s’agit donc de les analyser, en plaçant le genre au cœur de la réflexion. Elles seront envisagées, dans le royaume des Francs du haut Moyen Âge, d’abord en (...) amont, pour comprendre comment elles sont décidées et réalisées, puis en aval, pour en saisir les conséquences en matière d’identité et d’intégration. (shrink)