The complexities of how justice comes to be realized, and by which agents, is a relatively neglected element in contemporary theories of justice. This has left several crucial questions about agency and justice undertheorized, such as why some particular agents are responsible for realizing justice, how their contribution towards realizing justice should be understood, and what role agents such as activists and community leaders play in realizing justice. We aim to contribute towards a better understanding of the landscape of these (...) kinds of questions. First, we argue that theorists should distinguish between (i) agents who are responsible for realizing justice, but not committed to it, (ii) agents who are not responsible for realizing justice, but who are committed to it, and (iii) agents who are both responsible for and committed to realizing justice. Second, we discuss how to incorporate agents of justice more robustly into theorizing about justice. (shrink)

Background In the ethical and clinical literature, cases of parents who want treatment for their child to be withdrawn against the views of the medical team have not received much attention. Yet resolution of such conflicts demands much effort of both the medical team and parents. Objective To discuss who can best protect a child9s interests, which often becomes a central issue, putting considerable pressure on mutual trust and partnership. Methods We describe the case of a 3-year-old boy with acquired (...) brain damage due to autoimmune-mediated encephalitis whose parents wanted to stop treatment. By comparing this case with relevant literature, we systematically explored the pros and cons of sharing end-of-life decisions with parents in cases where treatment is considered futile by parents and not (yet) by physicians. Conclusions Sharing end-of-life decisions with parents is a more important duty for physicians than protecting parents from guilt or doubt. Moreover, a request from parents on behalf of their child to discontinue treatment is, and should be, hard to over-rule in cases with significant prognostic uncertainty and/or in cases with divergent opinions within the medical team. (shrink)

At the height of the COVID-19 crisis in the Netherlands a shortness of intensive care beds was looming. Dutch professional medical organizations asked a group of ethicists for assistance in drafting guidelines and criteria for selection of patients for intensive care treatment in case of absolute scarcity, when medical selection criteria would no longer suffice. This article describes the Dutch context, the process of drafting the advice and reflects on the role of ethicists and lessons learned. We argue that timely (...) interaction between clinical and ethical expertise is necessary since the distinction between medical and non-medical considerations is not as clearcut as sometimes assumed. Furthermore, pragmatic considerations related to the specifics of an epidemic are of importance, for example, in relation to prioritizing health care workers. As a consequence, any protocol already present before the pandemic would need alterations to fit the current situation. The ‘fair innings’ criterion we proposed, rephrased as an argument of intergenerational solidarity, was considered reasonable by professionals as well as patient organizations. While it is desirable to draft ethical guidelines in ‘peacetime’ as a matter of pandemic preparedness, the pressure of an actual crisis facilitates decision-making, although it will also complicate a more democratic approach. (shrink)

Increasing attention and efforts are being put towards engaging patients in health research, and some have even argued that patient engagement in research is an ethical imperative. Yet there is relatively little empirical data on ethical issues associated with PER. A three-round Delphi survey was conducted with a panel of early-career researchers involved in PER. One of the objectives was to examine the ethical dimensions of PER as well as ECRs’ self-perceived level of preparedness to conduct PER ethically. The study (...) was conducted among awardees of the Québec SPOR-SUPPORT Unit in Canada, who represent the next generation of researchers involved in PER. Many themes were addressed throughout the study, such as definition, values, patients’ roles, expected characteristics of patients, and anticipated challenges. Open-ended questions were used, and all quantitative data were collected through statements using 7-point Likert scales. Between April and November 2016, 25 ECRs were invited to participate; 18 completed both the first and second rounds, and 16 completed the third round. Panelists consisted of nine women and seven men with various backgrounds. The majority were between 25 and 44 years old. Panelists’ responses showed PER raises important ethical issues: 1) professionalization of patients involved in research ; 2) adequate remuneration of patients; 3) fair recognition of patients’ experiential knowledge; and 4) tokenism. While the panelists felt moderately prepared to confront these ethical issues, they reported being uncomfortable applying for an ethics certificate for a PER project. If PER is an ethical imperative, it is vital to establish clear ethical standards and to train and support the PER community to identify and resolve ethical issues. Despite their overall readiness to conduct PER, panelists did not feel adequately prepared to address many of these issues. It is not easy for ECRs to reconcile ethical desiderata and logistical imperatives. Additional research should focus on supporting the responsible conduct of PER, which, if not done, can undermine the credibility and feasibility of the entire PER enterprise. (shrink)

This paper articulates dignity as relational engagement in concrete care situations. Dignity is often understood as an abstract principle that represents inherent worth of all human beings. In actual care practices, this principle has to be substantiated in order to gain meaning and inform care activities. We describe three exemplary substantiations of the principle of dignity in care: as a state or characteristic of a situation; as a way to differentiate between socio-cultural positions; or as personal meaning. We continue our (...) analysis by presenting cases on dignity in care related to us in focus groups with medical professionals. Our empirical ethical lens is in this paper is to analyse, not the meaning of dignity, but the way in which it emerges in practices where it is pursued, within relationships between people, technologies, places, regulations, and the values cherished by or embedded in them. We show that professional caregivers recognize in the dignity of the person they care for their own dignity; giving up on the one implies no less than giving up on the other. This ‘mirrored experience’ of dignity expresses itself in professional’s engagement with the situation. The value of this engagement, we argue, lies not primarily in realizing the particular content of the values at stake. We point to the importance of engagement itself, even if the values engaged with cannot be realized to the full, and even if competing versions of dignity are at stake simultaneously. In this way the caregivers provide us with interesting examples of moral actorship in situations of conflicting values. (shrink)

Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut across various theories and domains of ecology. These assumptions should be clearly addressed, notably for the sake (...) of an effective comparison and integration across domains, and for assessing whether or not to use functional diversity approaches for developing ecological management strategies. The objective of this contribution is to identify and critically analyze the most salient of these assumptions. To this aim, we provide an “epistemic roadmap” that pinpoints these assumptions along a set of historical, conceptual, empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions. (shrink)

Ideals (or ideal values) help people to navigate in social life. They indicate at a very fundamental level what people are concerned about, what they strive for, and what they want to be affiliated with. Transferring this to a leader–follower analysis, our first study (n = 306) confirms that followers’ identification and satisfaction with their leaders are stronger, the more leaders match followers’ ideal leader values. Study 2 (n = 244) extends the perspective by introducing the novel concept of counter-ideals (...) (i.e., how an ideal leader should not be) as a second, non-redundant point of reference. Results confirm that a leader’s match on ideal and on counter-ideal values have independent effects in that both explain unique variance in followers’ identification and satisfaction with their leader. Study 3 (n = 136) replicates the previous results in an experimental scenario study and provides evidence for the proposed causal direction of the underlying process. We conclude that counter-ideal values might be an additional point of reference that people use to triangulate targets above and beyond ideal values and discuss the implications of our findings for value research and management. (shrink)

Au début de la deuxième vague de COVID-19, le 7 novembre 2020, était organisé le séminaire « Questions d’éthique » au Lieu Unique à Nantes (France). La conférence du Pr. Axel Kahn était axée sur la perspective éthique des relations entre information et médias, chercheurs et essais cliniques, liberté individuelle et démocratie sanitaire, mais également l’urgence des soins, le tri des patients et le confinement. Partant du caractère indispensable de l’ « éthique en temps de crise », titre de sa (...) conférence, il analyse sa pratique à travers le prisme de la liberté et de la responsabilité. (shrink)

In a century where humans and machines—powered by artificial intelligence or not—increasingly work together, it is of interest to understand human processing of multi-sensory stimuli in relation to attention and working memory. This paper explores whether and when supporting visual information with rhythmic auditory stimuli can optimize multi-sensory information processing. In turn, this can make the interaction between humans or between machines and humans more engaging, rewarding and activating. For this purpose a novel working memory paradigm was developed where participants (...) are presented with a series of five target digits randomly interchanged with five distractor digits. Their goal is to remember the target digits and recall them orally. Depending on the condition support is provided by audio and/or rhythm. It is expected that the sound will lead to a better performance. It is also expected that this effect of sound is different in case of rhythmic and non-rhythmic sound. Last but not least, some variability is expected across participants. To make correct conclusions, the data of the experiment was statistically analyzed in a classic way, but also predictive models were developed in order to predict outcomes based on a range of input variables related to the experiment and the participant. The effect of auditory support could be confirmed, but no difference was observed between rhythmic and non-rhythmic sounds. Overall performance was indeed affected by individual differences, such as visual dominance or perceived task difficulty. Surprisingly a music education did not significantly affect the performance and even tended toward a negative effect. To better understand the underlying processes of attention, also brain activation data, e.g., by means of electroencephalography, should be recorded. This approach can be subject to a future work. (shrink)

Ideals (or ideal values) help people to navigate in social life. They indicate at a very fundamental level what people are concerned about, what they strive for, and what they want to be affiliated with. Transferring this to a leader-follower analysis, our first study (n = 306) confirms that followers' identification and satisfaction with their leaders are stronger, the more leaders match followers' ideal leader values. Study 2 (n = 244) extends the perspective by introducing the novel concept of counterideals (...) (i. e., how an ideal leader should not be) as a second, non-redundant point of reference. Results confirm that a leader's match on ideal and on counter-ideal values have independent effects in that both explain unique variance in followers' identification and satisfaction with their leader. Study 3 (n = 136) replicates the previous results in an experimental scenario study and provides evidence for the proposed causal direction of the underlying process. We conclude that counter-ideal values might be an additional point of reference that people use to triangulate targets above and beyond ideal values and discuss the implications of our findings for value research and management. (shrink)

This new edition of Genevieve Lloyd's classic study of the maleness of reason in philosophy contains a new introduction and bibliographical essay assessing the book's place in the explosion of writing and gender since 1984.

Clifford, Dick The world outlook is rather grim. Greece is bankrupt, the efforts to cure the problem by making new loans to the banks and cutting living standards is likely only to postpone the date when bankruptcy is declared. Italy and Spain are in a similar position. Britain, Europe and the USA are loaded with debt, only a few countries like Iceland are adopting methods which are the reverse of what conventional economics requires and seem to be recovering from (...) their problems slowly. (shrink)

Developments in medical big data analytics may bring societal benefits but are also challenging privacy and other ethical values. At the same time, an overly restrictive data protection regime can form a serious threat to valuable observational studies. Discussions about whether data privacy or data solidarity should be the foundational value of research policies, have remained unresolved. We add to this debate with an empirically informed ethical analysis. First, experiences with the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) within (...) a European research consortium demonstrate a gap between the aims of the regulation and its effects in practice. Namely, strictly formalised data protection requirements may cause routinisation among researchers instead of substantive ethical reflection, and may crowd out trust between actors in the health data research ecosystem; while harmonisation across Europe and data sharing between countries is hampered by different interpretations of the law, which partly stem from different views about ethical values. Then, building on these observations, we use theory to argue that the concept of trust provides an escape from the privacy-solidarity debate. Lastly, the paper details three aspects of trust that can help to create a responsible research environment and to mitigate the encountered challenges: trust as multi-agent concept; trust as a rational and democratic value; and trust as method for priority setting. Mutual cooperation in research—among researchers and with data subjects—is grounded in trust, which should be more explicitly recognised in the governance of health data research. (shrink)

Engaging patients in research conduct and agenda setting is increasingly considered as an ethical imperative, and a way to transcend views of patients as passive subjects by fostering their empowerment. However, patient engagement in research is still an emerging approach with debated definitional and operational frameworks. This song addresses the sometimes difficult encounter and elusive mutual understanding between researchers and patients. “What is PER?” is an impressionistic illustration of the challenges and issues that can be found in the universe of (...) patient engagement in research. (shrink)

Wars and crises worldwide force millions of people to flee and seek refuge, often outside their countries of origin. What moral responsibilities do states have towards refugees? In this Ethical Annotation, Dr Jos Philips and his co-authors zoom in on the responsibilities of EU countries. They consider arguments in favour of and against admitting refugees and argue that EU countries must do at least at much as they can do at little cost, and perhaps even more.

In recent years, to protect the rights and welfare of human subjects, institutions in the USA have begun to set up programmes to monitor ongoing medical research. These programmes provide routine, onsite oversight, and thus go beyond existing oversight such as investigating suspected misconduct or reviewing paperwork provided by investigators. However, because of a lack of guidelines and evidence, institutions have had little guidance in setting up their programmes. To help institutions make the right choices, we used interviews and document (...) analysis to study how and why 11 US institutions have set up their monitoring programmes. Although these programmes varied considerably, we were able to distinguish two general types. ‘Compliance’ programmes on the one hand were part of the institutional review board office and set up to ensure compliance with regulations. Investigators’ participation was mandatory. Monitors focused on documentation. Investigators could be disciplined, and could be obliged to take corrective actions. ‘Quality-improvement’ programmes on the other hand were part of a separate office. Investigators requested to be monitored. Monitors focused more on actual research conduct. Investigators and other parties received feedback on how to improve the research process. Although both types of programmes have their drawbacks and advantages, we argue that if institutions want to set up monitoring programmes, quality improvement is the better choice: it can help foster an atmosphere of trust between investigators and the institutional review board, and can help raise the standards for the protection of human subjects. (shrink)

Fluorescence microscopy has provided a route to qualitatively analyze features of nuclear structures and chromatin domains with increasing resolution. However, it is becoming increasingly important to develop tools for quantitative analysis. Here, we present an automated method to quantitatively determine the enrichment of several endogenous factors, immunostained in pericentric heterochromatin domains in mouse cells. We show that this method permits an unbiased characterization of changes in the enrichment of several factors with statistical significance from a large number of nuclei. Furthermore, (...) the nuclei can be sorted according to the enrichment value of these factors. This method should prove useful to monitor events related to changes in the amount, rather than the presence or absence, of any factor. By adapting a few parameters, it could be extended to other nuclear structures and the benefit of using available software will permit its use in many biological labs. (shrink)

Philosophy's traditional "man of reason"—independent, neutral, unemotional—is an illusion. That's because the "man of reason" ignores one very important thing—the woman. Representing Reason: Feminist Theory and Formal Logic collects new and old essays that shed light on the underexplored intersection of logic and feminism.

Two experiments involving an international collaboration of experimenters sought to replicate and extend a previously published psi experiment on precognition by Daryl Bem that has been the focus of extensive research. The experiment reverses the usual cause–effect sequence of a standard psychology experiment using priming and reaction times. The preregistered confirmatory hypothesis is that response times to incongruent stimuli will be longer than response times to congruent stimuli even though the prime has not yet appeared when the participant records their (...) judgments. The confirmatory hypothesis for Experiment 1 was not supported. Exploratory analyses indicated that those participants who completed the English-language version rather than a translation showed a significant effect, as was the case in the original study; no significant departure from chance was found in data involving non-English translations. Experiment 2 sought to enhance the predicted effect by having each participant read either a pro-psi or an anti-psi statement at the beginning of the experiment to test the pre-recorded hypothesis that a pro-psi statement would produce a larger effect than an anti-psi statement. The results did not support the primary psi hypothesis and there was no effect in the English-language sample. However, there was mixed support for the effect of the psi statement on performance; those participants who received the pro-psi statement had a greater psi score than those who received the anti-psi statement. As in the original experiment, neither the experimenters’ nor participants’ beliefs were significantly associated with the dependent measure. In sum, the pre-registered confirmatory hypotheses were not supported. The importance of the personality variable Sensation Seeking, a component of extraversion, as a correlate of psi performance is discussed as are the challenges and implications for international collaborations and replication in controversial science. Keywords: priming; expectancy effect; retrocausation; consciousness; sociology; precognition; psi; replication Two experiments involving an international collaboration of experimenters sought to replicate and extend a previously published psi experiment on precognition by Daryl Bem that has been the focus of extensive research. The experiment reverses the usual cause-effect sequence of a standard psychology experiment using priming and reaction times. The preregistered confirmatory hypothesis is that response times to incongruent stimuli will be longer than response times to congruent stimuli even though the prime has not yet appeared when the participant records his or her judgments. The confirmatory hypothesis for Study 1 was not supported. Exploratory analyses indicated that those participants who completed the English-language version rather than a translation showed a significant effect, as was the case in the original study; no significant departure from chance was found in data involving non-English translations. Study 2 sought to enhance the predicted effect by having each participant read either a pro-psi or an anti-psi statement at the beginning of the experiment to test the pre-recorded hypothesis that a pro-psi statement would produce a larger effect than an anti-psi statement. The results did not support the primary psi hypothesis and there was no observed association between belief and experience of ESP and psi outcome. However, there was mixed support for the effect of the psi statement on performance; those participants who received the pro-psi statement had a greater psi score than those who received anti-psi statement. As in the original experiment, neither the experimenters’ nor participants’ beliefs or expectations were significantly correlated with the dependent measure. In sum, the pre-registered confirmatory hypotheses were not supported. The importance of the personality variable Sensation Seeking, a component of extraversion, as a correlate of psi performance is discussed as are the challenges and implications for international collaborations and replication in controversial science. (shrink)

The American Indian Movement, founded in 1968 in Minneapolis, burst into that turbulent time with passion, anger, and radical acts of resistance. Spurred by the Civil Rights movement, Native people began to protest the decades--centuries--of corruption, racism, and abuse they had endured. They argued for political, social, and cultural change, and they got attention. The photographs of activist Dick Bancroft, a key documentarian of AIM, provide a stunningly intimate view of this major piece of American history from 1970 to (...) 1981. Veteran journalist Laura Waterman Wittstock, who participated in events in Washington, DC, has interviewed a host of surviving participants to tell the stories behind the images. The words of Russell Means, Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, Eddie Benton Banai, Pat Bellanger, Elaine Salinas, Winona LaDuke, Bill Means, Ken Tilsen, Larry Leventhal, Jose Barreiro, and others tell the stories: the takeovers of federal buildings and the Winter Dam in Wisconsin, the founding of survival schools in the Twin Cities, the Wounded Knee trials, international conferences for indigenous rights, the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan and the Longest Walk for Survival, powwows and camps and United Nations actions. This is the inside record of a movement that began to change a nation. Dick Bancroft has been the unofficial photographer for the American Indian Movement since 1970. He has traveled the world to take these photographs. Laura Waterman Wittstock, a writer and media consultant, covered the early years of the American Indian Movement as a journalist. Rigoberta Menchú Tum, recipient of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, is an activist for indigenous rights in Guatemala. (shrink)

We give a systematic method of constructing extensions of the Kuznetsov-Gerčiu logic KG without the finite model property (fmp for short), and show that there are continuum many such. We also introduce a new technique of gluing of cyclic intuitionistic descriptive frames and give a new simple proof of Gerčiu’s result [9, 8] that all extensions of the Rieger-Nishimura logic RN have the fmp. Moreover, we show that each extension of RN has the poly-size model property, thus improving on [9]. (...) Furthermore, for each function f: omega -> omega, we construct an extension Lf of KG such that Lf has the fmp, but does not have the f-size model property. We also give a new simple proof of another result of Gerčiu [9] characterizing the only extension of KG that bounds the fmp for extensions of KG. We conclude the paper by proving that RN.KC = RN + (¬p vee ¬¬p) is the only pre-locally tabular extension of KG, introduce the internal depth of an extension L of RN, and show that L is locally tabular if and only if the internal depth of L is finite. (shrink)

People in Java traditionally internalise the value of ‘nrima’. It is a verb, from the noun ‘ trima’ in Javanese language (box 1). The closest word to ‘nrima’ in English is acceptance, although the meaning in local wisdom is deeper. Historically, the concept is known as ‘ nrima ing pandhum’, which means a wholehearted, sincere and grateful acceptance of life events (usually unfortunate) that are given to us. This nrima attitude will result in resilience, perseverance and adaptability in facing adversity. (...) Nowadays, it is commonly shortened to ‘ nrimo’ or ‘nrima’. Nrima in daily life of Javanese is practised as accepting an event wholeheartedly, with a grateful feeling of an event or something that is (usually) unfortunate. Nrima involves accepting without protest and without being destructive, but not apathetic (continuing to try to overcome).1 2 Nrima can involve active reflection, reasoning and an attitude to turn something one initially thought was unacceptable into acceptance. However, nowadays nrima is often misinterpreted as deliberate, fatalistic and passive acceptance of a hardship, including health and disease.3 This misinterpretation of nrima has ethical relevance in the patient–doctor relationship. Box 1 ### Description about the context and Javanese language About the context and Javanese language. (shrink)

In this article, we hypothesize that leaders who display group-oriented values (i.e., values that focus on the welfare of the group rather than on the self-interest of the leader) will be evaluated more positively by their followers than leaders who do not display group-oriented values. Importantly, we expected these effects to be more pronounced for leaders who are ingroup members (i.e., stemming from the same social group as their followers) than for leaders who are outgroup members (i.e., leaders stemming from (...) a different social group than their followers). We tested our hypotheses in two studies. Results of a field study ( N = 95) showed the expected relationship between leaders’ group-oriented values and followers’ identification with their leaders. A scenario study ( N = 137) replicated the results and extended it to followers’ endorsement of their leaders. Overall, these findings suggest that displaying group-oriented values pays off more for ingroup than for outgroup leaders. (shrink)

“Modern slavery,” a term used to describe severe forms of labor exploitation, is beginning to spark growing interest within business and society research. As a novel phenomenon, it offers potential for innovative theoretical and empirical pathways to a range of business and management research questions. And yet, development into what we might call a “field” of modern slavery research in business and management remains significantly, and disappointingly, underdeveloped. To explore this, we elaborate on the developments to date, the potential drawbacks, (...) and the possible future deviations that might evolve within six subdisciplinary areas of business and management. We also examine the value that nonmanagement disciplines can bring to research on modern slavery and business, examining the connections, critiques, and catalysts evident in research from political science, law, and history. These, we suggest, offer significant potential for building toward a more substantial subfield of research. (shrink)

One of the new ways used by companies to demonstrate their social responsibility is to encourage employee volunteering, whereby employees engage in socially beneficial activities on company time, while being paid by the company. The reasoning is that it is good for employee motivation (internal effects) and good for the company reputation (external effects). This article reports an empirical investigation of the internal effects of employee volunteering conducted amongst employees of the Dutch ABN-AMRO bank. The study showed that (a) socio-demographic (...) characteristics from employee volunteers markedly differ from those of non-volunteers and community volunteers and (b) employee volunteering seems to have positive effects on attitudes and behavior towards the organization. (shrink)