Let X be a compact metric space. A closed set K $\subseteq$ X is located if the distance function d(x, K) exists as a continuous real-valued function on X; weakly located if the predicate d(x, K) $>$ r is Σ 0 1 allowing parameters. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concepts of located and weakly located subsets of a compact separable metric space in the context of subsystems of second order arithmetic such as RCA 0 , WKL (...) 0 and ACA 0 . We also give some applications of these concepts by discussing some versions of the Tietze extension theorem. In particular we prove an RCA 0 version of this result for weakly located closed sets. (shrink)

We study Lebesgue and Atsuji spaces within subsystems of second order arithmetic. The former spaces are those such that every open covering has a Lebesgue number, while the latter are those such that every continuous function defined on them is uniformly continuous. The main results we obtain are the following: the statement “every compact space is Lebesgue” is equivalent to $\hbox{\sf WKL}_0$ ; the statements “every perfect Lebesgue space is compact” and “every perfect Atsuji space is compact” are equivalent to (...) $\hbox{\sf ACA}_0$ ; the statement “every Lebesgue space is Atsuji” is provable in $\hbox{\sf RCA}_0$ ; the statement “every Atsuji space is Lebesgue” is provable in $\hbox{\sf ACA}_0$ . We also prove that the statement “the distance from a closed set is a continuous function” is equivalent to $\Pi^1_1\hbox{-\sf CA}_0$. (shrink)

Adults typically take pleasure in the physical dimension of caring for children. Confusingly, much recent theology either condemns adults' physical enjoyment of children as exploitive or accepts it without comment. A convincing, unifying theological moral argument is needed to yoke the two instincts systematically. Although this essay acknowledges sexual abuse's harmful effects on children, its focus is the ordering of adult desire and behavior. Beginning from the premise that all human love is erotic—hoping in, if not expecting, pleasurable reciprocity—I draw (...) upon the work of Wendy Farley and Linda Holler to argue that healthy human love for children combines desires for the other with unpossessive delight, attunement, and realistic responsiveness. I examine the documented examples of female abuse of children and the example of male abuse in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita to demonstrate the usefulness of this discussion for an analysis of Western accounts of abuse, and I suggest that the approach may be illuminating in other cultures. (shrink)

BackgroundThe idea that individuals are responsible for their health has been the focus of debate in the theoretical literature and in its concrete application to healthcare policy in many countries. Controversies persist regarding the form, substance and fairness of allocating health responsibility to the individual, particularly in universal, need-based healthcare systems.ObjectiveTo examine how personal health responsibility has been framed and rationalised in Norwegian key policy documents on priority setting.MethodsDocuments issued or published by the Ministry of Health and Care Services between (...) 1987 and 2018 were thematically analysed. We developed a predefined conceptual framework that guided the analysis. The framework included: the subject and object of responsibility, the level of conceptual abstraction, temporality, normative justificatory arguments and objections to the application of personal health responsibility.ResultsAs an additional criterion, personal health responsibility has been interpreted as relevant if: the patient’s harmful behaviour is repeated after receiving treatment, and if the success of the treatment is conditional on the patient’s behavioural change. When discussed as a retrospective criterion, considerations of reciprocal fairness have been dominant. When discussed as a prospective criterion, the expected benefit of treatment justified its relevance.ConclusionPersonal health responsibility appears to challenge core values of equality, inclusion and solidarity in the Norwegian context and has been repeatedly rejected as a necessary criterion for priority setting. However, the responsibility criterion seems to have some relevance in particular priority setting decisions. (shrink)

Continuing the investigations of X. Yu and others, we study the role of set existence axioms in classical Lebesgue measure theory. We show that pairwise disjoint countable additivity for open sets of reals is provable in RCA0. We show that several well-known measure-theoretic propositions including the Vitali Covering Theorem are equivalent to WWKL over RCA0.

Lifestyle-induced diseases are becoming a burden on healthcare, actualizing the discussion on health responsibilities. Using data from the National Association for Heart and Lung Diseases ’s 2015 Health Survey, this study examined the public’s attitudes towards personal and social health responsibility in a Norwegian population. The questionnaires covered self-reported health and lifestyle, attitudes towards personal responsibility and the authorities’ responsibility for promoting health, resource-prioritisation and socio-demographic characteristics. Block-wise multiple linear regression assessed the association between attitudes towards health responsibilities and individual (...) lifestyle, political orientation and health condition. We found a moderate support for social responsibility across political views. Respondents reporting unhealthier eating habits, smokers and physically inactive were less supportive of health promotion policies. The idea that individuals are responsible for taking care of their health was widely accepted as an abstract ideal. Yet, only a third of the respondents agreed with introducing higher co-payments for treatment of ‘self-inflicted’ conditions and levels of support were patterned by health-related behaviour and left-right political orientation. Our study suggests that a significant support for social responsibility does not exclude a strong support for personal health responsibility. However, conditional access to healthcare based on personal lifestyle is still controversial. (shrink)

Over the last half century, United States debates about abortion focused at first on the question whether the fetus is a person with rights and later on whether involuntary conception—for instance, as a consequence of sexual assault—might mitigate a woman’s responsibilities toward the fetus she carries. This article argues that, whatever one’s position on these two questions, a third, morally salient dimension of most US women’s experiences of unwanted pregnancy deserves more attention: both abortion and birth burden women with their (...) inevitable moral failure to fulfill their responsibilities to persons who frequently have de facto last‐resort and unavoidable claims on them. Using Lisa Tessman’s work on moral failure and Pope Francis’s interventions on abortion and mercy, I argue that this moral anguish is not a simple emotional remainder. Structural evil, not necessity, is the primary driver of forced pregnancy choices that injure women and their children both materially and morally. Consequently, whether they abort or carry to term, women with unwanted pregnancies need mercy or forgiveness. But they also need compassionate solidarity: prophetic, active efforts to transform the social structures that make material harm and moral failure, and consequent moral anguish and moral injury, inevitable for many pregnant women. (shrink)

This paper asks how to account for vulnerable integrity in the temporal dynamism of human lives without relying on a subtractive vision of integral human nature, borrowing from presumed past or future rationality and maturity, or depending on an external attribution of dignity. Illustrating the challenges with vignettes from the author’s life, it argues inductively that human integrity includes morally inviolable vulnerability to others with whom we are in interdependent relationship and without whom we cannot develop or maintain our selves. (...) Others reside at the core of our integrity, for better and for worse, and we reside at theirs. Augustine’s accounts of memory, time, and the narrative self; Whiteheadian process thought’s understanding of continuity through change; and feminist theories of narrative all provide theological and philosophical justifications for this vision of integrity. John Wall’s and Johan Brännmark’s non-foundational approaches to integrity and human rights lead us to the same conclusion without entailing theological anthropological claims, ensuring its relevance in a pluralist culture. (shrink)

Childhood obesity is an increasing health problem. Prior empirical research suggests that, although discussing lifestyle behaviours with parents could help prevent childhood obesity and its health-related consequences, physicians are reluctant to address parental responsibility in the clinical setting. Therefore, this paper questions whether parents might be responsible for their children’s obesity, and if so, whether parental responsibility ought to be addressed in the physician–patient/parent encounter. We illustrate how different ideal-typical models of the physician–patient/parent interaction emphasise different understandings of patient autonomy (...) and parental responsibility and argue that these models advocate different responses to an appeal for discussing parents’ role in childhood obesity. We suggest that responsibility should be attributed to parents because of their parental roles in providing for their children’s welfare. We also argue that whether, and how, this responsibility gives rise to a requirement to act depends on the parents’ capacities. A deliberative-oriented physician–patient/parent interaction best captures the current ideals of antipaternalism, patient autonomy, and shared and evidence-informed decision-making, and might facilitate parental role development. We conclude that, while not discussing parental responsibility for childhood obesity in the clinical setting can be warranted in particular cases, this cannot be justified as a general rule. (shrink)

This article aims at summing up the reflections of a small group of psychologists who work in the domain of palliative treatment. The theory and methodology supporting it are borrowed by a group analysis approach; the group's purpose is a research based on the workers' experience elaboration, which aims at finding out both the specificities of the work apparatus with the people accompanied to the conclusion of their lives, and the main thematic areas of the relationship between healthcare team, patients, (...) and families. The work we present aims at introducing the most meaningful themes that emerged during group meetings: first of all, some service criticalities examined in the area of terminal healthcare and the workers' possible saturation and psycho-social discomfort quotas, generating in some cases a common sense of professional precariousness. (shrink)

CHILDREN ARE INCONSISTENTLY LABELED MORAL AGENTS IN SOME HIGHLY charged situations and denied that status in others. This essay draws on the writings of Nomy Arpaly, Lisa Tessman, and legal theorists to argue that both children and adults should nearly always be considered moral agents. But agency does not imply autonomy, ability to articulate rational reasons, or legal liability for either adults or children. Rather, all agents are dependent and conditioned. This quality divides them from a strict Augustinian vision in (...) which adults and children are fully and solely responsible for their actions. The subtext of Augustine's Confessions suggests that Augustine's biography can as easily be interpreted according to the present framework as according to his own thematic of concupiscence. (shrink)

ALTHOUGH "CHILD LABOR" IS UNIVERSALLY CONDEMNED, CHILD WORK will be a feature of global life for the foreseeable future because many children without adequate access to the requisites of human dignity must work to gain them. With help from the recent work of John Wall, Mary M. Doyle Roche, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, and others, the author claims children's right to work in Ethna Regan's sense, as an expression of a "situated universal." Rights on this view are real but contingent. They (...) are means to protect universal human goods and vulnerabilities under attack in particular situations. In this case, a situated right to work protects children's flourishing in a global culture still shaped by liberal and capitalist institutions, even as it criticizes that culture's injustices and exclusions. (shrink)

In a proleptically queer mode, Avery Cardinal Dulles’s Models of the Church argued that the church—a mystery—must bear multiple simultaneously true, dynamic, indispensable, yet inadequate labels. If so, one theological test of our ethics is their ability to sustain ecclesiological multiplicity. The anti-trans* policies of some US dioceses and of the Congregation for Catholic Education (CCE) document “‘Male and Female He Created Them’” embrace Dulles’s institution model to the point of exclusive authoritarian institutionalism, while other CCE documents, embracing open-ended, loving (...) dialogue across difference, favor his communion and community of disciples models without discarding the other dimensions of church. Dulles’s belief in the dynamism and temporality of ecclesiological models is permission to replace the institution model, which is vulnerable to abuse, with a kenotic model drawn from queer theology that installs apophasis and self-criticism as indispensable elements of ecclesiology. Ethics of sexuality and gender must pass this ecclesiological test. (shrink)

The 2016 American presidential campaign raised awareness of structural evil among segments of the population whose privilege has protected this knowledge, both making them self-conscious of their vulnerability as persons and revealing the role that the liberal narrative of progress has played in establishing and perpetuating structural evil. This moment of opportunity to shift both the political and the theological narrative demands liberal conversion: overcoming the temptations of anger, denial, and paralysis to embrace solidarity in vulnerability and power. An early (...) liberationist narrative that embraces utopian praxis rather than utopian ideology is both more theologically honest and more effective than the liberal narrative of progress. (shrink)

AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF THE NEAR-PROHIBITION OF TOUCH IN RElations between unequals, this essay addresses very different questions: When do more-powerful people owe touch to less-powerful people as a consequence of their moral responsibility to care and nurture? How are we to understand morally the enjoyment that powerful adults receive from such contacts with their charges? This essay draws on psychological literature on touch to argue that touch is a condition of human flourishing. Consequently, in many circumstances the obligation to (...) care not only permits but requires physical affection. It argues as well that the lines separating required, permitted, and forbidden touch are somewhat culture-dependent but nevertheless can be adjudicated. Finally, it suggests how traditional theologies and ethics of embodiment might support and be developed by these claims, showing that a positive ethic of touch shares the same theological foundations as the existing ethic of protection. (shrink)

We describe in detail the first experimental test that distinguishes between an event-based corpuscular model of the interaction of photons with matter and quantum mechanics. The test looks at the interference that results as a single photon passes through a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The experimental results, obtained with a low-noise single-photon source, agree with the predictions of standard quantum mechanics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals by Cristina L. H. TrainaSandra Sullivan-DunbarErotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals CRISTINA L. H. TRAINA Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 363 pp. $55.00In this ambitious and broadly interdisciplinary work, Cristina Traina begins from an experience that evades contemporary discussion: maternal sensual pleasure in the care of infants and young children. As (...) Traina notes, this experience puts two contemporary dogmas on a “collision course”: the widely accepted norm that sexual pleasure is intrinsically good and the widely accepted norm that sexual pleasure between unequals is intrinsically exploitative. As with other feminist turns toward neglected experience, this one calls for a recalibration of ethical models—in this case, a more complex and nuanced sexual ethic.Traina challenges readers to broaden notions of sexuality beyond androcentric models focused primarily on particular acts and on genital release. Such models are deeply graven in the Christian tradition and reinforced through reductive cultural appropriations of Freudian thought. But all human relations are embodied and involve desire, argues Traina, and are thus in some sense erotic, though most do not involve genital sexuality. Likewise, her readers are challenged to recognize the pervasiveness of relations of inequality in human life, when most Christian sexual ethics limit themselves to relations between equals, or at least understand a sexual ethic to aim at equality and mutuality.The book engages psychological resources demonstrating the human need for appropriate touch as well as the profound damage done by abusive touch. The need is so universal and foundational that Traina casts it as a human right; yet offering such touch appropriately is a subtle and challenging moral task beset with danger and the potential for self-deception.Traina diagnoses the sexual abuser as a fragmented self, one unable to perceive the concrete reality, needs, and experiences of her victim and bent on the doomed project of creating a whole self by appropriating and objectifying the other. Thus, at the heart of her ethic of sensuality between unequals is the notion of “attunement.” The attuned caregiver can acknowledge and fully experience inclinations, joys, and pains with a contemplative and compassionate awareness that allows considered and appropriate responses. The attuned care-giver lives with “unending, acknowledged desire” (177), a desire that glories in the goodness of the child in her care and, in so doing, creatively elicits subjectivity from her rather than manipulating her to meet the needs of the caregiver. [End Page 240]This ethical vision is developed in dialogue with a number of resources from Christian and secular sources. Traina helpfully nuances a Thomistic account of the virtue of temperance as a guideline for appropriate touch. She also develops revisionist accounts of Augustinian desire offered by Wendy Farley and Linda Holler. I found myself wondering whether some more traditional interpretations of Augustine might serve Traina’s project as well as or better than these revisionist understandings, which emphasize desire as a permanent state rather than directed toward final rest in God.Likewise, Traina works her way through the plethora of recent eros theologies, drawing in particular on recent interpretations of Plato’s Symposium that stress the creativity of eros in bringing to birth goodness and beauty as well as its potential for enabling a degree of other-regard. It seems to this reader that a contemporary ethic of sexuality between unequals calls for greater other-regard than the most generous interpretation of Plato’s ladder of love can suggest. However, Plato’s caution about the profound difficulty of directing eros toward the true good resonates with the difficulty of achieving the “erotic attunement” described by Traina.In any case, quibbles about the resources and interpretations that Traina mines to support her ethic do not lessen the originality, power, and importance of this book, which extends beyond sexual ethics to reframe questions about embodiment, (in)equality, and moral agency in profound and necessary ways.Sandra Sullivan-DunbarLoyola University, ChicagoCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Sfruttando alcune considerazioni, presenti in Richard (1997), riguardo questioni pragmatiche e psicologiche connesse alla semantica russelliana per i verbi psicologici si propone un modello teorico in cui, attraverso l’introduzione di alcuni enunciati strategici, ad es. “Lois non realizza che Superman è Clark Kent”, alcuni problemi connessi al diverso comportamento di Lois con gli individui Superman e Clark Kent, sembrerebbero risolti fornendoci corrette predizioni riguardo il comportamento di un agente razionale. Scopo di questo lavoro è estendere il modello ad alcuni casi (...) riguardanti l’etica delle credenze e mostrare, attraverso un caso paradigmatico nella letteratura specialistica, alcune potenziali conferme empiriche del modello stesso. (shrink)

Things are not the same when, even remaining the same, they are placed on the right or on the left, above or below, in front or behind. In the concrete space of our daily experience, in the space of myths and religions, we are not confronted with a neutral, homogeneous, infinite and isotropic spatiality, indifferent to directions. On the contrary, the possibility of a meaningful movement in space, rooted in my own body and in its praxis (as Kant shows in (...) his pre-critical and critical essays devoted to the space regions and to orientation), is assigned to the three main axes (above/below, right/left, front/behind) and their correspondent differences. The same applies for the space of images and pictures. The present issue of “Aisthesis” aims at exploring how the articulations above/below, right/left, front/behind produce a difference – syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and symbolic – in the iconic domain, and at investigating what theoretical models can be employed in order to understand such difference. (shrink)