AUTHORITY AND INEQUALITY UNDER CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM: USA, USSR, AND CHINA by Barrington Moore, Jr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. 142 pp., $29.95.

Complex social and ethical problems are often most effectively solved by engaging them at the messy and uncomfortable intersections of disciplines and practices, a notion that grounds the InVisible Difference project, which seeks to extend thinking and alter practice around the making, status, ownership, and value of work by contemporary dance choreographers by examining choreographic work through the lenses of law, bioethics, dance scholarship, and the practice of dance by differently-abled dancers. This article offers a critical thesis on how bioethics (...) has come to occupy a marginal and marginalizing role in questions about the differently-abled body. In doing so, it has rendered the disabled community largely invisible to and in bioethics. It then defends the claim that bioethics – as a social undertaking pursued collaboratively by individuals from different disciplines – must take much better notice of the body and the embodied individual if it is to better achieve its ends, which include constructing a moral and just society. Finally, this article considers how the arts, and specifically dance, provides us with rich evidence about the body and our ability to respond positively to normally ‘othered’ bodies. It concludes that greater attention to empirical evidence like that being generated in InVisible Difference will help to expand the reach and significance of bioethics, and thereby its relevance to important questions about the status of bodies and bodily differences, which must be considered as central to its ambitions. (shrink)

We discuss some research that has examined approach motivational urges and how this research clarifies the definition of approach motivation. Our research and that of others have raised doubts about the commonly accepted definition of approach motivation, which views it as a positive affective state triggered by positive stimuli. We review evidence that suggests: (a) that approach motivation is occasionally evoked by negative stimuli; (b) that approach motivation may be experienced as a negative state; and (c) that stimuli are unnecessary (...) to evoke approach motivation. (shrink)

"More and more applied work in biology, anthropology, linguistics, and allied fields is now undergirded by the assumption that we are approaching a threshold of irreversible loss..." asserts Harmon in his preface. He undertakes investigation of the "converging extinction crises," presenting far-reaching philosophical and scientific discussion with particular attention to the connections between biological and cultural diversity. Harmon is identified as a cofounder of Terralingua, a non-profit organization supporting linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity, and as director of the (...) George Wright Society (advancing parks and other protected areas); his scientific or other credentials are not stated. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

For an object to be multilocated is for it to wholly occupy disjoint spatial regions simultaneously. If multilocation is possible, it is possible that a multilocated particle is wholly located at 1080 distinct locations, such that it constitutes a particle-for-particle duplicate of the actual universe. Such a universe would presumably be perceptually identical to the actual universe. If we take multilocation as possible, we are thus presented with two accounts between which our perceptual evidence cannot adjudicate: one wherein the universe (...) is constituted by many particles and another wherein it is constituted by one radically multilocated particle. Parsimony concerns dictate that the latter is the more rational to accept. Since this is absurd, we should reject that multilocation is possible. Mooney responds to the problem by arguing that distinct location is evidence of non-identity, even if acceptance of the possibility of multilocation entails that this evidence is not decisive. If this is right, then the evidence favors a theory featuring many particles. In this paper, I contend that our commitment to taking distinct location as evidence of nonidentity is motivated by a more fundamental intuition that does not apply in the relevant context. (shrink)

How does Christ's mediation affect the individual human being? And how does that effect on the individual human being's soul relate to the way of salvation that incorporates, in principle, all human beings? Harmon answers both questions by examining Augustine's narration of his own life, and his treatment of the universal way of salvation as it flows among men in society and as it flows through the individual both involve the reconciliation of elements divided by the effects of sin. (...) The healing of divisions among human beings and within human beings, in the thought of Augustine, is effected by the same agency: the redemptive action of the Incarnate Word. (shrink)

The term 'sociobiology' was introduced in E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) as the application of evolutionary theory to social behavior. Sociobiologists claim that many social behaviors have been shaped by natural selection for reproductive success, and they attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary histories of particular behaviors or behavioral strategies. This survey attempts to clarify and evaluate the aim of sociobiology. Given that a neutral account is impossible, this entry does the next best thing. It takes sociobiology as (...) well as its critics seriously. On the one hand, by demonstrating that current studies of evolution and human behavior are based on Darwin's arguments for evolution (properly updated), we gain a strong rationale for thinking that something closer to sociobiology than to disconnectionism is needed to properly understand human sociality. Nevertheless, this survey reconstructs sociobiology in its best light, according to its aims. Consequently, criticism of sociobiology as it is actually practiced is not ignored or dismissed. This approach reveals what is best about sociobiology, while remaining sensitive to many of the problems it has generated. (shrink)

An emerging trend in cognitive science is to explore central epistemological questions using psychological methods. Early work in this growing area of research has revealed that epistemologists’ theories of knowledge diverge in various ways from the ways in which ordinary people think of knowledge. Reflecting the practices of epistemology as a whole, the vast majority of these studies have focused on the concept of propositional knowledge, or knowledge-that. Many philosophers, however, have argued that knowing how to do something is importantly (...) different from knowing that something is the case. Hence, in this paper we turn our attention to people’s concept of knowledge-how. We present data from two experiments that employed a sentence recognition task as an implicit measure of conceptual activation. The data from this implicit measure suggest that, contrary to prominent intellectualist theories of know-how, according to which know-how is a species of propositional knowledge, people’s concept of know-how more closely aligns with anti-intellectualism, the view that knowing how to perform some task consists in having the appropriate skills or abilities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The literature regarding the Dark Triad of personality (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) has expanded rapidly during recent years with researchers evaluating the connections that these personality traits have with a variety of phenomena including philosophical beliefs and moral decision-making. The goal of the present study was to replicate and extend recent research concerning the associations that the Dark Triad had with anti-natalist beliefs (i.e., that it is morally wrong to procreate) by using multidimensional conceptualizations of these dark personality (...) traits and examining whether primal world beliefs mediate the associations that these dark personality traits have with anti-natalist beliefs. The results indicate that, as expected, specific dark personality traits (i.e., antagonistic narcissism, psychopathic meanness, psychopathic disinhibition, and antagonistic Machiavellianism) were positively associated with certain anti-natalist beliefs. In addition, the associations that these dark personality traits had with anti-natalist beliefs were sometimes mediated by the safe primal world belief (i.e., perceiving the world to be non-threatening and cooperative) and the enticing primal world belief (i.e., perceiving the world to be irresistibly fascinating). Discussion focuses on the implications of these results for the role that primal world beliefs play in the connections between dark personality traits and anti-natalist beliefs. (shrink)

Medthics is an online graphic novel series comprising of six issues . What is often viewed as pop culture escapism, this "comic book" series tackles the complex world of medicine and its moral/ethical intricacies. From topics about physician identity formation to humane patient care, Medthics brings to the forefront subject matter essential to clinical practice. The art of medicine is depicted through stylized characters as they live their lives through a fictional world inspired by true events.

_Reconfigures classic aesthetic concepts in relation to the novelty introduced by virtual bodies._.

This volume moves beyond ethics as problem-solving or ethics as etiquette to offer a look at ethics in primary care—as opposed to life-or-death—medical care. Professional Ethics and Primary Care Medicine deals with the ethics of routine, day-to-day encounters between doctors and patients. It probes beneath the hard decisions to look at the moral frameworks, habits of thought, and customs of practice that underlie choices. Harmon Smith and Larry Churchill argue that primary care, far from being merely a setting for (...) the rendering of care, provides a new understanding of both physician and patient, and thereby offers a fresh basis for medical ethics. (shrink)

The fundamental unit of assessment in the sociobiology debate is neither a field nor a theory, but a framework of group commitments. Recourse to the framework concept is motivated, in general, by post-Kuhnian philosophy of scientific change and, in particular, by the dispute between E. O. Wilson and R. C. Lewontin. The framework concept is explicated in terms of commitments about problems, domain, disciplinary relations, exemplars, and performance evaluations. One upshot is that debate over such charges as genetic determinism, reductionism, (...) adaptationism, and the biologization of human nature has been vexed. It has lost sight of human sociobiology's central problem, namely to help show that the modern synthesis is complete. (shrink)

Vaccines are not the only public health tool, but they are critical in routine and emergency settings. Achieving optimal vaccination rates requires timely access to vaccines. However, we have persistently failed to secure, distribute, and administer vaccines in a timely, effective, and equitable manner despite an enduring rhetoric of global health equity.

Explains how individuals are in charge of their own lives and can change the way they feel about choices and actions in their experience.

In this response paper I defend an alternative position to both Jennifer McMahon’s neo-Kantian view on the aesthetics of perceptual experience, and the sense-data theory that she rightly repudiates. McMahon argues that sense perception is informed by concepts “all the way out,” and that the empiricist notion of unmediated sensuous access to entities in the world is untenable. She further claims that art is demanding inasmuch as it compels one to engage in an open-ended, cognitive interpretive process with sensuous phenomena, (...) and that it is this very process that opens up a space for critique of the entrenched representational concepts by which we navigate the world. In contrast, I argue that the sensuous itself is a source of demand. Perceptual objects, in virtue of their material constitution, are inexhaustible plexuses of meaning that demand a kind of sensuous, interpretive response on the part of our bodily posture and orientation. Works of art offer opportunities for critique insofar as they reveal dimensions of sensuous reality hitherto covered over by status quo conceptual distributions. McMahon is right that sensuous objects are never simply given. But, I claim, she is wrong to suggest that it is only by way of conceptual mediation that we make contact with the world. On the contrary, the sensuous self-presentation of things is always at the same time a demand on our sensory apparatus that resists encapsulation by concepts. (shrink)

Critics of evolutionary psychology object that it is not rigorous science compared to other evolutionary science. Advocates reply that it is rigorous science, and that the critics are uninformed. Still, informed people having opposing preconceptions of what counts as rigor may reach opposing evaluative conclusions. I shall clarify the very idea of rigorous evolutionary histories in relation to the basic objection that “evolution without history” is not rigorous.

ABSTRACTGiven its intimate relationship with the human body and its environment, biotechnology innovation, and more particularly stem cell research innovations as a part thereof, implicate diverse social and moral/ethical issues. This paper explores some of the most important and controversial moral concerns raised by human embryonic stem cell research , focusing on concerns relating to the wellbeing of the embryo and the wellbeing of society . It then considers how and whether these concerns are dealt with in regulatory instruments in (...) Argentina, a southern developing country, examining in particular whether the values underlying these concerns have been translated into practical and effective rules reflective of the primary moral positions advanced. It concludes that Argentina's current state of stem cell research governance fails to consistently reflect the moral positions that have formed and is inadequate given Argentina's activity in this field. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology is a science in the making, working toward the goal of showing how psychological adaptation underlies much human behavior. The knee-jerk reaction that sociobiology is unscientific because it tells just-so stories has become a common charge against evolutionary psychology as well. My main positive thesis is that inference to the best explanation is a proper method for evolutionary analyses, and it supplies a new perspective on the issues raised in Schlinger's (1996) just-so story critique. My main negative thesis (...) is that, like many nonevolutionist critics, Schlinger's objections arise from misunderstandings of the evolutionary approach.Evolutionary psychology has progressed beyond telling just-so stories. It has found a host of ingenious special techniques to test hypotheses about the adaptive significance and proximate mechanisms of behavior. Naturalistic data using the comparative method combined with controlled tests using statistical analyses of data provide good evidence for a variety of hypotheses about behavioral control mechanisms — whether in nonhumans or in humans. For instance, the work of Gangestad and Thornhill on evolved mate preferences and fluctuating asymmetry of body type (FA) is a model of success. As the quantity and quality of evidence increase, we are entitled not just to regard such evolutionary hypotheses as preferable, but also as true. Such studies combine to show that the best explanation of the psychic unity of humankind — common patterns across societies, history, and cultures exposed by evolutionists — is the gendered, adapted, evolved species-typical design of the mind. (shrink)

The present research was designed to test whether the subjective experience of more effort related to more reward valuation as measured by a neural response. This prediction was derived from the theory of cognitive dissonance and its effort justification paradigm. Young adult participants (n = 82) engaged in multiple trails of a low or high effort task that resulted in a loss or reward on each trial. Neural responses to the reward (loss) cue were measured using EEG, so that the (...) event-related potential known as the Reward Positivity (RewP) could be assessed. Results revealed no significant differences between low and high effort conditions on the RewP. However, within the high effort condition, a more subjective experience of effort was associated with a larger RewP. This research extends past research on the effort justification paradigm of cognitive dissonance theory by suggesting that effort justification is associated with an implicit measure of reward valuation. It therefore challenges recent perspectives on dissonance processes that posit that these evaluative changes should only occur on explicit but not implicit measures. (shrink)