HIV stigma and fears surrounding the disease pose a challenge for public health interventions, particularly those that target pregnant women. In order to reduce stigma and improve the lives of vulnerable populations, researchers have recognized a need to integrate different types of support at various levels. To better inform HIV interventions, the current study draws on social-ecological and evolutionary theories of reproduction to predict stigma and fear of contracting HIV among pregnant women in South India. The aims of this study (...) were twofold: compare the social-ecological model to a modified maternal-fetal protection model and test a combined model that included strong predictors from each model. The study took place in 2008–2011 in Mysore District, Karnataka, India. Using data from a cross-sectional survey and biological indicators of health, we statistically modeled social-ecological variables representing individual, interpersonal, and community/institutional levels. Participants were 645 pregnant women. The social-ecological and combined models were the best-fitting models for HIV-related stigma, and the combined model was the best fit for HIV-related fear. Our findings suggest that combining reproductive life history factors along with individual, interpersonal, and community/institutional factors are significant indicators of HIV-related stigma and fear. Results of this study support a multifaceted approach to intervention development for HIV-related stigma and fear. The combined model in this study can be used as a predictive model for future research focused on HIV stigma and fear, with the intent that dual consideration of social-ecological and evolutionary theories will improve public health communication efforts. (shrink)

Recently two distinct forms of rule-utilitarianism have been introduced that differ on how to measure the consequences of rules. Brad Hooker advocates fixed-rate rule-utilitarianism, while Michael Ridge advocates variable-rate rule-utilitarianism. I argue that both of these are inferior to a new proposal, optimum-rate rule-utilitarianism. According to optimum-rate rule-utilitarianism, an ideal code is the code whose optimum acceptance level is no lower than that of any alternative code. I then argue that all three forms of rule-utilitarianism fall prey to two fatal (...) problems that leave us without any viable form of rule-utilitarianism. (shrink)

We use the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to assess the reputational risks created by political investment opportunities that allow managers to spend unlimited and potentially undisclosed firm resources on independent political expenditures. This new opportunity raises important ethical questions, as it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, under current law for shareholders to hold managers accountable for this investment choice and the reputational risks it entails. Using firms’ known political activity as a proxy for (...) managers’ likely future use of independent political expenditures, we examine how market participants reacted to Citizens United, conditional on this prior activity and corporate governance attributes related to the concentration of decision rights in senior management and blockholders. The results of our analyses document that firms with both a high level of known political activity and CEO-chairperson of the board duality experienced negative abnormal returns in reaction to Citizens United. In contrast, firms with concentrated ownership experienced positive abnormal returns; however, as known political activity increased, investors discounted the benefits of concentrated ownership. These findings suggest that investors expect this expansion of firms’ political investment opportunities to amplify principal-agent problems inherent in corporate political activity. Additionally, our findings provide evidence for those deliberating the mandatory disclosure of firms’ investments in politics as a means of increasing managerial accountability to both shareholders and the public. (shrink)

After witnessing extraordinary scientific and regulatory efforts to speed development of and access to new COVID-19 interventions, patients facing other serious diseases have begun to ask “where’s...

"Readers of Badiou will have to take account of this remarkable book. Phelps shows how Saint Paul is not marginal to Badiou's philosophy but lies at the heart of it." - Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas "This book offers an important step forward in the theological reception of Alain Badiou's philosophy by exploring how Badiou, despite his radical atheism, nevertheless remains entagled in theology." - Frederiek Depoortere, Catholic University of Leuven The place of theology in Alain Badious writings is (...) key to understanding his thought. Badiou is one of the most influential theorists of recent times. Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-theology provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of the relationship between Badiou's philosophy and theology. Examining the full range of Badiou's writings, this provocative study explores how Badiou's philosophy relies on theology even if he claims otherwise and actively attempts to work against theology. Despite the complex questions discussed ranging across ontology, the theory of truth and the subject, philosophy and its conditions, and anti-philosophy this book presents a clear and accessible overview of the theological, religious and biblical themes which animate Badiou's philosophy. (shrink)

The aims of this paper are: (1) to present tense-logical versions of such classical notions as saturated and special models; (2) to establish several fundamental existence theorems about these notions; (3) to apply these powerful techniques to tense complexity.In this paper we are concerned exclusively with quantifiedK 1 (for linear time) with constant domain. Our present research owes much to Bowen [2], Fine [5] and Gabbay [6].

When the Argonauts reach the island of Lemnos, Apollonius of Rhodes tells us, they send their herald Aethalides to the ruler of the island. Such a means of establishing contact and requesting safe passage was the norm in the Homeric world; there heralds acted as intermediaries between commanders and subordinates or between groups of people. In preliterate societies, heralds facilitated communication: messages were transmitted through memorization and repetition rather than by means of writing. While verbatim repetition was no doubt a (...) necessary feature of this form of communication, its wholesale transference into Homeric poetry was not necessarily the logical corollary. Nonetheless, we know of such repetitions precisely because of their appearance in the Homeric poems. It is now widely accepted that such passages are a result of the oral style of composition in which the oral poet repeats passages just as he uses shorter formulaic phrases. The debate embedded in the A-scholia of the Iliad suggests that repeated passages were a source of contention already in antiquity. While it is more common to see the scholiasts trying to decide which passage is ‘correct’ and which should be athetized, this provides evidence that athetization was not a unanimous impulse. The scholiast defends 2.60–71, part of which is repeated for the third time, against Zenodotus. (shrink)

The requirement that moral theories be usable for making decisions runs afoul of the fact that decision makers often lack sufficient information about their options to derive any accurate prescriptions from the standard theories. Many theorists attempt to solve this problem by adopting subjective moral theories—ones that ground obligations on the agent’s beliefs about the features of her options, rather than on the options’ actual features. I argue that subjective deontological theories suffer a fatal flaw, since they cannot appropriately require (...) agents to gather information before acting. (shrink)

Institutional Review Boards have substantial power and authority over research with human subjects, and in turn, their decisions have substantial implications for those subjects, investigators, and the public at large. However, there is little transparency about IRB processes and decisions. This article provides the first comprehensive taxonomy of what transparency means for IRBs — answering the questions “to whom, about what, and by what mechanisms?” It also explains why the status quo of nontransparency is problematic, and presents arguments for greater (...) transparency from the perspective of a variety of stakeholders. IRB transparency will make boards more accountable, improve the quality of their decision-making, facilitate consistency in board decisions, permit empirical study of IRBs, promote research efficiency, and advance trust in the research enterprise, among a variety of other benefits. Regulators should promote IRB transparency, IRBs themselves should commit to sharing as much information as they can within the confines of confidentiality requirements, and investigators can endeavor to take matters into their own hands by sharing IRB correspondence and IRB-approved protocols and consent materials. (shrink)

Certain primitive Yoruba carry about with them boxes covered with cowrie shells, which they treat with special regard. When asked what they are doing, they apparently reply that the boxes are their heads or souls and that they are protecting them against witchcraft. Is that an interesting fact or a bad translation? The question is, I believe, partly philosophical. In what follows, I shall propound and try to solve the philosopher's question, arguing that it has large implications for the theory (...) of Social Anthropology. (shrink)

With growth in the quantity of business ethics journals in recent years, assessments of journal quality are helpful to ethics researchers and administrators, as researchers consider available publication venues, and administrators consider the value of faculty research. The few published evaluations of business ethics journals have predominantly utilized two methods of journal quality determination: citation analysis and surveys of active researchers. This study employs a novel method to assess business ethics journals: 83 Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business business (...) schools provided their internally developed journal lists that were used to evaluate faculty research, and the submitted lists were then analyzed for the presence and assessment of business ethics journals. This analysis yielded a ranking of 24 business-ethics-centric journals, and this ranking reflects the collective judgments of AACSB business school faculties. The results of this study are pragmatic in that the journal evaluation data employed metrics actually used by business schools to determine the quality of business ethics journals. These findings also provide additional impetus for the recognition of business ethics as a distinct business discipline and business ethics research as a unique field of scholarly endeavor. While studies of business ethics may be influential when they are published in non-BEC journals, such studies may be more powerfully impactful when published in BEC journals. (shrink)

What should we do if we cannot figure what morality requires of us? Holly M. Smith argues that the best moral codes solve this problem by offering two tiers, one of which tells us what makes acts right and wrong, and the other of which provides user-friendly decision guides. She opens a path towards resolving a deep problem of moral life.

_The first comprehensive examination in English of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View._.

Discussions of supererogation usually focus on cases in which the agent can choose among a finite number of options. However, Daniel Muñoz has recently shown that cases in which the agent faces an infinite chain of increasingly less good options make trouble for existing definitions of supererogation. Muñoz proposes a promising new definition as a solution to the problem of infinite cases. I argue that any acceptable account of supererogation must (1) enable us to accurately identify supererogatory acts in both (...) finite and infinite option cases. It must also (2) include a suitably related account of what makes one act more supererogatory than another for finite, infinite, single-choice (one agent choosing among several supererogatory options) and inter-choice (two different agents, each choosing a supererogatory option) cases. I further argue that the best current account of supererogation for finite cases works well for finite cases, but cannot handle infinite cases. However, Muñoz’s proposal cannot handle inter-choice cases in either finite or infinite cases. I conclude we still need an account for infinite cases, and may have to settle for separate definitions of supererogation for finite and infinite cases. (shrink)

In this paper we study a certain class of Lie algebras over commutative von Neumann algebras satisfying a certain finiteness condition. By using Boolean valued methods developed by Takeuti [8]-[11], we will establish the basic structure and representation theorems.

Since 2011, the research community had waited with bated breath as regulators contemplated for the first time bringing secondary research with nonidentifiable biospecimens under the Common Rule and dramatically tightening the criteria for waiving consent to biospecimen research. After considerable pushback from both researchers and patients and amid rumors of intractable disagreement among Common Rule agencies, the Final Rule published on the last day of President Obama's administration left out these troubling changes, and there was a collective sigh of relief. (...) Relief is appropriate, but celebration premature: researchers have little reason to avail themselves of the new broad consent option offered in the Final Rule, and the question of whether biospecimens ought to be treated as inherently identifiable has merely been postponed. (shrink)

Does it make sense to refer to bird song - a complex vocalization, full of repetitive and transformative patterns that are carefully calculated to woo a mate - as art? What about a pack of wolves howling in unison or the cacophony made by an entire rain forest? Redefining music as "the art of possibly animate things," Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies that blends musicological methods with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist (...) approaches that insist on a separation between culture and nature--approaches that appear increasingly untenable in an era defined by human-generated climate change--Musical Vitalities treats music as one example of the cultural practices and biotic arts of the animal kingdom rather than as a phenomenon categorically distinct from nonhuman forms of sonic expression. The book challenges the human exceptionalism that has allowed musicologists to overlook music's structural resemblances to the songs of nonhuman species, the intricacies of music's physiological impact on listeners, and the many analogues between music's formal processes and those of the dynamic natural world. Through close readings of Austro-German music and aesthetic writings that suggest wide-ranging analogies between music and nature, Musical Vitalities seeks to both rekindle the critical potential of nineteenth-century music and rejoin the humans at the center of the humanities with the nonhumans whose evolutionary endowments and planetary fates they share. (shrink)

I argue that alignment of linguistic representations and situation models in dialogue are qualitatively distinct. By virtue of the isomorphy between interlocutors' linguistic representations, interlocutors align their linguistic representations fully. However, evidence about situation models is indirect and mediated through language, with the result that alignment of situation models is only partial.

The compassionate treatment of animals has been the focal point of speeches and writings by one of the most influential Buddhist cleric-scholars on the Tibetan plateau today, Khenpo Tsultrim Lodrö of Larung Buddhist Academy. This essay surveys the Khenpo's broad-based advocacy for animal welfare and details his discrete appeals to nomads in eastern Tibet to forgo selling livestock for slaughter, to eat a vegetarian diet on religious holidays, to relinquish wearing animal fur, to protect wildlife habitat, and to liberate the (...) lives of animals. I focus on the modernist “this worldly” dimension of his advocacy, calling attention to how Tsultrim Lodrö goes beyond traditional scare tactics that emphasize the karmic effects of negative deeds in future lives and instead invokes compassion by attending to the lived experience and suffering of animals. In doing so, the Khenpo positions Buddhism as a civilizing force in order to reform certain Tibetan customs and mitigate the influence of Chinese modernity and state marketization policies. I argue that his strategy of “reverse orientalism” appropriates state civilizational discourse and reverses its terms. (shrink)

The cytoskeleton has a central role in eukaryotic biology, enabling cells to organize internally, polarize, and translocate. Studying cytoskeletal machinery across the tree of life can identify common elements, illuminate fundamental mechanisms, and provide insight into processes specific to less‐characterized organisms. Red algae represent an ancient lineage that is diverse, ecologically significant, and biomedically relevant. Recent genomic analysis shows that red algae have a surprising paucity of cytoskeletal elements, particularly molecular motors. Here, we review the genomic and cell biological evidence (...) and propose testable models of how red algal cells might perform processes including cell motility, cytokinesis, intracellular transport, and secretion, given their reduced cytoskeletons. In addition to enhancing understanding of red algae and lineages that evolved from red algal endosymbioses (e.g., apicomplexan parasites), these ideas may also provide insight into cytoskeletal processes in animal cells. (shrink)

The common sense that queer liberation is based upon a linear or progressive trajectory fails to account for the complexities and contradictions surrounding the current demand for LGBT equality and its place within intersecting social movements. This article uses the history of Marxist praxis, including Marcuse’s contributions, to argue for abandoning linear and stagist assumptions of gradual change in favor of a dialectical approach toward the intersection of identity formation and social struggle.