The use of psychopharmaceuticals to enhance human mental functioning such as cognition and mood has raised a debate on questions regarding identity and authenticity. While some hold that psychopharmaceutical substances can help users to ‘become who they really are’ and thus strengthen their identity and authenticity, others believe that the substances will lead to inauthenticity, normalization, and socially-enforced adaptation of behaviour and personality. In light of this debate, we studied how persons who actually have experience with the use of psychopharmaceutical (...) medication would view their ‘self’ or their authentic personal identity in relation to the use of medication. We have interviewed a number of adults diagnosed with ADHD and discussed their experiences with medication use in relation to their conceptions of self and identity. In the first part of this paper we illustrate that the concepts of identity and authenticity play an important and sometimes problematic role in experiences of ADHD adults. This shows that the question about identity and psychopharmacology is not merely an ‘academic’ issue, but one that influences everyday lives of real people. In order to answer the question whether psychopharmaceuticals threaten personal identity and authenticity, more than empirical research is needed. We also need to analyse the concepts of personal identity, authenticity and self: what do we mean when we are using statements as ‘a way of living that is uniquely our own’, ‘our true self’, or ‘who we really are’? In the second part of this paper we discuss two important philosophical views on personal identity, authenticity and self: the self-control view as elaborated by Frankfurt, and the self-expression view as proposed by Schechtman. We compare these with the experiences of our respondents to see which view can help us to understand the diverse and often conflicting experiences that people have with medication for ADHD. This will contribute to a better understanding of whether and in which cases personal identity and authenticity are threatened by psychopharmacology. (shrink)

This article re-introduces the notion of liturgical mysticism from both the perspectives of systematic theology and Church history. The authors adopt an interdisciplinary approach grounded in theology aiming to revisit the concept of liturgical mysticism in order to contribute to developing an adequate interpretive model for mystical texts. The article introduces the notion of liturgical mysticism firstly by a systematic-theological fundamental analysis of Christian mystical experience, showing the uniqueness of that experience and the possible interconnections with liturgy; secondly, by studying (...) liturgical mysticism historically, in the context of the Middle Dutch tradition in the sixteenth century, especially the Arnhem Mystical Sermons, in order to provide a solid historical basis for our argumentation; lastly, the article explores first the impact of our findings on the theological understanding and method in the study of mysticism, and second it notes some ramifications for contemporary Christian spirituality. The authors attempt to show that liturgical mysticism, understood and practised as a tradition bound and context sensitive religious experience, is historically plausible and theologically promising. (shrink)

ISI Books' Crosscurrents series makes available in English-usually for the first time-new translations of both classic and contemporary works by authors working within, or with crucial importance for, the conservative, religious, and humanist intellectual traditions. Book jacket.

This collection of essays addresses recent and historical changes in the ways in which listening has been conceived as a cultural agency and act. It argues that listening, by emancipating from an essentially implied, passive-receiving, and subjected position, has become an explicit factor in culture and the object of proactive collective and individual politics.

This article contributes to the debate on governance of emerging technologies, focusing in particular on the international level and taking into account the fact that these technologies are developed through a common effort of different stakeholders including governments, research communities, industry and civil society actors. These issues are explored from the perspective of communitarian ethical criticism of liberal social contract thinking, in order to enhance visibility of the influence collective non-state actors exercise on the development of these technologies. In particular, (...) the effect of different values in the discussion on emerging technologies on the perceived governance options is explored. A paradigm shift from defensive values such as security, risk and human rights to more optimistic values like peace, justice and integrity of creation is proposed and discussed. (shrink)

This book offers an updated and comprehensive phenomenology of norms and normativity. It is the first volume that systematically tackles both the normativity of experiencing and various experiences of norms. Part I begins with a discussion of the methodological resources that phenomenology offers for the critique of epistemological, social and cultural norms. It argues that these resources are powerful and have largely been neglected in contemporary philosophy as well as social and human sciences. The second part deepens the discussion by (...) studying the existential and moral-philosophical foundations of practical normativity. It takes on the task of illuminating the origins of normativity and offers phenomenological alternatives to the neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian approaches that dominate contemporary debates on the sources of normativity. The final part proceeds from practical normativity to the analysis of the guiding powers of values, perceptual norms, instincts and drives. These are different forms of intentionality that in various manners contribute to the constitution of human practices. By clarifying their divergences and their interrelations, the volume demonstrates that normativity is not one phenomenon but a complex set of various phenomena, with multiple origins and sources. Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on issues of normativity in phenomenology, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy. (shrink)

Informed decision-making (IDM) is considered an important ethical and legal requirement for population-based screening. Governments offering such screening have a duty to enable invitees to make informed decisions regarding participation. Various views exist on how to define and measure IDM in different screening programmes. In this paper we first address the question which components should be part of IDM in the context of cancer screening. Departing from two diverging interpretations of the value of autonomy—as a right and as an ideal—we (...) describe how this value is operationalized in the practice of informed consent in medicine and translate this to IDM in population-based cancer screening. Next, we specify components of IDM, which is voluntariness and the requirements of disclosure and understanding. We argue that whereas disclosure should contain all information considered relevant in order to enable authentic IDM, understanding of basic information is sufficient for a valid IDM. In the second part of the paper we apply the capability approach in order to argue for the responsibility of the government to warrant equal and real opportunities for invitees for IDM. We argue that additional conditions beyond mere provision of information are needed in order to do so. (shrink)

Epigenetic markers could potentially be used for risk assessment in risk-stratified population-based cancer screening programmes. Whereas current screening programmes generally aim to detect existing cancer, epigenetic markers could be used to provide risk estimates for not-yet-existing cancers. Epigenetic risk-predictive tests may thus allow for new opportunities for risk assessment for developing cancer in the future. Since epigenetic changes are presumed to be modifiable, preventive measures, such as lifestyle modification, could be used to reduce the risk of cancer. Moreover, epigenetic markers (...) might be used to monitor the response to risk-reducing interventions. In this article, we address ethical concerns related to personal responsibility raised by epigenetic risk-predictive tests in cancer population screening. Will individuals increasingly be held responsible for their health, that is, will they be held accountable for bad health outcomes? Will they be blamed or subject to moral sanctions? We will illustrate these ethical concerns by means of a Europe-wide research programme that develops an epigenetic risk-predictive test for female cancers. Subsequently, we investigate when we can hold someone responsible for her actions. We argue that the standard conception of personal responsibility does not provide an appropriate framework to address these concerns. A different, prospective account of responsibility meets part of our concerns, that is, concerns about inequality of opportunities, but does not meet all our concerns about personal responsibility. We argue that even if someone is responsible on grounds of a negative and/or prospective account of responsibility, there may be moral and practical reasons to abstain from moral sanctions. (shrink)

All stakeholders agree publicly that innovation and governance of emerging technologies should be done responsibly. However, the international debate on who should do what to contribute to this lofty goal is nowhere near a solution. The starting point of this paper is the issue of how and for which reason to engage stakeholders in addition to governments in the international governance of nanotechnology. This article examines the mainly North-American communitarian criticism of political liberalism and the related concept of subsidiarity in (...) order to shed new light on this discussion. The central research question is: Can a communitarian-subsidiarity perspective on the roles of governments, companies and civil society actors that hold a stake in emerging technologies clarify the grounds on which each actor should be expected to contribute to responsible research and innovation at the international level? After selecting some relevant aspects of a communitarian-subsidiarity model for a dialogue society, an analytical framework is proposed. This framework is then applied to the recent international dialogue on responsible governance of nanotechnology. The outcomes of the analysis are compared to the OECD planning guide on public engagement and outreach in nanotechnology, and indicators for monitoring progress in responsible global innovation are suggested. The main contribution of the selected communitarian-subsidiarity perspective is that it offers philosophical grounds for a return of citizens to the driving seat in cooperative international responsible innovation. (shrink)

Background: In the Netherlands, people with severe cognitive deficits due to Korsakoff syndrome are generally admitted to a specialized nursing home. Professional caregivers experience that these residents are often not aware of their deficits, and consequently, their willingness to accept care is relatively low. However, these residents need permanent support when performing daily tasks due to severe cognitive deficits. The combination of objective care needs and low subjective responsiveness makes caring for people with Korsakoff syndrome a complex undertaking. It is (...) unknown how professional caregivers deal with this complex task and how they manage the associated ethical challenges. Objectives: The aim of this study was to explore the professional caregivers’ perspectives on good care for residents with Korsakoff syndrome. Methods: A qualitative study design was used. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews. The Framework Method was used for the thematic analyses of the interview data. Participants and research context: Five specialized nursing homes participated in this study. Twelve professional caregivers, including nurses, nursing assistants, and support workers, were selected based on the ability to provide rich information on the study topics and to capture a variety of demographic and professional characteristics. Ethical considerations: The institutional review board of the VU University Medical Center Amsterdam approved the research protocol. The study was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects. Findings: Three perspectives on good care emerged: (1) making daily life a joint effort, (2) being steadfast, and (3) treating with respect. Discussion and conclusion: Professional caregivers try to achieve responsiveness in people with Korsakoff syndrome in three different ways. These perspectives reflect fundamentally different views on the care relationship and the autonomy of the resident. By elucidating the three perspectives, we hope to promote the practitioners’ reflection on their own ideas about good care for people with Korsakoff syndrome. (shrink)

"The fourth in a series that explores cultural and ethical values in Classical Antiquity, this volume examines the negative foils, the anti-values, against ...

Thirty years ago, H. Flashar discussed the introduction to an anonymous commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates. The text contains an interesting picture of Hippocrates as a culture hero, who saved suffering humanity by the introduction of systematic medicine. The first section of this introduction offers some complicated problems. It ends with an extremely long and difficult sentence, which, has not yet been explained quite satisfactorily, and it contains a curious use of the verb σαρκόω, combined with τν ύσιν, which (...) has led Flashar to suspect Christian influence. These two points are the subject of the first part of this paper. (shrink)

This article analyses current trends in and future expectations of nanotechnology and other key enabling technologies for security as well as dual use nanotechnology from the perspective of the ethical Just War Theory (JWT), interpreted as an instrument to increase the threshold for using armed force for solving conflicts. The aim is to investigate the relevance of the JWT to the ethical governance of research. The analysis gives rise to the following results. From the perspective of the JWT, military research (...) should be evaluated with different criteria than research for civil or civil security applications. From a technological perspective, the boundaries between technologies for civil and military applications are fuzzy. Therefore the JWT offers theoretical grounds for making clear distinctions between research for military, civil security and other applications that are not obvious from a purely technological perspective. Different actors bear responsibility for development of the technology than for resorting to armed force for solving conflicts or for use of weapons and military technologies in combat. Different criteria should be used for moral judgment of decisions made by each type of actor in each context. In addition to evaluation of potential consequences of future use of the weapons or military technologies under development, the JWT also prescribes ethical evaluation of the inherent intent and other foreseeable consequences of the development itself of new military technologies. (shrink)

Objective: Clock variance is an important statistic in many clinical and developmental studies. Existing methods require a large number of trials for accurate clock variability assessment, which is problematic in studies using clinical or either young or aged participants. Furthermore, these existing methods often implicitly convolute clock and memory processes, making it difficult to disentangle whether the clock or memory system are driving the observed deviations. Here we assessed whether twenty repeated productions of a well-engrained interval (1 second), a task (...) that does not incorporate memory updating nor the processing of feedback, could provide an accurate assessment of clock variability. Method: Sixty-eight undergraduate students completed two tasks: a 1-second production task in which they were asked to produce a 1-second duration by ending a tone by a keypress, and a multi-duration reproduction task. Durations presented in the reproduction task were tones lasting 1.17, 1.4 and 1.68 seconds. No feedback was presented in either task, and the order of presentation was counterbalanced between participants. Results: The observed central tendency in the reproduction task was better explained by models including the measures of clock variability derived from the 1-second production task than by models without it. Three clock variability measures were calculated for each participant (standard deviation, root mean squared residuals (RMSR) from an estimated linear slope, and RMSR scaled by mean production duration). The model including the scaled RMSR was prefered over the alternative models, and no notable effects of the order of presentation were observed. These results suggest that (1) measures of variability should account for drift, (2) the presentation of another timing task before a 1-second production task did not influence the assessment of the clock variability, and (3) the observed variability adheres to the scalar property and predicts temporal performance, and is thus a usable index of clock variability. Conclusion: This study shows that just 20 repeated productions of 1 second provide a reliable index of clock variability. As administering this task is fast and easy, it could prove to be useful in a large variety of developmental and clinical populations. (shrink)

Because it promises to benefit business and society simultaneously, strategic philanthropy might be characterized as a “happy marriage” of corporate social responsibility behavior and corporate financial performance. However, as evidence so far has been mostly anecdotal, it is important to understand to what extent empirics support the actual practice as well as value of a strategic approach, which creates both business and social impacts through corporate philanthropic activities. Utilizing data from the years 2006 to 2009 for a sample of the (...) Dow Jones Sustainability Index, which monitors the world’s most sustainable companies, the authors test a model of strategic philanthropy in which the dependent variable is evidence that a firm does or does not measure business and social impacts simultaneously. From the DJSI data, the authors find a proposed measure of overall corporate social performance to be the most important explanatory factor for engagement in strategic philanthropy. Moreover, this measure of CSP has a mediating effect on the relations between certain independent variables and strategic philanthropy. Other important findings provide support for the influence of the institutional factors industry and region on the likelihood that companies are practicing strategic philanthropy, but little effect of the business characteristics company size and profitability on that likelihood. (shrink)

There has been an increased focus within the AI ethics literature on questions of power, reflected in the ideal of accountability supported by many Responsible AI guidelines. While this recent debate points towards the power asymmetry between those who shape AI systems and those affected by them, the literature lacks normative grounding and misses conceptual clarity on how these power dynamics take shape. In this paper, I develop a workable conceptualization of said power dynamics according to Cristiano Castelfranchi’s conceptual framework (...) of power and argue that end-users depend on a system’s developers and users, because end-users rely on these systems to satisfy their goals, constituting a power asymmetry between developers, users and end-users. I ground my analysis in the neo-republican moral wrong of domination, drawing attention to legitimacy concerns of the power-dependence relation following from the current lack of accountability mechanisms. I illustrate my claims on the basis of a risk-prediction machine learning system, and propose institutional and project-specific solutions to mitigate domination. (shrink)

The Victorian polymath William Stanley Jevons is generally and rightly venerated as one of the great innovators of economic theory and method in what came to be known as the 'marginalist revolution'. This book is an investigation into the cultural and intellectual resources that Jevons drew upon to revolutionize research methods in economics. Jevons's uniform approach to the sciences was based on a firm belief in the mechanical constitution of the universe and a firm conviction that all scientific knowledge was (...) limited and therefore hypothetical in character. Jevons's mechanical beliefs found their way into his early meteorological studies, his formal logic, and his economic pursuits. By using mechanical analogies as instruments of discovery, Jevons was able to bridge the divide between theory and statistics that had become more or less institutionalized in mid nineteenth-century Britain. (shrink)

We analyze the cognitive strategies underlying performance in the Number task, a Math game that requires both arithmetic fluency and mathematical creativity. In this game all elements in a set of numbers have to be used precisely once to create a target number with basic arithmetic operations. We argue that some instances of this game are NP complete, by showing its relation to the well-known Partition problem. We propose heuristics based on the distinction in forward and backward reasoning. The Number (...) Game is part of Math Garden, a popular online educational platform for practicing and monitoring math skills using innovations in computerized adaptive testing. These educational games generate enormous amounts of rich data on children's cognitive development. We found converging evidence for the use of forward proximity heuristics in the data of Math Garden, consisting of more than 20 million answers to 1,700 items. Item difficulties and the structure of correct answers were analyzed. (shrink)

Nanomaterials are handled in global value chains for many different products, albeit not always recognisable as nanoproducts. The global market for nanomaterials faces an uncertain future, as the international dialogue on regulating nanomaterials is still ongoing and risk assessment data are being collected. At the same time, regulators and civil society organisations complain about a lack of transparency about the presence of nanomaterials on the market. In the project on Sustainable Nanotechnologies, a Decision Support System has been developed, primarily for (...) confidential use by risk and sustainability managers inside a company or consortium. In this article, we formulate a scenario concerning a potential role for an open access decision support system in negotiations on international agreements regulating trade in nanomaterials. The scenario includes design rules for decision support systems as well as procedures for use of such a system in stakeholder dialogue and policy-making on governance of these and other emerging technologies. This article incorporates analysis of results of stakeholder engagement on nanomaterials as well as literature and internet sources suggested by these stakeholders. (shrink)

It has long been noted that there are links between the Homeric portrayals of Odysseus' companions and the suitors. These two largely anonymous groups of Ithacans are connected not only by their ἀτασθαλίαι but also by the fact that by the end of theOdysseyboth groups will be dead. Clearly, these fatalities are – in their different ways – crucial to the story. Nagler regards the death of the suitors as a ‘grim inversion’ of the death of Odysseus' crew. Odysseus himself (...) is depicted both by the primary narrator and in his own narrative inOd.9–12 as making every effort to save his crew, all in vain. By contrast, he is the prime and highly effective instigator of the death of the suitors. (shrink)

Gender discrimination continues to be a problem in organizations. It is therefore important that organizations use performance evaluation methods that ensure equal opportunities for men and women. This article reports the results of an experiment to investigate whether and, if so, how the gender of the rater and that of the ratee moderate the relationship between the level of subjectivity in performance appraisals and organizational attractiveness. Participants in the experiment were 313 undergraduate students. We predicted, and indeed established, that as (...) the probability increases that employee performance is evaluated by a female manager, women expect more positive outcomes of subjective, but not objective evaluation processes. Our data did not support our expectation that as the probability of being evaluated by a female manager increases, men expect less positive outcomes of subjective evaluation processes. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of why women are over-represented in jobs with objective formula-based reward systems, such as piece-rate systems. They are also of interest to organizations that are looking for more ethical human resource management practices. (shrink)

The hopes and fears expressed in the debate on human enhancement are not always based on a realistic assessment of the expected possibilities. Discussions about extreme scenarios may at times obscure the ethical and policy issues that are relevant today. This paper aims to contribute to an adequate and ethically sound societal response to actual current developments. After a brief outline of the ethical debate concerning neuro-enhancement, it describes the current state of the art in psychopharmacological science and current uses (...) of psychopharmacological enhancement, as well as the prospects for the near future. It then identifies ethical issues regarding psychopharmacological enhancements that require attention from policymakers, both on the professional and on the governmental level. These concern enhancement research, the gradual expansion of medical categories, off-label prescription and responsibility of doctors, and accessibility of enhancers on the Internet. It is concluded that further discussion on the advantages and drawbacks of enhancers on a collective social level is still needed. (shrink)