SummaryHeterozygous 4.1 hereditary elliptocytosis results from the absence of one haploid set of protein 4.1, a major component of the red cell skeleton. Two successive epidemiological investigations revealed fifteen probands in the French Northern Alps. The frequency of this disease seems to be very high in four small villages isolated in the Aravis mountains. The genealogical study shows that eleven probands share common ancestors who lived eight or ten generations ago in these villages. Thus there was probably a founder effect (...) from one pair of ancestors, strengthened by endogamy. In contrast, four probands originate from another area and are not genealogically related. Recent results in molecular genetics support the present data. (shrink)

The proliferation of multistakeholder initiatives (MSIs) over the past years has sparked an intense debate on the political role of corporations in the governance of global business conduct. To gain a better understanding of corporate political behavior in multistakeholder governance, this article investigates how firms construct a political identity when participating in MSIs. Based on an in-depth case study of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh—an MSI established after the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory complex (...) in 2013 to improve working conditions in the Bangladeshi garment industry—we introduce the construct of a political CSR (corporate social responsibility) identity (PCSRI) and explore how firms construct their PCSRIs in MSIs. Employing a qualitative, inductive theory-building method, we analyze interviews and archival data to develop a framework that elucidates how companies construct their PCSRIs within a continuum ranging from conservative to progressive. We show that constructing a PCSRI involves enacting specific, yet interrelated, political strategies that are themselves shaped by several forces over time. This article contributes to the literature by providing a political perspective on organizational identity construction that extends the emerging integrative perspective in political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) research. We suggest that MSIs should be conceptualized as inherently political governance mechanisms that are driven by multidirectional and dynamic political processes of identity construction. Our study shows that corporate political engagement in MSIs is a more nuanced and complex phenomenon than presently theorized. (shrink)

As the usual regulatory framework did not fit well during the last Ebola outbreak, innovative thinking still needed. In the absence of an outbreak, randomised controlled trials of clinical efficacy in humans cannot be done, while during an outbreak such trials will continue to face significant practical, philosophical, and ethical challenges. This article argues that researchers should also test the safety and effectiveness of novel vaccines in wild apes by employing a pluralistic approach to evidence. There are three reasons to (...) test vaccines in wild populations of apes: i) protect apes; ii) reduce Ebola transmission from wild animals to humans; and iii) accelerate vaccine development and licensing for humans. Data obtained from studies of vaccines among wild apes and chimpanzees may even be considered sufficient for licensing new vaccines for humans. This strategy will serve to benefit both wild apes and humans. (shrink)

_The Foundations of Arithmetic_ is undoubtedly the best introduction to Frege's thought; it is here that Frege expounds the central notions of his philosophy, subjecting the views of his predecessors and contemporaries to devastating analysis. The book represents the first philosophically sound discussion of the concept of number in Western civilization. It profoundly influenced developments in the philosophy of mathematics and in general ontology.

In the first part of the paper, factual information is given about developments in European business ethics since it started on a more or less institutionalized basis, five or six years ago. In the second part some comments are presented on the meaning of the developments and the possible causes. Attention is given to resemblances and differences between American and European business ethics. In the short last part some suggestions are proposed about tasks business ethics will face in the next (...) decade. (shrink)

A. Either God can create a stone which He cannot lift, or He cannot create a stone which He cannot lift. If God can create a stone which He cannot lift, then He is not omnipotent. If God cannot create a stone which He cannot lift, then He is not omnipotent. Therefore, God is not omnipotent.In a paper published in Analysis I tried to show that any attempt to find something wrong with all arguments of the general form of A (...) above, any attempt to resolve the “paradox,” must fail, that the reason these attempts must fail is that at least some arguments of this form are essentially sound, and that the only thing which makes these arguments seem paradoxical, their conclusion to the effect that God is not omnipotent, is, like at least some versions of the arguments to this conclusion, quite correct. (shrink)

Such is John Stuart Mill's succinct exposition of the core of utilitarian theory. A contemporary philosopher has aptly described utilitarianism as ‘the combination of two principles: (1)the consequentialist principlethat the rightness, or wrongness, of an action is determined by the goodness, or badness, of the results that flow from it and (2)the hedonist principlethat the only thing that is good in itself is pleasure and the only thing bad in itself is pain. Although the consequentialistprinciple has attracted the most attention (...) in modern discussions of utilitarianism, it is the second principle which invites immediate comparison with the views of Plato. I propose therefore to start by comparing the Platonic and the utilitarian conceptions of the good in the hope that this will enable us to see too in what sense Plato's position is consequentialist, and whether his ethical and political theories in general can properly be described as utilitarian. (shrink)

The contributions in the first part Re-modelling logic of this volume take account of formal logic in the theory of rational argumentation.

Perhaps no word has received such varied treatment from philosophers as the word ‘good’. No doubt this is largely due to the fact that it is a word with an unusually wide range of use. Aristotle, for example, realised that it is a term that can be applied to substances, qualities, relations, actions, passivities, times and places, and we may notice that he was of the opinion that the term must have different meanings when applied in these different categories. Many (...) of the usages which are distinguishable in everyday speech have given rise to corresponding theories about the nature of goodness. Indeed if we survey the history of philosophical speculation about goodness, we find that there are just about as many theories about goodness as there are distinct uses of the word ‘good’. For example, goodness has been variously described as an unique quality, as a consequential property, as a relational property, etc., and the word ‘good’ has been described as a term of commendation or approval, and its attributive, predicative and instrumental senses, to name a few, have been distinguished. (shrink)

There is a standard tradition in the ancient sources, which makes its first appearance at Thucydides 1.138.5, that, when Themistocles had fled into exile and been given the equivalent of political asylum by the Persian King Artaxerxes, he was ‘given’ the three Asiatic Greek cities of Magnesia, Myus and Lampsacus. There has been a fair amount of scholarly controversy over how the King could ‘give’ Themistocles Lampsacus, a city of great strategic importance on the Hellespont, which, by the mid-460s, was (...) almost certainly within the ambit of the Delian League, i.e. no longer his to give. My concern in this paper is not with that political problem, but rather with a different, though related, issue – whether valid conclusions can be drawn from the Thucydides passage and the subsequent tradition for the social and economic history of these three cities in the classical period. I suggest that they cannot. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 6, Page 35-37, June 2012.

Cells are the fundamental building blocks of organisms and their organization holds the key to our understanding of the processes that control Development and Physiology as well as the mechanisms that underlie disease. Traditional methods of analysis of subcellular structure have relied on the purification of organelles and the painstaking biochemical description of their components. The arrival of high‐throughput genomic and, more significantly, proteomic technologies has opened hereto unforeseen possibilities for this task. Recently two reports(1,2) show how much can be (...) gleaned from the combination of analytical centrifugation, mass spectrometry and advanced statistical techniques focused on a high‐throughput analysis of the content and organization of plant and animal cells. The results reveal intriguing possibilities for the future and the possibility of mapping much of the known proteome onto our current map of the cell. BioEssays 28: 780–784, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The authors argue that while meaning holism makes massive error possible, it does not, as Donald Davidson fears, threaten interpretability. Thus they hold, in opposition to Davidson, that meaning holism need not be constrained by an account of meaning according to which in the methodologically most basic cases the content of a belief is given by the cause of that belief. What ensures interpretability, they maintain, is not that speakers' beliefs are in the main true, but rather that beliefs have (...) the contents they do because of events others can in principle identify and describe. (shrink)

The importance of non-codifying DNA polymorphism for the administration of justice is now well known. In Spain, however, this type of test has given rise to questions in recent years: Should consent be obtained before biological samples are taken from an individual for DNA analysis? Does society perceive these techniques and methods of analysis as being reliable? There appears to be lack of knowledge concerning the basic norms that regulate databases containing private or personal information and the protection that information (...) of this type must be given. This opinion survey and the subsequent analysis of the results in ethical terms may serve to reveal the criteria and the degree of information that society has with regard to DNA databases. In the study, 73.20% of the population surveyed was in favour of specific legislation for computer files in which DNA analysis results for forensic purposes are stored. (shrink)

In this paper, we respond to Andrew Avins's recent review of methods whose use he advocates in clinical trials, to make them more ethical. He recommends in particular, “unbalanced randomisation”. However, we argue that, before such a recommendation can be made, it is important to establish why unequal randomisation might offer ethical advantages over equal randomisation, other things being equal. It is important to make a pragmatic distinction between trials of treatments that are already routinely available and trials of restricted (...) treatments. We conclude that unequal randomisation could, indeed, be an ethical compromise between protecting the interests of participants and those of society. (shrink)