Background U.S. federal regulations require that certain ethical elements be followed to protect human research subjects. The location and clinical circumstances of a proposed research study can differ substantially and can have significant implications for these ethical considerations. Both the location and clinical circumstances are particularly relevant for research in intensive care units (ICUs), where patients are often unable to provide informed consent to participate in a proposed research intervention. Purpose Our goal is to elaborate on the updated 2013 U.S. (...) Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidance document regarding an exemption from the requirement of obtaining informed consent from patients or their surrogates and to address certain elements within that document, thereby assisting clinicians in developing a framework for emergency research in accordance with the regulatory bodies at their own institutions and in the United States. Methods Review of the 2011 and updated FDA guidance document on exemption from informed consent. Results The current process of obtaining informed consent within ICUs needs to be revisited, especially for research in which timely informed consent is not likely. In particular, the process of obtaining informed consent may not be appropriate or even ethical for critically ill patients in extremis who require an intervention for which there is no current acceptable standard of care and clinical equipoise exists. We provide clinicians with a viewpoint that further elaborates on the FDA guidance document. Limitations The viewpoints provided herein are those of the authors and are therefore inherently limited by the personal views of a selected few. Other clinicians or researchers may not interpret the FDA guidelines in a similar manner. Moreover, the discussion of a guideline document is a limitation in and of itself. The guidelines set forth by the FDA are precisely that—guidelines. Therefore, they may not be followed as outlined in the guidance document within one’s own institution. Our goal is that, by elaborating on the guidelines for planned research involving human subjects in the ICU, institutional regulatory bodies may gain a better understanding in drafting their own document when faced with a clinician or a researcher who wishes to conduct planned research in an ICU. Conclusions We believe that the interpretations provided will allow clinicians to safely undertake planned research in ICUs without endangering the main tenets of ethical research involving human participants. This research is needed for the advancement of care in the critically ill. (shrink)

This volume presents cutting-edge theory and research on emotions as constructed events rather than fixed, essential entities. It provides a thorough introduction to the assumptions, hypotheses, and scientific methods that embody psychological constructionist approaches. Leading scholars examine the neurobiological, cognitive/perceptual, and social processes that give rise to the experiences Western cultures call sadness, anger, fear, and so on. The book explores such compelling questions as how the brain creates emotional experiences, whether the "ingredients" of emotions also give rise to other (...) mental states, and how to define what is or is not an emotion. Introductory and concluding chapters by the editors identify key themes and controversies and compare psychological construction to other theories of emotion. (shrink)

The effort to revise the Declaration of Helsinki and the CIOMS Guidelines has sparked a sometimes vitriolic debate centering on the use of placebo controls.

Over the past 25 years, Graham Priest has ably presented and defended dialetheism, the view that certain sentences are properly characterized as true with true negations. Our goal here is neither to quibble with the tenability of true, assertable contradictions nor, really, with the arguments for dialetheism. Rather, we wish to address the dialetheist's treatment of cases of semantic pathology and to pose a worry for dialetheism that has not been adequately considered. The problem that we present seems to have (...) broader bite, afflicting both consistent and inconsistent proposals for resolving semantic pathology. Thus, while our primary goal is to uncover some important connections between dialetheism, semantic pathology, and other, more general issues, the problem that we pose might be a worry for anyone who aims to resolve semantic pathology - consistently or not. (shrink)

Feeling bad is one thing, judging something to be bad another. This hot/cold distinction helps resolve the debate between bipolar and bivariate accounts of affect. A typical affective reaction includes both core affect (feeling good or bad) and judgments of the affective qualities of various aspects of the stimulus situation (which can have both good and bad aspects). Core affect is described by a bipolar valence dimension in which feeling good precludes simultaneously feeling bad and vice versa. Judgments of affective (...) quality of opposite valence can occur simultaneously because the stimulus situation has many aspects. Affective reaction can also include an emotional meta-experience, which can, but rarely does, embrace simultaneous emotion categories of opposite valence. (shrink)

Collaboration requires agents to coordinate their behavior on the fly, sometimes cooperating to solve a single task together and other times dividing it up into sub‐tasks to work on in parallel. Underlying the human ability to collaborate is theory‐of‐mind (ToM), the ability to infer the hidden mental states that drive others to act. Here, we develop Bayesian Delegation, a decentralized multi‐agent learning mechanism with these abilities. Bayesian Delegation enables agents to rapidly infer the hidden intentions of others by inverse planning. (...) We test Bayesian Delegation in a suite of multi‐agent Markov decision processes inspired by cooking problems. On these tasks, agents with Bayesian Delegation coordinate both their high‐level plans (e.g., what sub‐task they should work on) and their low‐level actions (e.g., avoiding getting in each other's way). When matched with partners that act using the same algorithm, Bayesian Delegation outperforms alternatives. Bayesian Delegation is also a capable ad hoc collaborator and successfully coordinates with other agent types even in the absence of prior experience. Finally, in a behavioral experiment, we show that Bayesian Delegation makes inferences similar to human observers about the intent of others. Together, these results argue for the centrality of ToM for successful decentralized multi‐agent collaboration. (shrink)

Six studies tested the hypothesis that being reminded of our animal nature makes us feel disgust. Participants from three cultural groups indicated the intensity of their disgust reactions to pleasant and unpleasant animal reminder stories and pictures as well as to a statement directly reminding them of their animal nature. Findings did not support the hypothesis: Pleasant animal reminders reminded respondents of their animal nature, but were not disgusting. The direct reminder of our animal nature was not disgusting. There was (...) no significant correlation between disgust and being reminded of animal nature for disgusting animal reminders. Thus, some disgusting events remind us of our animal nature, but they are not disgusting because they remind us of our animal nature. Animal reminders per se are not disgusting. (shrink)

It is now—at least loosely—acknowledged that most health and clinical outcomes are influenced by different interacting causes. Surprisingly, medical research studies are nearly universally designed to study—usually in a binary way—the effect of a single cause. Recent experiences during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic brought to the forefront that most of our challenges in medicine and healthcare deal with systemic, that is, interdependent and interconnected problems. Understanding these problems defy simplistic dichotomous research methodologies. These insights demand a shift in our (...) thinking from ‘cause and effect’ to ‘causes and effects’ since this transcends the classical way of Cartesian reductionist thinking. We require a shift to a ‘causes and effects’ frame so we can choose the research methodology that reflects the relationships between variables of interest—one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many. One-to-one (or cause and effect) relationships are amenable to the traditional randomized control trial design, while all others require systemic designs to understand ‘causes and effects’. Researchers urgently need to re-evaluate their science models and embrace research designs that allow an exploration of the clinically obvious multiple ‘causes and effects’ on health and disease. Clinical examples highlight the application of various systemic research methodologies and demonstrate how ‘causes and effects’ explain the heterogeneity of clinical outcomes. This shift in scientific thinking will allow us to find the necessary personalized or precise clinical interventions that address the underlying reasons for the variability of clinical outcomes and will contribute to greater health equity. (shrink)

Several commentators have argued that Hegel's account of ‘self-consciousness’ in Chapter IV of the Phenomenology of Spirit can be read as an ‘immanent critique’ of Fichte's idealism. If this is correct, it raises the question of whether Hegel's account of ‘recognition’ in Chapter IV can be interpreted as a critique of Fichte's conception of recognition as expounded in the Foundations of Natural Right. A satisfactory answer to this question will have to provide a plausible interpretation of the ‘life and death (...) struggle’ as an immanent critique of Fichte's account of recognition. This paper aims to provide such an interpretation. The first part of the paper provides a discussion of Fichte's account of recognition that emphasizes its ‘epistemic’ concerns. The second part argues that Hegel's account of the ‘life and death struggle’ can be read plausibly as an immanent critique of Fichte's account of recognition. (shrink)

Tackling global injustice requires appropriate and effective institutions as well as cosmopolitan solidarity. This paper assumes that the ‘constitutionalized world society’ theorized by Habermas offers a viable proposal to make the protection and promotion of human rights more feasible. His account of solidarity, however, reveals a conundrum: If strong forms of solidarity grow out of shared political institutions and a related collective identity, but it is precisely those institutions that we need to enhance at the global level, then how can (...) we build sufficient solidarity to support this process? Habermas relies on a global consensus on human rights, but I argue that his version of cosmopolitan solidarity is too weak to motivate the measures needed to fully realize economic, social and cultural rights and the package of institutional reforms that he proposes. We thus need a narrative of the human condition that can lend additional support to the idea of human rights and cosmopolitan duties. I find the seeds of such a position, which I call cosmocommonism, in the work of Nancy. Having shown how this can motivate cosmopolitanism and support for human rights, I then consider in the conclusion its compatibility with the political institutions that Habermas proposes. (shrink)

Scientific explanation is an important goal of scientific practise. Philosophers have proposed a striking diversity of seemingly incompatible accounts of explanation, from deductive-nomological to statistical relevance, unification, pragmatic, causal-mechanical, mechanistic, causal intervention, asymptotic, and model-based accounts. In this dissertation I apply two novel methods to reexamine our evidence about scientific explanation in practise and thereby address the fragmentation of philosophical accounts. I start by collecting a data set of 781 articles from one year of the journal Science. Using automated text (...) mining techniques I measure the frequency and distribution of several groups of philosophically interesting words, such as "explain", "cause", "evidence", "theory", "law", "mechanism", and "model". I show that "explain" words are much more common in scientific writing than in other genres, occurring in roughly half of all articles, and that their use is very often qualified or negated. These results about the use of words complement traditional conceptual analysis. Next I use random samples from the data set to develop a large number of small case studies across a wide range of scientific disciplines. I use a sample of "explain" sentences to develop and defend a new general philosophical account of scientific explanation, and then test my account against a larger set of randomly sampled sentences and abstracts. Five coarse categories can classify the explanans and explananda of my cases: data, entities, kinds, models, and theories. The pair of the categories of the explanans and explanandum indicates the "form" of an explanation. The explain-relation supports counterfactual reasoning about the dependence of qualities of the explanandum on qualities of the explanans. But for each form there is a different "core relation" between explanans and explanandum that supports the explain-relation. Causation, modelling, and argument are the core relations for different forms of scientific explanation between different categories of explanans and explananda. This flexibility allows me to resolve some of the fragmentation in the philosophical literature. I provide empirical evidence to show that my general philosophical account successfully describes a wide range of scientific practise across a large number of scientific disciplines. (shrink)

The RNAi machinery is not only involved with post‐transcriptional degradation of messenger RNAs, but also used for targeting of chromatin changes associated with transcriptional silencing. Two recent papers determine the global patterns of gene expression and chromatin modifications produced by the RNAi machinery in fission yeast.(9, 10) The major sites include the outer centromere repeats, the mating‐type locus and subtelomeric regions. By comparison, studies of Arabidopsis heterochromatin also implicate transposons as a major target for silencing. Analyses of siRNA libraries from (...) Drosophila, nematodes and Arabidopsis indicate that major repeats at centromeres, telomeres and transposable elements are likely targets of RNAi. Also, intergenic regions are implicated as targets in Arabidopsis. BioEssays 27:1209–1212, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In 1975 the Clarendon Press at Oxford published Peter Nidditch's edition of John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding. In his Introduction Nidditch says that his edition “offers a text that is directly derived, without modernization, from the early published versions; it notes the provenance of all its adopted readings ; and it aims at recording all relevant differences between these versions”. As Nidditch goes on to acknowledge, the “relevant differences” were many, “requiring several thousand registrations both in the case (...) of material variants and in the case of formal variants ”. The textual history of Locke's Essay is extremely complicated. While there is no manuscript of the first edition of the book, there were four editions in Locke's lifetime, each new one containing extensive and significant revisions, as well as a posthumous edition published shortly after the author's death. There was a translation into French made with Locke's cooperation and published in 1700, and a Latin translation came out a year later. Nevertheless, Nidditch managed to record all the material variants in footnotes to the text, in a way that makes it fairly easy to track the changes that Locke made to successive editions of the book, and to locate points at which judgements had to be made as a critical text was established on the basis of the chosen copy text. Sometimes a critical edition succeeds in completely changing the way that a text is read. Peter Laslett's 1960 edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government is a good example. Nidditch's edition of the Essay did not have that kind of very dramatic effect on Locke scholarship. Rather, it made it possible for those without direct access to all the early editions to engage in careful, historically sensitive studies of Locke's account of human understanding. The result was a slow revolution in Locke studies that continues to shed new light on even the most familiar aspects of the Lockean philosophy. (shrink)

Truth-talk exhibits certain features that render it philosophically suspect and motivate a deflationary account. I offer a new formulation of deflationism that explains truth-talk in terms of semantic pretense. This amounts to a fictionalist account of truth-talk but avoids an error-theoretic interpretation and its resulting incoherence. The pretense analysis fits especially well with deflationism’s central commitment, and it handles truth-talk’s unusual features effectively. In particular, this approach suggests an interesting strategy for dealing with the Liar paradox. This version of deflationism (...) has advantages over the formulations currently available in the literature, mainly because it offers a more satisfying account of the generalizing role deflationary views take as truth-talk’s central function. Explaining the notion of truth in terms of pretense generates some special concerns, but none we cannot address through careful consideration of how pretense operates in truth-talk and of the attitudes instances of pretending involve. (shrink)

What is the cognitive significance of talking to ourselves? I criticize two interpretations of this function , and offer a third: I argue that inner speech is a genuine dialogue, not a monologue; that the partners in this dialogue represent the independent interests of experienced meaning and logical articulation; that the former is either silent or capable only of abbreviated speech; that articulation is a logical, not a social demand; and that neither partner is a full-time subordinate of the other. (...) I examine the views of Plato, Arendt, Gadamer, Ryle, Piaget and Vygotsky on the nature of inner speech, and the views of Gazzaniga and Dennett on the role of inner speech in the constitution of human consciousness. (shrink)

This paper raises the question of how a history of the philosophy of eighteenth-century Britain should be written. First, it describes the usual answer to this question, which divides the period into what happened before Hume, then Hume, then responses to Hume. It notes that this answer does not correspond well with how the period saw itself. It then considers how ‘philosophy’ is defined in Britain in the eighteenth century, taking into account dictionary definitions, book titles, and university syllabi. Obvious (...) differences between eighteenth-century and twenty-first-century philosophy are explored, including the idea that ‘natural philosophy’ is as much part of philosophy as moral philosophy, metaphysics, and logic, and the difficulty of making a distinction between philosophy and what we now call psychology. In the final section of the paper some difficulties are raised regarding the hypothesis that ‘enlightenment’ might provide an organizing concept for a more historically sensitive account of eighteenth-century British philosophy. (shrink)

William James indicated a “middle path” according to which religious experience yields something like knowledge for the mystic, but not a kind that others, who do not share his experience, are compelled to accept. Such a middle way is initially appealing, but how is it to be developed? Here I suggest three leading ideas—the epistemic analogue of “agent-relative permissions,” the complementary relationship between the Jamesian virtues of bold exploration and sober caution, and the kind of special access the lover (...) may claim with respect to knowledge of his beloved—with an eye to such development. Each is found helpful, but in ascending order of importance. (shrink)

It has been claimed that (1) computer professionals should be held responsible for an undisclosed list of “undesirable events” associated with their work and (2) most if not all computer disasters can be avoided by truly understanding responsibility. Programmers, software developers, and other computer professionals should be defended against such vague, counterproductive, and impossible ideals because these imply the mandatory satisfaction of social needs and the equation of ethics with a kind of altruism. The concept of social needs is debatable (...) with no one possessing the authority to impose their version of them. Similarly, the notion of “positive responsibility” is difficult to apply, does not effectively change computing practice, and confuses good (i.e., efficient) computer engineering with good (i.e. moral) computer engineering. (shrink)

This essay examines the evolutionary development of the “rights” concept. It argues that the concept is both relatively recent and fundamentally economic rather than abstractly philosophical. The essay is unique, not only in its explication of the concept, but also in the use of ngram data to visualize the correspondence between the evolving rights concept and growing aggregate prosperity.

Argues that, in advanced industrial societies, pluralistic religions and social systems and structures and multi-dimensional selces must replace the unworkable, outmoded order of monotheism, the sovereign statesm and the unitary self.

It has been claimed that (1) computer professionals should be held responsible for an undisclosed list of “undesirable events” associated with their work and (2) most if not all computer disasters can be avoided by truly understanding responsibility. Commentators of “A Critique of Positive Responsibility in Computing” argue that this is not Donald Gotterbarn’s view (Gotterbarn, JSEE 14(2):235–239, 2008) but that a critique of the view nevertheless raises significant moral issues within computing such as the ethical goals of a computing (...) profession, the appropriate ethical stance toward bugs, and the public good with respect to computing (Miller, JSEE 14(2):245–249, 2008). Commentators also argue that “A Critique”’s “profitable misreading” demonstrates the “moral ecology” of organizations “dedicated narrowly to financial success” and that other “moral ecologies” that are customer or quality driven can be shown to be more important or preeminent (Huff, JSEE 14(2):241–244, 2008). It is argued here that (1) the hyper-inflated reading of Gotterbarn’s and Ladd’s views on positive responsibility persists despite Gotterbarn’s explicit rejection of it, and that (2) such a reading of positive responsibility cannot be placed within a single moral ecology, nor can a single moral ecology be shown to be any more important or preeminent than others. (shrink)

The book starts with a scandal, that is, Socrates’s mortality as entailed in the Aristotelian syllogism,All men are mortal,Socrates is a man,Therefore, Socrates is mortal. The scandal pertains to the deduction of Socrates’s death from the logical connections of premises, which, according to Braude, renders it “meaningless.” But, what does this scandal have to do with a philosophical defense of intuition in medicine? For Braude, the scandal is emblematic of a crisis in medicine and philosophy—a crisis in which human mortality (...) is severed from its morality. Braude articulates the crisis with the following question:Where, therefore, between the cracks of universal logic and reifying medicine is there a place for the individual patient, for a response to the cry of pain to which medicine responds, or to the voice of injustice upon which moral philosophy is founded? For him, intuition provides a means to answer the question and thereby to resolve the crisis. It serves as “a bridge be .. (shrink)

The practice of paying research subjects for participating inclinical trials has yet to receive an adequate moral analysis.Dickert and Grady argue for a wage payment model in whichresearch subjects are paid an hourly wage based on that ofunskilled laborers. If we accept this approach, what follows?Norms for just working conditions emerge from workplacelegislation and political theory. All workers, includingpaid research subjects under Dickert and Grady''s analysis,have a right to at least minimum wage, a standard work week,extra pay for overtime hours, (...) a safe workplace, no faultcompensation for work-related injury, and union organization.If we accept that paid research subjects are wage earners likeany other, then the implications for changes to current practiceare substantial. (shrink)

In eighteenth‐century Britain, there was more than one way of thinking about poverty. For some, poverty was an essentially moral problem. Another way of conceiving of poverty was in economic terms. In this article, however, I want to consider some eighteenth‐century versions of the idea that poverty might be a political issue. What I have in mind is the idea that a society containing a large proportion of very poor people might be, just for that reason, an unstable and disordered (...) society. I argue, first, that this idea is central to Smith's treatment of poverty in The Wealth of Nations. Then, after a brief account of how Paine and Godwin imagined the end of poverty, I describe the further development and refinement of Smithian lines of thought in Burke and Malthus. My conclusion is that Smith, Burke, and Malthus constitute evidence that present‐day ideas of social justice derive more from the nineteenth century and subsequent developments in moral and political thought than from the early modern period. (shrink)

This paper divides firms in the Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&P 500) into two groups based on inclusion in or exclusion from the Domini Social Index (DSI). Inclusion in the DSI is interpreted as a positive indicator of ethical status. Using data for the 1992–2003 period, I provide evidence that chief executive officer (CEO) compensation, other executive compensation, and director compensation tend to be lower in DSI firms than in other firms in the S&P 500. This applies to the unconditional (...) group averages (and medians) and is particularly striking given that DSI firms as a group had better financial performance than the other firms. This finding is also true in a regression framework that controls for other influences on compensation, including firm size and financial performance. In a regression context, the estimated discount for CEOs of DSI firms is approximately 12% for both current compensation (salary and bonuses) and total compensation (including the value of options). These results are consistent with the expectation that some senior executives require a “compensating differential” to accept positions in firms with less attractive ethical status. It is also consistent with the expectation that some firms with positive ethical status might use more restraint in setting executive compensation. (shrink)

In a recent article in FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY, Alvin Plantinga advised Christian philosophers to philosophize in light of their fundamental beliefs as Christians. Believing that his discussion does not give proper weight to the necessary role of secular beliefs in modifying our Christian beliefs, in this article I propose that Christian beliefs and secular beliefs should be related more dialectically than Plantinga suggests--i.e., that neither should always be given precedence. I defend this proposal with several examples on a variety of (...) topics from the history of Christian thought and suggest how much weight to give to beliefs of each type. (shrink)

For at least the past several decades, medicine has been embroiled in a crisis concerning the nature of its professionalism. The fundamental questions that drive this ongoing crisis are primarily three. First, what is the nature of medical professionalism? Second, who are medical professionals? Third, what does medicine or these professionals profess or promise? In this paper, the professionalism crisis vis-à-vis these questions is examined and analyzed chiefly in terms of both Francis Peabody’s and Edmund Pellegrino’s writings. Based on their (...) writings, I introduce a conceptual framework for professionalism to address the crisis. In addition, I contend that to address the professionalism crisis adequately, medicine’s position within an evolving health care network must also be considered. To that end, I first discuss the genesis of the crisis in terms of the Flexner Report and especially Peabody’s response to it. Next, I explore how the crisis intensified during the twentieth century, particularly in terms of medicine’s ultimate scientification and eventual commercialization, and how Pellegrino reacted to this. I then propose a health care professionalism cycle and a care-competence cycle to provide a conceptual framework for addressing the crisis. I conclude that medicine’s position is no longer as the center of health care but rather as another node within a wider evolving health care network. And the resolution of medicine’s professionalism crisis depends on medicine’s positioning and defining itself in terms of the professionalism for each of the other professions within the health care network. (shrink)