Comparative Political Theory and Cross-Cultural Philosophy explores new forms of philosophizing in the age of globalization by challenging the conventional border between the East and the West, as well as the traditional boundaries among different academic disciplines. This rich investigation demonstrates the importance of cross-cultural thinking in our reading of philosophical texts and explores how cross-cultural thinking transforms our understanding of the traditional philosophical paradigm.

In adolescence, aspects of cognition that are required to deal with complex cooperation situations, such as mentalising and social value orientation, are still in development. In the Trust Game, cooperation may lead to better outcomes for both players, but can also lead to exploitation by the trustee. In the present study, we explore how mindreading, a crucial aspect of mentalising, and social value orientation (whether someone is prosocial or proself) are related to trust. In a group of 217 students (51% (...) girls, Mage = 15.1) social value orientation, mindreading and trust (using the Trust Game) were measured. The result show that social value orientation moderates the relation between mindreading and trust. In the group of prosocials, we find no correlation between mindreading and trust. In the group of proselfs, mindreading is negatively correlated to trust, indicating that proselfs use their mentalising skills to assess that the trustee is likely to exploit them. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, we have seen an increase in the use of medical-legal partnerships in health-care and/or legal settings to address health disparities affecting vulnerable populations. MLPs increase medical teams' capacity to address social and environmental threats to patients' health, such as unsafe housing conditions, through partnership with legal professionals. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses guidelines, we systematically reviewed observational studies published from January 1993-January 2016 to investigate the capacity of MLPs to address (...) legal and health disparities. We identified 13 articles for qualitative analysis from an initial pool of 355 records. The resulting pool of 13 articles revealed more information regarding the capacity of MLPs to address legal outcomes than their capacity to address health outcomes; only 4 studies directly addressed the impact of MLP intervention on patient wellbeing and/or patient utilization of healthcare services. We call for further evaluation/longitudinal studies that specifically address MLPs' short and long term effects upon patient health disparities. Finally, given the demonstrated capacity of MLPs to address unmet legal needs, and their evident potential in regards to improving health outcomes, we present the MLP model as a framework to address HIV-related legal and health disparities. (shrink)

Understanding a patient’s story is integral to providing ethically supportable and practical recommendations that can improve patient care. Important skills include how to elicit an individual’s story, how to weave different narrative threads together, and how to assist the care team, patients, and caregivers to resolve difficult decisions or moral dilemmas. Narrative approaches to ethics consultation deepen dialogue and stakeholders’ engagement to reveal important values, preferences, and beliefs that may prove critical in resolving care challenges. Recognizing barriers to narrative inquiry, (...) such as patients who are unable or refuse to share their story, is also important. In this article we offer specific steps and guidelines that ethicists can follow to systematically elicit and construct patients’ stories. We provide a case example to illustrate how a narrative approach to ethics consultation illuminates salient ethical issues that may otherwise go unnoticed. We argue that this approach should be part of every consultant’s tool kit. (shrink)

Adolescent pregnancy results from the complex interaction between various internal and external vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities persist after the infant's birth when the adolescent becomes a parent. Adolescent parents are unfairly stereotyped as unmotivated and incompetent. Some legislations prohibit adolescents from giving consent on the grounds of incompetency. Despite being different, “competency” is frequently used interchangeably with “capacity”; thus, incompetent individuals are often mistaken to lack capacity. Consequently, legally incompetent adolescents who became parents are frequently disregarded during their infant's decision-making process. (...) This article discusses the distinction between the competence and capacity of adolescent parents, the various vulnerabilities that contribute to an adolescent's incompetency, and advocates respect for the adolescent's capacity in making decisions for her infant. We propose a workflow for obtaining informed consent for infants born to adolescents ethically guided by the respect for individuals principle while staying within the country's legal framework. (shrink)

RAID-II is a high-bandwidth, network-attached storage server designed and implemented at the University of California at Berkeley. In this paper, we measure the performance of RAID-II and evaluate various architectural decisions made during the design process. We first measure the end-to-end performance of the system to be approximately 20 MB/s for both disk array reads and writes. We then perform a bottleneck analysis by examining the performance of each individual subsystem and conclude that the disk subsystem limits performance. By adding (...) a custom interconnect board with a high-speed memory and bus system and parity engine, we are able to achieve a performance speedup of 8 to 15 over a comparative system using only off-the-shelf hardware. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the mathematical foundations of the model for utility theory developed by Richard Jeffrey in The Logic of Decision [5]. In it I discuss the relationship of Jeffrey's to classical models, state and interpret an existence theorem for numerical utilities and subjective probabilities and restate a theorem on their uniqueness.

BackgroundDespite rapid growth of the scientific literature, no consensus guidelines have emerged to define the optimal criteria for editors to grade submitted manuscripts. The purpose of this project was to assess the peer reviewer metrics currently used in the surgical literature to evaluate original manuscript submissions.MethodsManuscript grading forms for 14 of the highest circulation general surgery-related journals were evaluated for content, including the type and number of quantitative and qualitative questions asked of peer reviewers. Reviewer grading forms for the seven (...) surgical journals with the higher impact factors were compared to the seven surgical journals with lower impact factors using Fisher’s exact tests.ResultsImpact factors of the studied journals ranged from 1.73 to 8.57, with a median impact factor of 4.26 in the higher group and 2.81 in the lower group. The content of the grading forms was found to vary considerably. Relatively few journals asked reviewers to grade specific components of a manuscript. Higher impact factor journal manuscript grading forms more frequently addressed statistical analysis, ethical considerations, and conflict of interest. In contrast, lower impact factor journals more commonly requested reviewers to make qualitative assessments of novelty/originality, scientific validity, and scientific importance.ConclusionSubstantial variation exists in the grading criteria used to evaluate original manuscripts submitted to the surgical literature for peer review, with differential emphasis placed on certain criteria correlated to journal impact factors. (shrink)

College students judged dog or cat misbehavior via questionnaire items. Common factor analysis yielded 3 dimensions of student response: the sinner ; the sin ; and mercy . Correlations among sinner, sin, and mercy factor scores supported predictions from causal attribution theory. Nevertheless, cross-tabulation analysis revealed that nearly 90% of all respondents endorsed mercy , regardless of the extent to which the animals were seen as sinners , or evaluations of the level of sin . Absolutely high average mercy scores (...) indicated an animal positivity bias. Results thus evoked the adage that "the quality of mercy is not strained." That is, regarding errant companion animals, cognitive responses to punish and to forgive are not always mutually exclusive options. (shrink)

Signaling through the Wnt/β‐catenin pathway is relayed through three multiprotein complexes: (1) the membrane‐associated signalosome, which includes the activated Wnt receptors, (2) the cytoplasmic destruction complex that regulates turnover of the transcriptional coactivator β‐catenin, and (3) the nuclear enhanceosome that mediates pathway‐specific transcription. Recent discoveries have revealed that Wnt receptor activities are tightly regulated to maintain proper tissue homeostasis and that aberrant receptor upregulation enhances Wnt signaling to drive tumorigenesis, highlighting the importance of signalosome control. These studies have focused on (...) the detailed process by which Wnt ligands engage their coreceptors, LRP5/6 and Frizzled. However, the components that constitute the signalosome and the regulation of their assembly remain undefined. In this review, we discuss Wnt/β‐catenin signalosome composition and the mechanisms that regulate signalosome assembly, including the role of biomolecular condensates and ubiquitylation. We also summarize the evidence for the presence of Wnt ligand‐independent signalosome formation. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss some of the mathematics behind an often quoted existence theorem from Richard Jeffrey's The Logic of Decision (Jeffrey 1990) in order to pose several new questions about the meaning and value of that mathematics for decision theory.

The precise orchestration of two opposing protein complexes – one in the cytoplasm (β‐catenin destruction complex) and the other at the plasma membrane (LRP6 signaling complex) – is critical for controlling levels of the transcriptional co‐factor β‐catenin, and subsequent activation of the Wnt/β‐catenin signal transduction pathway. The Wnt pathway component Axin acts as an essential scaffold for the assembly of both complexes. How the β‐catenin destruction and LRP6 signaling complexes are modulated following Wnt stimulation remains controversial. A recent study in (...) Science by He and coworkers reveals an underlying logic for Wnt pathway control in which Axin phosphorylation toggles a switch between the active and inactive states. This mini‐review focuses on this and two other recent studies that provide insight into the initial signaling events triggered by Wnt exposure. We emphasize regulation of the β‐catenin destruction and LRP6 signaling complexes and propose a framework for future work in this area. (shrink)

Addressing many social challenges requires both structural and behavioral change. The binary of an i- and s-frame obscures how behavioral science can help foster bottom-up collective action. Adopting a community-frame perspective moves toward a more integrative view of how social change emerges, and how it might be promoted by policymakers and publics in service of addressing challenges like climate change.

Comments on Sukjae Lee's "Berkeley on the Activity of Spirits," presented at Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Baltimore, MD, December 2007.

ABSTRACT Lee claims that foetuses and adult humans are phases of the same identical substance, and thus have the same moral status because: first, foetuses and adults are the same physical organism, and second, the development from foetus to adult is quantitative and thus not a change of substance. Versus the first argument, I contend that the fact that foetuses and adults are the same physical organism implies only that they are the same thing but not the same substance, much (...) as living adults and their corpses are the same thing (same body) but not the same substance. Against Lee's second argument, I contend that Lee confuses the nature of a process with the nature of its result. A process of quantitative change can produce a change in substance. Lee also fails to show that foetuses are rational and thus have all the essential properties of adults, as required for them to be the same substance. Against the pro‐choice argument from asymmetric value (that only the fact that a human has become conscious of its life and begun to count on its continuing can explain human life's asymmetric moral value, i.e. that it is vastly worse to kill a human than not to produce one), Lee claims that foetus's lives are asymmetrically valuable to them before consciousness. This leads to counterintuitive outcomes, and it confuses the goodness of life (a symmetric value that cannot account for why it is worse to kill a human than not produce one) with asymmetric value. (shrink)

This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exemplify the utility of our approach by proposing three specific operations of folding—proximation, universalisation and (...) normalisation. The article develops these three operations through four empirical vignettes, drawn from different settings that deal with algorithms in relation to AIDS, Zika and stock markets. In proposing this analytical approach, we wish to highlight the many different attachments and relations that algorithms enfold. The approach thus aims to produce accounts that highlight how algorithms dynamically combine and reconfigure different social and material heterogeneities as well as the ethical, normative and political consequences of these reconfigurations. (shrink)

It is widely known that one of the projects that was most preoccupying the late, and much regretted, Alexander Kazhdan in his latter years was a study of Byzantine literature that would bring this field into the modern era. For far too long Byzantine literature, he asserted, had been encased in the strait-jacket imposed by Krumbacher's magisterial Geschichte. Byzantinists were constrained by a Handbuch mentality whose bonds had been confirmed by the three volumes that replaced Krumbacher's single tome: Beck on (...) ‘Theologische Literatur’ and ‘Volksliteratur’ and Hunger on high-style secular literature. However humane the tone might appear at times in these reference works (Hunger's contributions being particularly noteworthy), nothing could disguise the fact that these books were taxonomic catalogues. Byzantium's literary output was categorised by genre, genres largely imposed by modern historians and not necessarily recognisable to any Byzantine: authors were disposed under a series of at times arbitrary divisions and it was virtually impossible to have a sense of any individual's total output; Psellos was perhaps the most notoriously splintered example. Furthermore, the content of these catalogues was resolutely pragmatic: names, dates, works, editions, contents. Qualitative assessments were eschewed, there was little interpretation of literary movements. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article defends the following argument: what makes you and I valuable so that it is wrong to kill us now is what we are (essentially). But we are essentially physical organisms, who, embryology reveals, came to be at conception/fertilisation. I reply to the objection to this argument (as found in Dean Stretton, Judith Thomson, and Jeffrey Reiman), which holds that we came to be at one time, but became valuable as a subject of rights only some time (...) later, in virtue of an acquired characteristic. I argue against this position that the difference between a basic, natural capacity and some degree of development of such a capacity is a mere difference in degree, that this position logically implies the denial of equal personal dignity, and that the selection of the required degree of development of a capacity is necessarily arbitrary. (shrink)

This paper presents a rereading of David Little and Sumner Twiss's Comparative Religious Ethics in the context of its initial reception and legacy within the field of religious ethics and argues that we can read it more charitably as a piece of pragmatism rather than as a work of formalism or semi-formalism. If one does not read Little and Twiss as committed positivists concerned with realizing a specific research program associated with the “twilight of logical empiricism,” then their theoretical and (...) methodological recommendations, illustrated in their case studies, appear more pragmatic in nature and less excessively rigid. By rereading Comparative Religious Ethics in this light, we can see more clearly its relevance for the field today, particularly regarding the fundamental importance of the discursive activity of practical reasoning, or the game of giving and asking for reasons, in the study of religious ethics. (shrink)

The work of Lee Preston and James Post helped to lay the foundation for one career in the field of business and public policy. They provided a theoretical framework for a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship of the corporation and society and those who are charged with its management.

This paper proposes an Interface Transparency Thesis concerning how linguistic meanings are related to the cognitive systems that are used to evaluate sentences for truth/falsity: a declarative sentence S is semantically associated with a canonical procedure for determining whether S is true; while this procedure need not be used as a verification strategy, competent speakers are biased towards strategies that directly reflect canonical specifications of truth conditions. Evidence in favor of this hypothesis comes from a psycholinguistic experiment examining adult judgments (...) concerning ‘Most of the dots are blue’. This sentence is true if and only if the number of blue dots exceeds the number of nonblue dots. But this leaves unsettled, e.g., how the second cardinality is specified for purposes of understanding and/or verification: via the nonblue things, given a restriction to the dots, as in ‘|{x: Dot(x) & ~Blue(x)}|’; via the blue things, given the same restriction, and subtraction from the number of dots, as in ‘|{x: Dot(x)}| – |{x: Dot(x) & Blue(x)}|’; or in some other way. Psycholinguistic evidence and psychophysical modeling support the second hypothesis. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a business paradigm that allows and enables the integration of environmental ethics into business decisions while creating a competitive advantage through the use of an ethical framework based on classical American pragmatism. Environmental ethics could be useful as an alternative paradigm for business ethics by offering new perspectives and methodologies to grant consideration of the natural environment. An approach based on classical American pragmatism provides a superior framework for businesses by focusing on experimentation and innovation, (...) driving a long-term focus, and providing actionable clarity. Under a pragmatic approach to ethics, the choice for sustainability becomes self-evident for business performance and moral reasons. (shrink)

Husserl is well known for his critique of the “mathematizing tendencies” of modern science, and is particularly emphatic that mathematics and phenomenology are distinct and in some sense incompatible. But Husserl himself uses mathematical methods in phenomenology. In the first half of the paper I give a detailed analysis of this tension, showing how those Husserlian doctrines which seem to speak against application of mathematics to phenomenology do not in fact do so. In the second half of the paper I (...) focus on a particular example of Husserl’s “mathematized phenomenology”: his use of concepts from what is today called dynamical systems theory. (shrink)

Rappaport's comment includes several errors. First, he conflates manipulation and deceit. Second, he confuses the rationalism of the evolutionary biological analysis of organisms with the rationalism (or lack thereof) of the motivational and cognitive structures of the organisms under study. Third, his moralistic judgment of my focus on manipulation implies that scientists should not only not explore but should also suppress such unsettling ideas. We will make little progress in understanding morality and in fostering truly moral behavior if we refuse (...) to acknowledge that moralistic statements may sometimes, and perhaps even often, be used in a manipulative way. (shrink)

I develop a “two-systems” interpretation of Husserl’s theory of belief. On this interpretation, Husserl accounts for our sense of the world in terms of (1) a system of embodied horizon meanings and passive synthesis, which is involved in any experience of an object, and (2) a system of active synthesis and sedimentation, which comes on line when we attend to an object’s properties. I use this account to defend Husserl against several forms of Heideggerean critique. One line of critique, recently (...) elaborated by Taylor Carman, says that Husserl wrongly loads everyday perception with explicit beliefs about things. A second, earlier line of critique, due to Hubert Dreyfus, charges Husserl with thinking of belief on a problematic Artificial Intelligence (AI) model which involves explicit rules applied to discrete symbol structures. I argue that these criticisms are based on a conflation of Husserl’s two systems of belief. The conception of Husserlian phenomenology which emerges is compatible with Heideggerean phenomenology and associated approaches to cognitive science (in particular, dynamical systems theory). (shrink)