Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and/or queer (LGBTQ) people experience profound health and social care inequalities. Research suggests that staff with negative attitudes towards LGBTQ people, are more likely to hold strong, traditional, religious beliefs. This article reports on a single case study with a newly qualified UK nurse who has since left the National Health Service. This is based on a single interview taken from a larger dataset derived from a funded scoping research study exploring religious freedoms, sexual orientation and (...) gender identity rights in older age care spaces. The interviewee described a toxic nursing culture on a hospital ward for older people. She recounted various incidents involving homophobic and transphobic practice and LGBTQ microaggressions which reportedly impacted the quality of nursing care. The findings are considered in relation to standards for anti-oppressive practice in nursing care, and how nursing students and staff can be supported in addressing practice relating to equality and diversity issues, specifically LGBTQ issues. They confirm the direct significance of addressing the needs and circumstances of LGBTQ people in nursing curricula and ongoing professional practice, and the need to further research, evaluate and progress translation of learning into improved quality care for diverse populations. (shrink)

It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference – like everyone else's – had to be cancelled. Once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. (...) In the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team's decisions. (shrink)

In this series of eight articles, the Australian Traumatic Brain Injury Initiative (AUS-TBI) consortium describes the Australian approach used to select the common data elements collected acutely that have been shown to predict outcome following moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) across the lifespan. This article presents the unified single data dictionary, together with additional measures chosen to facilitate comparative effectiveness research and data linkage. Consultations with the AUS-TBI Lived Experience Expert Group provided insights on the merits and considerations regarding data (...) elements for some of the study areas, as well as more general principles to guide the collection of data and the selection of meaningful measures. These are presented as a series of guiding principles and themes. The AUS-TBI Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Group identified a number of key points and considerations for the project approach specific to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including key issues of data sovereignty and community involvement. These are outlined in the form of principles to guide selection of appropriate methodologies, data management, and governance. Implementation of the AUS-TBI approach aims to maximize ongoing data collection and linkage, to facilitate personalization of care and improved outcomes for people who experience moderate-severe TBI. (shrink)

In this paper, I review recent attempts by experimental philosophers and psychologists to study folk metaethics empirically and discuss some of the difficulties that researchers face when trying to construct the right kind of research materials and interpreting the results that they obtain. At first glance, the findings obtained so far do not look good for the thesis that people are everywhere moral realists about every moral issue. However, because of difficulties in interpreting these results, I argue that better research (...) is needed to move the debate forward. (shrink)

Abstract:Disturbing cases continue to be published of patients declared brain dead who later were found to have a few intact brain functions. We address the reasons for the mismatch between the whole-brain criterion and brain death tests, and suggest solutions. Many of the cases result from diagnostic errors in brain death determination. Others probably result from a tiny amount of residual blood flow to the brain despite intracranial circulatory arrest. Strategies to lessen the mismatch include improving brain death determination training (...) for physicians, mandating a test showing complete intracranial circulatory arrest, or revising the whole-brain criterion. (shrink)

This study examines the influence of ethics instruction, religiosity, and intelligence on cheating behavior. A sample of 230 upper level, undergraduate business students had the opportunity to increase their chances of winning money in an experimental situation by falsely reporting their task performance. In general, the results indicate that students who attended worship services more frequently were less likely to cheat than those who attended worship services less frequently, but that students who had taken a course in business ethics were (...) no less likely to cheat than students who had not taken such a course. However, the results do indicate that the extent to which taking a business ethics course influenced cheating behavior was moderated by the religiosity and intelligence of the individual student. In particular, while students who were highly religious were unlikely to cheat whether or not they had taken a business ethics course, students who were not highly religious demonstrated less cheating if they had taken a business ethics course. In addition, the extent of cheating among highly intelligent students was significantly reduced if such students had taken a course in business ethics. Likewise, individuals who were highly intelligent displayed significantly less cheating if they were also highly religious. The implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Patients -- Clients -- Welfare assessment -- Clinical choices -- Achieving animal welfare goals -- Beyond the clinic.

Recently there has been an outpouring of consumer frustration over rising food and energy prices. Many politicians railed against “speculators” who allegedly drove up the prices of key necessities. Is speculation unethical? This article reviews the traditional arguments against speculation. Many of the standard criticisms confuse speculation with gambling. In much the same way as ethicists now draw distinctions between usury and normal business interest, we draw a distinction between socially useful speculation and gambling. Gambling involves taking on risk with (...) no plausible expectation of making a profit. Gambling may provide entertainment value to some people, but like other addictive activities causes grave harm to a subset of users. Speculation involves taking on a business risk with a plausible expectation that a profit will result. Speculators provide an important risk bearing service by taking on risks that others do not want. They help markets to function better by helping to incorporate information into prices as well as providing liquidity. Speculators may actually reduce shortages by causing quicker price increases that motivate producers to increase production and consumers to conserve. But even socially useful speculation may have an ethical dark side. Does such speculation cause damage by adding excess volatility to prices? Speculators may contribute to price bubbles. At what point does legitimate speculation become odious “price gouging?” We also draw an ethical distinction between speculation, which seeks to benefit from changing prices, and manipulation, actions taken to push prices away from their economically appropriate levels. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic defense of the single-case propensity account of probabilistic explanation from the criticisms advanced by Hanna and by Humphreys and to offer a critical appraisal of the aleatory conception advanced by Humphreys and of the deductive-nomological-probabilistic approach Railton has proposed. The principal conclusion supported by this analysis is that the Requirements of Maximal Specificity and of Strict Maximal Specificity afford the foundation for completely objective explanations of probabilistic explananda, so long as (...) they are employed on the basis of propensity criteria of explanatory relevance. (shrink)

Preface to the fifth edition -- A world of difference -- A universe charged with the grandeur of God : Christian theism -- The clockwork universe : deism -- The silence of finite space : naturalism -- Zero point : nihilism -- Beyond nihilism : existentialism -- Journey to the east : eastern pantheistic monism -- A separate universe : the New Age spirituality without religion -- The vanished horizon : postmodernism -- A view from the Middle East : Islamic (...) theism -- The examined life. (shrink)

The complex-systems approach to cognitive science seeks to move beyond the formalism of information exchange and to situate cognition within the broader formalism of energy flow. Changes in cognitive performance exhibit a fractal (i.e., power-law) relationship between size and time scale. These fractal fluctuations reflect the flow of energy at all scales governing cognition. Information transfer, as traditionally understood in the cognitive sciences, may be a subset of this multiscale energy flow. The cognitive system exhibits not just a single power-law (...) relationship between fluctuation size and time scale but actually exhibits many power-law relationships, whether over time or space. This change in fractal scaling, that is, multifractality, provides new insights into changes in energy flow through the cognitive system. We survey recent findings demonstrating the role of multifractality in (a) understanding atypical developmental outcomes, and (b) predicting cognitive change. We propose that multifractality provides insights into energy flows driving the emergence of cognitive structure. (shrink)

This final volume of The Works of William James provides a full record of James's teaching career at Harvard from 1872 to 1907.

Logical Form, Probability Interpretations, and the Inductive/Deductive Distinction.

The article studies Foucault’s treatment of religious culture and some theological responses to his approach. Foucault examined some modern practices as exhibiting a ‘Christianization-in-depth’, as, for example, in the extension of confession as a continuing practice in recent and current political culture. Confessions of faith characterize both fascism and communism and the confessional form of the latter showed extensive debt to the legacy of eastern Christian practices. The Soviet hermeneutics of the self contrasted with the western form because the self-knowledge (...) of the former is not a western confession of desires and movements of the soul but, rather, coming to a clarity in grasping how one is regarded in the eyes of others. The continuing vitality of religious forms in contemporary experience shows itself in American apocalyptic creeds. Foucault’s critical analysis aids a self-understanding in three areas of religious activism: self-denial; the envisioning of sexuality; the aspirations toward community and friendship. (shrink)

A relatively new and exciting area of collaboration has begun between philosophy of mind and ethics. This paper attempts to explore aspects of this collaboration and how they bear upon traditional ethics. It is the author's contention that much of Western moral philosophy has been guided by largely unrecognized assumptions regarding reason, knowledge and conceptualization, and that when examined against empirical research in cognitive science, these assumptions turn out to be false -- or at the very least, unrealistic for creatures (...) with our cognitive structures. The fundamental tension between the Western idea of morality (as basically rule-following) and the way in which people actually confront and experience moral dilemmas is a result of our failure to take the insights of cognitive psychology seriously. This failure has had a dramatic impact on not only how we teach ethics, but how we attempt to live out lives. (shrink)

Dynamics is not enough for cognition, nor it is a substitute for information-processing aspects of brain behavior. Moreover, dynamics and computation are not at odds, but are quite compatible. They can be synthesized so that any dynamical system can be analyzed in terms of its intrinsic computational components.

Our ability to survive in a world beset by looming global perils depends ultimately on our collective will to harness our intellects and change our behaviors. In order to respond appropriately, people must first believe that serious problems exist, that there are potential solutions, and that they have a role to play in finding and implementing them. Without such beliefs, individual change is unlikely. In order to promote belief change, it is important to understand how beliefs are learned, what their (...) functions are, and why they are so often resistant to change. These issues are discussed in this article, along with the role that social dilemmas play in inhibiting individually prosocial behavior. (shrink)

The historiography of Norman and early Angevin palatine lordships, like that of Magna Carta, was determined in the seventeenth century. The origin of the English palatinates is still customarily referred to the reign of William the Conqueror, as it was by the early writers, despite a good deal of later scholarship that argues against an Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman origin of these great liberties.