Jennifer Church presents a new account of perception, which shows how imagining alternative perspectives and possibilities plays a key role in creating and validating experiences of self-evident objectivity. She explores the nature of moral perception and aesthetic perception, and argues that perception can be both literal and substantive.

BackgroundArtificial intelligence has been described as the “fourth industrial revolution” with transformative and global implications, including in healthcare, public health, and global health. AI approaches hold promise for improving health systems worldwide, as well as individual and population health outcomes. While AI may have potential for advancing health equity within and between countries, we must consider the ethical implications of its deployment in order to mitigate its potential harms, particularly for the most vulnerable. This scoping review addresses the following question: (...) What ethical issues have been identified in relation to AI in the field of health, including from a global health perspective?MethodsEight electronic databases were searched for peer reviewed and grey literature published before April 2018 using the concepts of health, ethics, and AI, and their related terms. Records were independently screened by two reviewers and were included if they reported on AI in relation to health and ethics and were written in the English language. Data was charted on a piloted data charting form, and a descriptive and thematic analysis was performed.ResultsUpon reviewing 12,722 articles, 103 met the predetermined inclusion criteria. The literature was primarily focused on the ethics of AI in health care, particularly on carer robots, diagnostics, and precision medicine, but was largely silent on ethics of AI in public and population health. The literature highlighted a number of common ethical concerns related to privacy, trust, accountability and responsibility, and bias. Largely missing from the literature was the ethics of AI in global health, particularly in the context of low- and middle-income countries.ConclusionsThe ethical issues surrounding AI in the field of health are both vast and complex. While AI holds the potential to improve health and health systems, our analysis suggests that its introduction should be approached with cautious optimism. The dearth of literature on the ethics of AI within LMICs, as well as in public health, also points to a critical need for further research into the ethical implications of AI within both global and public health, to ensure that its development and implementation is ethical for everyone, everywhere. (shrink)

Introduction -- From paideia to humanism -- Pietism and the problem of human craft (Menschen-Kunst) -- The harmonious harp-playing of humanity: J. G. Herder -- Ethical formation and the invention of the religion of art -- The rise of the Bildungsroman and the commodification of literature -- Authorship and its resignation in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister -- "The Bildung of self-consciousness itself towards science": Hegel.

Truth, Trust and Medicine investigates the notion of trust and honesty in medicine, and questions whether honesty and openness are of equal importance in maintaining the trust necessary in doctor-patient relationships. Jackson begins with the premise that those in the medical profession have a basic duty to be worthy of the trust their patients place in them. Yet questions of the ethics of withholding information and consent and covert surveillance in care units persist. This book boldly addresses these questions which (...) disturb our very modern notions of a patient's autonomy, self-determination and informed consent. (shrink)

Critical discourse analysis is a useful and productive qualitative methodology but has been underutilized within nursing research. In order to redress this deficiency the research presented in this article represents an exploration of the way in which critical discourse analysis may be applied to the analysis of public debates around policy for nursing practice. In this article the author discusses the history of the application of critical discourse analysis and provides an example of its application to the debate around the (...) use of nurse practitioners within the Australian healthcare system. (shrink)

In this collection of original essays, international scholars put Asian traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, into conversation with one or more contemporary feminist philosophies, founding a new mode of inquiry that attends to diverse voices and the complex global relationships that define our world. -/- These cross-cultural meditations focus on the liberation of persons from suffering, oppression, illusion, harmful conventions and desires, and other impediments to full personhood by deploying a methodology that traverses multiple philosophical styles, historical (...) texts, and frames of reference. Hailing from the discipline of philosophy in addition to Asian, gender, and religious studies, the contributors offer a fresh take on the classic concerns of free will, consciousness, knowledge, objectivity, sexual difference, embodiment, selfhood, the state, morality, and hermeneutics. One of the first anthologies to embody the practice of feminist comparative philosophy, this collection creatively and effectively engages with global, cultural, and gender differences within the realms of scholarly inquiry and theory construction. -/- http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16624-9/asian-and-feminist-philosophies-in-dialogue. (shrink)

This paper describes the unique values of, challenges within, and opportunities presented by embedded ELSI ethnography. Drawing from our six‐year embedded ELSI study of the WISDOM (Women Informed to Screen Depending on Measures of Risk) trial, we present three examples of the variable ways we engaged with the WISDOM trial's scientific team. WISDOM is a preference‐sensitive, pragmatic, randomized controlled trial of risk‐based breast cancer screening informed by genomics. Our embedded ELSI approach included multiple modes of engagement: (a) Trial investigators sought (...) bioethics expertise; for example, we were asked to consult on traditional bioethics topics such as consent as well as more complex questions about whether to implement a specific risk‐assessment approach on only one race‐defined group of trial participants. (b) As the ELSI investigators, we identified ethical concerns in issues that surfaced via ethnography and considered them in the Bioethics Working Group; for example, there were concerns about the implementation processes that the WISDOM team viewed as logistical challenges. (c) Our presence in WISDOM working group conversations and our expertise on classic social science topics, including race and gender, offered opportunities to engage on the spot with topics such as how to include transgender participants in a trial initially focused on “women's health”; through such engagement, the value of social science became clear to the trial investigators. The paper elaborates on the dynamic relationship between our ethnographic observations, the Bioethics Working Group discussions, and the contributions of each to our real‐time ELSI interventions in these examples. The methods and experiences we describe here suggest modes of engagement that, in combination, have the potential to expand the role of ELSI to offer real‐time intervention on issues related to equity, inclusion, and justice in genetic and genomic research. (shrink)

This paper applies a relational and familial ethic to address concerns relating to nursing home deaths and advance care planning during Covid‐19 and beyond. The deaths of our elderly in nursing homes during this pandemic have been made more complicated by the restriction of visitors even at the end of life, a time when families would normally be present. While we must be vigilant about preventing unnecessary deaths caused by coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes, some deaths of our elders are (...) inevitable. Thus, it is essential that advanced care planning occurs in a way that upholds the familial and relational aspects of elders’ lives that often matter to them the most. We invoke concepts from feminist ethicists like Hilde Lindemann and Eva Kittay and introduce Avery Weisman and Thomas Hackett’s concept of “appropriate death” to suggest better ways of planning for those deaths of our elderly that cannot be avoided. Our hope is to allow for deaths that are as meaningful as possible for both the elderly and the family members who survive them. (shrink)

Without proper recognition of the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racism that Asian Americans and other racial minorities in the United States are facing, we cannot successfully address structural b...

Jennifer Hornsby; V*—Which Physical Events are Mental Events?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 81, Issue 1, 1 June 1981, Pages 73–92, https://do.

The Rencontres de Bamako or ‘African Photography Biennial’, held in Mali’s capital city, is the only biennial devoted to photography from Africa and the only international photography festival routinely held on the African continent. Since its first edition in 1994, the event has picked up impressive momentum and has caught the attention of jet-setting curators, critics, and dealers and brought exposure and international patronage to a lucky handful of photographers. The biennial has also been controversial. Some of the reasons for (...) this controversy are familiar and echo long-standing issues in the presentation of African art to Euro-American audiences. Other criticisms raise broader problems connected with the globalization of markets and of image culture. These are increasingly voiced by a younger generation of artists, activists, and curators who are exploring new ways of working in and with the global art market. This essay seeks to give a critical and analytical account of the biennial, through conversations with key players, and it explores emergent strategies to avoid dependence on the old North-South funding structures. (shrink)

En 1997, Hong Kong volvió a China en el marco de la gobernanza conocida como «Un país, dos sistemas», que fue ideado para permitir a la China continental seguir siendo «socialista», mientras Hong Kong podía mantener su sistema capitalista. Sin embargo, la estrategia retórica y legal de mantener metafórica y constitucionalmente la distancia entre los dos lugares y seguir afirmando su soberanía y unidad, es ambigua y contradictoria. Este artículo explora estas ambiguas contradicciones (estratégicas, ideológicas y retóricas) y tras ello (...) su impacto en el debate sobre la democracia y el sufragio en Hong Kong, que su constitución, la Ley básica, promete para el futuro. (shrink)

Adherens (AJ) and tight junctions (TJ) maintain cell‐cell adhesions and cellular polarity in normal tissues. Afadin, a multi‐domain scaffold protein, is commonly found in both adherens and tight junctions, where it plays both structural and signal‐modulating roles. Afadin is a complex modulator of cellular processes implicated in cancer progression, including signal transduction, migration, invasion, and apoptosis. In keeping with the complexities associated with the roles of adherens and tight junctions in cancer, afadin exhibits both tumor suppressive and pro‐metastatic functions. In (...) this review, we will explore the dichotomous roles that afadin plays during cancer progression. (shrink)

The spirit of nursing and its healing art: a Jungian perspectiveTimely change is in the air as interest grows in the riches of nursing literature and other creative arts of nursing. Using Jungian and sociological concepts, this article takes a personal look at the literature's contribution to the profession. As the image of contemporary nursing is redefined, the power of the creative is evident, both in its grounding effect on individual practice and its unifying and strengthening potential for a changing (...) profession. (shrink)

Robinson argues that by certain threshold criteria, pregnant women qualify for a higher moral status by reason of their pregnancies. While her intention is to make this a status upgrade for women, we worry that it may result in a status downgrade for women as a class, by presupposing and reinforcing women’s value in relation to their reproductive labour. Historically, central to feminist analysis is resistance to reductive accounts of women in relation to their reproductivity. For example, de Beauvoir addressed (...) men’s transcendence and contrasted it with women’s immanence, a status distinction possible because women are mired in expectations that they will marry, produce children and remain in the domestic realm; and for her part, Firestone argued that biological reproduction underlies women’s inferiority to men and that ‘The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both (should) be replaced by…artificial reproduction’1 2 Her concern was to liberate women from expectations of biological reproduction so their productive value in society is not reduced to their reproductive contributions. A formidable body of analysis in this same vein cautions against collapsing the value of women into their pregnancies, so much so that some commentators even distinguish ‘mothering’ from gestation.3 Robinson’s argument that pregnant women qualify at a higher threshold of personhood emphasises …. (shrink)

Book synopsis: The aim of this collection of papers is to present different philosophical perspectives on the mental, exploring questions about how to define, explain and understand the various kinds of mental acts and processes, and exhibiting, in particular, the contrast between naturalistic and non-naturalistic approaches. There is a long tradition in philosophy of clarifying concepts such as those of thinking, knowing and believing. The task of clarifying these concepts has become ever more important with the major developments that have (...) taken place over the last century in the human and cognitive sciences - most notably, psychology, sociology, linguistics, neurophysiology, AI, and cognitive science itself. In all these sciences, there is a need to delineate the domain of the mental and to elucidate the key concepts and underlying assumptions. This need is widely recognized, but approaches and answers vary significantly. Some stress the representational features involved in most of our mental processes, others the inferential dimension; some stress the necessity of using empirical data, others the need to refine ideas before pursuing and drawing on empirical research. The papers collected in this volume are grouped into four parts, on language and thought, on knowledge, belief and action, on intentionality, and on naturalism. The volume will be welcomed by all those engaged and interested in debates about the mental in philosophy and the human and cognitive sciences. (shrink)

This article draws on the insight that people and communities have fundamental relationships with place. People are defined and shaped by place; and place is, in turn, defined and shaped by communi...

Mass incarceration and the aging prison population in the United States is an ethical crisis, understudied in empirical bioethics research. In this article, I share one woman’s narrative to illustrate how older Black women describe accessing healthcare while incarcerated and identify sites for bioethical exploration. I argue that, due to the punitive nature of prison healthcare interactions, wherein women are seen as inmates first and patients second, healthcare providers are caught in a trap of competing ethical commitments to their patients (...) and the state. As the prison population ages, these challenges will become more acute. Feminist bioethics has a critical role to play in imagining new possibilities for accessing, giving, and receiving care in the carceral context. (shrink)

In this article, we investigate the role of scientific and patient narratives on perceptions of the medical debate around gestational diabetes testing. Among medical scientists, we show that the narrative surrounding GDM testing affirms that future research and data will lead to medical consensus. We call this narrative trajectory the “deferred quest.” For patients, however, diagnosis and their subsequent discovery that biomedicine does not speak in one voice ruptures their trust in medical authority. This new distrust creates space for patients (...) to develop a Frankian quest narrative where they become the protagonist in their story. Additionally, across these different narratives, we observe how character is constructed and employed to negotiate trust. We conclude that healthcare providers should assess the narrative trajectory adopted by patients after diagnosis. Also, we suggest that providers acknowledge the lack of medical consensus to their patients. This veracity would foster women’s sense of trust in their provider as well as allow women to be active interlocutors in a debate that ultimately plays out in their deliberation about their body, pregnancy, and risk. (shrink)

Feelings associated with grief are regularly described as painful, but in what respect are they to be understood as pain? The acute pain of easily located tissue damage has long been the paradigm of pain in scientific and philosophical analysis, a dominance serving to obscure features the pain of grief might share not only with chronic pain but with some depressive suffering. Two examples of such commonalities are explored (ways pain feelings are experienced as in and of the body; and (...) are often recessed to the background of consciousness). These features are introduced to illustrate how a preliminary search for additional pain paradigms might proceed, and in so doing to offer some support for the proposal that pain endured as part of grieving may be real pain, not merely 'pain'. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Criminal law has been described as a species of political and moral philosophy; whether that can be said to be true is not at all certain, but criminal law can be the subject of philosophical study. The aim of this book is to explore some of the philosophical foundations of the criminal law. The distinguished English and North American contributors to this volume have all produced original and sparkling essays which will command attention.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.1 (2003) 57-62 [Access article in PDF] Listening to People Or Listening to Prozac?Another Consideration of Causal Classifications Jennifer Hansen Keywords causal classification, descriptivism, melancholia, neurasthenia, depression, cultural relativism. The shape and detail of depression have gone through a thousand cartwheels, and the treatment of depression has alternated between the ridiculous and the sublime, but the excessive sleeping, inadequate eating, suicidiality, withdrawal from social (...) interaction, and relentless despair are all as old as the hill tribes, if not as old as the hills. In the years since man achieved the capacity for self-reference, shame has come and gone; treatments for bodily complaints have alternated and crossed with treatments for spiritual ones; pleas to external gods have echoed pleas to internal demons. To understand the history of depression is to understand the invention of human being as we now know and are him. Our Prozac-popping, cognitively focused, semi-alienated postmodernity is only a stage in the ongoing understanding and control of mood and character. (Solomon 2001, 286) ALTHOUGH ANDREW SOLOMON clearly believes that "the shape and detail of depression have gone through a thousand cartwheels," Jennifer Radden gives us pause before assuming that depression is just another name for Dame Melancholy. Solomon's claim depends on a deeper metaphysical claim about the nature of depression and its causes. The current method of psychiatric nosology, descriptivism, does not necessarily support equating melancholia and depression. Furthermore, it appears that adopting descriptivism as the sole method of classifying mental disorders commits us to cultural relativist psychiatry. Below I reconsider whether we want to rule out causal classifications and suggest that embracing both descriptivism and causal classifications offer us greater possibilities in understanding human illness and culture.Although the occasion for Jennifer Radden's essay is to investigate whether or not melancholia and depression refer to the same thing, her essay detours into a consideration of extra-descriptivist models of psychiatric illness versus the descriptivism of current psychiatric nosology. This detour turns out to be warranted; her purely academic question yields to a timelier question concerning the proper methodology for classifying mental disorders. Whereas debates about psychiatric nosology are perennial, the recent success of the new generation of antidepressants [End Page 57] is reviving biological psychiatry and its search for the neurochemical origins of depression. Hence, embedded in Radden's question concerning whether or not melancholia is the same thing as clinical depression, is another important question concerning the causes of mental illness, particularly depression.Currently, with its descriptivist approach, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) does not classify mental illness, such as clinical depression, based on underlying causes. The cluster of symptoms and behavioral signs that lead a clinician to diagnose one as depressed that are contained in either the DSM or the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) may be too fuzzy or elusive to give any clear distinction between major depression, mild depression, and the blues. For example, one group of epidemiologists points out that [t]he DSM-III, DSM-III-R, and DSM-IV acknowledge that depression, like many mental disorders, has no currently obvious natural classes... If natural classes of depression exist, then their nosology awaits the discovery of distinct and reliable genetic, biological, clinical, or other predictors of risk, severity, or clinical course. Clinicians have a tradition of separating depressions into subtypes; however, this subtyping has not yet led to clear-cut delineations of syndromes in populations. (Kaelber 1995, 4) The evidence is still insufficient to establish the biological or psychological origins of depression. Although many theories exist that explain why people become depressed, scientifically we are not yet in a position to determine which is the right theory. From a pragmatic perspective, however, whether or not we know what causes depression, we can nonetheless attempt to alleviate suffering from depression. And it is with this goal in mind that the DSM-IV and ICD-10 classify mental disorders.Now, given that our current methodology for psychiatric nosology does not establish causes, it is also insufficient for determining what... (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the implications of adopting one model of self rather than another in respect to one particular feature of our mental life. The need to explain synchronic unity in normal subjectivity, and also to explain the apparent and puzzling absence of synchronic unity in certain symptoms of severe mental disorder, I show, becomes more pressing with one particular model. But in the process of developing that explanation we learn something about subjectivity and perhaps also something about (...) brain functioning. (shrink)

As an environmentally focused, applied field science, fisheries biology has recently been marked by its failed promise to enable sustainable exploitation. Fisheries biology’s origin through state support raises many questions. How did fisheries biologists get this support? Did political considerations and economic ideals fundamentally shape the science? Why has it been perceived as fundamentally conservation oriented? New evidence indicates the political basis for Thomas Henry Huxley’s contention that the deep-sea fisheries were inexhaustible; this essay shows how his influence extended to (...) recent neoliberal resource management solutions. It also explores how fisheries biology acquired the ideal of maximum sustained yield via Progressive Era efficiency conservation and German scientific forestry; how American Cold War foreign policy made this ideal paradigmatic of mid to late twentieth-century fisheries biology; and how emerging bioeconomics in the 1950s imposed a troublesome misunderstanding of fisheries biology’s earlier mission. (shrink)

When faced with an ambiguous pronoun, comprehenders use both multimodal cues and linguistic cues to identify the antecedent. While research has shown that gestures facilitate language comprehension, improve reference tracking, and influence the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns, literature on reference resolution suggests that a wide set of linguistic constraints influences the successful resolution of ambiguous pronouns and that linguistic cues are more powerful than some multimodal cues. To address the outstanding question of the importance of gesture as a cue in (...) reference resolution relative to cues in the speech signal, we have previously investigated the comprehension of contrastive gestures that indexed abstract referents – in this case expressions of personal preference – and found that such gestures did facilitate the resolution of ambiguous statements of preference. In this study, we extend this work to investigate whether the effect of gesture on resolution is diminished when the gesture indexes a statement that is less likely to be interpreted as the correct referent. Participants watched videos in which a speaker contrasted two ideas that were either neutral or moral acceptable). A gesture to the left or right side co-occurred with speech expressing each position. In gesture-disambiguating trials, an ambiguous phrase was accompanied by a gesture to one side or the other. In gesture non-disambiguating trials, no third gesture occurred with the ambiguous phrase. Participants were more likely to choose the idea accompanied by gesture as the stimulus speaker’s preference. We found no effect of scenario type. Regardless of whether the linguistic cue expressed a view that was morally charged or neutral, observers used gesture to understand the speaker’s opinion. This finding contributes to our understanding of the strength and range of cues, both linguistic and multimodal, that listeners use to resolve ambiguous references. (shrink)

This paper is one of four interrelated action papers resulting from the 2008 National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control. Summit participants engaged in discussions on the current state of the law with respect to obesity, nutrition and food policy, physical activity, and physical education. Participants also identified gaps in the law at all jurisdictional levels and relevant to numerous sectors and disciplines that have a stake in obesity prevention and control.The companion paper, “Assessment of Laws and (...) Legal Authorities for Obesity Prevention and Control,”identified numerous laws and policies enacted to target the three domains of healthy lifestyles, healthy places, and healthy societies. That paper identified several gaps in the law that require attention and action. This paper addresses those gaps and presents applicable laws and legal authorities that public health professionals and lawyers can consider to implement to close the gaps. (shrink)

The evidence is clear and consistent that African Americans and Hispanics are treated differently depending on their skin color within their racial or ethnic group, and yet the surveys that show these results also show very few political or political-psychological patterns as a result of skin color. To investigate why this is so, this paper uses the fact that discriminatory treatment by skin color does not necessarily result in political action or perceptions around that discrimination to raise the larger question (...) of when racial or ethnic groups see and protest unfairness, and when they do not. My hypotheses about why this occurs differ for blacks and Latinos. In the former case, the ideology of group consciousness is strong enough, and embarrassment about internal skin-color hierarchy is powerful enough, that blacks don't want to recognize differences by skin color. Light-skinned blacks, in fact, may be more racially identified than dark-skinned blacks — so their economic and social advantages are offset by their commitments to their race as a whole, and they behave politically like dark-skinned blacks do. The case of Hispanics may be better explained in terms of a weak sense of group consciousness rather than a strong one. That is, Latinos may not think of themselves as a group, such that they see skin color differentiation as a consequence of being members of different races rather than as a form of discrimination against some members of "their" group. (shrink)

The Common Health problems that plague Americans today are often the result of people’s choices and behaviors: obesity, cigarette smoking, accidental pediatric head trauma owing to failure to properly restrain children, and failure to adhere to medication regimens. For each problem, there is a well-studied effective behavioral intervention: a healthy diet and exercise for obesity, smoking cessation programs to overcome cigarette addiction, appropriate car restraints to prevent accidental head trauma, and direct observation of treatment and simplification of medical regimens to (...) improve drug adherence. Traditionally, the physician defined the problem and told the patient what she needed to do. In the modern era of .. (shrink)

Everyday identity change is common after conflict, as people attempt to move away from oppositional group relations and closed group boundaries. This article asks how it scales up and out to impact these group relations and boundaries, and what stops this? Theoretically, the article focusses on complex oppositional configurations of groupness, where relationality and feedback mechanisms (rather than more easily measured variables) are crucial to change and continuity, and in which moral authority is a key node of reproduction. It uses (...) the normatively weighted concept of transformation to augment existing research on boundary and identity change, while elaborating it to recognise the role of everyday agency in furthering change and moral inertia in impeding it. Substantively, the article compares the processes of everyday transformation of groupness in three cases that are very similar in historical depth, social embeddedness, symbolic opposition and everyday change, but very different in time-scale and with contrasting outcomes: successful transformation of reformation religious groupness; partial transformation of national groupness; and failed transformation of complexly-configured ethnic groupness in Northern Ireland. This allows tracing of the patterns and mechanisms at work. To anticipate, the article argues that everyday identity change can erode the moral authority of groupness. Its impact is generational and dependent on institutional linkages. The article highlights the importance of moral mechanisms as drivers of and obstacles to change; and it suggests ways that the obstacles could be overcome by radical policy interventions. (shrink)