Organized religion has played a key role in shaping national and international policy for millennia. This paper discusses the parts some Christian churches have played in creating and supporting drug control policies stipulated inunmultilateral treaties. Mainstream churches have largely ignored the harms these policies inflict on vulnerable populations, including both people who use drugs, and those who are terminally ill and cannot access controlled medicines for pain relief. Mainstream – especially theologically “conservative” – churches reject people who use drugs, an (...) approach that damages individuals, families, and communities both inside and outside the church, along multiple dimensions. This damage has, dialectically, produced a counter-theology and praxis that prioritizes compassionate ministry and insists on metanoia, a scriptural ethic of hospitality and evidence based care. Churches must play a prophetic role according to scripture, contemporary theologians, and Christians engaged in social justice praxis, in ministering to individuals who are marginalized and criminalized for using prohibited substances. (shrink)

In this article I discuss how some women activists experience their citizenship locally and around the world through their work for the environment and resistance to systems which threaten world existence. By looking at the oikos-polis distinction in Aristotle as the genesis of environmental pathologies which give rise to newly complementary categories of citizenship and ecofeminism, I consider moral pluralism and agonistic liberalism as non-hierarchical theoretical frameworks for thinking about citizenship.

Eating disorders are mental illnesses that can have a significant and persistent physical impact, especially for those who are not treated early in their disease trajectory. Although many persons w...

Background: The field of clinical ethics is examining ways of determining competency. The Assessing Clinical Ethics Skills (ACES) tool offers a new approach that identifies a range of skills necessary in the conduct of clinical ethics consultation and provides a consistent framework for evaluating these skills. Through a training website, users learn to apply the ACES tool to clinical ethics consultants (CECs) in simulated ethics consultation videos. The aim is to recognize competent and incompetent clinical ethics consultation skills by watching (...) and evaluating a videotaped CEC performance. We report how we set a criterion cut score (i.e., minimally acceptable score) for judging the ability of users of the ACES tool to evaluate simulated CEC performances.Methods: A modified Angoff standard-setting procedure was used to establish the cut score for an end-of-life case included on the ACES training website. The standard-setting committee viewed the Futility Case and estimated the probability that a minimally competent CEC would correctly answer each item on the ACES tool. The committee further adjusted these estimates by reviewing data from 31 pilot users of the Futility Case before determining the cut score.Results: Averaging over all 31 items, the proposed proportion correct score for minimal competency was 80%, corresponding to a cut score that is between 24 and 25 points out of 31 possible points. The standard-setting committee subsequently set the minimal competency cut score to 24 points.Conclusions: The cut score for the ACES tool identifies the number of correct responses a user of the ACES tool training website must attain to “pass” and reach minimal competency in recognizing competent and incompetent skills of the CECs in the simulated ethics consultation videos. The application of the cut score to live training of CECs and other areas of practice requires further investigation. (shrink)

The ideal of objectivity is in crisis in science and the law, and yet it continues to do important work in both practices. This article describes that crisis and develops a shared rescue strategy for objectivity in both domains. In a recent article, Inkeri Koskinen attempts to bring unity to the fragmented discourse on objectivity in the philosophy of science with a risk account of objectivity. To put it simply, she argues that we call practitioners, processes, and products of science (...) objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic risks. We endorse this view and attempt to tailor Koskinen's strategy to the problem of objectivity in the legal context. To do so, we develop a novel notion of phronetic risk, and argue that we call practitioners, processes, and products of law objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic and/or phronetic risks. Our attempt to rescue objectivity is especially important for work at the intersection of law and psychiatry. For that intersection represents a place where skeptical worries about objectivity in science and law work in tandem to pose serious critical challenges to contemporary practice; and our rescue strategy represents a promising way to negotiate those challenges. (shrink)

Philosophy of Science Today offers a state-of-the-art guide to this fast-developing area. An eminent international team of authors covers a wide range of topics at the intersection of philosophy and the sciences, including causation, realism, methodology, epistemology, and the philosophical foundations of physics, biology, and psychology.

Intellectually stimulating articles, which grapple with the tough issues involving morality, justice, and the law. This balanced anthology will be of interest to philosophers, legal scholars, and anyone concerned about the relation of law to morality.

Three points that are implicit in Dixon et al.'s paradigm-challenging paper serve to make prejudice potent. First, prejudice reflects understandings of social identity usthem that are shared within particular groups. Second, these understandings are actively promoted by leaders who represent and advance in-group identity. Third, prejudice is identified in out-groups, not in-groups.

Individuals with substance use disorders exhibit risk-taking behaviors, potentially leading to negative consequences and difficulty maintaining recovery. Non-invasive brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial direct current stimulation have yielded mixed effects on risk-taking among healthy controls. Given the importance of risk-taking behaviors among substance-using samples, this study aimed to examine the effects of tDCS on risk-taking among a sample of adults using cannabis. Using a double-blind design, 27 cannabis users [M age = 32.48, 41% female] were randomized, receiving one session (...) of active or sham tDCS over the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Stimulation parameters closely followed prior studies with anodal right dlPFC and cathodal left dlPFC stimulation. Risk-taking—assessed via a modified Cambridge Gambling Task—was measured before and during tDCS. Delay and probability discounting tasks were assessed before and after stimulation. No significant effects of stimulation on risk-taking behavior were found. However, participants chose the less risky option ∼86% of the trials before stimulation which potentially contributed to ceiling effects. These results contradict one prior study showing increased risk-taking among cannabis users following tDCS. There was a significant increase in delay discounting of a $1000 delayed reward during stimulation for the sham group only, but no significant effects for probability discounting. The current study adds to conflicting and inconclusive literature on tDCS and cognition among substance-using samples. In conclusion, results suggest the ineffectiveness of single session dlPFC tDCS using an established stimulation protocol on risk-taking, although ceiling effects at baseline may have also prevented behavior change following tDCS. (shrink)

Historizing is the way Dasein takes up possibilities and roles to project itself into the future. It is why we experience continuity throughout our lives, and it is the basis for historicality – our sense of a more general continuity of “history.” In Being and Time,Heidegger identifies both inauthentic and authentic modes of historizing that give rise, respectively, to inauthentic and authentic modes of histori-cality. He focuses on historizing at the individual level but gestures at a communal form of historizing. (...) In this paper, I develop the concept of co-historizing in both its authentic and inauthentic modes. I argue that Heidegger’s unarticulated concept of inauthentic co-historizing is what necessitated the planned (but unfinished) second half of Being and Time – the “phenomenological destruction of the history of ontol-ogy.” I consider what it means to take responsibility for our destiny as a people and specifically as a community of philosophers. (shrink)

The Republic of Ireland has some of the most restrictive abortion legislation in the world which grants to the ‘unborn’ an equal right to life to that of the pregnant woman. This article outlines recent developments in the public discourse on abortion in Ireland and explains the particular cultural and religious context that informs the ethical case for access to abortion services. Our perspective rests on respect for two very familiar moral principles – autonomy and justice – which are at (...) the centre of social and democratic societies around the world. This article explains the context for the deployment of these concepts in order to support the claim that the current legislation and its operationalisation in clinical practice poses serious risks to the health, lives and well-being of pregnant women, tramples on their autonomy rights and requires of them a self-sacrifice that is unreasonable and unjust. (shrink)

The article discusses leadership enactment in medical emergencies. We draw on video recordings of simulated obstetric emergencies and investigate how senior clinicians ‘do being’ the leader discursively in the spatiomaterial context of the emergency room. We take an interactional analysis approach, combining conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics and look specifically into the ways in which professional roles do interactional control using directives and questions in the material space of the obstetric room. We discuss this interactional performance in relation to the (...) clinical performance of the teams. Our analysis shows that leadership in medical emergencies is multimodally achieved; professionals draw on discursive strategies, the affordances of material space, body and gaze orientation, which build on each other and converge in indexing leadership. Our findings highlight the situated nature of negotiating responsibility, illustrating that leadership in our context is claimed, projected and resisted discursively. We provide a typology of the functions of questions in the emergency encounter, and close the article by foregrounding the implications of our study and providing directions for further research. (shrink)

Media, politicians, and the courts portray college campuses as divided over diversity and affirmative action. But what do students and faculty really think? This book uses a novel technique to elicit honest opinions from students and faculty and measure preferences for diversity in undergraduate admissions and faculty recruitment at seven major universities, breaking out attitudes by participants' race, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, and political partisanship. Scholarly excellence is a top priority everywhere, but the authors show that when students consider individual (...) candidates, they favor members of all traditionally underrepresented groups - by race, ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic background. Moreover, there is little evidence of polarization in the attitudes of different student groups. The book reveals that campus communities are less deeply divided than they are often portrayed to be; although affirmative action remains controversial in the abstract, there is broad support for prioritizing diversity in practice. (shrink)

Spirituality has been a part of nursing for many centuries and represents an essential value for people, including nurses and patients. Cumulative evidence points to the positive contribution of spiritually on health and wellbeing. However, there is little clarity about what spirituality means. The literature reveals that nurses have ascribed a diversity of interpretations to spirituality. However, no studies have investigated how registered nurses construct their understanding of spirituality using a critical discourse analysis approach. Therefore, the aim of this study (...) was to uncover how registered nurses construct their understanding of spirituality using a critical discourse analysis approach. Twenty registered nurses from a non‐denominational public hospital and a faith‐based private hospital were interviewed about their understanding of spirituality and practice of spiritual care. A critical discourse analysis approach was used in the examination of the interview texts to uncover underlying social and power features. Links were made between the linguistic features the registered nurses used in their interviews and the broader social context of the study. Three discourses emerged from the interview texts. These include constructing spirituality through personal religious beliefs discourse, holistic discourse and empathetic care discourse. The findings of this study have implications for nurse education and policy makers. (shrink)

SummarySkepticism is very powerful and persuasive, yet it is not the basis upon which the reasonable person operates in the world. In this paper I've tried to articulate the criteria whereby the reasonable person determines what is a fact and determines that she/he knows. I've taken six areas where knowledge is a matter of contention between the reasonable person and the skeptic and constructed dialogues between the two. The six areas are things not directly perceived mathematical and tautological statements the (...) distinction between dream and reality other minds and the contents of other minds facts of the past both historical and invividual “scientific facts”. My position is that of the reasonable person.RésuméLe scepticisme est très puissant et persuasif, mais ce n'est pas une base à partir de laquelle la personne raisonnable agit dans le monde. Dans cet article, j'ai essayé?on; énoncer les critères selon lesquels la personne raisonnable détermine ce qu'est un fait et ce qu'elle sait. J'ai pris six domaines où la connaissance est objet de contestation entre la personne raisonnable et le sceptique et ai imaginé un dialogue entre eux. Ces six domaines sont: les choses non directement perçues les énoncés mathématiques et tautologiques la distinction entre rêve et réalité les autres esprits et leur contenu les faits appartenant au passé individuel et historique les faits scientifiques. Ma propre position s'identifie avec celle de la personne raisonnable.ZusammenfassungDer Skeptizismus mag zwar eine starke und überzeugende Doktrin sein, er bietet jedoch keine Grundlage für vernünftige Handlungen in der Welt an. Es wird versucht, die Kriterien anzugeben, aufgrund von welchen eine vernünftige Person bestimmt, was eine Tatsache ist und was sie weiss. Es werden sechs Bereiche angegeben, in welchen sich die vernünftige Person mit dem Skeptiker über Erkenntnisfragen in einen Konflikt verwickeln kann: Dinge, die nicht unmittelbar wahrgenommen werden mathematisch und tautologische Aussagen, die Unterscheidung zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit, andere Geister und fremdpsychische Inhalte, Tatsachen der Vergangenheit , wissenschaftliche Tatsachen. Der Position der vernünftigen Person wird der Vorzug gegeben. (shrink)

Newman’s explicit presentation of the ideal type, “the gentleman,” appears first and foremost in his Oratory papers of 1847 and 1848, and appears only secondarily, and then but partially, four and five years later in his Dublin Discourses of 1852. This essay traces lines of similarity and of difference between these successive portraits and distinguishes both from the attractive, better-known sketch Newman presents as Lord Shaftesbury’s, the “beau ideal” of the man of the world.

Despite early emerging and impressive linguistic abilities, young children demonstrate ostensibly puzzling beliefs about the nature of language. In some circumstances monolingual children even express the belief that an individual's language is more stable than her race. The present research investigated bilingual children's thinking about the relative stability of language and race. Five-to six-year-old bilingual children were asked to judge whether a target child who varied in race and language would grow up to be an adult who maintained the target (...) child's race or her language. Similar to many monolingual children, a heterogeneous group of bilingual children on average chose the language-match. Yet French-English bilingual children were relatively more likely to choose the race-match, especially when tested in their non-dominant language. Specific experience with relevant languages, and communicating in a non-dominant language, may contribute to children's developing metalinguistic success and their thinking about social categorization. (shrink)

Members of the Baha'i Faith have been subject to persecution in Iran since the mid‐nineteenth century. Our investigation considers how collective identity among a Pacific Northwest Community has been constructed through the contexts of continued persecution in Iran and the development of religious texts, which helped to define the religious community. The texts found within the Baha'i Faith utilize metaphors of the body to construct religious identity. Many anthropologists have theorized on the usefulness of the body as a unit of (...) study; in addition, recent attention by scholars has illustrated the intersection of the body and religion. A model is developed linking identity, consciousness, the body and experience that explains how collective identity is constructed. When considering the situation of the Baha'i community, this model has proven particularly useful in understanding how geographically disassociated people manage to construct social kinship within the context of religious persecution. In particular, American Baha'is describe the persecution of Baha'is in Iran as a collective experience, especially since the direct experience of persecution is far removed from their everyday living. Preliminary analysis of interviews with an American Baha'i, and an ex‐patriot Iranian Baha'i reveal differences in constructions of identity. (shrink)

Research has consistently revealed gender differences in attitudes toward science and technology. One explanation is that women are more personally affected by particular technologies, so they consider them differently. However, not all women universally experience biomedical technologies. We use the concept of technological salience to address how differences in subjective implications of a technology might explain differences in women’s attitudes toward biotechnology. In a sample of U.S. women from the National Survey of Fertility Barriers, we examine how women with and (...) without a biomedical barrier to fertility evaluate biotechnology for infertility, which, we argue, reflects differences in technological salience. For women with a biomedical barrier, various experiences, beliefs, and values impacted their attitudes; yet, most of these did not affect attitudes if women had not experienced a fertility barrier. Results suggest that technological salience contextualizes women’s attitudes toward these biotechnologies and may also have broader implications for other biotechnologies. (shrink)

The COVID-19 Law Lab platform enables quantitative representation of epidemic law and policies in a given country for multiple years, enabling governments and researchers to compare countries, and learn about the impacts and drivers of policy choices. The Law Lab initiative is designed to address the urgent need for quality legal information to support the study of how law and policy can be used to effectively manage this, and future, pandemic(s).

The recent finding that the human version of a neurodevelopmental enhancer of the Wnt receptor Frizzled 8 (FZD8) gene alters neural progenitor cell cycle timing and brain size is a step forward to understanding human brain evolution. The human brain is distinctive in terms of its cognitive abilities as well as its susceptibility to neurological disease. Identifying which of the millions of genomic changes that occurred during human evolution led to these and other uniquely human traits is extremely challenging. Recent (...) studies have demonstrated that many of the fastest evolving regions of the human genome function as gene regulatory enhancers during embryonic development and that the human‐specific mutations in them might alter expression patterns. However, elucidating molecular and cellular effects of sequence or expression pattern changes is a major obstacle to discovering the genetic bases of the evolution of our species. There is much work to do before human‐specific genetic and genomic changes are linked to complex human traits. (shrink)

At the empirical center of James’s theory of emotion is the prediction that people induced to act emotionally will report feeling the corresponding emotion. While the research more or less inspired by James is complex, it is also large. Reisenzein and Stephan (2014) identify a number of problems in this literature, but we think, on balance, the research supports James’s hypothesis. At a minimum, there are literally hundreds of studies showing that people induced to act as if they felt an (...) emotion, an attitude, or a judgment report those feelings. Critics of James’s theory are left with the task of accounting for these findings. (shrink)

Consideration of social cognition—how an individual’s decision-making is influenced by her/his social environment—is key to understanding the behaviour of socially living nonhuman primates. In this chapter we discuss primate social cognition by focusing on primates’ behavioural responses to the presence and actions of others, how they adjust their behaviour to maximize their own gains, and possibly also the rewards received by a partner. Individuals can observe and replicate the actions of others, or the outcomes of their actions, to accelerate behavioural (...) acquisition of techniques to obtain rewards. Beyond passively observing others, primates can also work with group mates to obtain rewards more easily or to get rewards that would otherwise be unattainable by a single individual. Although not universally seen among primates, one individual may also help another to acquire resources. Prosocial and collaborative interactions may result in an imbalance of benefits received, and certain primate species respond negatively when receiving less than a social partner, a response which may protect individuals against cheating. Such behaviours demonstrate how the interplay between an individual’s desires and those of others can modify behavioural outcomes and the importance of considering cognition from a social perspective in order to understand the decision-making of individuals. However, there is variation both within and between species in their sensitivity to the actions of others and their responses to them. Thus, a comparative framework is needed when studying what is meant by ‘primate social cognition’. (shrink)