Nature contact has associations with emotional ill-being and well-being. However, the mechanisms underlying these associations are not fully understood. We hypothesised that increased adaptive and decreased maladaptive emotion regulation strategies would be a pathway linking nature contact to ill-being and well-being. Using data from a survey of 600 U.S.-based adults administered online in 2022, we conducted structural equation modelling to test our hypotheses. We found that (1) frequency of nature contact was significantly associated with lesser emotional ill-being and greater emotional (...) well-being, (2) effective emotion regulation was significantly associated with lesser emotional ill-being and greater emotional well-being, and (3) the associations of higher frequency of nature contact with these benefits were partly explained via emotion regulation. Moreover, we found a nonlinear relationship for the associations of duration of nature contact with some outcomes, with a rise in benefits up to certain amounts of time, and a levelling off after these points. These findings support and extend previous work that demonstrates that the associations of nature contact with emotional ill-being and well-being may be partly explained by changes in emotion regulation. (shrink)

Over the years, Katie Cannon's students referred to her work in progress as "Katie's canon." Not only does this book represent the canon of Cannon's best work; the book itself directly addresses the issues of canon formation and canon reformation. Cannon canonizes a literary tradition and directly addresses both oppression and liberation of African American women. Now in an expanded 25th-anniversary edition, Katie's Canon still packs firepower.

There is a strong impetus in international agricultural development to close ‘gender gaps’ in agricultural productivity. The goal of empowering women is often framed as the solution to closing these gaps, stimulating the proliferation of new indicators and instruments for the targeting, measurement, and tracking of programmatic goals in research for agricultural development. Despite these advances, current measurements and indices remain too simplified in terms of unit and scope of analysis, as well as being fundamentally flawed in how they aim (...) to capture the relevance of ‘gender’ in diverse local contexts. We propose that the impulse to apply exogenously defined and weakly validated ‘women’s empowerment’ measures to diverse local contexts risks prioritizing practical expedience over scientific accuracy and societal relevance. Furthermore, the application of such measures risks creating the impression that programmatic “gender targets” are being achieved, while simultaneously undermining substantive gender transformative goals. The authors conclude that a different methodological approach grounded in participatory and qualitative methods is needed to create more meaningful metrics for assessing progress towards women’s empowerment. (shrink)

In this paper we consider persuasion in the context of practical reasoning, and discuss the problems associated with construing reasoning about actions in a manner similar to reasoning about beliefs. We propose a perspective on practical reasoning as presumptive justification of a course of action, along with critical questions of this justification, building on the account of Walton. From this perspective, we articulate an interaction protocol, which we call PARMA, for dialogues over proposed actions based on this theory. We outline (...) an axiomatic semantics for the PARMA Protocol, and discuss two implementations which use this protocol to mediate a discussion between humans. We then show how our proposal can be made computational within the framework of agents based on the Belief-Desire-Intention model, and illustrate this proposal with an example debate within a multi agent system. (shrink)

There is growing consensus that teaching computer ethics is important, but there is little consensus on how to do so. One unmet challenge is increasing the capacity of computing students to make decisions about the ethical challenges embedded in their technical work. This paper reports on the design, testing, and evaluation of an educational simulation to meet this challenge. The privacy by design simulation enables more relevant and effective computer ethics education by letting students experience and make decisions about common (...) ethical challenges encountered in real-world work environments. This paper describes the process of incorporating empirical observations of ethical questions in computing into an online simulation and an in-person board game. We employed theValues at Playframework to transform empirical observations of design into a playable educational experience. First, we conducted qualitative research to discover when and how values levers—practices that encourage values discussions during technology development—occur during the design of new mobile applications. We then translated these findings into gameplay elements, including the goals, roles, and elements of surprise incorporated into a simulation. We ran the online simulation in five undergraduate computer and information science classes. Based on this experience, we created a more accessible board game, which we tested in two undergraduate classes and two professional workshops. We evaluated the effectiveness of both the online simulation and the board game using two methods: a pre/post-test of moral sensitivity based on the Defining Issues Test, and a questionnaire evaluating student experience. We found that converting real-world ethical challenges into a playable simulation increased student’s reported interest in ethical issues in technology, and that students identified the role-playing activity as relevant to their technical coursework. This demonstrates that roleplaying can emphasize ethical decision-making as a relevant component of technical work. (shrink)

This essay addresses the relationship between Kierkegaard and natural law afresh. First, I exposit Thomas's natural law doctrine in the Summa, particularly its theological emphasis on the God‐human relationship, which often goes underappreciated. Then, I argue that natural law doctrine downstream from Thomas suffers from an acute vulnerability: its natural aspect is emphasised so much that the divine‐human relationship at the heart of natural law falls away. Next, I argue Problema II of Fear and Trembling deals with this same issue (...) and theologically criticises ethics’ secularising tendency. I then argue that Fear and Trembling and other writings of Kierkegaard's corpus claim a universal law similar to Thomas's doctrine: each individual must relate absolutely to God. Thereby, Kierkegaard transforms natural law from a general norm prone to secularisation into a gift and theological task for everyone, grounding the possibility of ethics in the divine‐human relationship. For regular dogmatic purposes, I suggest this shifts natural law to the doctrines of justification and sanctification. (shrink)

While the fundamental laws of physics are time-reversal invariant, most macroscopic processes are irreversible. Given that the fundamental laws are taken to underpin all other processes, how can the fundamental time-symmetry be reconciled with the asymmetry manifest elsewhere? In statistical mechanics, progress can be made with this question. What I dub the ‘Zwanzig–Zeh–Wallace framework’ can be used to construct the irreversible equations of SM from the underlying microdynamics. Yet this framework uses coarse-graining, a procedure that has faced much criticism. I (...) focus on two objections in the literature: claims that coarse-graining makes time-asymmetry ‘illusory’ and ‘anthropocentric’. I argue that these objections arise from an unsatisfactory justification of coarse-graining prevalent in the literature, rather than from coarse-graining itself. This justification relies on the idea of measurement imprecision. By considering the role that abstraction and autonomy play, I provide an alternative justification and offer replies to the illusory and anthropocentric objections. Finally, I consider the broader consequences of this alternative justification: the connection to debates about inter-theoretic reduction and the implication that the time-asymmetry in SM is weakly emergent. 1Introduction 1.1Prospectus2The Zwanzig–Zeh–Wallace Framework3Why Does This Method Work? 3.1The special conditions account3.2When is a density forwards-compatible?4Anthropocentrism and Illusion: Two Objections 4.1The two objections in more detail4.2Against the justification by measurement imprecision5An Alternative Justification 5.1Abstraction and autonomy5.2An illustration: the Game of Life6Reply to Illusory7Reply to Anthropocentric8The Wider Landscape: Concluding Remarks 8.1Inter-theoretic relations8.2The nature of irreversibility. (shrink)

Through discourse with international groups of physicians, we conducted a cross-cultural analysis of the types of ethical dilemmas physicians face. Qualitative analysis was used to categorise the dilemmas into seven themes, which we compared among the physicians by country of practice. These themes were a-theoretically-driven and grounded heavily within the text. We then subjected the dilemmas to an analysis of moral intensity, which represents an important theoretical perspective of ethical decision making. These constructs represent salient determinants of ethical behaviour and (...) our cross-cultural sample afforded us the opportunity to consider both the pragmatic aspects of culture, as they are perceived by physicians, as well as the theory-driven concept of moral intensity. By examining both culture and moral intensity, we hope to better elucidate the complexities of ethical decision-making determinants among physicians in their daily practice. Doing so may potentially have practical implications for ethics training of medical students and foreign physicians. (shrink)

In multi-agent systems (MAS), abstract argumentation and argumentation schemes are increasingly important. To be useful for MAS, argumentation schemes require a computational approach so that agent...

The search for the statistical mechanical underpinning of thermodynamic irreversibility has so far focussed on the spontaneous approach to equilibrium. But this is the search for the underpinning of what Brown and Uffink have dubbed the ‘minus first law’ of thermodynamics. In contrast, the second law tells us that certain interventions on equilibrium states render the initial state ‘irrecoverable’. In this article, I discuss the unusual nature of processes in thermodynamics, and the type of irreversibility that the second law embodies. (...) I then search for the microscopic underpinning or statistical mechanical ‘reductive basis’ of the second law of thermodynamics by taking a functionalist strategy. First, I outline the functional role of the thermodynamic entropy: for a thermally isolated system, the thermodynamic entropy is constant in quasi-static processes, but increasing in non-quasi-static processes. I then search for the statistical mechanical quantity that plays this role—rather than the role of the traditional ‘holy grail’ as described by Callender. I argue that in statistical mechanics, the Gibbs entropy plays this role. (shrink)

While pain is common among seniors, it is not adequately treated or managed. In particular, pain in seniors with dementia is often undertreated and undermanaged. Although the undertreatment of pain among persons with cognitive impairments represents a serious ethical concern for pain clinicians, most writers in the area explain the undertreatment of pain by focusing on issues related to liability, fears of addiction to opioids, and erroneous beliefs that pain is a normal part of the ageing process. We argue that (...) the philosophical notion of personhood must also be given careful attention when considering the problem of pain undermanagement. In this paper, we consider the undertreatment of pain among seniors with dementia, while focusing on the ontology of relationships and on existential philosophy. Moreover, we outline a series of recommendations to help minimize the probability of pain undertreatment in this population and to encourage considerations relating to personhood when treating people with dementia. (shrink)

The goal of this two-part series of papers is to show that constructive logic with strong negation N is definitionally equivalent to a certain axiomatic extension NFL ew of the substructural logic FL ew. The main result of Part I of this series [41] shows that the equivalent variety semantics of N and the equivalent variety semantics of NFL ew are term equivalent. In this paper, the term equivalence result of Part I [41] is lifted to the setting of deductive (...) systems to establish the definitional equivalence of the logics N and NFL ew. It follows from the definitional equivalence of these systems that constructive logic with strong negation is a substructural logic. (shrink)

Azul y no tan rosa was the first Venezuelan film to win the Goya for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film. It was also the first Venezuelan film to feature a kiss between two men, as well as an openly transgender character. At the heart of the film is a scene which cross-cuts between transsexual Delirio performing the 1980s Venezuelan pop hit ‘No soy una señora’ and a vicious homophobic attack. This scene exemplifies the film’s preoccupation with the performance of gender, (...) its denunciation of machista violence, and its call for acceptance of difference. (shrink)

Abstract:If climate change is as bad as many now predict, we may be faced with the problem of how to cope with a natural world that is changing more rapidly than our ability to form emotional attachments can keep pace with. How can we love a natural world that seems so strange and unfamiliar to us? For help in answering this question, I turn to structurally similar problems that we face in our emotional attachments to other people. Using the cases (...) of dementia and mental illness, I investigate how people adapt their love in cases where their beloved changes in ways that render her, at least at times, unfamiliar, strange, and unpredictable. I argue that in both human and nonhuman cases, love can be compatible with dramatic and rapid changes in one's beloved, but to achieve this one must remain open-minded about the nature of the beloved and morally attentive to the ongoing question of which states will promote its well-being. (shrink)

Most ethicists agree that at least some nonhumans have interests that are of direct moral importance. Yet with very few exceptions, both climate ethics and climate policy have operated as though only human interests should be considered in formulating and evaluating climate policy. In this paper I argue that the anthropocentrism of current climate ethics and policy cannot be justified. I first describe the ethical claims upon which my analysis rests, arguing that they are no longer controversial within contemporary ethics. (...) Next, I review work in climate ethics and policy, demonstrating the absence of consideration of nonhuman interests in both domains. Finally, I consider five possible justifications for omitting nonhuman interests in the evaluation climate policy options, arguing that none of these arguments succeeds. (shrink)

Privacy is a critical challenge for corporate social responsibility in the mobile device ecosystem. Mobile application firms can collect granular and largely unregulated data about their consumers, and must make ethical decisions about how and whether to collect, store, and share these data. This paper conducts a discourse analysis of mobile application developer forums to discover when and how privacy conversations, as a representative of larger ethical debates, arise during development. It finds that online forums can be useful spaces for (...) ethical deliberations, as developers use these spaces to define, discuss, and justify their values. It also discovers that ethical discussions in mobile development are prompted by work practices which vary considerably between iOS and Android, today’s two major mobile platforms. For educators, regulators, and managers interested in encouraging more ethical discussion and deliberation in mobile development, these work practices provide a valuable point of entry. But while the triggers for privacy conversations are quite different between platforms, ultimately the justifications for privacy are similar. Developers for both platforms use moral and cautionary tales, moral evaluation, and instrumental and technical rationalization to justify and legitimize privacy as a value in mobile development. Understanding these three forms of justification for privacy is useful to educators, regulators, and managers who wish to promote ethical practices in mobile development. (shrink)

KATIE McSHANE | : Taking the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as representative, I argue that animal ethics has been neglected in the assessment of climate policy. While effects on ecosystem services, biodiversity, and human welfare are all catalogued quite carefully, there is no consideration at all of the effects of climate change on the welfare of animals. This omission, I argue, should bother us, for animal welfare is not adequately captured by assessments of (...) ecosystem services, biodiversity, or human welfare. After describing the paper’s assumptions and discussing the role of the IPCC’s Assessment Reports in climate policy, I consider the presentation of climate impacts in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, noting the aspects of animal welfare that are considered there, and comparing the report’s treatment of animal welfare to its treatment of human welfare. Next, I argue that the concepts of ecosystem services, biodiversity, and human welfare do not adequately capture the welfare of animals. Finally, I discuss concerns about human responsibility for animal welfare and the practicality of including considerations of animal welfare among the climate impacts studied by the IPCC. | : En prenant le Cinquième Rapport d’évaluation du Groupe d’experts intergouvernemental sur l’évolution du climat à titre de cas représentatif, je soutiens que l’éthique animale a été négligée dans l’évaluation de la politique climatique. Alors que les effets sur les services écosystémiques, la biodiversité et le bien-être humain y sont tous soigneusement recensés, les effets du changement climatique sur le bien-être des animaux n’y sont aucunement pris en considération. Je soutiens que cette omission devrait nous préoccuper, étant donné que l’évaluation des services écosystémiques, de la biodiversité et du bien-être humain ne rend pas compte adéquatement du bien-être des animaux. Après avoir décrit les présupposés de l’article et réfléchi au rôle des Rapports d’évaluation du GIEC quant à la politique climatique, j’examine la présentation des effets climatiques dans le Cinquième Rapport du GIEC, en indiquant les aspects du bien-être animal qui y sont pris en considération, tout en comparant le traitement que fait le rapport du bien-être animal à celui qui est fait du bien-être humain. Ensuite, je soutiens que les concepts de services écosystémiques, de biodiversité et de bien-être humain ne reflètent pas adéquatement le bien-être des animaux. Enfin, je traite des problèmes potentiels liés à la responsabilité humaine relativement au bien-être des animaux ainsi que de la faisabilité d’inclure des considérations liées au bien-être animal parmi les effets climatiques étudiés par le GIEC. (shrink)

This journal recently published a special issue on Kant, evil, moral perfection and education. The essays included in the special issue discussed the vulnerably and imperfection of human be...

Recent critics (Andrew Light, Bryan Norton, Anthony Weston, and Bruce Morito, among others) have argued that we should give up talk of intrinsic value in general and that of nature in particular. While earlier theorists might have overestimated the importance of intrinsic value, these recent critics underestimate its importance. Claims about a thing’s intrinsic value are claims about the distinctive way in which we have reason to care about that thing. If we understand intrinsic value in this manner, we can (...) capture the core claims that environmentalists want to make about nature while avoiding the worries raised by contemporary critics. Since the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value plays a critical role in our understanding of the different ways that we do and should care about things, moral psychology, ethical theory in general, and environmental ethics in particular shouldn’t give up on the concept of intrinsic value. (shrink)

Chapter One Triadomany defined You shall bind them in Three Classes; according to their Classes. William Blake, Milton In a manuscript of The Quest for ...

The technical details of Internet architecture affect social debates about privacy and autonomy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, and the basic performance and reliability of Internet services. This paper explores one method for practicing anticipatory ethics in order to understand how a new infrastructure for the Internet might impact these social debates. This paper systematically examines values expressed by an Internet architecture engineering team—the Named Data Networking project—based on data gathered from publications and internal documents. Networking engineers making technical choices also weigh (...) non-technical values when working on Internet infrastructure. Analysis of the team’s documents reveals both values invoked in response to technical constraints and possibilities, such as efficiency and dynamism, as well as values, including privacy, security and anonymity, which stem from a concern for personal liberties. More peripheral communitarian values espoused by the engineers include democratization and trust. The paper considers the contextual and social origins of these values, and then uses them as a method of practicing anticipatory ethics: considering the impact such priorities may have on a future Internet. (shrink)

This article explores the ways in which language users make sense of metaphoricity when manifest in a variety of ways within the language. The research provides an analysis of the lexical characteristics of a single item when used in potentially, but not clearly identified, metaphoric contexts. The analysis focuses on flexible patterns of meaning and the relationship between metaphor and other aspects of figurative language such as polysemy, metonymy, and meronymy. The research stands as a follow up to a larger (...) corpus-driven study that found differences in the lexical behavior of clearly defined metaphoric and nonmetaphoric instances of items, when looking at a large set of collocations, colligations, and semantic, pragmatic and textual associations. These behaviors or patterns are consequently avoided by the non-metaphoric instances of that same item, in order to avoid ambiguity. In the case of more ambiguous or unclear cases of metaphor, this article aims to determine if these patterns are still visible and the extent to which they signal metaphoricity. Evidence of such patterns would imply that lexical, grammatical, textual, and pragmatic manifestations in language play an important role in distinguishing between subtleties in word senses and meanings, even in the case of less obvious metaphoricity. As a consequence, awareness of these behaviors or characteristics should be at the forefront of any lexical metaphor theory. (shrink)

Constructions of normality and abnormality in discussions of young people changed considerably in the early to mid-twentieth century in many parts of the world, including Australia. The perennial trope of youth as a threat assumed a distinctly new form in this era, as the troubled and troublesome child, the incipient and confirmed delinquent, was reconfigured through emerging knowledges of the human sciences. Exploring the effects of new concerns with the ‘normal’, this article begins by examining the construct of normalcy and (...) its interdependency with notions of the ‘abnormal’, particularly juvenile delinquency, as the antithesis of personal and social adjustment. Yet the discursive strategies that saw delinquency, at one level, recognized as a complex and multi-causal problem also construed it as amenable to clinical solutions, notably psychological intervention. The article explores how emergent ideas of the importance of early intervention created divisions between three groups of youthful populations: the ‘normal child’ deemed well adjusted, the ‘problem child’ thought to be responsive to adjustive measures, and the ‘confirmed delinquent’, whose behaviour was considered intractable and was thus unlikely to attain the socially desired status of normalcy. (shrink)

This article argues that common intuitions regarding (a) the specialness of ‘use-novel’ data for confirmation and (b) that this specialness implies the ‘no-double-counting rule’, which says that data used in ‘constructing’ (calibrating) a model cannot also play a role in confirming the model’s predictions, are too crude. The intuitions in question are pertinent in all the sciences, but we appeal to a climate science case study to illustrate what is at stake. Our strategy is to analyse the intuitive claims in (...) light of prominent accounts of confirmation of model predictions. We show that on the Bayesian account of confirmation, and also on the standard classical hypothesis-testing account, claims (a) and (b) are not generally true; but for some select cases, it is possible to distinguish data used for calibration from use-novel data, where only the latter confirm. The more specialized classical model-selection methods, on the other hand, uphold a nuanced version of claim (a), but this comes apart from (b), which must be rejected in favour of a more refined account of the relationship between calibration and confirmation. Thus, depending on the framework of confirmation, either the scope or the simplicity of the intuitive position must be revised. (shrink)

Firewalls are an important tool in the assurance of network security. Packet filtering firewalls are configured by providing a set of rules that identify how to handle individual data packets that...

The goal of this two-part series of papers is to show that constructive logic with strong negation N is definitionally equivalent to a certain axiomatic extension NFL ew of the substructural logic FL ew . In this paper, it is shown that the equivalent variety semantics of N (namely, the variety of Nelson algebras) and the equivalent variety semantics of NFL ew (namely, a certain variety of FL ew -algebras) are term equivalent. This answers a longstanding question of Nelson [30]. (...) Extensive use is made of the automated theorem-prover Prover9 in order to establish the result. The main result of this paper is exploited in Part II of this series [40] to show that the deductive systems N and NFL ew are definitionally equivalent, and hence that constructive logic with strong negation is a substructural logic over FL ew. (shrink)

Background: Exploring the concept of ethical competence in the context of healthcare is essential as it pertains to better quality of care. The concept still lacks a comprehensive definition covering the aspects of ethical expertise, ethical knowledge and action of a health professional. Objective: This article aims to report an analysis of the concept of ethical competence. Method: A modified strategy suggested by Walker and Avant was used to analyse the concept. Results: As a result, the concept of ethical competence (...) can be defined in terms of character strength, ethical awareness, moral judgement skills and willingness to do good. Virtuous professional, experience of a professional, human communication, ethical knowledge and supporting surroundings in the organisation can be seen as prerequisites for ethical competence. Ethical competence results in the best possible solutions for the patient, reduced moral distress at work and development and democratisation of society. Conclusion: The results of the analysis establish a basis for an instrument to evaluate health professionals’ ethical competence. It will guide educators, as well as managers in healthcare, to support the development of ethical conduct in healthcare. (shrink)

In their review, Ruba and Repacholi summarize the methods used to assess preverbal infants’ understanding of emotions, and analyze the existing evidence in light of classical and constructionist ac...

The historical forces of war and migration impacted heavily on the disciplinary locations, practitioners, and structures of sexology and psychoanalysis that had developed in the first decades of the 20th century. By the late 1940s, the US was fast becoming the world centre of each of these prominent fields within the modern human sciences. During these years, the work of Alfred C. Kinsey and his team became synonymous with a distinctly North American brand of empirical sex research. This article offers (...) the most nuanced account to date of the shifting relationship between these two fields in the late 1940s to mid 1950s. It argues that this was more collaborative and mutually influential than previous historians have assumed, even as, following the publication of the first ‘Kinsey report’, tensions grew between the Indiana team and the conservative brand of psychoanalysis that by this stage dominated 1950s North American psychiatry. A keen sense of professional competitiveness accelerated the growing split between these two fields, as Kinsey’s team developed a distinctly modern, technologized brand of statistically oriented sexology that contrasted with the older patient case history, and assumed a very different approach to conservative analysts on ideas of homosexuality and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour. Yet this story of divergence is also tempered through consideration of other aspects of ‘situated knowledge’ such as religion and gender identity, even as accounts of cross-disciplinary competitiveness are expanded by contrasting Kinsey’s positions on psychoanalysis with those of contemporaries such as Harry Benjamin. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I Listen Like Nausicaa to NPR KATIE HARTSOCK “Kwame wants to show me the Pru River... Young girls and women wash clothes along the banks.” —“River Blindness Robbed Him of His Sight But Not His Independence,” Morning Edition As if we stood with no one between us, not your translator or my handmaidens. Why should a young thing like me want a man oceans older, trailing a goddess (...) who gussies him up to take the years off. I’ll go online to read the radio story, posted with pictures of your cloudy face. “The trick,” you say, “to gardening blind is planting in straight lines.” Your hands in dirt, knowing by feel the cardinal directions, work alone. I’m rinsing the silks of my soaped-up trousseau for an abstract husband, in the river you reel your fish from, waters that breed the black fly whose parasitic bite pricked you, quick as a paper cut from a book of murder ballads, before you reached the age to marry. I could have brought cloths, those last days you could see, when you saw worms swim across your eyes, to swathe your itching, long ago, beyond all laws, before a state-mandated pill ended the disease. “I sleep and wake on my own.” But that is just what a king would say, washed up naked at my feet arion 26.3 winter 2019 and hiding histories of desire with a leaf. Our separate selves stay separate. No one suspects a thing as we walk, at a distance I decide, away from the river that rose to our thighs with its necessities, like laundry or longing, and its cataracts of other lives, disrobing. 34 i listen like nausicaa to npr... (shrink)

On most understandings of what an ecosystem is, it is a kind of thing that can be literally, not just metaphorically, healthy or unhealthy. Health is best understood as a kind of well-being; a thing’s health is a matter of retaining those structures and functions that are good for it. While it is true both that what’s good for an ecosystem depends on how we define the system and that how we define the system depends on our interests, these facts (...) do not force us to the conclusion that an ecosystem has no good of its own. Ecosystems and persons can have goods of their own in spite of the fact that the schemes we use to categorize them are matters that we decide upon. (shrink)