Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

This paper tells the story of a recent laboratory medicine controversy in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. During the controversy, a DAKOAutostainer machine was blamed for inaccurate breast cancer test results that led to the suboptimal treatment of many patients. In truth, the machine was not at fault. Using concepts developed by Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu, we document the changing nature of the DAKO machine’s agency before, during, and after the controversy, and we make the ethical argument (...) that treating the machine as a scapegoat was harmful to patients. The mistreatment of patients was directly tied to a misrepresentation of the DAKO machine. The way to avoid both forms of mistreatment would have been to include all humans and nonhumans affected by the controversy in the network of decision-making. (shrink)

Many publicly-funded health systems apply cost-benefit frameworks in response to the moral dilemma of how best to allocate scarce healthcare resources. However, implementation of recommendations based on costs and benefit calculations and subsequent challenges have led to ‘special cases’ with certain types of health benefits considered more valuable than others. Recent debate and research has focused on the relative value of life extensions for people with terminal illnesses. This research investigates societal perspectives in relation to this issue, in the UK.

When people describe motion events, their path expressions are biased toward inclusion of goal paths (e.g., into the house) and omission of source paths (e.g., out of the house). In this paper, we explored whether this asymmetry has its origins in people’s non-linguistic representations of events. In three experiments, 4-year-old children and adults described or remembered manner of motion events that represented animate/intentional and physical events. The results suggest that the linguistic asymmetry between goals and sources is not fully rooted (...) in non-linguistic event representations: linguistic descriptions showed the goal bias for both kinds of events, whereas non-linguistic memory for events showed the goal bias only for events involving animate, goal-directed motion. The findings are discussed in terms of the mapping between non-linguistic representations of goals and sources in language, focusing on the role that linguistic principles play in producing a more absolute goal bias from more gradient non-linguistic representations of paths. (shrink)

The research presented in this paper focuses on business ethical values inChina, a country in which the process of institutional transformation has left cultural values in a state of flux. A survey was conducted in China and the U.S. by using five business scenarios. Survey results show similarities between the Chinese and American decision choices for three out of five scenarios. However, the results reveal significant differences in rationales, even forsimilar decisions. The implications of similarities and differences between the U.S. (...) and Chinese samples are discussed. (shrink)

Background Intensivists must provide enough analgesia and sedation to ensure dying patients receive good palliative care. However, if it is perceived that too much is given, they risk prosecution for committing euthanasia. The goal of this study is to develop consensus guidelines on analgesia and sedation in dying intensive care unit patients that help distinguish palliative care from euthanasia. Methods Using the Delphi technique, panelists rated levels of agreement with statements describing how analgesics and sedatives should be given to dying (...) ICU patients and how palliative care should be distinguished from euthanasia. Participants were drawn from 3 panels: 1) Canadian Academic Adult Intensive Care Fellowship program directors and Intensive Care division chiefs (N = 9); 2) Deputy chief provincial coroners (N = 5); 3) Validation panel of Intensivists attending the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group meeting (N = 12). Results After three Delphi rounds, consensus was achieved on 16 statements encompassing the role of palliative care in the intensive care unit, the management of pain and suffering, current areas of controversy, and ways of improving palliative care in the ICU. Conclusion Consensus guidelines were developed to guide the administration of analgesics and sedatives to dying ICU patients and to help distinguish palliative care from euthanasia. (shrink)

A growing number of multi-stakeholder initiatives seek to improve labor and environmental standards through third-party certification. Fairtrade, one of the most popular third-party certifications in the agro-food sector, is currently expanding its operations from its traditional base in commodities like coffee produced by peasant cooperatives to products like flowers produced by hired labor enterprises. My analysis reveals how Fairtrade’s engagement in the hired labor sector is shaped by the tensions between traditional market and industrial conventions, rooted in price competition, bureaucratic (...) efficiency, product standardization and certification and alternative domestic and civic conventions, rooted in trust, personal ties, and concerns for societal wide benefits. At the global level, these tensions shape Fairtrade’s global standard setting as reflected in Fairtrade’s recently revised labor standards. At the local level, these tensions shape the varied impacts of certification on the ground as revealed through a case study of certified flower production in Ecuador. (shrink)

Alfons Schilling began his long‐term investigations on perception during the early 1960s by designing motion paintings,1 and continued the research with design of optical instruments called Vision Machines.2 Schilling's experiments were constructed as head‐worn objects, or instruments, in various shapes and sizes, which transformed the viewer's perception through first‐hand experience.

Vaccine hesitancy is a growing threat to public health. The reasons are complex but linked inextricably to a lack of trust in vaccines, expertise and traditional sources of authority. Efforts to increase immunization uptake in children in many countries that have seen a fall in vaccination rates are two-fold: addressing hesitancy by improving healthcare professional-parent exchange and information provision in the clinic; and, secondly, public health strategies that can override parental concerns and values with coercive measures such as mandatory and (...) presumptive vaccination. It is argued that such conflicting, parallel approaches seriously risk undermining trust that is crucial for sustaining herd immunity. Although public health strategies can be ethically justified in limiting freedoms, a parent-centered approach seldom acknowledges how it is impacted by contemporaneous coercive measures. In addition, the clinical encounter is not well suited to helping parents consider the public dimensions of vaccination, despite these being important for trust formation and informed decision-making. Efforts to address vaccine hesitancy require more consistent engagement of parental and citizen views. Along with evidence-based information, debates need to be informed by ethical support that equips parents and professionals to respond to the private and public dimensions of vaccination in a more even-handed, transparent manner. Efforts to address vaccine hesitancy need to avoid simple reliance on either parental values or coercive public policies. To do this effectively requires increasing citizen engagement on vaccination to help inform a parent-centered approach and legitimize public policy measures. In addition, cultivating a more ethically consistent strategy means moving beyond the current silos of health ethics - clinical and public health ethics. (shrink)

There is scarce research on the interaction between psychosocial working conditions and being a target of workplace bullying with individual characteristics as a moderator. We therefore examined 3,363 employees from 60 Danish workplaces to test whether sense of coherence moderates the relationship between the job demand-control model and bullying. This work is exploratory in nature, as no previous study to assess this moderation was found. Hierarchical linear regressions showed that demand-control model was significantly associated with bullying. Sense of coherence displayed (...) a significant though practically negligible moderating effect. This suggests that negative psychosocial working conditions are associated with bullying independently of personal characteristics, at least in terms of sense of coherence. (shrink)

Deep ecological appeals for wilderness preservation commonly conjoin arguments for participatory land use decision-making with their central championing of natural areas protection. As an articulation of the normative meaning of participatory democracy, the discourse ethics advanced by Jürgen Habermas is employed to highlight the consistency and justifiability of this dual claim. I argue that Habermasian moral theory reveals a key tension between, on the one hand, an ethical commitment to wilderness preservation informed by deep ecological and bioregional principles that is (...) oriented to a naturalistic value order and, on the other, the procedural norms of democratic participation. It is claimed that discourse ethics thereby raises critical philosophical and practical questions concerning the political legitimacy of deep ecology. In examining the progressive claims of environmental philosophers and wilderness activists embracing this perspective, I draw empirically upon Canadian arguments for natural areas protection and associated radical prescriptions for a democratisation of land use decision-making. (shrink)

Corporate malpractice and malfeasance on an unprecedented scale have brought ethical issues to the fore and accentuated demands from activists, governments, and the public for greater corporate social responsibility (CSR). The predominant response of researchers and policymakers has been to focus on the external impact of business operations and the merits of regulation or persuasion in achieving more responsible practice in these areas. In this article, we focus on a less well explored aspect of CSR, namely the evaluation of an (...) organization's CSR activities by its internal stakeholders (i.e., employees). Salient CSR literature is reviewed to differentiate between CSR and ethical business practice (EBP), conceptualizing the latter as the internal manifestation of CSR as represented by an organization's values and vision, strategy and policy, systems and procedures, and people management practices. This article assesses organizational espousal of EBP in three ways: how successfully it is communicated to employees, how closely espousal aligns with employee expectation, and how this evaluation impacts on employee commitment. Our research approach aligns with and extends previous work in this area that identifies the likelihood of a “false consensus bias” by managers in assuming congruence between organization espousal of EBP and employee expectation. A conceptual model is offered to explain possible employee responses to an organization's EBP. This relates organization espousal of EBP to employee assessment of its salience to identify three positions on commitment that employees can adopt—abrogated, continuance, and affective commitment—together with their likely behavioral implications. The analysis generates a series of research questions and related areas of exploration to empirically test the conceptual model. (shrink)

The Article presents a study of opportunities and problems related to the procedural actions taken by bailiffs electronically. In the opinion of the authors, the digitalisation of the enforcement procedure seeks to ensure the maximum use of electronic documents: enforcement and procedural documents should function only in the electronic format and thereby should create an effective, transparent and easily accessible information system of electronic enforcement files, which will not only increase the effectiveness of performance of bailiffs and save costs, but (...) will also ensure the protection of the rights of claimants and debtors in enforcement proceedings through reliable and prompt service of procedural documents by electronic means, access to information about the course of the enforcement proceedings by using information technologies, and transfer of certain procedural actions taken by bailiffs into the electronic environment. Section one of the Article discusses the EU regulation in the area of unification and digitalisation of the enforcement procedure. Section two deals with the possibilities of issuing electronic enforcement orders, issuance of an enforcement order, technical measures to enable bailiffs access the information systems of the institutions issuing enforcement orders by safe electronic channels and thereby electronic enforcement orders would be transferred from the issuing institution to bailiffs electronically, without using any hard copy enforcement orders. In the opinion of the authors, considering that the majority of enforcement orders are issued by courts, it would be expedient, first of all, to take advantage of the existing information system LITEKO, making it possible to keep not only court judgments but also enforcement orders there as well as providing bailiffs with technical possibilities of access to the LITEKO system and acceptance of the electronic enforcement orders from the system. A similar principle should be followed for designing integrated information systems of bailiffs and other institutions that issue enforcement orders. Section three focuses on the main procedural documents – arrangements given by bailiffs and property attachment deeds – and on their electronic service on the participants involved in the enforcement procedure. The last section of the Article offers a study of the measures to secure the rights of participants of the enforcement procedure, namely access of the participants of the enforcement procedure to the enforcement file, possibilities for courts to obtain electronic enforcement files promptly, etc. (shrink)

We present a novel way of accounting for similarity judgments. Our approach posits that similarity stems from three main sources—familiarity, priming, and inherent perceptual likeness. Here, we explore each of these constructs and demonstrate their individual and combined effectiveness in explaining similarity judgments. Using these three measures, our account of similarity explains ratings of simple, color-based perceptual stimuli that display asymmetry effects, as well as more complicated perceptual stimuli with structural properties; more traditional approaches to similarity solve one or the (...) other and have difficulty accounting for both. Overall, our work demonstrates the importance of each of these components of similarity in explaining similarity judgments, both individually and together, and suggests important implications for other similarity approaches. (shrink)

A l'aube du troisième millénaire, l'âme est oubliée. Les poètes l'ont remplacée par son double, le corps ; les philosophes l'évitent, les psychanalystes tentent de le remplacer. Même les théologiens en boudent l'usage& Eclipse de l'âme. Une disparition si singulière appelle à la réflexion. Le mot très ancien se serait-il usé à force de trop signifier? Faudrait-il le ranger définitivement au grenier des idées désuètes? Ayant relégué l'âme au rayon des vieilleries, nous sommes aujourd'hui confrontés au fait que les notions (...) de corps, d'animal, de vie, de mort et de personne sont devenues impossibles à cerner, comme le savent les experts en bioéthique et les juristes, parfois désemparés devant les problèmes que posent la science, la médecine moderne et le développement des biotechnologies. L'auteur propose de revenir sur les théories et les " modèles " que les philosophes, les théologiens, les médecins et les hommes de science ont proposés, et parfois soumis à l'expérimentation pour penser l'âme, d'en retracer les origines parfois très anciennes, et d'en suivre les avatars dans l'histoire naturelle de l'Homme. Tout cela afin de retrouver le moyen de penser notre " place " parmi les autres êtres " animés ", les relations entre notre " âme vitale " et notre " âme pensante ", de penser les problèmes de la vie, la mort, et de la frontière entre les deux. (shrink)

This paper explores the recent social phenomenon of the confrontation by critics of government officials while they are out in public, yet engaged in “private” activities, e.g. eating dinner at a restaurant, shopping in a bookstore, or getting into their cars. This paper argues that such confrontations are a symptom of the lack of trust brought on by the absence of shared social values that results in toxic forms of public discourse, the blurring of the classical liberal distinction between the (...) public and the private realms, and the inability to hold one another responsible for the violation of self-avowed moral norms. Implicit in this argument is the conclusion that such confrontations are ineffective at best. Some have suggested more physical intermingling among people who hold conflicting political views in order to establish such trust (Haidt, Wilk). In the absence of such opportunities for intermingling, sharing our value-laden personal stories with each other, in the spirit and style of Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming, might help to create tolerance and trust among those with differing political perspectives. (shrink)

The study described in this article examines whether wives' relative resources and material conditions affect husbands' domestic labor within varying economic development contexts. The study tests: whether wives' relative resources increase husbands' regularity of housework participation and whether the effects of wives' relative resources on husbands' regularity of housework participation vary in quantity and effect at different levels of economic development. The study indicates that wives' material conditions and relative resources have no consistent, significant effects on husbands' regularity of housework (...) participation. Levels of national economic development also have little effect. (shrink)

This study shows how Goethe's Die pilgernde Torin, Kleist's Die Marquise von O..., Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and James' Daisy Miller can appeal to the reader who identifies a message friendly towards woman and her plight, whether the message was the author's intention or not.

I suggest that philosophical writers should connect epistemological theorizing with life experience in order to explore the complex relationship between the two. The relationship of theory to experience does not fit the neat hierarchical model of a small number of general organizing principles giving form to or receiving form from a large mass of facts. Instead, as the narrative of my honeymoon and my life following it suggests, philosophical theories are one of the many genres of stories philosophers tell themselves (...) in the process of creating and recreating personal identities and personae. (shrink)

The wearable technology field, including terms and areas such as wearable computing and fashionable technology, has been evolving at the cross-section of various disciplines including science, technology, arts, augmented reality, design, cybernetics, ergonomics and fashion. As an example, the research community in wearable computing has been carrying out profound work in understanding and defining many key principles in the field. According to these researchers, the wearable computer is understood as a kind of extension of the body, which enables it to (...) perform tasks that would not otherwise be possible, such as being in several places at the same time.1This is an example of one of the approaches currently existing in this multifaceted field. The field also contains other detectable approaches, each with their own distinct aim. These approaches vary from developing solutions to engineering problems to developments in fashion and design and further to more conceptual approaches in addressing the field with what the author refers to as a playful attitude. When one investigates various projects in the wearable field more closely one can detect at least three clearly distinct approaches. The first approach is to follow the general guidelines for wearable computing development and objectives defined during the 1990s. The second approach sometimes called fashionable technology, to some extent follows similar directives as the first approach, but, in addition, it is strongly related to traditions and expectations in the areas of fashion and textile. The third approach has self-defined aims, which are partially contradictory to the general goals prevailing in the field. This third approach has been left almost without a notice in publications emerging from the field as well as in other theoretical writings concerned of art and technology. Until now the wearable technology field has been discussed primarily as one unified area striving towards similar goals.This article investigates this third approach. It asks how and why some of the projects in the field seem to differ from the general goals persisting in the field, and examines what the possible motivations and intentions behind this alternative approach are. Lastly, the article introduces the Hybronaut as a concept related to the author's practice and research. (shrink)