Based on European National Transfer Accounts data from 2010, this paper quantifies and evaluates the balance of intergenerational transfer flows in 16 EU countries, including transfers in the form of unpaid household work. On average, the value of net transfers received by a child amounts to sixteen times the labour income of a full-time worker, and the net transfers received by an elderly person to six times the labour income of a full-time worker. Intergenerational transfers can be regarded as the (...) reciprocal exchange between two generations: the size of the transfers to the child generation determines their potential to generate income and finance public transfers to the elderly population once they enter employment. We develop and calculate an indicator to analyse if there is a balance between transfers to children and transfers expected by the elderly population. The results indicate that in most of the analysed countries the human capital investments in children are far too low to finance the generous transfers to the elderly population in the future. (shrink)

Vaccines and vaccination are richly explored areas of study within the history of science and medicine, connecting related fields of the history of science and technology, and spanning across subfields such as biomedical sciences, animal studies, colonial and postcolonial history, and the history of global health. Vaccination is a thoroughly political act that is at once an intimate and local issue and a transnational one, with its particular set of politics connecting stakes for the individual and the community. Vaccination also (...) maps on narratives and temporal frameworks of disease with an ultimate goal of ending epidemics. Therefore, the essay takes these three analytical entry points to discuss the historiography of vaccination: the geographical, the political, and the temporal. We argue that through these lenses we can gain a more nuanced understanding of historical narratives we privilege, and in return, this understanding can enable us to explore past and current questions of health inequalities, validation practices, power relations and resistance and vaccine diplomacy. (shrink)

This article investigates a puzzle in the rapidly evolving profession of advertising in post-socialist Hungary: young professionals who came of age during the shift to market-driven practices want to produce advertising that is uncompromised by clients and consumers, and to educate others about western modernity. It is their older colleagues—trained during customer-hostile socialism—who emphasize that good professionals serve their clients’ needs. These unexpected generational positions show that 1) professions are more than groups expanding their jurisdiction. They are fields structured by (...) two conflicting demands: autonomy of expertise and dependence on clients. We can explain the puzzle by noting that actors are positioning themselves on one or the other side based on their trajectory or movement in the field relative to other actors. Old and new groups vie for power in the transforming post-socialist professional field, responding to each other’s claims and vulnerabilities, exploiting the professional field’s contradictory demands on its actors. 2) The struggle is not between those who are oriented to the west and those that are not. Rather, the west is both the means and the stake of the struggle over historical continuity and professional power. Imposing a definition of the west is almost the same as imposing a definition of the profession on the field. In this historical case, “field” appears less as a stable structure based on actors’ equipment with capital, than as dynamic relations moved forward by contestation of the field’s relevant capital. (shrink)

According to the Maintainable Positive Mental Health Theory (MPMHT), the main pillars of positive mental health are global well-being, efficient coping that enables an individual to maintain positive conditions and functioning, savoring capacity, resilience, and dynamic self-regulation. This study presents the validation of a new five-scale mental health test (MHT), the MHT that operationalizes MPMHT. The methodology comprised two online cross-sectional studies using self-report questionnaires. Participants in Study I (n = 1,736; 448 males, 1,288 females; mean age 51.3 years; SD (...) = 11.6 years) filled in the MHT, the Flow, the Positive emotions, Engagement, Positive Relationship, Meaning, Accomplishment Questionnaire (PERMA-Profiler), and the Flourishing Scale. Participants in Study II (n = 1,083; 233 males, 847 females; mean age 33.9 years; SD = 12.2 years) filled in the MHT, the Shortened Aspiration Index, the short form of the Beck Depression Inventory, the WHO Well-Being Index, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the Purpose in Life Test, and the Schema Questionnaire–Short Form. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) identified a five-factor structure with 17 items in Study I that was confirmed with excellent fit measures in confirmatory factor analysis in Study II. Both studies indicated a high level of internal consistency (above 0.70). In each subscale, a minimum part of 44% did not overlap with the set of the other subscales. The content validity of the subscales was confirmed by 10 tests of mental health. We found a positive correlation of the self-regulation and resilience subscales with age, while women showed a higher level of savoring than men at all age levels. When Study I was replicated after 2 weeks and again after 11 months, excellent internal consistency and good test–retest correlation values of the MHT scales were found. The MHT can thus be considered a reliable and valid measurement tool for mental health. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms bring out an under-appreciated puzzle of discrimination, namely figuring out when a decision made on the basis of a factor correlated with race is a decision made on the basis of race. I argue that prevailing approaches, which are based on identifying and then distinguishing among causal effects of race, in their metaphysical timidity, fail to get off the ground. I suggest, instead, that adopting a constructivist theory of race answers this puzzle in a principled manner. On (...) what I call a “thick constructivist” account of race, to be raced is to be socially positioned in the way indicated by a certain set of statistical regularities on the basis of particular phenotypical traits. A thick constructivist sees that acting on the basis of correlations that constitute race qua social position just is acting on the basis of race, because races just are social positions that subject their member individuals to a particular matrix of social relations that define the raced position. This conclusion has considerable ramifications for our understanding of discrimination, algorithms and beyond. (shrink)

The development of highly humanoid sex robots is on the technological horizon. If sex robots are integrated into the legal community as “electronic persons”, the issue of sexual consent arises, which is essential for legally and morally permissible sexual relations between human persons. This paper explores whether it is conceivable, possible, and desirable that humanoid robots should be designed such that they are capable of consenting to sex. We consider reasons for giving both “no” and “yes” answers to these three (...) questions by examining the concept of consent in general, as well as critiques of its adequacy in the domain of sexual ethics; the relationship between consent and free will; and the relationship between consent and consciousness. Additionally we canvass the most influential existing literature on the ethics of sex with robots. (shrink)

"The work is on an important topic that has been oft debated but rarely systematically studied – the political, cultural, and moral effects of distant news coverage of suffering. [The book] is extremely well steeped in the relevant literature, including semiotics, discourse analysis, meda and social theory and makes a fresh methodological contribution by looking at the codes and formats of news about suffering. It has a fresh vision and answer to some of the stickiest moral and media problems of (...) our time … and deserves to find its place among important books about the moral aspects of media and society in our times." —John D. Peters, F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor, University of Ohio This book is about the relationship between the spectators in countries of the west, and the distant sufferer on the television screen; the sufferer in Somalia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, but also from New York and Washington DC. How do we relate to television images of the distant sufferer? The question touches on the ethical role of the media in public life today. They address the issue of whether the media can cultivate a disposition of care for and engagement with the far away other; whether television can create a global public with a sense of social responsibility towards the distant sufferer. (shrink)

Moral bioenhancement, nudge-designed environments, and ambient persuasive technologies may help people behave more consistently with their deeply held moral convictions. Alternatively, they may aid people in overcoming cognitive and affective limitations that prevent them from appreciating a situation’s moral dimensions. Or they may simply make it easier for them to make the morally right choice by helping them to overcome sources of weakness of will. This paper makes two assumptions. First, technologies to improve people’s moral capacities are realizable. Second, such (...) technologies will actually help people get morality right and behave more consistently with whatever the ‘real’ right thing to do turns out to be. The paper then considers whether or not humanity loses anything valuable, particularly opportunities for moral progress, when being moral is made much easier by eliminating difficult moral deliberation and internal moral struggle. Ultimately, the worry that moral struggle has value as a catalyst for moral progress is rejected. Moral progress is understood here as the discovery and application of new values or sensitization to new sources of harm. (shrink)

Recent advances in machine learning methods have created opportunities to eliminate unfairness from algorithmic decision making. Multiple computational techniques (i.e., algorithmic fairness criteria) have arisen out of this work. Yet, urgent questions remain about the perceived fairness of these criteria and in which situations organizations should use them. In this paper, we seek to gain insight into these questions by exploring fairness perceptions of five algorithmic criteria. We focus on two key dimensions of fairness evaluations: distributive fairness and procedural fairness. (...) We shed light on variation in the potential for different algorithmic criteria to facilitate distributive fairness. Subsequently, we discuss procedural fairness and provide a framework for understanding how algorithmic criteria relate to essential aspects of this construct, which helps to identify when a specific criterion is suitable. From a practical standpoint, we encourage organizations to recognize that managing fairness in machine learning systems is complex, and that adopting a blind or one-size-fits-all mentality toward algorithmic criteria will surely damage people’s attitudes and trust in automated technology. Instead, firms should carefully consider the subtle yet significant differences between these technical solutions. (shrink)

Addiction appears to be a deeply moralized concept. To understand the entwinement of addiction and morality, we briefly discuss the disease model and its alternatives in order to address the following questions: Is the disease model the only path towards a ‘de-moralized’ discourse of addiction? While it is tempting to think that medical language surrounding addiction provides liberation from the moralized language, evidence suggests that this is not necessarily the case. On the other hand non-disease models of addiction may seem (...) to resuscitate problematic forms of the moralization of addiction, including, invoking blame, shame, and the wholesale rejection of addicts as people who have deep character flaws, while ignoring the complex biological and social context of addiction. This is also not necessarily the case. We argue that a deficit in reasons responsiveness as basis for attribution of moral responsibility can be realized by multiple different causes, disease being one, but it also seems likely that alternative accounts of addiction as developed by Flanagan, Lewis, and Levy, may also involve mechanisms, psychological, social, and neurobiological that can diminish reasons responsiveness. It thus seems to us that nondisease models of addiction do not necessarily involve moralization. Hence, a non-stigmatizing approach to recovery can be realized in ways that are consistent with both the disease model and alternative models of addiction. (shrink)

In this chapter we take stock of some of the complexities of the sprawling field of AI ethics. We consider questions like "what is the proper scope of AI ethics?" And "who counts as an AI ethicist?" At the same time, we flag several potential uses and abuses of AI ethics. These include challenges for the AI ethicist, including what qualifications they should have; the proper place and extent of futuring and speculation in the field; and the dilemmas concerning how (...) we use our public and academic resources. (shrink)

Digital peddling of fake news is influential to persuasive political participation, with veritable social media platforms. Social media, with their instantaneous and widespread usage, have been exploited by ‘anonymous’ political influencers who fabricate and inundate internet community with unverified and false information. Using van Leeuwen’s Discourse Legitimation approach and insights from Discourse Analysis, this study analyses 120 purposively sampled fake news posts on Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter, shared during the 2019 general elections in Nigeria. WhatsApp allows for the easy and (...) fast sharing of fake news as it pulled the largest occurrence of legitimation strategies, followed by Facebook. Authorisation is the highest occurring legitimation strategy at 46.6% frequency; this is followed by Moralisation which has 27% and Rationalisation at 26.4%; while Mythopoesis did not feature at all in the sampled data, leaving it at 0%. In particular, expert and role model authority are most often deployed to validate fake news such as the demise and cloning of President Buhari, ruling party’s plan to rig and destabilise the 2019 election, massive corruption in the current administration and imminent ethnic violence. The study argues that these strategies are viable persuasive tools owing to their use of discourse markers like make-believe images, emotive language, appeal to emotions, rational conclusions, hateful comments, verbal indictment and coercive verbs. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper focuses on the opening of a discursive space: the emergence of informational and scriptural representations of life and their self-negating consequences for the construction of biological meaning. It probes the notion of writing and the book of life and shows how molecular biology's claims to a status of language and texuality undermines its own objective of control. These textual significations were historically contingent. The informational representations of heredity and life were not an outcome of the internal cognitive (...) momentum of molecular biology; they were not a logical necessity of the unravelling of the base-pairing of the DNA double-helix. They were transported into molecular biology still within the protein paradigm of the gene in the 1940s and permeated nearly every discipline in the life and social sciences. These information-based models, metaphors, linguistic, and semiotic tools which were central to the formulation of the genetic code were transported into molecular biology from cybernetics, information theory, electronic computing, and control and communication systems — technosciences that were deeply embedded with the military experiences of world war II and the Cold War. The information discourse thus became fixed in molecular biology not because it worked in the narrow epistemic sense (it did not), but because it positioned molecular biology within postwar discourse and culture, perhaps within the transition to a post-modern information-based society. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship between abusive supervision and employee creativity by shedding light on the mediating role of negative affect and the moderating role of interpersonal harmony. Based on affective events theory, it was hypothesized that abusive supervision impacts employees’ negative affect and their creativity. Data from a questionnaire survey of 398 Chinese employee–supervisor dyads were collected and analyzed. The results support our hypotheses, address unexplored theoretical predictions, and suggest that organizations should deal with the factors undermining employees’ emotions (...) to improve their creativity. (shrink)

The study examined the effect of celebrity attractiveness, celebrity trustworthiness, and celebrity cause fit on the attitude toward green cosmetics. This was followed by the effect of brand awareness, brand associations, brand loyalty, perceived quality, brand credibility on brand equity, including the impact of attitude toward green cosmetics and brand equity on the willingness to purchase green cosmetics among of young Chinese consumers. This study adopted a cross-sectional design and collected quantitative data from 301 respondents using a structured questionnaire, which (...) was distributed online using various social media platforms. It was found that celebrity attractiveness, celebrity trustworthiness, and celebrity cause-fit had a significant impact on the attitudes toward green cosmetic, while brand loyalty, perceived quality, and brand credibility substantially affected brand equity. Moreover, the attitudes toward green cosmetics and brand equity had a strong impact on the willingness to purchase green cosmetics. To increase the sales for green cosmetics, the advertisements for it should have appeal, trustworthiness, and cause-fit celebrities to improve consumers’ attitudes and willingness to purchase green cosmetics. Finding of this study provide a guideline for green cosmetic manufacturers, to direct their resources to enhance brand loyalty, credibility, and perceived quality of the product they produce by highlighting the difference between conventional and green cosmetics. (shrink)

Research investigating the intricacies of how self-regulated writing strategies are used in a finely focused area of the second language writing process is still lacking. This study takes a mixed-methods approach to explore Chinese English as a Foreign Language learners’ use of self-regulated writing strategies when revising based on automated, peer, and teacher feedback in an online EFL writing context. Thirty-six Chinese university learners filled in three questionnaires. In addition, four learners followed a think-aloud protocol while revising and responding to (...) a stimulated recall interview to provide further data. The results revealed that learners employed an array of self-regulated writing strategies to attain their feedback revision goals. Learners used more cognitive strategies when revising based on automated feedback compared with peer and teacher feedback and more motivational strategies when revising based on teacher feedback. The think-aloud data and stimulated recall interviews coincided with the quantitative findings. Textual analysis revealed that feedback type and quantity were associated with self-regulated writing strategy use. (shrink)

In this chapter we identify three potentially morally problematic behaviours that are common among users of dating and hook-up apps (DHAs) and provide arguments as to why they may or may not be considered (a) in a category of their own, distinct from similar behaviours outside of DHAs; (b) caused or facilitated by affordances and business logic of DHAs; (c) as indeed morally wrong. We also consider ways in which morally problematic behaviours can be anticipated, mitigated, or even prevented by (...) analysis of the ethical and moral dimensions of technologies and their afforded uses. Finally, we offer some possible directions for future work on these topics in particular and on the ethical consequences of DHAs in general. (shrink)

Cultural diversity between residents and staff is significant in aged care homes in many developed nations in the context of international migration. This diversity can be a challenge to achieving effective cross‐cultural communication. The aim of this study was to critically examine how staff and residents initiated effective cross‐cultural communication and social cohesion that enabled positive changes to occur. A critical hermeneutic analysis underpinned by Giddens’ Structuration Theory was applied to the study. Data were collected by interviews with residents or (...) their family and by focus groups with staff in four aged care homes in Australia. Findings reveal that residents and staff are capable of restructuring communication via a partnership approach. They can also work in collaboration to develop communication resources. When staff demonstrate cultural humility, they empower residents from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to engage in effective communication. Findings also suggest that workforce interventions are required to improve residents’ experiences in cross‐cultural care. This study challenges aged care homes to establish policies, criteria and procedures in cross‐cultural communication. There is also the challenge to provide ongoing education and training for staff to improve their cross‐cultural communication capabilities. (shrink)

How could ectogestative technology disrupt gender roles, parenting practices, and concepts such as ‘birth’, ‘body’, or ‘parent’? In this chapter, we situate this emerging technology in the context of the history of reproductive technologies and analyse the potential social and conceptual disruptions to which it could contribute. An ectogestative device, better known as ‘artificial womb’, enables the extra-uterine gestation of a human being, or mammal more generally. It is currently developed with the main goal of improving the survival chances of (...) extremely premature neonates. We argue that the intended use of the technology in neonatal intensive care units, as an alternative to current incubators (’partial-ectogestation’), challenges concepts such as ‘birth’, ‘fetus’, and ‘neonate’, and has several ethico-legal implications. We moreover address a more futuristic scenario where the entire embryological and fetal development could happen within an artificial womb (’full-ectogestation’). Such a scenario reveals the disruption of gender roles, parenting practices, and concepts such as ‘mother’, ‘father’, and ‘parent’. Both full- and partial-ectogestation would have implications for engineering and design, law-making, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

The Problem of the value of truth came before us – or was it we who came before the problem? Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks.– NietzscheArthur Fine, in his defense of the Natural Ontological Attitude, has argued that any attempt to analyze truth will fail because any such analysis presupposes an untenable essentialism. In particular, he asserts that the anti-realist analysis of truth commits itself to (...) there being an essential property which all true statements possess, qua true statements. It is this commitment which he castigates. For the concept of truth is the fundamental semantical concept. Its uses, history, logic, and grammar are sufficiently definite to be partially catalogued, at least for a time. But it cannot be “explained” or given an “account of” without circularity. Nor does it require anything of the sort. The concept of truth is open-ended, growing with the growth of science …. Thus there is no projectible sketch now of what truth signifies, nor of what areas of science truth is exempt from - nor will there ever be. (shrink)

Kunstmatige intelligentie (AI) en systemen die met machine learning (ML) werken, kunnen veel onderdelen van het medische besluitvormingsproces ondersteunen of vervangen. Ook zouden ze artsen kunnen helpen bij het omgaan met klinische, morele dilemma’s. AI/ML-beslissingen kunnen zo in de plaats komen van professionele beslissingen. We betogen dat dit belangrijke gevolgen heeft voor de relatie tussen een patiënt en de medische professie als instelling, en dat dit onvermijdelijk zal leiden tot uitholling van het institutionele vertrouwen in de geneeskunde.

Though there has been much debate about whether Abelard's ethics are dangerously subjective or surprisingly absolutist, one thing is unanimous: they are intentionalist. The goal of this article is to parse out what should be meant by this claim, distancing his ethical account from the popular Kantian appraisal. Though much of the secondary literature on Abelard likens him to Kant, I argue that this is mistaken. For Abelard, an agent's intentions are informed by their affections—whether carnal or spiritual. This becomes (...) clear when contextualizing Abelard's use of intentio with a view to his Commentary on Romans. Using the account of intention I suggest—one nuanced by Abelard's own theological commitments and biblical exegesis—it will be clear that Abelard's ethics is not a case for the moral neutrality of the passions nor an ethic of pure reason. (shrink)

One of the most legendary educational books ever written is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Émile ou de l’Education”. Most obviously Rousseau wrote this book guided by diverse more or less conscious purposes and one of the main problems it presents is paradoxical: Does education have to promote freedom by force? In this article I will, firstly, present several aims that might have triggered Rousseau to write “Émile”. Secondly, I will discuss Rousseau’s view of the so called “educational paradox”. Since this quandary touches (...) the topic of many other of his books, I will discuss “Émile” along with Rousseau’s other works and thus place his educational story in his “great narrative”. (shrink)

This discussion concerns the under-explored influence of Jacques Derrida on Paul B. Preciado and the autotheoretical enterprise that is Testo Junkie. Picking up on the deconstructive logic of contamination at work in Preciado’s early writings, the article reckons with autotheory as both a theoretical mode motored by the first person and an autobiographical mode interested in self-shaping. In so doing, it offers a genealogy of autotheory that finds its origins in Derrida’s disinterest in disciplinary purity and dislike of philosophical detachment, (...) at the same time as positioning Testo Junkie firmly within a French literary and philosophical context where it both intervenes in the activity of queer theorizing and antagonizes the highly popular genre of autofiction through a series of generic contaminations. Autotheory, in this itinerary, is inseparable from the self-writing project that Preciado undertakes and advocates, one that disidentifies from the fiction of a privately sexed and interior ‘self’. (shrink)

Much of the research on theory of mind (ToM) approaches ToM as a unitary construct; on such an account, mental state understanding across different contexts reflects the same cognitive process. Some researchers, however, suggest that ToM can be separated into different components that contribute differently to the understanding of people's minds. Evidence from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience supports the notion that ToM consists of at least two components. Three different componential views are discussed: (1) early‐ versus late‐developing components, (2) (...) social‐perceptual versus social‐cognitive components, and (3) affective versus cognitive components. (shrink)

This review essay on the literature on creative cities pays particular attention to the ways in which transnational mobilities contribute significantly to the making of such cities. The paper reviews critically both the literature and phenomena of creative cities and their transnational flows by framing the discussion around the mobility of ideas (creative economy/creative city discourse), the mobility of people (the migration of the creative class), the mobility of technology (the travel of the creative cluster and architectural iconism phenomena), the (...) mobility of finances (capital and investment flows), and the mobility of images (transnational artistic collaborations and products). (shrink)