The Anderson Station massacre highlights problems with both sovereignty's fragmentation and biopolitics. Sovereign entities have power over and determine the value of human life. Over and over, Belter life is reduced to bare life. They are exploited and then exterminated when their “usefulness” runs its course. What we often see in these reductions of Belters to bare life is the way that capitalism corrupts—both other sovereign entities and as a sovereign. In The Expanse, the problems with the uncontrolled capitalist sovereign (...) and the influence of capitalism on other sovereign entities are stark. Adding in the aspect of biopolitics, a people considered inferior like the Belters, makes these problems even more stark. Even Ceres police detective Joe Miller says the Belter political organization, the Outer Planets Alliance, is beloved by the people it helped and feared by the ones who got in its way. (shrink)

Variation in decision-making about end-of-life care among ethnic groups creates clinical conflicts. In order to understand changes in preferences for end-of-life care among Japanese who immigrate to the United States, we conducted 18 focus groups with 122 participants: 65 English-speaking Japanese Americans, 29 Japanese-speaking Japanese Americans and 28 Japanese living in Japan.Negative feelings toward living in adverse health states and receiving life-sustaining treatment in such states permeated all three groups. Fear of being meiwaku, a physical, psychological or financial caregiving burden (...) on loved ones, was a prominent concern. They preferred to die pokkuri (popping off) before they become end stage or physically frail. All groups preferred group-oriented decision-making with family. Although advance directives were generally accepted, Japanese participants saw written directives as intrusive whereas Japanese Americans viewed them mainly as tools to reduce conflict created by dying person's wishes and a family's kazoku no jo– responsibility to sustain the dying patient. These findings suggest that in the United States Japanese cultural values concerning end-of-life care and decision-making process are largely preserved. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est issu d’un colloque organisé à l’Université de Pennsylvanie en 2010 par les éditrices du volume, toutes deux historiennes. Les articles de cette anthologie sont d’une lecture très accessible, malgré leurs références érudites, et présentent un panorama de travaux menés essentiellement aux États-Unis, à la croisée du genre et de la religion. Ces recherches démontrent que les innovations théoriques des études de genre (gender studies) contribuent à renouveler les études juives et...

Twenty-two engaging and approachable essays, written by scholars and activists working to protect the world’s eight bear species, explore pressures that threaten the world’s remaining bears, offering a tapestry of possibilities for protecting and preserving these endangered yet much-loved beings.

Argues that in order to reinvigorate our moral inheritances we must endeavor not only to live well, but also to live better.

. The concept of bodily health is problematic for mechanists like Descartes, as it seems that they need to appeal to something extrinsic to a machine, i.e., its purpose, to determine whether the machine is working well or badly, and so healthy or unhealthy. I take issue with this claim. By drawing on the history of medicine, I suggest that in the seventeenth century there was space for a non-teleological account of health. I further argue that mechanists can and did (...) appeal to structural integrity, as a non-teleological notion of form, to ground the norms required for ascriptions of health. (shrink)

This study investigates the connection between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate reputation among the public using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). To examine complex processes underlying the reactions of this influential stakeholder group, hypotheses are drawn from the category diagnosticity approach. Thereby, a psychological model of perceived (im)morality is transferred to the CSR context. In line with these hypotheses, positive/negative CSR activities influence reputation in the expected directions (H1a, b), while the effects of specific configurations of CSR activities (...) reveal an asymmetry suggesting a negativity bias (H2). Further analyses confirm that positive effects require a consistent positive performance regarding prior reputations (H3a) and the aggregated CSR activities of several previous years (H3b, c). Moreover, the relevant patterns vary between industries (H4). The present study thus contributes to CSR research by investigating a powerful but hitherto understudied stakeholder group through a category diagnosticity lens combined with a configurational approach to analysis. (shrink)

(1999). Princess Elizabeth and Descartes: The union of soul and body and the practice of philosophy. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 503-520. doi: 10.1080/09608789908571042.

Analysing ten interviews with women diagnosed with and treated for congenital absence of the vagina, this article theorises the notion of ideal (hetero)relational normality. It explores how women in my case study negotiate, relate to and challenge this notion and examines the normative and bodily work for which it calls. The article specifically underscores the corporeal dimension of (hetero)relational normality. I argue that this notion of normality shapes the bodies of the women through medical interventions, while concurrently being reinforced through (...) the corporeal shapings that the women undergo. These corporeal shapings consolidate enacted norms concerning heterosexuality and form understandings of female and male bodies. The analysis also reveals how these women nevertheless find ways to re-negotiate and question the notion of ideal (hetero)relational normality and its intertwinement with medical practice. The article contributes both to the critical examination of genital surgery and to feminist discussions of how to critically examine heterosexuality without rejecting it. Furthermore, it provides a deeper understanding of how medical interventions designed to create a vagina, or dilate a vagina considered ‘too small’, are made meaningful by the women affected. (shrink)

I argue that a particular epistemological approach, “ecological thinking,” helps to demonstrate that long-term care work is organized transnationally—through health, economic, labor, and immigration policies established primarily by governments, transnational corporations, other for-profit entities, and international lending bodies—to create and sustain injustice against the dependent elderly and those who care for them, and to weaken the care capacities of countries and their health systems, especially those of source countries. An ecological approach also helps to reveal the grounding of global responsibilities (...) and an alternative conception of justice for long-term care and global health equity more generally. (shrink)

This paper will consider the right not to know in the context of psychiatric disorders. It will outline the arguments for and against acquiring knowledge about the results of genetic testing for conditions such as breast cancer and Huntington’s disease, and examine whether similar considerations apply to disclosing to clients the results of genetic testing for psychiatric disorders such as depression and Alzheimer’s disease. The right not to know will also be examined in the context of the diagnosis of psychiatric (...) disorders that are associated with stigma or for which there is no effective treatment. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been significant interest in injustices that do not consist in inflicting physical or material harm on others, but operate in more subtle ways, e.g. by targeting our status as epistemic agents. In a similar fashion, this paper aims to bring to the forefront a currently overlooked kind of injustice that occurs in relation to our concepts: conceptual injustice, which is characterised by wrongful in- or exclusion from the application of a concept. The first part of (...) the paper is concerned with spelling out the notion, discussing its characteristic wrongs, and with tracing it in a number of examples. In the second part, I discuss conceptual injustice in relation to connected but different forms of injustice, such as epistemic injustice. This highlights the advantages of having the notion on hand: it enhances our understanding of other forms of injustice like hermeneutical injustice, and allows us to capture a ‘remainder of injustice’ for which we could not account otherwise. (shrink)

Although there exist numerous publications on job and task rotation from various disciplines, there is no consistent evidence of their effectiveness. Drawing on theories from industrial and organizational psychology, knowledge management, ergonomics, and management science, we meta-analytically investigated relationships between job/task rotation and employee attitudes, learning and development, psychological and physical health, and organizational performance. Due to a conceptual overlap and frequent confusion of terminology, we analyzed the design of the rotation (job rotation vs. task rotation) as a possible moderator. (...) The three-level meta-analysis on 56 studies (N= 284,086) showed that rotation was significantly associated with job satisfaction (r= 0.27), organizational commitment (r= 0.16), career success (r= 0.31), labor flexibility (r= 0.32), general psychological health (r= 0.20), stress/burnout (r= −0.13), individual performance (r= 0.13), and productivity (r= 0.13). Positive relationships between rotation and physical health could only be found when rotation was compared to high-intensity work. Task rotation yielded stronger relationships with attitudinal outcomes, job rotation with learning and development, psychological health, and organizational performance outcomes. Further moderator analyses showed that individualism decreased relationships between task rotation and attitudes, and correlations with organizational performance and physical health were stronger for subjective measures. The findings indicate that many expectations toward job and task rotation are not fully supported. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with philosophical perspectives on the stigma of mental illness, with each chapter exploring different philosophical issues. Chapter one delineates the central concept around which the rest of the work revolves: the stigma of mental illness. It provides an outline of the stigma mechanism, how it applies to mental illness, why it is such a large public health concern and what has been done so far to combat it. Chapter two is concerned with the application of recent (...) literature in the philosophy of implicit bias to the topic of mental illness. It suggests that we have hitherto been preoccupied with explicit formulations of the stigma mechanism, but argues that there are distinctive issues involved in combatting forms of discrimination in which the participants are not cognisant of their attitudes or actions, and that anti-stigma initiatives for mental illness should take note. Chapter three applies the philosophical literature concerning the ethics of our epistemic practices to the stigma of mental illness. It contains an analysis of how epistemic injustice- primarily in the forms of testimonial injustice and stereotype threat- affects those with mental illnesses. The fourth chapter brings in issues in the philosophy of science to explore the possibility of intervening on the stigma process to halt the stigma of mental illness. The first candidate is discounted, and the second is tentatively endorsed. The fifth chapter is concerned with how language facilitates the stigma of mental illness. It suggests that using generics to talk about mental illness is deeply problematic. In the former, it conveys insidious forms of social stereotyping. In the latter, it propagates misinformation by presenting the category as a quintessential one. (shrink)

This essay is part of a dossier on Cristina Lafont's book Democracy without Shortcuts.

This paper questions the prevailing historical understanding that scientific racism "retreated" in the 1950s when anthropology adopted the concepts and methods of population genetics and race was recognized to be a social construct and replaced by the concept of population. More accurately, a "populational" concept of race was substituted for a "typological one"-this is demonstrated by looking at the work of Theodosius Dobzhansky circa 1950. The potential for contemporary research in human population genetics to contribute to racism needs to be (...) considered with respect to the ability of the typological-population distinction to arbitrate boundaries between racist society and nonracist, even anti-racist, science. I point out some ethical limits of "population thinking" in doing so. (shrink)

: The model of moral reasoning used in Institutional Review Board review fails to uphold ethical ideals for research participants for it does not adequately acknowledge the particular context of research or of subjects, including their gender, their socioeconomic status, and the communities in which they lead their lives. The ethical review of research needs to take seriously the particularities of the research context as well as the situations of potential participants. A variety of conclusions are drawn for changes to (...) the system for ethical review. Most significant is a call for effective consultation with the various communities affected by research and greater reliance on subject representatives. Also proposed is national review for selected research. (shrink)

Allowing persons to make an informed choice about their participation in research is a pre-eminent ethical and legal requirement. Almost universally, this requirement has been addressed through the provision of written patient information sheets and consent forms. Researchers and others have raised concerns about the extent to which such forms—particularly given their frequent lengthiness and complexity—provide participants with the tools and knowledge necessary for autonomous decision-making. Concerns are especially pronounced for certain participant groups, such as persons with low literacy and (...) Indigenous persons. Multimedia strategies have the potential to usefully supplement current consent practices in Australia; however, information is needed about the need for supplementary consent practices, along with drivers for and barriers against adoption. This study initiates the required evidence base through an audit of informed consent practices for medical research in the Australian state of Tasmania to assess the need for, and current uptake of, supplementary consent strategies. Drivers for and barriers against adoption of multimedia consent practices were explored in detail through interviews with key stakeholders, including researchers, HREC chairs and members, and research participants, including Indigenous participants. (shrink)

Reproductive genetic carrier screening (RCS), when offered to anyone regardless of their family history or ancestry, has been subject to the critique that it is a form of eugenics. Eugenics describes a range of practices that seek to use the science of heredity to improve the genetic composition of a population group. The term is associated with a range of unethical programmes that were taken up in various countries during the 20th century. Contemporary practice in medical genetics has, understandably, distanced (...) itself from such programmes. However, as RCS becomes more widespread, gains public funding and uses expanded gene panels, there are concerns that such programmes could be perceived as eugenic either in intent or outcome. The typical response to the eugenics critique of RCS is to emphasise the voluntary nature of both participating in screening and making subsequent reproductive choices. While safeguarding individuals’ freedom to choose in relation to screening is essential, we consider this response inadequate. By examining the specific ethical wrongs committed by eugenics in the past, we argue that to avoid the perception of RCS being a form of eugenics it is essential to attend to the broader normative context in which reproductive decisions occur. Furthermore, ethical RCS programmes must recognise and respond to their potential to shift societal norms that shape individual reproductive choices. (shrink)

This article examines what it is to think through queer eyes, that is what may queer theory offer to the study of theology. It shows what queer is in this context and challenges the reader to think in other ways. The article examines how queer theory helps to illuminate the radical nature of incarnation at the same time as examining some of the concerns expressed by theorists about the nature of the queer theological project.

The clinical years of medical student education are an ideal time for students to practise and refine ethical thinking and behaviour. We piloted a new clinical ethics teaching activity this year with undergraduate medical students within the Rural Clinical School at the University of New South Wales. We used a modified teaching ward round model, with students bringing deidentified cases of ethical interest for round-table discussion. We found that students were more engaged in the subject of clinical ethics after attending (...) the teaching sessions and particularly appreciated having structured time to listen to and learn from their peers. Despite this, we found no change in student involvement in managing or planning action in situations that they find ethically challenging. A key challenge for educators in clinical ethics is to address the barriers that prevent students taking action. (shrink)

The intersection of national security, foreign policy, and health has been explored in a number of arenas, but little attention has been devoted to the ethical issues surrounding the global health impact of current counterterrorism policy and practice. In this essay, we’ll review a range of harms to population health traceable to counterterrorism operations, identify concerns involving moral agency and responsibility—specifically of humanitarian health workers, military medical personnel, and national security officials and operatives—and highlight two interrelated policy issues: the need (...) for a conception of national security that incorporates a cosmopolitan concern for health, and the need for shared health governance, including governance of activities affecting health. (shrink)

Human motor skills are exceptional compared to other species, no less than their cognitive skills. In this perspective paper, we suggest that “movement matters!,” implying that motor development is a crucial driving force of cognitive development, much more impactful than previously acknowledged. Thus, we argue that to fully understand and explain developmental changes, it is necessary to consider the interaction of motor and cognitive skills. We exemplify this argument by introducing the concept of “embodied planning,” which takes an embodied cognition (...) perspective on planning development throughout childhood. From this integrated, comprehensive framework, we present a novel climbing paradigm as the ideal testbed to explore the development of embodied planning in childhood and across the lifespan. Finally, we outline future research directions and discuss practical applications of the work on developmental embodied planning for robotics, sports, and education. (shrink)

Adolescent risk-taking behaviour has potentially serious injury consequences and school-based behaviour change programmes provide potential for reducing such harm. A well-designed programme is likely to be theory-based and ecologically valid; however, it is rare that the operationalisation process of theories is described. The aim of this paper is to outline how the theory of planned behaviour and cognitive behavioural therapy informed intervention design in a school setting. Teacher interviews provided insights into strategies that might be implemented within the curriculum and (...) provided detail used to operationalise theory constructs. Benefits and challenges in applying both theories are described with examples from an injury prevention programme, Skills for Preventing Injury in Youth. (shrink)

Within the health care industry, the move from regulatory cost controls to market competition has generated rapid and dramatic restructuring of providers. To enhance their competitive positions in the evolving market, many health care organizations are pursuing the ownership and integration of all elements and stages of health care delivery and payment, with the goal of increasing access to capital and lowering costs through administrative efficiencies and economies of scale. As of July 1994, 24 percent of hospitals were members of (...) an integrated delivery system, and 47 percent were involved in IDS development.IDSs pose a singular challenge to the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS recognizes that its traditional policies for granting tax exempt status are not flexible enough for the competitive and rapidly changing health care market. In recent years, the IRS has taken a more active role in scrutinizing emerging health care institutions seeking taxexempt status. (shrink)

This analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households confirmed earlier findings: Much of the violence between married partners occurred in couples in which both partners were reported as perpetrators, and women as well as men committed violent acts in married couples. However, the NSFH data indicated that the probabilities of injury for male and female respondents differed significantly, with wives more likely to be injured than husbands. The NSFH differentiated between violent acts and injurious outcomes and provided an (...) empirical rebuttal of the “battered husband syndrome.” At the same time, the NSFH reproduced many of the problems of quantitative surveys as they are currently used to measure the incidence and consequences of intimate violence. The article discusses the major problems with both the content and the context of currently employed survey methodology, as exemplified by the NSFH. (shrink)

In this paper the permissibility of stem cell research on early human embryos is defended. It is argued that, in order to have moral status, an individual must have an interest in its own wellbeing. Sentience is a prerequisite for having an interest in avoiding pain, and personhood is a prerequisite for having an interest in the continuation of one's own existence. Early human embryos are not sentient and therefore they are not recipients of direct moral consideration. Early human embryos (...) do not satisfy the requirements for personhood, but there are arguments to the effect that they should be treated as persons nonetheless. These are the arguments from potentiality, symbolic value and the principle of human dignity. These arguments are challenged in this paper and it is claimed that they offer us no good reason to believe that early human embryos should be treated as persons. (shrink)

Reproductive genetic carrier screening provides information about people's chance of having children with certain genetic conditions. Severity of genetic conditions is an important criterion for their inclusion in carrier screening programmes. However, the concept of severity is conceptually complex and underspecified. We analyse why severity is an important concept in carrier screening and for reproductive decision-making and show that assessments of severity can also have normative societal implications. While some genetic conditions are unambiguously associated with a high degree of suffering, (...) there are many factors that contribute to how severe a condition is perceived to be, and perspectives will vary. Attempts to classify genetic conditions according to their severity tend to prioritise biomedical information at the expense of incorporating qualitative aspects of the impact of genetic conditions on people's lives. Further complexity arises because some genotypes can present with variable phenotypes and because some conditions are not always experienced in the same way by all people who have them. To acknowledge this complexity, we argue that an understanding of severity needs to distinguish between the severity of a genetic condition—requiring a generalised approach for purposes of policy development and programme design—and the severity of an instance of a genetic condition in a particular person. Families making reproductive decisions also require access to diverse experiences of the qualitative aspects of living with genetic conditions. As a result, reproductive carrier screening programmes must recognise and respond to the complexity inherent in determining the severity of genetic conditions. (shrink)

In Australia, along with many other countries, limited guidance or other support strategies are currently available to researchers, institutional research ethics committees, and others responsible for making decisions about whether to return genomic findings with potential value to participants or their blood relatives. This lack of guidance results in onerous decision-making burdens—traversing technical, interpretative, and ethical dimensions—as well as uncertainty and inconsistencies for research participants. This article draws on a recent targeted consultation conducted by the Australian National Health and Medical (...) Research Council to put forward strategies for supporting return of finding decision-making. In particular, we propose a pyramid of decision-making support: decision-making guidelines, technical and interpretative assistance, and ethical assistance for intractable “tough” cases. Each step of the pyramid involves an increasing level of regulatory involvement and applies to a smaller subsection of genomic research findings. Implementation of such strategies would facilitate a growing evidence base for return of finding decisions, thereby easing the financial, time, and moral burdens currently placed on researchers and other relevant decision-makers while also improving the quality of such decisions and, consequently, participant outcomes. (shrink)

The extraction of natural resources is a controversial business practice that has profound ethical and economic risk implications for both firms involved in extractive activities and society at large. In response to these implications, the Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 directed the Securities and Exchange Commission to create the first ever rules requiring annual corporate responsibility disclosures. The two proposed rules, requiring disclosure of the source of “conflict minerals” and of payments to foreign governments by extractive firms, conjured intense debate among (...) stakeholders, largely related to the risks of firms providing the information. These risks span from required disclosures increasing compliance costs for firms to non-disclosure threatening human rights. In this study, we seek to understand the way in which stakeholders perceive the risks associated with corporate responsibility disclosures. We analyze comment letters submitted to the SEC related to the two disclosure rules through the lens of Douglas’s cultural perspectives of risk. We find consistencies across the two proposed disclosures with regard to the presence of three risk perspectives within the comment letter discourse for each proposal. We find inconsistencies, however, in the underlying nature of risk perceived across the two rules, which we argue reveals an aspect of risk that incorporates ethicality and is ultimately linked to reputational considerations. We complement these insights by analyzing the market reaction to the proposed regulations. Overall, our analysis suggests that stakeholders’ perceptions of risk have consequences for how risk is perceived and acted upon in the market. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 61-63.

Reproductive genetic carrier screening is increasingly being offered more widely, including to people with no family history or otherwise elevated chance of having a baby with a genetic condition. There are valid reasons to reject a prevention-focused public health ethics approach to such screening programs. Rejecting the prevention paradigm in this context has led to an emphasis on more individually-focused values of freedom of choice and fostering reproductive autonomy in RCS. We argue, however, that population-wide RCS has sufficient features in (...) common with other public health screening programs that it becomes important also to attend to its public health implications. Not doing so constitutes a failure to address the social conditions that significantly affect people’s capacity to exercise their reproductive autonomy. We discuss how a public health ethics approach to RCS is broader in focus than prevention. We also show that additional values inherent to ethical public health—such as equity and solidarity—are essential to underpin and inform the aims and implementation of reproductive carrier screening programs. (shrink)

Humans routinely transmit and interpret subtle information about their mental states through the language they use, even when only the language text is available. This suggests humans can utilize the linguistic signature of a mental state, comprised of features in the text. Once the relevant features are identified, mindprints can be used to automatically identify mental states communicated via language. We focus on the mindprints of eight mental states resulting from intentions, attitudes, and emotions, and present a mindprint-based machine learning (...) technique to automatically identify these mental states in realistic language data. By using linguistic features that leverage available semantic, syntactic, and valence information, our approach achieves near-human performance on average and even exceeds human performance on occasion. Given this, we believe mindprints could be very valuable for intelligent systems interacting linguistically with humans. Keywords: mental state; linguistic features; mindprint; natural language processing; information extraction. (shrink)

Within the social sciences the widespread impact of the social capital concept has prompted strong critique on the part of feminists, for it is a concept which appears to reinstate a version of social worlds which for the past thirty years or more feminist social scientists have sought to problematize and move beyond. Yet do these critiques go beyond the social capital paradigm? It is the contention of this article that they do not and in particular that such critiques fail (...) to problematize the association of women with collective social goods found in the social capital literature. It will be suggested further that this association relates to the use of a dualism of instrumentality versus freedom, whereby women are overwhelmingly associated with the latter. This article therefore delineates a gendered subtext operative within the social capital debates. Recognition of this subtext should lead feminists to disengage with the social capital concept, for this is a concept whose use will always trap women in the social-historical time of industrial society. (shrink)

Secure property rights are considered a common institutional feature of rapidly growing economies. Although different property rights regimes have prevailed around the world over time, relatively little scholarship has empirically characterized the historical property rights of societies outside Western Europe. Using data from Egypt’s Mamluk Sultanate, this article provides a detailed characterization of land tenure patterns and identifies changes to real property holdings associated with an institutional bargain between Egypt’s slave soldiers—the mamluks—and the sultan. Although agricultural land was a collective (...) resource of the state, individual mamluks—state actors themselves—established religious endowments as a privatizing work-around to the impermissibility of transferring mamluk status to their sons. The article’s characterization of landholding patterns in medieval Egypt provides an empirical illustration of how Middle Eastern institutions differed from those in other world regions as well as an understanding for how and why regimes come under political stress as a result of their property rights institutions. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Taking On Your Natural Human Role by Killing Non‐Human Animals Discover Nature by Killing Non‐Human Animals The Paradox of Ethical Hunting Hunting and Environmentalism Notes.