Under the terms of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Australia has ratified, children have a right to know who their genetic parents are. As a result, we have a duty to establish these facts and to make this information available for children to access should they wish to know. Introducing mandatory DNA testing of newborns and their alleged genetic parents is one viable option to ensure that this information is available for children to access. Indeed, (...) it may be the only viable option to address childrens' right to the fulfilment of Article 7 of the CRC. There are a number of benefits to obtaining this benefit for children. For one, mandatory DNA testing could solve all disputed paternity cases and finalise them early in the lives of children, thus making life more financially secure for those children in the long term. This could reduce or eliminate the need for fathers to secretly carry out DNA tests in order to disestablish paternity. The large number of benefits gained from identifying genetic parents for children and the small possible risks that they may suffer when this information is withheld give us good reasons to support mandatory DNA testing. (shrink)

Westworld calls attention to the fact that freedom comes in kinds as well as in degrees, something philosophers have been trying to explain for as long as people can remember. This chapter explains how distinct Westworld's characters are from each other, and how fresh and real their agonies feel despite reliance on well‐worn tropes. As monstrous humans and hosts play out their hideous fictions but shed tears as they meet their even more horrible fates. One of the premises that (...) makes Westworld work is that hosts are programmed to ignore anything that might disrupt their continued belief in who they are meant to be. The most salient moral of Westworld is that agency and purpose come in endless varieties, wondrous to behold. The constraints upon Westworld's residents and guests remind us that humans live in inherited institutions and internalize one another's ideas. (shrink)

Researchers, educators and clinicians have long recognized the profound influence of the mid‐twentieth century focus on interpersonal relations and relationships on nursing. Today, in nursing, as well as in medicine and other social sciences, neuroanatomy, neurobiology and neurophysiology have replaced interpersonal dynamics as keys to understanding human behavior. Yet concerns are being raised that the teaching, research and practice of the critical importance of healing relationships have been overridden by a biological focus on the experiences of health and illness. (...) As a way to move forward, we return to Hildegard Peplau's seminal ideas about the transformative power of relationships in nursing. We propose that Peplau's formulations and, in particular, her seminal Interpersonal Relations in Nursing can provide direction. We do not propose that her formulations or her book be simply transposed from the 1950s to today's classroom and clinic. But we do believe that her ideas and writings are dynamic documents containing concepts and derived operations that can be brought to life in clinical practice. Finally, we explore Peplau's transformative idea that nursing is, at its core, an interpersonal process both to acknowledge an idea that has shaped our past and can guide us into our future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Effecting AffectionThe Corporeal Ethics of Gins and ArakawaGordon C. F. Bearn (bio)No one has yet determined what the body can do …—Spinoza, Ethics, 1677, Part III, proposition 2, ScholiumWhat could be the educational relevance of an architecture designed to make its inhabitants live forever? At first, it is hard to take seriously that Madeline Gins and Arakawa, in their work Architectural Body, are trying to escape mortality. Many (...) are those who smile and say that what they call "the architectural surrounds" that they have designed and built for what they call "organisms that person" are intriguing enough, but this idea of slipping death's grip… Really. They say. Hmmm. And they clear their throats. But is it really that unusual to think that what inspires philosophical thinking is death? And insofar as death has inspired philosophy, hasn't it inspired escape—and if not escape from death itself then at least escape from its terrors? Plato's Phaedo is an early instance of this, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus is a more recent one, no less explicit in its discussion of death. Gins and Arakawa are therefore part of a long and traditional line of philosophers who's thinking never quite loses sight of death. But why are philosophers concerned with death?The reason is simple. By and large, philosophers don't like it here. They would rather be somewhere else. And what don't they like about it here? Often, almost invariably, it is becoming that bothers them. Becoming. And they don't like becoming both for existential and metaphysical reasons. Existentially, "becoming" means change. Today's friends may betray you tomorrow, or the next day. And even if they don't, they will die. And be gone. You too. Soon enough. Dead. Existentially, change and becoming ruin everything we care about—people and projects. Metaphysically, "becoming" is a threat to the dream of understanding, the dream of forming a precise [End Page 40] picture of the world. I learned this from the opening pages of Deleuze's Logic of Sense. On top of the cake, beautifully marked in currants, are the words "EAT ME," and Alice did. She ate the cake and grew taller. And what, you may wonder, is the problem with that? It happens at children's parties every day, even after eating normal cake.Common sense assumes that at any moment Alice will be a certain height, and that as the moments pass her height will increase. But this is just as if we had taken an egg-slicer to her becoming taller, turning becoming into a succession of unchanging slices of being. This egg-sliced reality is good enough for ordinary work, and it is good enough, by means of the calculus, for science and for physics. But it is not good enough for metaphysics. If at a given moment Alice is really becoming taller, then at that moment, while she is becoming, she must paradoxically be both a definite height h, and also not h. If there is becoming, then the world cannot be completely conceptually represented. And if everything is becoming, then nothing can be conceptually represented. That is the metaphysical difficulty with becoming, and so philosophers run from becoming. They run both from death and from what is beyond representation.They tend to go in either of two directions. Up or down. Either up to eternity if you are drawn to the transcendent, or down to the rough ground, the earth, if you are drawn to the ordinary. In either case, the negation implicit in becoming, whether it is the negation of life or the negation of our dreams of conceptual representation, both of these negations are themselves negated. It is the old philosophical gambit: backing by double negation into an ersatz affirmation. Gins and Arakawa join neither of these two ways of escaping becoming. But first let us see why these two negations are disappointing.Take the way up first. This is famously the technique of Plato's Phaedo. Worried that your lover or your mother or you yourself is going to die, Plato's Socrates carves out room for the eternity of the form of human... (shrink)

This paper presents the Futurium platform used by Digital Futures, a foresight project launched by the European Commission's Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT). Futurium was initially developed with the primary purpose of hosting and curating visions and policy ideas generated by Digital Futures (Digital Futures was launched in July 2011 by DG CONNECT's Director General Robert Madelin following a prior DG CONNECT exercise called Digital Science.). However, it has turned into a platform on which to (...) experiment with new policymaking models based on scientific evidence and stakeholder participation, referred to in this paper as ‘Policy Making 3.0’. The platform hosts an online foresight toolkit to facilitate the joint creation of ideas to help design future policies. It leverages the potential of social networks, open data, semantic and knowledge mining technologies as well as participatory brainstorming techniques to engage stakeholders and harness their views and creativity to better inform policies that matter to them. The Futurium distinguishes between different variables, reflecting the emotional vs. rational mindsets of the participants, and offers the possibility to frame the engagement and co-creation process into multiple phases of a workflow. Futurium was developed to support Digital Futures, but its open architecture makes it easily adaptable to any policymaking/decision-making context where thinking ahead, participation, scientific evidence and agility are needed. Futurium is an early prototype implementation of the Policy Making 3.0 model, which is a long-term vision requiring further investigation and experimentation. The Futurium production website can be seen here: ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/futurium. (shrink)

Severe tour guide stigma is a significant problem hindering tourism development. Based on self-identity threat and moral disengagement theory, this study analyzed the relationship between tour guide stigmatization and tour guides’ interpersonal deviance behavior. Survey data collected from 241 tour guides at three different points in time showed that tour guide stigmatization was positively related to tour guides’ interpersonal deviance behavior and that self-identity threat mediated this effect. The results also show that moral disengagement moderated the effect of tour guides’ (...) self-identity threat on interpersonal deviance behavior, as well as the indirect effect of tour guide stigmatization on tour guides’ interpersonal deviance behavior via self-identity threat. This study enriches theoretical research on tour guide stigmatization and offers practical suggestions for solving stigmatization problems for tour guides and organizations. (shrink)

Drawing on the perspective of causal reasoning and the social cognitive theory of moral thought and action, this study explores the mechanisms underlying the association between exposure to exploitative leadership and employee workplace deviance. The results of a time-lagged survey conducted in China reveal that exposure to exploitative leadership can evoke a moral justification process that leads to increased employee organizational and interpersonal deviance. A tendency toward hostile attribution bias reinforces the direct link between exploitative leadership and moral justification and (...) the indirect effects of exploitative leadership on employee organizational and interpersonal deviance, via moral justification. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed and potential directions for future studies are proposed. (shrink)

The rash of high-profile accounting frauds involving internal corporate accountants calls into question the individual accountant’s perceptions of the ethical climate within their organization and the limits to which these professionals will tolerate unethical behavior and/or accept it as the norm. This study uses social cognitive theory to examine the antecedents of individual corporate accountant’s perceived personal fit with their organization’s ethical climate and empirically tests how these factors impact organizational attitudes. A survey was completed by 203 corporate accountants to (...) assess their perception of relevant variables. The results of the structural equation model indicate three significant antecedents relating to ethical climate fit: higher internal levels of locus of control; greater numbers of prior job changes; and higher perceptions of an increasingly better fit with the firm’s ethical climate. Our results also indicate that higher levels of perceived fit to the ethical climate of a firm are associated with higher levels of perceived job satisfaction and organizational commitment. We also theorize that perceptions of an organization’s ethical climate may be reflections of client narcissism and serve a potential indicator of fraud risk. This is an important topic of study, since current auditing standards call for auditors to examine organizational attitudes toward fraud, but offer minimal guidance in doing so. (shrink)

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points (...) that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms. (shrink)

The political environment has a significant impact on the sustainable development of enterprises. This manuscript aims to investigate the effect of policy uncertainty and official social capital on enterprises’ effective tax rate due to the change of officials. Based on the panel data from the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Database from 1998 to 2009, it is shown that the policy uncertainty caused by the change of local government officials significantly increases the ETR of enterprises. Meanwhile, municipal officials who have social ties (...) with provincial officials in their province also tend to raise the ETR of industrial enterprises, and this tendency is more evident when the officials take office. Further research shows that the effects vary in many aspects for policy uncertainty and social capital on the ETR of enterprises. The findings of this manuscript provide support for a deeper understanding of the change in local government fiscal policies and give suggestions to strengthen political environmental governance for the sustainable development of enterprises. (shrink)

La thèse défendue dans cet article est que le gouvernement chinois, chapeauté par un Parti qui se revendique encore du communisme, se sert du capitalisme, en le contrôlant strictement, afin d’accélérer le développement, mais sans dévier d’un objectif prioritaire : la construction d’une société socialiste ; et il s’appuie sur le Marx qui pensait que le communisme supposait un haut développement des forces productives. En France, cette thèse est minoritaire, et combattue ; peut-être, paradoxalement, parce que des similitudes existent entre (...) les deux pays. Cependant, les malentendus entre eux sont aussi nombreux (1 re partie). Cela pourrait tenir notamment aux différences de modes de pensée de ces deux peuples, en particulier vis-à-vis des contradictions et des mouvements de la dialectique (2 e partie), comme aussi en matière de mobilisation de la morale par le discours politique (3 e partie). Pour finir, les auteurs analysent les effets de cette comparaison sur l’interprétation du « socialisme aux couleurs chinoises » (4 e partie). Classification JEL : B24, H59, N45, O53, O57, P20, P52. (shrink)

In the mid-1990s, several state legislatures enacted a "second generation" of small group health insurance reforms that required guaranteed issue of all products and prohibited the use of health as a rating factor. We use data from two large employer surveys to compare the behavior of small business in nine states that adopted these reforms between 1993 and 1997 to the behavior of small business in 11 states and the District of Columbia, where neither of these small group health insurance (...) market reforms existed prior to 1997 (N = 8,465 in 1993; N = 12,219 in 1997). Our analyses focus on several outcomes: health insurance offer and enrollment rates in any employer plan, and in an HMO plan; turnover in offer decisions; and premiums, variability in premiums, and the rate of change in premiums. Overall, we find no effect of small group reform on any of the outcomes; the sign of the effect is not consistent across reform states, the estimates rarely attain statistical significance, and they show no consistent pattern across the outcomes within each state. Therefore, predictions of the harm these regulations might cause to the market have not come to pass. On the other hand, proponents' hopes for a solution to low coverage rates among small businesses have not materialized either. (shrink)

When is an ideal of a ring radical or prime? By examining its generators, one may in many cases definably and uniformly test the ideal’s properties. We seek to establish such definable formulas in rings of p-adic power series, such as $\mathbb Q_{p}\langle X\rangle $, $\mathbb Z_{p}\langle X\rangle $, and related rings of power series over more general valuation rings and their fraction fields. We obtain a definable, uniform test for radicality, and, in the one-dimensional case, for primality. This builds (...) upon the techniques stemming from the proof of the quantifier elimination results for the analytic theory of the p-adic integers by Denef and van den Dries, and the linear algebra methods of Hermann and Seidenberg.prepared by Madeline G. Barnicle.E-mail: [email protected]: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6t02q9s4. (shrink)

In developing artificial intelligence (AI), researchers often benchmark against human performance as a measure of progress. Is this kind of comparison possible for moral cognition? Given that human moral judgment often hinges on intangible properties like “intention” which may have no natural analog in artificial agents, it may prove difficult to design a “like‐for‐like” comparison between the moral behavior of artificial and human agents. What would a measure of moral behavior for both humans and AI look like? We unravel the (...) complexity of this question by discussing examples within reinforcement learning and generative AI, and we examine how the puzzle of evaluating artificial agents' moral cognition remains open for further investigation within cognitive science. (shrink)

Organoids are quickly becoming an accepted model for understanding human biology and disease. Pluripotent stem cells (PSC) provide a starting point for many organs and enable modeling of the embryonic development and maturation of such organs. The foundation of PSC‐derived organoids can be found in elegant developmental studies demonstrating the remarkable ability of immature cells to undergo histogenesis even when taken out of the embryo context. PSC‐organoids are an evolution of earlier methods such as embryoid bodies, taken to a new (...) level with finer control and in some cases going beyond tissue histogenesis to organ‐like morphogenesis. But many of the discoveries that led to organoids were not necessarily planned, but rather the result of inquisitive minds with freedom to explore. Protecting such curiosity‐led research through flexible funding will be important going forward if we are to see further ground‐breaking discoveries. (shrink)

Anesthesiology training programs are tasked with equipping trainees with the skills to become medically and ethically competent in the practice of anesthesia and to be prepared to obtain board certification, yet there is currently no standardized ethics curriculum within anesthesia training programs in the United States. To bridge this gap, and to provide a validated ethics curriculum to meet the aforementioned needs, in July 2021, a survey was sent to anesthesia scholars in the field of biomedical ethics to identify key (...) areas that should be included in such an ethics curriculum. The responses were rated on a Likert scale and ranked. This paper identifies the top ten topics identified as high priority for inclusion in an anesthesiology training program and consequently deemed most relevant to meet the educational needs of graduates of an anesthesiology residency: (1) capacity to consent; (2) capacity to refuse elective versus lifesaving treatment; (3) application of surrogate decisionmaking; (4) approach to do not resuscitate (DNR) status in the operating room; (5) patient autonomy and advance directives; (6) navigating patient beliefs that may impair care; (7) “futility” in end-of-life care: when to withdraw life support; (8) disclosure of medical errors; (9) clinical criteria for “brain death” and consequences of this definition; and (10) the impaired anesthesiologist. (shrink)

How to motivate employees to break through the role constraints and show more initiative determines the success or failure of a company’s future development. Taking charge behavior refers to the behavior where individuals influence the change of organizational function through voluntary and constructive efforts, which is a challenging organizational citizenship behavior. This study investigates the underlying mechanism and boundary condition of authentic leadership on employees’ taking charge behavior based on the role identity theory and literature concerning perspective taking. Matched data (...) were collected from a multi-source sample that included 146 direct supervisors and 328 subordinates in mainland, China. The empirical results indicate that AL has a positive influence on the employees’ taking charge behavior, and subordinates’ moqi mediates the relationship between them. In addition, the employees’ perspective taking positively moderated the positive relationship between AL and subordinates’ moqi, as well as the mediating effect of subordinates’ moqi in the relationship between AL and employees’ taking charge behavior. Compared with the low levels of perspective taking, high levels of that made the influence of AL on subordinates’ moqi stronger, so is the whole indirect effect. This study is the first to explore the influencing mechanism of AL on employees’ taking charge behavior from the perspective of the role identity theory, thereby enriching the relevant studies and providing practical insights for organizational leaders regarding on how to foster employees to take charge. (shrink)

Iconophobia, literally the fear of religious images, usually occurs in proportion to the powers attributed to them by their believers. In the worst cases, these fears have led to, or coincide with, a cycle of violence that may involve the actual destruction of images (iconoclasm) and of human life. Semiotics helps interpret the interconnectedness of these seemingly separate events. Most iconoclasm involves confusion between the image or sign (such as a statue) and its referent (the actual subject), and a re-encoding (...) of the signified (the meanings assigned to the sign). This article explores four case studies. In the aftermath of iconoclasm, fragments and ruins can be trans-valued as relics, and thus inspire hatred of the perpetrator and sympathy for the group whose sacred precincts have been violated. Or, broken statues may be preserved by a re-encoding as `art'. Yet not only do historical models warn of recurring conditions in which violence may be perpetrated against people and objects, but the more recent examples indicate that even great works of art that capitalist society deems world treasures cannot be taken out of the currency of iconoclastic exchange. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century psychiatrists ascribed to a model of health that was predicated on the existence of objective and strictly defined laws of nature. The allegedly “natural” rules governing the production of consumption of food, however, were structured by a set of distinctively bourgeois moral values that demonized over-indulgence and intemperance, encouraged self-discipline and productivity, and treated gentility as an index of social worth. Accordingly, the asylum acted not only as a therapeutic instrument but also as a moral machine that was designed (...) to remake lazy, indolent transgressors into useful, “decorous” citizens. Because the theory and mechanics underlying this machine seemed straightforward and self-evident to psychiatrists, they were confounded when the asylum failed to translate its ideals into reality. While psychiatrists tended to blame this failure on the intractable immorality and weakness of individual patients, particularly paupers and immigrants, a review of the various meanings and uses of food in the hospital reveals the fault lines that ran through the asylum’s ideological structure. (shrink)

In keeping with the general theme of the General Assembly of CIPSH in Beijing, 2004, in this article I emphasize the potential of the internet to impact the use of works of art in public and private museums for study and research, and for the publication of research. The possibility exists nowadays of creating a hyper-real ‘musée imaginaire’ or ‘museum without walls’ to use André Malraux's phrase of more than fifty years ago. It is hard to see how it could (...) be anything but a benefit to human knowledge to have images of all works in the public domain (that is, for which the creator's copyright has expired) available on the world wide web. Under US law this year (2006) that would mean all works created before 1911. There are encouraging developments in that direction, but there is also constant legal wrangling. And I have to admit there are sometimes two sides to the question, even if I think one argument is far stronger than the other. (shrink)

The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker. By Jane Hathaway. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 323. $105, £75.

The Evolving Social Responsibilities of Internet Corporate Actors: Pointers Past and Present Content Type Journal Article Category Commentary Pages 455-461 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0049-0 Authors Robert Madelin, Directorate General Information Society and Media, European Commission, BU25 06/183, 1049 Brussels, Belgium Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433 Journal Volume Volume 24 Journal Issue Volume 24, Number 4.

Hope for persons with disabilities is most often associated with the possibility of cure. When cure is not achievable, there remains a dire lack in our socio-cultural imagination around and construction of hopeful disabled futurity. This paper explores Karl Rahner’s eschatology as a means of both deconstructing narrow visions of curative hope and affirming the presence of theological hope that already exists in the lives of disabled people. Ultimately, this paper argues that “crip time”—the time embodied by persons with disabilities—witnesses (...) to a prophetic relationship with time in its openness to the life-giving possibilities of the absolute future. (shrink)

A model is “any representation or concept that helps us to understand the world whenever common sense or direct observations are inadequate.” Common sense and direct observation often prove inadequate to the complexities of the twenty-first-century cities. Thus, models abound in urban life and governance. However, a model is not only a tool for control but a way of defining a situation. Framing the city so as to render it susceptible to interpretation and intervention is an exercise not merely with (...) scientific or technological value but with rhetorical power. The tradition of comprehensive urban models, beginning with the advent of computers and culminating in the self-analyzing “smart city,” I argue, sidelines this rhetorical power in favor of a tone of scientific authority that, while justifiable in technical domains, does not legitimately scale to the level of a political community. Making good on the civic potential of Big Data thus requires recontextualizing properly scientific enterprises within an adequate political philosophy of the city, allowing for the construction of cultural urban models that set human freedom at the core of its inner workings. (shrink)

This book offers a new theory of property and distributive justice derived from Talmudic law, illustrated by a case study involving the sale of organs for transplant. Although organ donation did not exist in late antiquity, this book posits a new way, drawn from the Talmud, to conceive of this modern means of giving to others. Our common understanding of organ transfers as either a gift or sale is trapped in a dichotomy that is conceptually and philosophically limiting. Drawing on (...) Maussian gift theory, this book suggests a different legal and cultural meaning for this property transfer. It introduces the concept of the 'divine lien', an obligation to others in need built into the definition of all property ownership. Rather than a gift or sale, organ transfer is shown to exemplify an owner's voluntary recognition and fulfilment of this latent property obligation. (shrink)