Health research initiatives worldwide are growing in scope and complexity, particularly as they move into the developing world. Expanding health research activity in low- and middle-income countries has resulted in a commensurate rise in the need for sound ethical review structures and functions in the form of Research Ethics Committees (RECs). Yet these seem to be lagging behind as a result of the enormous challenges facing these countries, including poor resource availability and lack of capacity. There is thus an urgent (...) need for ongoing capacity and resource development in these regions in general, and in Africa in particular. Similarly, there is a need for research and initiatives that can identify existing capacity and funding and indicate the areas where this needs to be developed.This discussion paper argues that the Mapping African Research Ethics Capacity (MARC) project is a timely initiative aimed at identifying existing capacity. MARC provides a platform and tool on the Council on Health Research for Development's (COHRED) Health Research website (HRWeb), which can be used by RECs and key stakeholders in health research in Africa to identify capacity, constraints and development needs. MARC intends to provide the first comprehensive interactive database of RECs in Africa, which will allow for the identification of key relationships and analyses of capacity. The potential of MARC lies in the mapping of current ethical review activity onto capacity needs. This paper serves as a starting point by providing a descriptive illustration of the current state of RECs in Africa. (shrink)

Health research initiatives worldwide are growing in scope and complexity, particularly as they move into the developing world. Expanding health research activity in low- and middle-income countries has resulted in a commensurate rise in the need for sound ethical review structures and functions in the form of Research Ethics Committees. The urgent need for continued capacity development in Africa has necessitated research initiatives to identify existing capacity. This discussion paper describes the mapping of RECs in Africa through MARC project, (...) second phase and discusses the findings. MARC provides a platform and tool on COHRED's Health Research HRWeb, which can be used by RECs and key stakeholders in health research in Africa to identify capacity, constraints and development needs. (shrink)

If a potential person would have a good life if he were to come into existence, can we coherently regard his coming into existence as better for him than his never coming into existence? And can we regard the situation in which he never comes into existence as worse for him? In this paper, we argue that both questions should be answered affirmatively. We also explain where prominent arguments to differing conclusions go wrong. Finally, we explore the relevance of our (...) answers to issues in population ethics. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This paper re-examines the welfare economics of risk. It singles out a class of criteria, the “expected equally-distributed equivalent”, as the unique class which avoids serious drawbacks of existing approaches. Such criteria behave like ex-post criteria when the final statistical distribution of wellbeing is known ex ante, and like ex-ante criteria when risk generates no inequality. The paper also provides a new result on the tension between inequality aversion and respect of individual ex ante preferences, in the vein of Harsanyi’s (...) aggregation theorem. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 3, Page 437-456, March 2022. Societal polarization has given rise to opposing groups that fight each other as enemies and that have very different ideas about what should be done and about what is the case. This article investigates what tools there are in the philosophy of Martin Buber to address this societal polarization. Buber’s notion of community, the relationship between means and ends, his opposition to the political principle, the notion of an (...) I-Thou dialogue and his conception of truth are presented as relevant for overcoming societal polarization. The article also presents the case of Daryl Davis as manifesting some of these Buberian principles. (shrink)

An analysis of survey data on membership, pillarisation, voting behaviour and attitudes.Belgian society is traditionally portrayed as heavily pillarised, i.e. having a system of exclusive linkages between voluntary associations and political parties, resulting in the formation of a catholic, a socialist and a liberal 'pillar' within society. Recently, several authors have questioned the validity oft his model. Our survey of the Flemish population, however, shows that pillarisation is an enduring feature of Flemish society. Membership of voluntary associations, trade unions and (...) health insurance organisations remains ideologically motivated, and shows a high degree ofconsistency in this respect. Integration into a 'pillar' exerts a strong influence on voting behaviour, although this effect weakens in younger generations. Pillars also have significant, but weaker effects on attitudes like individualism, trust and solidarity. In the social capital research tradition, these differential effects of membership are often neglected. Although there are signs that pillarisation weakens in Fiemish society, the system certainly has not disappeared. (shrink)

Logical puzzles like the doctrinal paradox raise the problem of how to aggregate individual judgements into a collective judgement, or alternatively, how to merge collectively inconsistent knowledge bases. In this paper, we view judgement aggregation as a function on propositional logic valuations, and we investigate how logic constrains judgement aggregation. In particular, we show that there is no non-dictatorial decision method for aggregating sets of judgements in a logically consistent way if the decision method is local, i.e., only depends on (...) the individual judgements on the proposition under consideration. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of wrongful depathologization, in which a psychiatric disorder is simultaneously stigmatized and trivialized. We use OCD as a case study to argue that cumulatively these two effects generate a profound epistemic injustice to OCD sufferers, and possibly to those with other mental disorders. We show that even seemingly positive stereotypes attached to mental disorders give rise to both testimonial injustice and wilful hermeneutical ignorance. We thus expose an insidious form of epistemic harm that has been (...) overlooked in the literature. (shrink)

In this paper, we present the methodology we used in the European Horizon 2020 AI-PROFICIENT project, to evaluate the implementation of the ethical component of the project. The project is a 3-year collaboration between a university partner and industrial and tech partners, which aims to research the integration of AI services in heavy industry work settings. An AI ethics approach developed for the project has involved embedded ethical analysis of work contexts and design solutions and the generation of specific and (...) evolving ethical recommendations for partners. We have performed an ongoing evaluation and monitoring of the implementation of recommendations. We describe the quantitative results of these implementations: overall, broken down by category, and broken down by category and responsible project partner (anonymized). In parallel, we discuss the results in light of our approach and offer insights for future research into the ground-level application of ethical recommendations for AI in heavy industry. (shrink)

We investigate under what conditions a given set of collective judgments can arise from a specific voting procedure. In order to answer this question, we introduce a language similar to modal logic for reasoning about judgment aggregation procedures. In this language, the formula expresses that is collectively accepted, or that is a group judgment based on voting. Different judgment aggregation procedures may be underlying the group decision making. Here we investigate majority voting, where holds if a majority of individuals accepts, (...) consensus voting, where holds if all individuals accept, and dictatorship. We provide complete axiomatizations for judgment sets arising from all three aggregation procedures. (shrink)

Les réflexions présentées dans cet article portent sur la nature du rituel et de la symbolique politique dans nos sociétés. On se propose de confronter différentes approches de ces phénomènes : d'un côté un point de vue qui met en évidence les déterminants sociologiques des rituels politiques. Cette approche prend appui sur une conception où la représentation politique apparaît comme une forme aliénante et mystifiante. Un autre point de vue consiste à prendre comme objet le travail symbolique du rituel : (...) cette perspective anthropologique met Paccent sur Pefficacité des rites et des symboles et leur imbrication dans l'action politique. (shrink)

Cet article porte sur les femmes algériennes qui, migrant à travers la méditerranée après 1947, migrent également à travers la citoyenneté : en une vie, elles ont été “indigènes”, Françaises musulmanes, Françaises à part entière (c’est-à-dire aussi dotées du droit de vote) durant quatre années (1958-1962), puis Algériennes et donc étrangères, toujours immigrées. Il examine ces parcours de femmes passées du statut de sujet colonial à celui d’autres statuts (citoyennes, étrangères, binationales). Pour cela, il repose sur une enquête orale menée (...) dans la région lyonnaise et sur des archives préfectorales (dossiers de naturalisation notamment). Dans le flou des discours, il analyse comment les Algériennes contribuent à faire naître, empiriquement, une définition de la citoyenneté, laquelle les signale en retour comme d’éternelles immigrées. (shrink)

Introduction L’analyse des temporalités de l’action constitue une entrée pertinente pour aborder les rapports sociaux de domination. À sa manière, la revue Temporalités a perpétué cette tradition des sciences sociales qui observent les inégalités et les différenciations sociales, analysent leurs logiques, en insistant sur les relations étroites entre temporalités et pouvoir. Mais les articles de Temporalités, à l’exception d’un dossier sur les temps sexués de l’activité (Bess..

This thought-provoking collection sheds light on the plight of our nonhuman primate cousins--and what we can do to help.

In this paper it will be shown that HEO and HRO E are isomorphic with respect to extensional equality. This answers a question of Troelstra [T, 2.4.12, p. 128]. The main problem is to extend effective operations to a larger domain. This will be achieved by a modification of the proof of the continuity of effective operations. Following a suggestion of A.S. Troelstra, similar results were obtained for ECF(U) and ICF E (U), where U is any universe of functions closed (...) under "recursive in". (shrink)

Nevin & Grace's approach is an interesting and useful attempt to find ways to measure “core” effects of a history of exposure to reinforcement. The momentum analogy makes intuitive sense, and the evidence for its utility is increasing. Several questions remain, however, about how the analogy will fare in the case of concurrent rather than sequential activities, about the use of extinction as a method to test resistance to change, and about the generality of some of the effects.

The Area Activation Model (Pomplun, Reingold, Shen, & Williams, 2000) is a computational model predicting the statistical distribution of saccadic endpoints in visual search tasks. Its basic assumption is that saccades in visual search tend to foveate display areas that provide a maximum amount of task‐relevant information for processing during the subsequent fixation. In the present study, a counterintuitive prediction by the model is empirically tested, namely that saccadic selectivity towards stimulus features depends on the spatial arrangement of search items. (...) We find good correspondence between simulated and empirically observed selectivity patterns, providing strong support for the Area Activation Model. (shrink)

This rejoinder to Roemer examines Roemer's amendment to his EOp criterion, explains the similarities and differences between Roemer's approach to equality of opportunity and the economic literature inspired by the fair allocation theory, and proposes some clarifications on the compensation principle and the role of the reward principle in the definition of a responsibility-sensitive social criterion. It highlights the power of the ideal of respect for individual preferences with respect to the reward issue and the concern for potential harshness of (...) the social criterion toward the individuals who fail to make good use of their opportunities. It discusses Roemer's objection against holding individuals responsible for their preferences. (shrink)

Originally presented as the author's thesis under the title: "Individualisierung" als soziologisches und sozialethisches "Zeichen der Zeit"- eine sozialethische Auseinandersetzung...

Historians of science have long believed that Abraham Trembley’s celebrity and impact were attributable chiefly to the incredible regenerative phenomena demonstrated by the polyp, which he discovered in 1744, and to the new experimental method he devised to investigate them. This essay shows that experimental method alone cannot account for Trembley’s success and influence; nor are the marvels of the polyp sufficient to explain its scientific and cultural impact. Experimental method was but one element in a new conception of the (...) laboratory that called for both experimental and para‐experimental skills whose public availability depended on a new style of communication. The strategy of generosity that led Trembley to dispatch polyps everywhere enabled experimental naturalist laboratories to spread throughout Europe, and the free circulation of living objects for scientific research led practitioners to establish an experimental field distinct from mechanical physics. Scholars reacted to the marvels of the polyp by strengthening the boundaries between the public and academic spheres and, in consequence, opened a space for new standards in both scientific work and the production of celebrity.… comme l’Auteur de l’Histoire des Polypes, il a passé de plein vol à l’immortalité.—Julien Offrey de La Mettrie … comme l’Auteur de l’Histoire des Polypes, il a passé de plein vol à l’immortalité.—Julien Offrey de La Mettrie. (shrink)