Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 7, Page 765-773, September 2022.

Rare copy number variants have a prominent role in the aetiology of schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Substantial risk for schizophrenia is conferred by large CNVs at several loci, including microdeletions at 1q21.1, 3q29, 15q13.3 and 22q11.2 and microduplication at 16p11.2. However, these CNVs collectively account for a small fraction of cases, and the relevant genes and neurobiological mechanisms are not well understood. Here we performed a large two-stage genome-wide scan of rare CNVs and report the significant association of copy (...) number gains at chromosome 7q36.3 with schizophrenia. Microduplications with variable breakpoints occurred within a 362-kilobase region and were detected in 29 of 8,290 patients versus 2 of 7,431 controls in the combined sample. All duplications overlapped or were located within 89 kilobases upstream of the vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor gene VIPR2. VIPR2 transcription and cyclic-AMP signalling were significantly increased in cultured lymphocytes from patients with microduplications of 7q36.3. These findings implicate altered vasoactive intestinal peptide signalling in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and indicate the VPAC2 receptor as a potential target for the development of new antipsychotic drugs. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. (shrink)

A notable feature of the COVID-19 pandemic is that children are less at risk of becoming infected or, if infected, less likely to become seriously unwell, so ethical discussions have consequently focused on the adult healthcare setting. However, despite a lower risk of children becoming acutely ill with COVID-19, there nevertheless may be significant and potentially sustained effects of COVID-19 on the physical, psychological, and emotional health and well-being of children. Focusing on the context of children’s cancer care, and specifically (...) bone marrow transplant, we describe some of these effects and then address one specific ethical challenge that arises. That is the question of what and how much to tell children whose cancer treatment has been changed because of COVID-19. Drawing on our previous work on the ethical reasons for telling the truth to younger children we link different ethical reasons to the different types of information that could be given to children in this context. We argue that children should be given an explanation of the changes that they will directly experience, including some changes to the process of their actual medical treatment; but not about increased risk associated with these changes, unless they specifically ask for this information. (shrink)

BackgroundScientific literature on posttraumatic growth after terrorist attacks has primarily focused on persons who had not been directly exposed to terrorist attacks or persons who had been directly exposed to them, but who were assessed few months or years after the attacks.MethodsWe examined long-term PTG in 210 adults directly exposed to terrorist attacks in Spain a mean of 29.6 years after the attacks. The participants had been injured by a terrorist attack or were first-degree relatives of people who had been (...) killed or injured by a terrorist attack. They completed diagnostic measures of emotional disorders and measures of PTSD and depression symptomatology, optimism, and PTG.ResultsMultiple regression analyses revealed gender differences and a positive linear relationship between PTG and cumulative trauma after the terrorist attack. Some PTG dimensions were significantly associated with PTSD symptomatology, these associations being linear, not curvilinear. However, PTG was not associated with depression symptomatology, diagnosis of emotional disorders, age, elapsed time since the attack, or optimism. In comparison with survivors assessed 18 years after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Spanish victims of terrorism showed higher levels of appreciation of life, but lower levels of relating to others and spiritual change.ConclusionThe findings underscore the influence of gender on PTG and provide support to the hypothesis that some emotional distress may be a necessary condition of PTG. Future studies on PTG after terrorist attacks should take into consideration the characteristics of the terrorist attack itself and the contexts of violence and threat in which it occurred. The political, social, and cultural characteristics of the community affected by it and the profile and characteristics of other traumatic events suffered after the attack should also be taken into account in further research. (shrink)

The importance of contextual reasoning is emphasized by various researchers in AI. (A partial list includes John McCarthy and his group, R. V. Guha, Yoav Shoham, Giuseppe Attardi and Maria Simi, and Fausto Giunchiglia and his group.) Here, we survey the problem of formalizing context and explore what is needed for an acceptable account of this abstract notion.

A natural formalization of the priority view is presented which results from adding expected utility theory to the main ideas of the priority view. The result is ex post prioritarianism. But ex post prioritarianism entails that in a world containing just one person, it is sometimes better for that person to do what is strictly worse for herself. This claim may appear to be implausible. But the deepest objection to ex post prioritarianism has to do with meaning: ex post prioritarianism (...) is not a genuine alternative to utilitarianism in the first place. By contrast, ex ante prioritarianism is defensible. But its motivation is very different from the usual rationales offered for the priority view. Given their hostility to egalitarianism, most supporters of the priority view have not provided reasons to reject utilitarianism. (shrink)

Recently, bioethicists and the UNCRPD have advocated for supported medical decision-making on behalf of patients with intellectual disabilities. But what does supported decision-making really entail? One compelling framework is Anita Silvers and Leslie Francis’ mental prosthesis account, which envisions supported decision-making as a process in which trustees act as mere appendages for the patient’s will; the trustee provides the cognitive tools the patient requires to realize her conception of her own good. We argue that supported decision-making would be better understood (...) as a collaborative process, giving patients with intellectual disabilities the opportunity to make decisions in a respectful relationship with trusted others. We offer an alternative account of supported decision-making where the primary constraint is to protect the patient from domination by the trustee. This is advantageous in its preservation of the prospects for genuine collaboration, for the mental prosthesis approach ultimately reinforces a problematic ideal of isolated patient self-determination. (shrink)

In this new textbook two Catholic ethicists with extensive teaching experience present a moral theology based on vision. David Matzko McCarthy and James M. Donohue draw widely from the Western philosophical tradition while integrating biblical and theological themes in order to explore such fundamental questions as What is good? The fourteen chapters in Moral Vision are short and thematic. Substantive study questions engage with primary texts and encourage students to apply theory to everyday life and common human experiences. The (...) book is accessibly written and flexible enough to fit into any undergraduate or seminary course on ethics. (shrink)

Moral distress has received much attention in the international nursing literature in recent years. In this article, we describe the evolution of the concept of moral distress among nursing theorists from its initial delineation by the philosopher Jameton to its subsequent deployment as an umbrella concept describing the impact of moral constraints on health professionals and the patients for whom they care. The article raises worries about the way in which the concept of moral distress has been portrayed in some (...) nursing research and expresses concern about the fact that research, so far, has been largely confined to determining the prevalence of experiences of moral distress among nurses. We conclude by proposing a reconsideration, possible reconstruction and multidisciplinary approach to understanding the experiences of all health professionals who have to make difficult moral judgements and decisions in complex situations. (shrink)

Beginning with an overview of the knowledge claims proposed by John Locke and David Hume, this essay first explores the respective responses of Newman and W. G. Ward and then updates the discussion by bringing Newman into dialogue with the thoughtof Alasdair MacIntyre.

These notes discuss formalizing contexts as first class objects. The basic relationships are: ist(c,p) meaning that the proposition p is true in the context c, and value(c,p) designating the value of the term e in the context c Besides these, there are lifting formulas that relate the propositions and terms in subcontexts to possibly more general propositions and terms in the outer context. Subcontextx are often specialised with regard to time, place and terminology. Introducing contexts as formal objects will permit (...) axiomatizations in limited contexts to be expanded to transcend the original limitations. This seems necessary to provide AI programs using logic with certain capabilities that human fact representation and human reasoning possess. Fully implementing transcendence seems to require further extensions to mathematical logic, ie. beyond the nonmonotonic inference methods first invented in AI and now studied as a new domain of logic. (shrink)

In this important volume Habermas outlines the views which form the basis of his critical theory of modern societies. The volume comprises five interlocking essays, which together define the contours of his theory of communication and of his substantive account of social change. ′What is Universal Pragmatics?′ is the best available statement of Habermas′s programme for a theoryof communication based on the analysis of speech acts. In the following two essays Habermas draws on the work of Kohlberg and others to (...) develop a distinctive account of moral consciousness and normative structures. ′Toward a Reconstruction of historical Materialsim′ takes these issues further, offering a wide–ranging reconstruction of Marx′s historical materialsim understood as a theory of social evolution. The final essay focuses on the question of legitimacy and on the legitimation problems faced by modern states. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with the key questions of social and political theory today. (shrink)

Saving the World and Healing the Soul treats the heroic and redemptive trials of Jason Bourne, Bruce Wayne, Bella Swan, and Katniss Everdeen. The Bourne films, Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, the Twilight saga, and the Hunger Games series offer us stories to live into, to make connection between our personal loves and trials and a good order of the world.

This paper makes the case for a pluralist, contextualist view of nursing ethics. In defending this view, I briefly outline two current perspectives of nursing ethics – the Traditional View and the Theory View. I argue that the Traditional View, which casts nursing ethics as a subcategory of healthcare ethics, is problematic because it (1) fails to sufficiently acknowledge the unique nature of nursing practice; and (2) applies standard ethical frameworks such as principlism to moral problems which tend to alienate (...) or undermine nursing ethical concerns. Alternatively, the Theory View, which aims to build an independent and comprehensive theory of nursing ethics, is also found wanting because it (1) fails to sufficiently acknowledge the heterogeneous nature of nursing practices; (2) overemphasizes the differences and undervalues the similarities between nurses and other health professionals; and (3) assumes that one ethical framework can be meaningfully applied across diverse moral problems and contexts.My alternative, is to argue that nursing ethics inquiry should take a pluralist and critical stance towards available ethical frameworks and the negotiation of the ethical realm. On this view, the search for moral consensus or a unique ethical framework for nursing is replaced by the task of working strategically with multiple frameworks in order to expand the moral agency of nurses and empower them to positively engage with moral uncertainty as an inevitable feature of living a moral life. I conclude by indicating some of the implications that this has for the teaching of nursing ethics. (shrink)

Why the narrative self? -- Contemporary interest in narrative theory -- Is the self real or illusory? -- Dennett's brand of naturalism -- The heterophenomenological method (HM) -- Consciousness and the self -- The naturalist narrative self -- Puzzle cases -- The HM and the narrative self -- The limitations of Dennett's account -- The limits of language -- Epistemological fragility -- Ontological fragility -- Naturalism and phenomenology -- Confronting naturalism -- Phenomenology and hermeneutics -- The detour of interpretation -- (...) Reflexivity -- The problem of personal identity -- The number of selves, identity relations and truth -- The capable self and its narrative identity -- Narrative identity and aristotelian muthos -- Narrative recounting of human lives -- LPSE-identity and literary puzzle cases -- Certainty, knowledge and attestation -- Narrative attestation -- Fact and fiction -- Narrative attestation -- The limitations of Ricoeur's account -- Selective appeals to literary and psychoanalytic discourses -- Focus on the self-examining self -- The ontological status of the narrative self -- The epistemological status of the narrative self -- The practical self -- Why the narrative self? (shrink)

Reliable medically assisted sex selection which does not involve abortion or infanticide has recently become available, and has been used for non-medical reasons. This raises questions about the morality of sex selection for non-medical reasons. But reasonable people continue to disagree about the answers to these questions. So another set of questions is about what the law should be on medically assisted sex selection for non-medical reasons in the face of reasonable disagreement about the morality of sex selection. This paper (...) sketches a way of thinking about what the law should be, and concludes, contrary to what the law is in many places, that medically assisted sex selection for non-medical reasons ought to be legal. (shrink)

John McCarthy, Stanford University Logical AI (artificial intelligence) is based on programs that represent facts about the world in languages of mathematical logic and decide what actions will achieve goals by logical reasoning. A lot has been accomplished with logic as is.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When OPRR Comes Calling:Enforcing Federal Research RegulationsCharles R. Mccarthy (bio)In an update following this article, Ruth Macklin responds to the revelation that the controversial Hall-Stillman embryo-splitting experiment at George Washington University was conducted—contrary to federal regulations—without prior institutional review board (IRB) review. This revelation altered Dr. Macklin's view of the ethical status of the research. Undoubtedly such revelations also raise general questions for administrators and researchers in many (...) institutions, including, for example: How do allegations of noncompliance with federal regulations arise? When should allegations of infractions of the regulations be reported? Who has an obligation to report? To whom should reports be made? What sort of inquiry should take place? Who should conduct the inquiry? If a determination is made that infractions have occurred, what sanctions are appropriate? And, what publicity is given to the allegations, before, during, and after an evaluation?Some of these questions can be answered in a straightforward manner, while the answers to others depend on the circumstances of the case. This article provides some general answers to these questions.1BackgroundThe Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is the largest supporter of biomedical and behavioral research in the world. Somewhere between 25 and 33 percent of its medical research budget is devoted to the support of research involving human subjects. In accordance with the Public Health Service Act, DHHS has issued Regulations for the Protection of Human Subjects (45 CFR 46). The DHHS Secretary has delegated responsibility for promulgating and administering the regulations to the Office for Protection from Research Risks (OPRR), which is located within the National Institutes of Health.When an institution receives an award from a DHHS agency to carry out research involving human subjects, it is required to negotiate, or to have on file, an "assurance of compliance" document that provides detailed information [End Page 51] specifying how the institution plans to comply with the regulations for the protection of human subjects. Most major research institutions in the country have on file a "multiple project assurance" (MPA) document, which extends DHHS regulations to all human subjects research conducted or sponsored by that institution, irrespective of the source of funding. The regulations and the assurance of compliance require any research project involving human subjects to be reviewed and approved by an institutional review board (IRB) prior to initiation of the research. In addition, the project must be re-reviewed by the IRB at appropriate intervals—in no case, less than once a year. Institutional compliance with these and other requirements of the regulations has improved during the last 30 years and appears to be at a high level. However, from time to time, allegations of noncompliance arise, as they did in the George Washington University embryo-splitting experiment, and set in motion the review process described below.How do Allegations of Noncompliance Arise?Allegations or indications of noncompliance with federal regulations for the protection of human subjects may come from a variety of sources. Most commonly, the institution's IRB discovers that research involving humans is going forward without the required prior IRB review and approval, or that approved research is being conducted in a way that is contrary to the stipulations of the IRB. The Hall-Stillman case came to the attention of George Washington University's IRB because the research protocol was submitted to the IRB after the research had been carried out. In this case, there could be no doubt that an infraction had occurred.Information about possible noncompliance also frequently derives from a funding agency's Initial Review Group (IRG) (commonly called a Study Section) when it has reason to suspect noncompliance in a project it is reviewing for possible funding. An actual case that occurred some years ago involved a research application that proposed to perform brain biopsies on normal volunteers. The IRG that reviewed the application lost little time in questioning whether an IRB had approved the protocol. In this case, it was not enough for the IRG to recommend disapproval of the proposal for funding; it also was obliged to report the possible infraction to OPRR.Whistleblowers, including research subjects, nurses, students, members of the... (shrink)

From the AI point of view, consciousness must be regarded as a collection of interacting processes rather than the unitary object of much philosophical speculation. We ask what kinds of propositions and other entities need to be designed for consciousness to be useful to an animal or a machine. We thereby assert that human consciousness is useful to human functioning and not just and epiphenomenon. Zombies in the sense of Todd Moody's article are merely the victims of Moody's prejudices. To (...) behave like humans, zombies will need what Moody might call pseudo-consciousness, but useful pseudo-consciousness will share all the observable qualities of human consciousness including what the zombie will be able to report. Robots will require a pseudo-consciousness with many of the intellectual qualities of human consciousness but will function successfully with few if any human emotional conscious qualities if that is how we choose to build them. (shrink)

An Example for Natural Language Understanding and the AI Problems it Raises I think this 1976 memorandum is of 1996 interest. The problems it raises haven't been solved or even substantially reformulated.

This book proposes a new theory of the origins of human language ability and presents an original account of the early evolution of language. It explains why humans are the only language-using animals, challenges the assumption that language is a consequence of intelligence, and offers a new perspective on human uniqueness. The author draws on evidence from archaeology, linguistics, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. Making no assumptions about the reader's prior knowledge he first provides an introductory but critical survey of (...) all sources of evidence for language evolution. He then considers what language itself reveals about its own and human origins and evolution. He shows that certain central aspects of language do not, unexpectedly, reflect what they are used for, are maladapted for their function. He considers why this should be, and argues that these odd aspects of language reveal important clues about its evolutionary origin. The Origins of Complex Language fulfils the promise of its title. In doing so it turns upside down conventional theories about the relation between cognition and expression, truth and reference, and the co-evolution of mind and body. Original in conception, brilliantly executed, stylishly written, this book will attract a wide range of readers interested in the evolution and origins of language. (shrink)

Michael H. McCarthy has carefully studied the writings of Bernard Lonergan (Canadian philosopher-theologian, 1904-1984) for over fifty years. In his 1989 book, The Crisis of Philosophy, McCarthy argued for the superiority of Lonergan's distinctive philosophical project to those of his analytic and phenomenological rivals. Now in Authenticity as Self-Transcendence: The Enduring Insights of Bernard Lonergan, he develops and expands his earlier argument with four new essays, designed to show Lonergan's exceptional relevance to the cultural situation of late modernity. (...) The essays explore and appraise Lonergan's cultural mission: to raise Catholic philosophy and theology to meet the intellectual challenges and standards of his time. (shrink)

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where (...) they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.Cormac McCarthy, The Road. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global health issue which has severely disrupted and deferred several landmark international sporting competitions. Like the general population, athletes have faced direct psychological consequences from COVID-19 in addition to cancelation of events, loss of support, lack of training, loss of earnings, hypervigilance, and anxiety among others. The aim of the present research was to identify the adversity experiences of athletes caused by COVID-19 and explore the process of resilience used by competitive elite athletes for positive (...) adaptation. Research has indicated psychological resilience to be a protective factor against similar adversities in the sporting context. The study uses an across-cases qualitative design comparing the real-time lived experiences of athletes during COVID-19 using narrative analysis. Data were collected from 10 competitive elite athletes from various countries, as part of a larger doctoral dissertation study during the lockdown period, using in-depth experiential interviews. Study 1 presents detailed narratives on the loss and incongruence, which were the two major adversities experienced. Study 2 outlines the process of resilience as narrated by the participants through the emergent and minimal-impact resilience trajectories. We discuss recommendations for interventions and the role of sports psychologists, coaches, and sporting organizations in ensuring athletes’ mental health and their rehabilitation into post-COVID sports life. (shrink)

Philosophers often assume that we can somehow quantitatively measure how good things are for people. But what does such talk mean? And what are the measures? In *Weighing Goods* John Broome offers one treatment of these questions. In his later *Weighing Lives* he offers a different treatment. This article discusses both positions but advocates a third. But while the three positions disagree about matters of meaning, they agree about the form of the measures. Roughly speaking, they are such that the (...) goodness of a lottery for an individual is equal to its expected goodness for her. (shrink)

Logical AI involves representing knowledge of an agent’s world, its goals and the current situation by sentences in logic. The agent decides what to do by inferring that a certain action or course of action is appropriate to achieve the goals. We characterize briefly a large number of concepts that have arisen in research in logical AI. Reaching human-level AI requires programs that deal with the common sense informatic situation. This in turn requires extensions from the way logic has been (...) used in formalizing branches of mathematics and physical science. It also seems to require extensions to the logics themselves, both in the formalism for expressing knowledge and the reasoning used to reach conclusions. A large number of concepts need to be studied to achieve logical AI of human level. This article presents candidates. The references, though numerous, to articles concerning these concepts are still insuf- ficient, and I’ll be grateful for more, especially for papers available on the web. This article is available in several forms via http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/conceptsai.html. (shrink)

In this unique and comprehensive book, George McCarthy examines the influence of Greek philosophy, literature, arts, and politics on the development of twentieth-century German social thought. McCarthy demonstrates that the classical spirit vitalized thinkers such as Weber, Heidegger, Freud, Marcuse, Arendt, Gadamer, and Habermas. With the romancing of antiquity, they transformed their understanding of the modern self, political community, and Enlightenment rationality. By viewing contemporary social theory from the framework of the classical world, McCarthy argues, we are (...) capable of thinking beyond the limits of modernity to new possibilities of human reason, science, beauty, and social justice. (shrink)

Many Catholics living in violent conflict zones or in situations of structural injustice, along with Pax Christi International, Maryknoll, Pope Francis, and others, have been cultivating a tectonic shift toward centering active nonviolence in Catholic social ethics and approaches to conflict. This essay will illuminate how Catholic community organizing and strategic campaigns can both contribute to this shift and be enhanced by such a shift. The first part will describe salient features of this shift in Catholic theology and social ethics. (...) The second part will assess components of Catholic community organizing and strategic campaigns that distinctly contribute to this shift. The third part will offer some initial suggestions for how centering nonviolence can enhance Catholic community organizing and strategic campaigns. In turn, these dynamics between centering nonviolence and Catholic community organizing can better illuminate the way of Jesus and the love of Christ in both the Church and societies. (shrink)

Jurgen Habermas is unquestionably one of the foremost philosophers writing today. His notions of communicative action and rationality have exerted a profound influence within philosophy and the social sciences. This volume examines the historical and intellectual contexts out of which Habermas' work emerged, and offers an overview of his main ideas, including those in his most recent publication. Amongst the topics discussed are his relationship to the Frankfurt School of critical theory and Marx, his unique contributions to the philosophy of (...) the social sciences, the concept of 'communicative ethics', and the critique of post-modernism. New readers and non-specialists will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Habermas currently available. Advanced students will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Habermas. (shrink)