To fulfill their crucial duty of relieving suffering in their patients, physicians may have to administer palliative sedation when they implement treatment-limitation decisions such as the withdrawal of life-supporting interventions in patients with poor prognosis chronic severe brain injury. The issue of palliative sedation deserves particular attention in adults with serious brain injuries and in neonates with severe and irreversible brain lesions, who are unable to express pain or to state their wishes. In France, treatment limitation decisions for these patients (...) are left to the physicians. Treatment-limitation decisions are made collegially, based on the presence of irreversible brain lesions responsible for chronic severe disorders of consciousness. Before these decisions are implemented, they are communicated to the relatives. Because the presence and severity of pain cannot be assessed in these patients, palliative analgesia and/or sedation should be administered. However, palliative sedation is a complex strategy that requires safeguards to prevent a drift toward hastening death or performing covert euthanasia. In addition to the law on patients' rights at the end of life passed in France on April 22, 2005, a recent revision of Article 37 of the French code of medical ethics both acknowledges that treatment-limitation decisions and palliative sedation may be required in patients with severe brain injuries and provides legal and ethical safeguards against a shift towards euthanasia. This legislation may hold value as a model for other countries where euthanasia is illegal and for countries such as Belgium and Netherlands where euthanasia is legal but not allowed in patients incapable of asking for euthanasia but in whom a treatment limitation decision has been made. (shrink)

Drawn from a larger research project exploring discourses of ability and gender, this paper identifies a narrative theme, ‘Girls Find God’, emerging both from teen-orientated television dramas and as a topic of discussion among participants in an online forum, www.smartgirls.tv. It considers the relationship between teens and the media, and the implications for the development of cultural identities and practices. Identifying some key tenets of television dramas which have a girl’s connection with the supernatural at their core, and exploring reflections (...) of on-line forum participants, I argue that the ‘Girls Find God’ narrative goes beyond a simple reinforcement of some historically inscribed relationships between divinity, gender and genius. While it is true that connectedness and service are maintained as the inevitable direction of girls’ talents and reinforced by a divine authority, this narrative also provides a locus for negotiation of what such hegemonic inscriptions might mean in contemporary contexts for girls. (shrink)

This paper supports the personal data platform cooperative as a means of bringing about John Rawls’s favoured institutional realisation of a just society, the property-owning democracy. It describes personal data platform cooperatives and applies Rawls’s political philosophy to analyse the institutional forms of a just society in relation to the economic power deriving from aggregating personal data. It argues that a society involving a significant number of personal data platform cooperatives will be more suitable to realising Rawls’s principle of fair (...) equality of opportunity. (shrink)

In the area of investment, responsibility may be expressed via four types of ethical concern: value-based ethics resulting in the exclusion of so-called "vicious" companies from the investment portfolio; fructification-oriented ethics with a view to long-term investment; consequence-based ethics aimed at initiating a behavioural change in the investment target; and ethics envisaged as a discriminating criterion in the search of the best financial performance. No single formula of responsible investment is available, and the "responsible" approach necessarily implies the active involvement (...) of a free acting subject striving to tackle fundamental ethical issues. The practice of responsible investment cannot be reduced to simply applying a particular legal rule or mathematical formula. (shrink)

In this consensus report by a diverse group of academics who conduct and/or are concerned about social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research, the authors recount the often‐ugly history of scientific attempts to understand the genetic contributions to human behaviors and social outcomes. They then describe what the current science—including genomewide association studies and polygenic indexes—can and cannot tell us, as well as its risks and potential benefits. They conclude with a discussion of responsible behavior in the context of SBG research. (...) SBG research that compares individuals within a group according to a “sensitive” phenotype requires extra attention to responsible conduct and to responsible communication about the research and its findings. SBG research (1) on sensitive phenotypes that (2) compares two or more groups defined by (a) race, (b) ethnicity, or (c) genetic ancestry (where genetic ancestry could easily be misunderstood as race or ethnicity) requires a compelling justification to be conducted, funded, or published. All authors agree that this justification at least requires a convincing argument that a study's design could yield scientifically valid results; some authors would additionally require the study to have a socially favorable risk‐benefit profile. (shrink)

Lauener's philosophical approach is well-articulated and has many features that are fully justified: epistemology appears at the level of metascience, as a normative discipline; Lauener's transcendentalism is open, the norms being able to evolve over time; in his analytic a priori-synthetic a posteriori dichotomy, analyticity is relative to the context and results from conventions, and the dichotomy is compatible with Quine's universal revisibility; Lauener has shown that a theory and the metatheory it is based on cannot be revised at the (...) same time, a strong argument for ontological relativity but against general holism, he conceives of tmth as applicable only within a theory, relative to an ontology and dependent on references, etc. Other aspects, however, appear more problematic: the idea that mathematical entities are the product of our thinking, which makes them more similar to fictional than to physical objects (the main objection to this is that mathematics plays a constitutive role in physical concepts), or the tendency to speak of "existence relative to modem physics" (as if real existence were a type of existence, on a par with existence in fiction). (shrink)

Gilbert and colleagues point out the discrepancy between the limited empirical data illustrating changes in personality following implantation of deep brain stimulating electrodes and the vast number of conceptual neuroethics papers implying that these changes are widespread, deleterious, and clinically significant. Their findings are reminiscent of C. P. Snow’s essay on the divide between the two cultures of the humanities and the sciences. This division in the literature raises significant ethical concerns surrounding unjustified fear of personality changes in the context (...) of DBS and negative perceptions of clinician-scientists engaged in DBS. These concerns have real world implications for funding future innovative, DBS trials aimed to reduce suffering as well as hampering true interdisciplinary scholarship. We argue that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism and the value it places on empirical inquiry, experiential knowledge, and inter-disciplinary scholarship – reflecting diverse ways of knowing – provides a framework to start to address the important questions Gilbert and colleagues raise. In particular, we highlight the importance of expert clinician knowledge in contributing to the neuroethical questions raised by Gilbert and colleagues. Finally, we provide illustrative examples of some of our interdisciplinary empirical research that demonstrate the iterative cycle of inquiry characteristic of pragmatism in which conceptual neuroethics questions have led to empirical studies whose results then raise additional conceptual questions that give rise to new empirical studies in a way that highlights the contributions of the humanities and the sciences. (shrink)

Pandemic plans recommend phases of response to an emergent infectious disease outbreak, and are primarily aimed at preventing and mitigating human-to-human transmission. These plans carry presumptive weight and are increasingly being operationalized at the national, regional and international level with the support of the World Health Organization. The conventional focus of pandemic preparedness for EIDs of zoonotic origin has been on public health and human welfare. However, this focus on human populations has resulted in strategically important disciplinary silos. As the (...) risks of zoonotic diseases have implications that reach across many domains outside traditional public health, including anthropological, environmental, and veterinary fora, a more inclusive ecological perspective is paramount for an effective response to future outbreaks. (shrink)

This rich and varied collection of essays addresses some of the most fundamental human questions through the lenses of philosophy, literature, religion, politics, and theology. Peter Augustine Lawler and Dale McConkey have fashioned an interdisciplinary consideration of such perennial and enduring issues as the relationship between nature and history, nature and grace, reason and revelation, classical philosophy and Christianity, modernity and postmodernity, repentance and self-limitation, and philosophy and politics.

In technologically grounded organizations, culture is bound tightly to the material characteristics of the technology that the organization manufactures, distributes, or services. Technological grounding helps explain why high-technology organizations often experience cultural integration problems following a merger. Examining the recent merger of US West and Qwest, this article analyzes how powerful actors strategically used the process of technological grounding to enroll a core technology to situate postmerger integration in technological terms, creating a discourse of inevitability that then justified publicly Qwest's (...) cultural domination of US West. (shrink)

The aim of this review is to show the fruitfulness of using images of facial expressions as experimental stimuli in order to study how neural systems support biologically relevant learning as it relates to social interactions. Here we consider facial expressions as naturally conditioned stimuli which, when presented in experimental paradigms, evoke activation in amygdala–prefrontal neural circuits that serve to decipher the predictive meaning of the expressions. Facial expressions offer a relatively innocuous strategy with which to investigate these normal variations (...) in affective information processing, as well as the promise of elucidating what role the aberrance of such processing might play in emotional disorders. (shrink)

The financial sector likes to call itself a "service industry". As such, its role is to guarantee the fluidity of transactions which are essential to economic activity by ensuring the best possible use of available capital. If finance is a service activity, it is important to specify what services it renders, to whom, in return for what, and for what purpose. In the absence of such clarification, finance may slide out of control and be left at the mercy of mass (...) enthusiasm or hysteria. This document, which is the result of work by people who hold senior positions in Geneva's financial sector or are external observers of the financial world identifies the issues and suggests some avenues for possible solutions. (shrink)

Previously published essays on Sartre by various authors, and texts of conversations between Sartre and the compiler.

ObjectiveStress can play a role in the onset and exacerbation of psoriasis. Psychological interventions to reduce stress have been shown to improve psychological and psoriasis-related outcomes. This pilot randomised study investigated the feasibility of a brief interaction with a Paro robot to reduce stress and improve skin parameters, after a stressor, in patients with psoriasis.MethodsAround 25 patients with psoriasis participated in a laboratory stress task, before being randomised to either interact with a Paro robot or sit quietly for 30 min. (...) Raman spectroscopy and trans-epidermal water loss were measured at baseline, after the stressor and after the intervention as indexes of acute skin changes. Psychological variables, including self-reported stress and affect, were also measured at the three time-points.ResultsNo statistically significant differences between the two conditions were found for any of the outcomes measured. However, effect sizes suggest significance could be possible with a larger sample size. Changes in the psychological and Raman spectroscopy outcomes across the experimental session were found, indicating the feasibility of the procedures.ConclusionThis pilot study showed that a brief interaction with a Paro robot was a feasible intervention for patients with psoriasis, but future trials should broaden the inclusion criteria to try to increase recruitment rates. Studying people who are highly stressed, depressed or who are stress-responders may increase the power of the intervention to show effects using a longer-term intervention. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether practical interests affect knowledge attributions in cases of testimony. It is argued that stakes impact testimonial knowledge attributions by increasing or decreasing the requirements for hearers to trust speakers and thereby gain the epistemic right to acquire knowledge via testimony. Standard, i.e. invariantist, reductionism and non-reductionism fail to provide a plausible account of testimony that is stakes sensitive, while non- invariantist versions of both traditional accounts can remedy this deficiency. Support for this conceptual analysis of stakes (...) is found through a review of the experimental philosophy literature on stakes effects on knowledge attribution. Finally, a diagnosis is offered for what is needed to provide a more robust defense of the paper’s primary claims in terms of future experimental study. (shrink)

Mucoidy and cytotoxicity arise from two independent modifications of the phenotype of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa that contribute to the mortality and morbidity of cystic fibrosis. We show that, even though the transcriptional regulatory networks controlling both processes are quite different from a molecular or mechanistic point of view, they may be identical from a dynamic point of view: epigenesis may in both cases be the cause of the acquisition of these new phenotypes. This was highlighted by the identity of (...) formal graphs modelling these networks. A mathematical framework based on formal methods from computer science was defined and implemented with a software environment. It allows an easy and rigorous validation and certification of these models and of the experimental methods that can be proposed to falsify or validate the underlying hypothesis. (shrink)

In the vocabulary of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance the term ‘humanist’ literature refers only to profane, as opposed to sacred, writings. However, the greatness of the ancient authors appeared such that a certain confusion was created between profane and classical writings. Thus the idea arose of what was much later called humanism, and the feeling of a mission ‘to revive dead things’ (in the words of Machiavelli) gained ground. Today we like to give a wider meaning to (...) the word humanism: to be a ‘humanist’ is to have faith in Man, to believe in his eminent dignity and in the potentialities of his genius. Such humanism is of all times, but it seems (and this is no mere chance) that its golden age coincides with that of the renaissance of antiquity and that it has remained inextricably linked with classical culture—culture understood here in the two-fold sense of ‘knowledge’ and ‘cult’ of Graeco-Roman antiquity. The reason for this correspondence between certain ideas on the potentialities of Man and admiration for the ancients is founded not only on the fact that these latter were admirable because of their wisdom, their virtues and their arts, but also, and primarily, because in the eyes of the Christians (who had good cause to believe themselves their equals), these ancients, whether Latin or Greek, not having received the help of Revelation and Redemption, had to accept on their own account the authority of moral law and to procure for themselves all the benefits of a truth envisaged only imperfectly. How could such triumph of Man, incomplete though it might have been, be arrived at? This was a crucial question, ever since the first centuries of Christianity, a question to which the Fathers of the Church, particularly the Greek Fathers, had found various answers. Some of them denied that the pagans had any knowledge whatever of Truth, others admitted that whatever they had learned or divined of Truth could be due merely to chance Hebraic influence or to the grace of partial revelation. (shrink)