In this article we pose three questions: 1) What are the questions that gave rise to the introduction of the concept and subdiscipline of meta-ethics? 2) What characterises the view of meta-ethics as a subdiscipline of moral philosophy? And 3) is it in fact possible to uphold a systematic distinction between normative moral philosophy and meta-ethics in a way that allows us to see these two aspects of moral philosophy as independent subdisciplines? In trying to answer these questions, we trace (...) two different roads in the shaping of the current understanding of meta-ethics: the introduction of the word in analytical moral philosophy and the characterisation of meta-ethics in the formative period of meta-ethics and in contemporary introductions. Among the characteristics ascribed to meta-ethics, we identify a special focus on normative neutrality, and we furthermore show that this idea of neutrality as the defining characteristic of meta-ethics cannot be upheld. Our aim is to show that meta-ethics cannot be characterised or construed in a way that is normatively neutral and independent of other work done in normative ethics. We therefore challenge the claim that meta-ethics makes up a subdiscipline that is independent of other work done in moral philosophy. Instead, we suggest a reflective view of the relationship between meta-ethics and normative ethics, according to which we should acknowledge that meta-ethics is inherently normative, and that meta-ethical questions are interwoven with normative questions in moral philosophy. (shrink)

Danish agriculture is facing a turning point. Centuries of struggle to increase arable land area as well as its productivity is about to be reversed, due to overproduction and environmental problems. Some land will probably be turned back to nature, and the use of chemicals in agriculture in general will be reduced, perhaps with a lower productivity and a better environment as a consequence. This paper mainly describes some of the political actions taken in Denmark to influence environmental-agricultural issues. First, (...) however, some of the recently perceived environmental problems and over-production problems connected with Danish farming are outlined. (shrink)

According to many believers there is no end to the enlightening things that may be truly said about God. Perhaps there is no end for them either to the useful ways of dividing these things up into illuminating classes. But as fairly traditional theists we suggest a need to stress two basic classes as two indispensable sides to a traditional theist’s coin. We suggest that neglect or rejection of either side can debase the currency under philosophical investigation, can lead a (...) philosopher—or at least his puzzled readers—into costly muddles about the analysis or evaluation of religious discourse and claims. (shrink)

“Dance” has been associated with many psychophysiological and medical health effects. However, varying definitions of what constitute “dance” have led to a rather heterogenous body of evidence about such potential effects, leaving the picture piecemeal at best. It remains unclear what exact parameters may be driving positive effects. We believe that this heterogeneity of evidence is partly due to a lack of a clear definition of dance for such empirical purposes. A differentiation is needed between (a) the effects on the (...) individual when the activity of “dancing” is enjoyedas a dancerwithindifferent dance domains(e.g.,professional/”high-art”type of dance,eroticdance,religiousdance,clubdancing,Dance Movement Therapy(DMT), and what is commonly known ashobby, recreationalorsocialdance), and (b) the effects on the individual within these different domains, as a dancer of thedifferent dance styles(solo dance, partnering dance, group dance; and all the different styles within these). Another separate category of dance engagement is, not as a dancer, but as a spectator of all of the above. “Watching dance” as part of an audience has its own set of psychophysiological and neurocognitive effects on the individual, and depends on the context where dance is witnessed. With the help of dance professionals, we first outline some different dance domains and dance styles, and outline aspects that differentiate them, and that may, therefore, cause differential empirical findings when compared regardless (e.g., amount of interpersonal contact, physical exertion, context, cognitive demand, type of movements, complexity of technique and ratio of choreography/improvisation). Then, we outline commonalities between all dance styles. We identify six basic components that are part of any dance practice, as part of a continuum, and review and discuss available research for each of them concerning the possible health and wellbeing effects of each of these components, and how they may relate to the psychophysiological and health effects that are reported for “dancing”: (1) rhythm and music, (2) sociality, (3) technique and fitness, (4) connection and connectedness (self-intimation), (5) flow and mindfulness, (6) aesthetic emotions and imagination. Future research efforts might take into account the important differences between types of dance activities, as well as the six components, for a more targeted assessment of how “dancing” affects the human body. (shrink)

Based on a qualitative study of Copenhagen 2021 WorldPride, this article explores collaboration between the local organiser and its corporate partners, focusing on the tensions involved in this collaboration, which emerge from and uphold relations between the extremes of unethical pinkwashing, on the one hand, and ethical purity, on the other. Here, pinkwashing is understood as a looming risk, and purity as an unrealizable ideal. As such, corporate sponsorships of Pride are conceptualized as inherently impure—and productive because of their very (...) impurity rather than despite it. Analytically, we identify and explore three productive tensions where the first involves emergent normativities for what constitutes good, right, or proper corporate engagement in Pride, the second revolves around queer(ed) practices and products that open normativities, and the third centres on the role of internal LGBTI+ employee-driven networks whose activism pushes organisations to become further involved in Pride, developing aspirational solidarity. Reading across literatures on corporate activism and queer organisation, we introduce Alexis Shotwell’s notion of constitutive impurity to suggest that the potential for ethical corporate Pride partnerships arises when accepting the risk of pinkwashing rather than seeking to overcome it. (shrink)

Background: Expanded newborn screening generates incidental results, notably carrier results. Yet newborn screening programmes typically restrict parental choice regarding receipt of this non-health serving genetic information. Healthcare providers play a key role in educating families or caring for screened infants and have strong beliefs about the management of incidental results. Methods: To inform policy on disclosure of infant sickle cell disorder (SCD) carrier results, a mixed-methods study of healthcare providers was conducted in Ontario, Canada, to understand attitudes regarding result management (...) using a cross-sectional survey (N = 1615) and semistructured interviews (N = 42). Results: Agreement to reasons favouring disclosure of SCD carrier results was high (65.1%–92.7%) and to reasons opposing disclosure was low (4.1%–18.1%). Genetics professionals expressed less support for arguments favouring disclosure (35.3%–78.8%), and more agreement with arguments opposing disclosure (15.7%–51.9%). A slim majority of genetics professionals (51.9%) agreed that a reason to avoid disclosure was the importance of allowing the child to decide to receive results. Qualitatively, there was a perceived “duty” to disclose, that if the clinician possessed the information, the clinician could not withhold it. Discussion: While a majority of respondents perceived a duty to disclose the incidental results of newborn screening, the policy implications of these attitudes are not obvious. In particular, policy must balance descriptive ethics (ie, what providers believe) and normative ethics (ie, what duty-based principles oblige), address dissenting opinion and consider the relevance of moral principles grounded in clinical obligations for public health initiatives. (shrink)

Linear chromosomes shorten in every round of replication. In Drosophila, telomere‐specialized long interspersed retrotransposable elements (LINEs) belonging to the jockey clade offset this shortening by forming head‐to‐tail arrays at Drosophila telomere ends. As such, these telomeric LINEs have been considered adaptive symbionts of the genome, protecting it from premature decay, particularly as Drosophila lacks a conventional telomerase holoenzyme. However, as reviewed here, recent work reveals a high degree of variation and turnover in the telomere‐specialized LINE lineages across Drosophila. There appears (...) to be no absolute requirement for LINE activity to maintain telomeres in flies, hence the suggestion that the telomere‐specialized LINEs may instead be neutral or in conflict with the host, rather than adaptive. (shrink)

Debate continues to rage among philosophers of religion over Anthony Flew's famous little paper ‘Theology and Falsification’ and the responses it provoked, most notably R. M. Hare's response that religious claims are in no way like scientific hypotheses. For now, twenty years later, we still find many theists taking a similar tack to Hare's. A particularly interesting example is J. F. Miller in Religious Studies, 1969, who replies to Flew that propositions like ‘God loves mankind’ cannot be subject to falsifiability (...) conditions because they are used as claims expressing ‘religious first-order principles of the Judaeo-Christian Weltanschauung and as such are not amenable to falsification’ (p. 50). Miller seems to put his faith in some kind of great gulf fixed between what he would consider decently falsifiable scientific hypotheses and what he takes to be unfalsifiable first-order principles both of theology and of contemporary science. In what follows we will try to sketch a more rational strategy for modern believers of a liberal empiricist type, for those whose interest in appealing and deferring to experience includes but is not restricted to so-called ‘sense experience’. This will involve accepting analogies between theological statements and so-called hypotheses, insofar as the latter are propositions held and put forward in a somewhat tentative spirit with a view to explaining what we experience. (shrink)

Grouping research participants by culture or language proficiency may no longer suffice to investigate cognitive universals and differences cross-culturally, due to the interconnectedness of our multicultural world. Based on immigration psychology research, we provide a ‘proof of principle’ for three culture screening tools. Across five online experiments (total N = 440), we developed (1) The Cultural Traditions Questionnaire (CTQ), (2) the Arts Engagement in Childhood Questionnaire (AECQ), and (3) the Enculturation and Acculturation Quiz (EAQ). While these screening tools are tailored (...) to Iranian and English cultures, the procedures provided here are expandable to other cultures. The screening scores predicted emotional attachment to a culture better than traditional variables used in cross-cultural research (self-ascribed culture group, country of residence during formative years, mother tongue). Continuous measures of enculturation and acculturation are potentially better predictors for downstream variables of interest, due to their finer granularity and capability to capture multifaceted cultural identities. (shrink)

For the purpose of contributing to a clarification of the term process, different kinds of musical processes are investigated: A rule-determined phase shifting process in Steve Reich's Piano Phase (1966), a model for an indeterminate composition process in John Cage's Variations II (1961), a number of evolution processes in György Ligeti's In zart fliessender Bewegung (1976), and a generative process of fractal nature in Per Nørgård's Second Symphony (1970). In conclusion I propose that six process categories should be included in (...) a typology of processes: Rule-determined, goal-directed and indeterminate transformation processes, and rule-determined, goal-directed and indeterminate generative processes. (shrink)

Understanding when it is acceptable to interrupt a joint activity is an important part of understanding what cooperation entails. Philosophical analyses have suggested that we should release our partner from a joint activity anytime the activity conflicts with fulfilling a moral obligation. To probe young children’s understanding of this aspect, we investigated whether 3-year-old children (N = 60) are sensitive to the legitimacy of motives (selfish condition vs. moral condition) leading agents to intentionally interrupt their joint activity. We measured whether (...) children protested or released their partner by scoring their reactions. Our results indicate that children did not manifest different reactions when the motive behind their partner leaving was moral than when the motive was selfish. However, our data showed a stable pattern: regardless of the partner’s motives, some 3-year-olds take initiatives to release their partners from joint activity, suggesting that measuring release is a valuable tool for investigating joint action. -/- . (shrink)

Following the Introduction, the essays to be listed, each with a reply by Errol E. Harris, comprise the principal content. B. Blanshard, “Harris on Internal Relations”; G.R. Lucas, Jr., “Science and Teleological Explanations”; J.E. Smith, “Harris’ Commentary on Hegel’s Logic”; G. Rinaldi, “The Identity of Thought and Being in Harris’ Interpretation of Hegel’s Logic”: T. Rockmore, “System and History: Harris on Hegel’s Logic”; R. Hepburn, “The Problem of Evil”; W. H. Walsh, “Hegel on Morality”; W.N.A. Klever, “The Properties of the (...) Intellect”; P. Muller, “The pons asinorum in Philosophy”; Wm. Earle, “The Evanescent Authority of Philosophy.”. (shrink)

Moral dilemmas are a useful tool to investigate empirically, which parameters of a given situation modulate participants’ moral judgment, and in what way. In an effort to provide moral judgment data from a non-WEIRD culture, we provide the translation and validation of 48 classical moral dilemmas in Persian language. The translated dilemma set was submitted to a validation experiment with N = 82 Iranian participants. The four-factor structure of this dilemma set was confirmed; including Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, Evitability, and (...) Intentionality. When comparing moral judgments of Iranian participants to those of Spanish and Italian participants’ from previous research with the same dilemma set, differences emerged. Iranian participants’ moral judgments were more deontological, than Spanish and Italian participants. Religiosity made participants’ moral judgments more deontological, and also dysphoric mood resulted in a more deontological response style. (shrink)

Ethical approval must be obtained before medical research can start. We describe the differences in EA for an pseudonymous, non-interventional, observational European study. Sixteen European national coordinators of the international study on very old intensive care patients answered an online questionnaire concerning their experience getting EA. N = 8/16 of the NCs could apply at one single national ethical committee, while the others had to apply to various regional ECs and/or individual hospital institutional research boards. The time between applying for (...) EA and the first decision varied between 7 days and 300 days. In 9/16 informed consent from the patient was not deemed necessary; in 7/16 informed consent was required from the patient or relatives. The upload of coded data to a central database required additional information in 14/16. In 4/16 the NCs had to ask separate approval to keep a subject identification code list to de-pseudonymize the patients if questions would occur. Only 2/16 of the NCs agreed that informed consent was necessary for this observational study. Overall, 6/16 of the NCs were satisfied with the entire process and 8/16 were unsatisfied. 11/16 would welcome a European central EC that would judge observational studies for all European countries. Variations in the process and prolonged time needed to get EA for observational studies hampers inclusion of patients in some European countries. This might have a negative influence on the external validity. Further harmonization of ethical approval process across Europe is welcomed for low-risk observational studies. Getting ethical approval for low-risk, non-interventional, observational studies varies enormously across European countries. (shrink)

Résumer pour des lecteurs de langue française le noble livre qu'ont publié l'an dernier John King-Farlow et William N. Christensen sur les rapports de la foi — entendez la foi Judéochrétienne — et la raison vivante — entendez la raison telle que la cultive de nos jours la philosophic analytique — n'est certes pas chose aisée, surtout quand le rédacteur de la chronique a été nourri et éduqué, comme c'est le cas, dans la tradition de la philosophic française! En (...) effet Faith and the Life of Reason procède d'une série d'articles qui ont paru successivement, au cours des quinze dernières années, dans d'importantes revues américaines, irlandaises ou anglaises et dont ce nouvel ouvrage constitue en quelque sorte la reprise, en même temps que la refonte, selon une perspective ordonnée. (shrink)

Many research ethics guidelines now oblige researchers to offer research participants the results of research in which they participated. This practice is intended to uphold respect for persons and ensure that participants are not treated as mere means to an end. Yet some scholars have begun to question a generalised duty to disclose research results, highlighting the potential harms arising from disclosure and questioning the ethical justification for a duty to disclose, especially with respect to individual results. In support of (...) this view, we argue that current rationales for a duty of disclosure do not form an adequate basis for an ethical imperative. We review policy guidance and scholarly commentary regarding the duty to communicate the results of biomedical, epidemiological and genetic research to research participants and show that there is wide variation in opinion regarding what should be disclosed and under what circumstance. Moreover, we argue that there is fundamental confusion about the notion of “research results,” specifically regarding three core concepts: the distinction between aggregate and individual results, amongst different types of research, and across different degrees of result veracity. Even where policy guidance and scholarly commentary have been most forceful in support of an ethical imperative to disclose research results, ambiguity regarding what is to be disclosed confounds ethical action. (shrink)

History of civilization and human nature of Vietnam.

Tim van Gelder, following Brandom, Collins and others, uses the so‐called wide content of capacities which support social, norm governed activities, such as language, to argue for their anti‐natural, abstract, but socially instituted nature and thence for the failure of the entire traditional mind‐body discussion as ill‐posed. We argue that his former conclusion is wrong, that such properties are naturalisable, complicated organisational properties of the complexly organised, non‐linearly interactive systems that human beings are. This analysis also provides principled support, but (...) on other grounds, for van Gelder’s latter conclusion. We outline a new naturalist approach to the organisational capacities of such systems that is intended to ground their biological, cognitive and social characters. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to a conceptual model of cell patterning, based on a generalized notion of the epigenetic code of a cell determining its state. We introduce the concept of signaling depending both upon the spatial distance between cells and the distance between their cell states (s-distance); signaling can repel cells in the space of cell states (s-space) or attract them. The influence of different types of repelling signaling on the evolution of cells is considered. Stabilizing signaling, namely a (...) signaling monotonically decreasing with s-distance, causes the restoring of cell states after perturbations; destabilizing signaling, i.e., the one in which the signaling monotonically increases with s-distance, causes the appearance of pairs of cells with alternating cell states (one close to the state conventionally called “head”, and another close to the “tail” state). Non-monotonic (in s-space) signaling splits the cells into groups. The model shows that different types of signaling may provide different types of cellular patterns. General principles for applying this model to complex cellular structures are discussed. (shrink)

Монография доктора философских наук, профессора, почетного работника высшего профессионального образования РФ Н. А. Маковского посвящена анализу философско-методологических аспектов взаимодействия наук. В ней рассматривается специфика социально-философской концепции.

Working memory--the ability to keep important information in mind while comprehending, thinking, and acting--varies considerably from person to person and changes dramatically during each person's life. Understanding such individual and developmental differences is crucial because working memory is a major contributor to general intellectual functioning. This volume offers a state-of-the-art, integrative, and comprehensive approach to understanding variation in working memory by presenting explicit, detailed comparisons of the leading theories. It incorporates views from the different research groups that operate on each (...) side of the Atlantic, and covers working-memory research on a wide variety of populations, including healthy adults, children with and without learning difficulties, older adults, and adults and children with neurological disorders. A particular strength of this volume is that each research group explicitly addresses the same set of theoretical questions, from the perspective of both their own theoretical and experimental work and from the perspective of relevant alternative approaches. Through these questions, each research group considers their overarching theory of working memory, specifies the critical sources of working memory variation according to their theory, reflects on the compatibility of their approach with other approaches, and assesses their contribution to general working memory theory. This shared focus across chapters unifies the volume and highlights the similarities and differences among the various theories. Each chapter includes both a summary of research positions and a detailed discussion of each position. Variation in Working Memory achieves coherence across its chapters, while presenting the entire range of current theoretical and experimental approaches to variation in working memory. (shrink)