In recent years, the concepts of charity and development aid have changed significantly. Present concepts combine direct money transfer with co-production, knowledge sharing and the development of products and services designed for the need of developing and transition economies. The concept of micro-financing is a financial service which has proven to allow for entrepreneurs in the respective countries to start up their businesses. A relatively new financial product for these countries is micro-insurance. This article deals with the question whether consumers (...) in the Netherlands are willing to donate micro-insurances and which factors influence this willingness to contribute to the non-profit micro-insurance approach of an insurance company. The data were collected with questionnaires among a sample of the Dutch population. The data have been processed in a one-way between-groups ANOVA, a paired sample t test and an ordinal regression analysis. The results show that approximately half of the Dutch consumers are willing to pay an additional amount on their insurance premium for the donation of micro-insurances. The amount of the insurance premium did, however, not affect the willingness to donate. If consumers could choose the beneficiary less people are willing to donate, yet those people are willing to donate more money. In conclusion, there is readiness among consumers to contribute to micro-insurance via an insurance company that assists in setting up micro-insurance projects. This indicates a possible role for companies to act as an intermediary between philanthropic acts and consumers. (shrink)

What standard or principle should guide decisionmaking concerning the permissibility of allowing children to be organ donors? For a long time, it has been widely assumed that the best interest of the child is the appropriate standard. But recently, several critics have charged that this standard fails to give due weight to the interests of the family and the intimate relationships that the family makes possible.1,2 This article reviews and rejects both the best-interest standard and the alternative standard recommended by (...) the critics. I then propose a new standard to help parents, healthcare professionals, and judges decide when it is and is not permissible for children to serve as organ donors. This new standard modifies and broadens the best-interest standard to allow it to account adequately for the contribution that intimate relationships make to the well-being of children. (shrink)

In order to develop the ontology of tendencies for use in the representation of medical knowledge, tendencies are compared with other kinds of entities possessing the realizable-realization structure, specifically: dispositions, propensities, abilities and virtues. The peculiarities of tendencies are discussed and a standard schema of tendency ascription is developed in order to represent the relations between the ascriptions of tendency tokens to particulars and the ascriptions of tendency types to universals. Two nonstandard cases and their epistemic variants are discussed.

""Catching Ourselves in the Act" is no less than an attempt to explain intelligence. Delightful how the author dismantles traditional views in.

Calls to expand temporary work programmes come from two directions. First, as global justice advocates observe, every year thousands of poor migrants cross borders in search of better opportunities, often in the form of improved employment opportunities. As a result, international organizations now lobby in favour of expanding ‘guest-work’ opportunities, that is, opportunities for citizens of poorer countries to migrate temporarily to wealthier countries to fill labour shortages. Second, temporary work programmes permit domestic governments to respond to two internal, contradictory (...) political pressures: (1) to fill labour shortages and (2) to do so without increasing rates of permanent migration. Temporary work programmes permit governments to appear ‘tough’ on migration, while responding to employer pressure to locate workers willing to work in low-skilled, poorly remunerated positions. The coincidence of national self-interest and global justice generates a strong case in favour of expanding guest-work. We evaluate the moral benefits and burdens of expanding guest-work opportunities, and conclude that although there are benefits to be gleaned from the perspective of global wealth redistribution, at present, temporary work programmes are generally unjust. We will argue that just temporary work programmes, in time, permit temporary workers to attain citizenship. This spells the end of traditional temporary work programmes, which require that workers return to their home country in time; instead, what is temporary is the employment obligation that must be fulfilled as a requirement to access citizenship. As long as this requirement is met, we endorse guest-work programmes as a tool to respond to global inequality. (shrink)

Registered nurses (RNs) employed in an urban medical center in the USA identified moral distress as a practice concern. This study describes RNs' moral distress and the frequency of morally distressing events. Data were collected using the Moral Distress Scale and an open-ended questionnaire. The instruments were distributed to direct-care-providing RNs; 100 responses were returned. Morally distressing events included: working with staffing levels perceived as `unsafe', following families' wishes for patient care even though the nurse disagreed with the plan, and (...) continuing life support for patients owing to family wishes despite patients' poor prognoses. One high frequency distressing event was carrying out orders for unnecessary tests and treatments. Qualitative data analysis revealed that the nurses sought support and information from nurse managers, chaplaincy services and colleagues. The RNs requested further information on biomedical ethics, suggested ethics rounds, and requested a non-punitive environment surrounding the initiation of ethics committee consultations. (shrink)

This article experiments with multimedia storytelling to re-vision difference outside biomedical and humanistic frames by generating new understandings of living dis/artfully with illness. We present and analyze seven short videos created by women and trans people living with illness as part of an arts-based research project that aimed to speak back to hegemonic concepts of disability that create barriers to healthcare.1 We call for a welcoming in of disability studies’ disruptive and re-imaginative orientations to bodily difference to unsettle medicine’s humanistic (...) accounts. In turn, we advance medical post-humanistic approaches that call on disability studies to re-embody its theories and approaches. (shrink)

In 1935, a group of mathematical statisticians in the United States announced the founding of a new professional organization, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In the coming years, this institution became a significant source of support for the growing community of mathematical statisticians. Thus it would seem that the formation of the Institute marked the beginning of the process of the creation of that community. This paper, however, argues that those who initially participated in the Institute constituted a small, loosely (...) organized, but wellconnected group within the broader scientific world even before they joined together formally to promote their discipline. We will examine some aspects of their education, employment, and interests in order to determine how American mathematical statisticians set themselves apart from other scientists and helped to define their discipline before the community acquired its official status. (shrink)

Journal Name: The Law & Ethics of Human Rights Issue: Ahead of print.

Elected prosecutors have pledged not to enforce abortion laws, in response to state-level abortion bans. For their pledges to be meaningful, prosecutors must exercise their discretion in cases of individuals who face legal risk, including people who help others self-manage their abortions. With a harm-reduction approach to improving abortion access, prosecutors should aim to reduce abortion helpers’ involvement with the criminal justice system.

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 594-600, July 2022. In The Shifting Border, Ayelet Shachar offers us two concrete proposals for combatting the danger posed by the shifting border, especially to those crossing borders in search of safety. One proposal suggests that human rights travel with migrants, so that agents who control the border must take responsibility for protecting their human rights at the border. A second proposal, which forms the basis of my commentary below, asks (...) that states consider alternative ways for migrants to seek protection safely. In responding to this second proposal, I make two proposals of my own that stem from Shachar's analysis: her analysis offers us the resources we need in order to expand, not only the channels available to migrants for seeking protection, but also our sense of who should be involved in controlling admission, and expanding the “who” that is involved in admission gives meaning to the concept of “moral proximity” which can help to overcome the territorial imperative that dominates the rules governing international migration, i.e., the imperative that protection travels with physical access to territory, only. (shrink)

The debate on abortion has tended to avoid the psychological significance of an unwanted pregnancy, dominated istead by the strong emotions the subject excites. Eva Pattis Zoja examines the thoughts that surround a woman's decision to end a pregnancy, and presents the challenging thesis that voluntary abortion can often be a violent and unconscious act of self-realisation. Treating a theme which is central to our existence, the author makes no attempt to argue for or against, or to deny the painful (...) nature of the subject which she tackles, but instead looks at the way in which a decision to abort can affect a woman's inner life. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that there are good reasons to permit states to engage in their own forms of prioritization of refugees for admission, if doing so enables more refugees overall to find safety. I identify three distinct clusters of programs that states operate, those that emphasize contribution-based reciprocity, those that emphasize anticipated benefit, and those that elevate cultural considerations. I assess the legitimacy of these programs separately, and then consider them together, to defend the view that – overall, (...) considering the profound need for resettlement spots – they warrant our normative support. At least at first glance, the reason that these programs are legitimate is that they are all underpinned by principles in moral philosophy that in general command widespread support. In the final section, I examine the discomfort they generate, and suggest that the discomfort has three related sources: (i) that there is something wrong with considering the benefits refugees may bring when at issue is simply whether states are carrying out their moral duties towards them; (ii) that the result of permitting such prioritization is that those who are most vulnerable are left behind; and (iii) that cultural considerations can easily slide into racist considerations. While I agree that we must be attentive to how these programs operate in practice, and whether they generate harm (in particular, more harm than good), I believe that in the current context, these objections can be adequately countered so that we should in general offer these programs our cautious, and conditional, support. (shrink)

The global space is in need of creative solutions to the challenges posed by those seeking, and deserving of, asylum. In some democratic states, experiments in permitting citizens to have a greater role in selecting refugees for admission are underway; in this article, I consider the conditions that must apply to any citizen‐selection scheme, in order for such a scheme to be morally acceptable. I begin with an account of the way in which citizen‐selection schemes – usually called ‘sponsorship programs’ (...) – operate presently. I then offer a justification for engaging citizens in refugee resettlement in general, as well as in selecting specific refugees for admission in particular, and then identify several conditions that must attend any permissible citizen‐selection scheme. I defend this account from two objections: (1) that states should be the primary, and indeed only, agent that selects refugees for admission and (2) that citizens will inevitably use problematic criteria in selecting refugees for admission, so they should be denied the right to do so. I conclude with some proposals for how a citizen‐selection scheme can be crafted to respond to this latter worry, including an outline of an exception clause that permits citizens to make the case that some refugees ought to be resettled, even if not specially selected by the UNHCR for resettlement priority, including especially family members and friends. (shrink)

Today there are over 1,500 public-use airports in the United States. Each of these airports provides a service to the surrounding community, whether in the form of a general aviation or commercial air service facility. An airport is dependent on many facets of the local government infrastructure for support services. Also, the airports have ties to neighboring or resident military installations. A military installation has similar missions and objectives to an airport, a situation that enables a working relationship that is (...) complementary to each party. For example, airports and military installations alike must provide such services as emergency response, fire protection, airspace control, environmental protection, and a safe infrastructure for aircraft operations. While many aspects of the relationships are intangible and subjective, others are easily measured. (shrink)

The article examines how the rules on formation of contract and on mistake, contained in the various transnational model rules that have been published over the past two decades, have taken shape. The approach adopted here is based on an analysis of the ‘textual stratification’ of European private law. The relevant instruments (Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, Principles of European Contract Law, UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts, Draft Common Frame of Reference, Principes contractuels communs) are (...) analysed and compared in their historical sequence. To what extent and why have the texts been transformed in the process? The article demonstrates that there is a very considerable common ground reflecting the state of the art of comparative research in these fields over the past hundred years. It also highlights issues on which consensus must still be reached and it suggests patterns towards reaching such consensus. It is argued that the Principles of European Contract Law, rather than the Draft Common Frame of Reference, should provide the point of departure for future discussions. The scene for the article is set by a critical examination of the concepts of contract and legal act, as used in the Draft Common Frame of Reference. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Knowing the EastPatti M. MarxsenKnowing the East. By Paul Claudel. Translated by James Lawler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. 136 pp.Fifty years after his death, Paul Claudel (1868–1955) is remembered for many things. Not only was he a major twentieth-century poet and playwright, he was an astute observer of Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese art. Not only was he the brother of sculptor Camille Claudel, he was a (...) diplomat who lived for nearly twenty years in Asia, including a stint as the French ambassador to Japan (1921–1927). When he was elected as a member of the Académie Française in 1946 at nearly 80 years of age he quipped, "For an academic, that is puberty." He died at 87, having lived large in two centuries and on three continents.Following an adolescence marked with indifference toward religion, Claudel experienced a profound conversion to Catholicism during a Christmas night service at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris at the age of 18. With Christianity at the center of his universe and under the influence of Symbolist poets Rimbaud and Mallarmé, he developed a response to the world that was at once poetic and spiritual. Through his poetry, plays, and essays, he insisted on a fundamental unity between matter and spirit, a harmonious and vast universe into which the human mind could enter. And, at least for him, the point of entry was the portal of the Church. He struggled at times, but never lost sight of his faith. For all this, he is often credited with the revival of French Catholicism in the wake of WWI. After all, if Paul Claudel could take religion seriously and find meaning in it, pourquoi pas the rest of us?The facts of his extraordinary biography form a peculiar background to the recent translation by James Lawler of Claudel's collection of prose poems titled Knowing [End Page 229] the East. First published in 1946 as Connaissance de l'est, these sixty-one texts were written between 1895 and 1905 during Claudel's first visits to China and Japan as a young vice-consul stationed in Shanghai. He was twenty-six and still finding his poetic voice. And though his stance in the world is decidedly Christian, the content of this intriguing work reveals an inner dialogue with Buddhist ideas of interconnection, harmony, the ongoing quest for a higher life condition, and the overwhelming impact of nature in the lives of mere humans.In "Pagoda," Claudel describes a seven-story Chinese pagoda as it "amplifies and multiplies the roof, exaggerates the horned corners that rise with an elegant surge, and turns their curves upward to the sky." This form that "does away with walls" and concentrates on the uplifting roof creates a space where "Buddha, Prince of Peace, dwells inside with all the gods." In this architecture he reads a structuring of physical and spiritual space, a kind of never ending upward movement divided into "the seven mystical heavens." The culminating effect is the heavenly achievement of the unknowable. And so, after going as far as he can go into the world of the spirit, he ends this prose poem with an abrupt return to temporal reality. "I have no more to say of the Pagoda. I do not know its name."Elsewhere, in "The Wanderer," he turns his sense of awe toward nature. "Every tree has its personality, every small beast its role, every voice its part in the symphony," he writes. "As one understands music, so I understand nature, like a detailed narrative of proper names; as my walk and the day advance, so does the elaboration of the doctrine." The "doctrine," it seems, is the idea of dependent origination, the interrelation of all life that springs from a single source. In the last line, he states, "I understand the world's harmony. When will I grasp its melody?"In "The Temple of Consciousness" Claudel climbs "the black rock's vertical wall, and only at this late afternoon hour do I know myself to be on the right track." Below, he observes golden rice fields. Ahead there is an "old stairway overlaid with hoary moss... (shrink)

This paper brings together the concepts of social norms and innovation diffusion to assess two community development projects with gender targets. The projects failed to meet their objectives although they embodied leading global ?good practices? for community-based participatory approaches. In order to succeed, the projects needed to reach and empower poor women; however, they were located in contexts with significant gender inequalities and weak governance in one case, and with political conflict in the other. In such contexts, participatory projects with (...) gender objectives likely require more strategic and longer term interventions than current community development models are allowing. (shrink)

This article considers two questions: Do democratic states have the right to deport non-citizens present or residing on their territory? And, if so, what principles should guide deportation in democratic states? The overall objective is to offer an account of what deportation should look like in a liberal democratic state. I begin by situating the practice of deportation in larger discussions of the extent of state discretion in controlling both borders and membership; here, I will argue that potential deportees occupy (...) an awkward middle space, i.e. it is not clear whether they should be treated according to the principles that regulate discretion at the border or discretion in admitting migrants to membership. I then consider more deeply whether deportation can be rendered non-arbitrary, or whether it is bound to remain unjustly applied; where it cannot be rendered non-arbitrary, it must be rejected, or so I shall argue. To be non-arbitrary, the practice of deportation must meet three criteria: a publicity criterion, a justification criterion, and a collective interest criterion. In the final section of the article, I disentangle deportation into its component parts – I distinguish just cause for deportation from just action in deportation – and consider how the criteria that stem from a commitment to non-arbitrariness constrain its application to non-citizen residents. The consequence of requiring deportation to be applied, if at all, in a non-arbitrary way is that there will certainly be cases where liberal democracies find themselves unable to deport those who might otherwise be thought eligible for deportation. Ultimately, I conclude that deportation from liberal democratic states can be fair only in a small number of cases. (shrink)

Are democratic states permitted to denationalize citizens, in particular those whom they believe pose dangers to the physical safety of others? In this article, I argue that they are not. The power to denationalize citizens—that is, to revoke citizenship—is one that many states have historically claimed for themselves, but which has largely been in disuse in the last several decades. Recent terrorist events have, however, prompted scholars and political actors to reconsider the role that denationalization can and perhaps should play (...) in democratic states, in particular with respect to its role in protecting national security and in supporting the global fight against terror more generally. In this article, my objective is to show that denationalization laws have no place in democratic states. To understand why, I propose examining the foundations of the right of citizenship, which lie, I shall argue, in the very strong interests that individuals have in security of residence. I use this formulation of the right to respond to two broad clusters of arguments: (1) those that claim that it is justifiable to denationalize citizens who threaten to undermine the safety of citizens in a democratic state or the ability of a democratic state to function as a democratic state, and (2) those that claim that it is justifiable to denationalize dual citizens because they possess citizenship status in a second country that is also able to protect their rights. (shrink)

Hidden in Historicism considers how the nineteenth-century philosophy of historicism depicts three "forgotten time regimes": a time of rise and fall, an ambiguous time of synchronicity of the non-synchronous, and a time in which decisive moments dominate. Before the eighteenth century, time was past-oriented. This inversed in the Enlightenment, when the future became dominating. Today, this time of progress continues to be embraced as a "time of the modern". Yet, inequality, increasing violence and climate change lead to doubts over a (...) bright future. In this book, Harry Jansen moves away from the heritage of Reinhart Koselleck and his single time of the modern towards a historicist, threefold temporal approach to history writing. In the time regime of the twenty-first century past, present and future coexist. It is a heterogeneous time that takeson the three forms of historicism. Jansen's study shows how all three times exist together in current historiography and contribute to a better understanding of the world today. Based on the idea that an incarnated time rules everything that happens it reality, the book offers a fresh perspective on the ongoing discussion about time and time regimes in contemporary philosophy and theory of history for students and scholars, both time specialists and the non-specialist. (shrink)

In considering the similarities between "momoirs"--popular memoirs written by mothers about motherhood experiences--and evocative autoethnographic mother-writing, I argue that differentiating these two forms of intimate observation and personal narrative requires a rethinking of autoethnographic practice. Specifically, I draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze to advocate for a radical specificity in autoethnographic writing. Thinking the autoethnographic narrative in terms of specificities and differences encourages us to think creatively about personal experiences and cultural relations beyond what is shared and communicable.

Algorithmic fairness is a new interdisciplinary field of study focused on how to measure whether a process, or algorithm, may unintentionally produce unfair outcomes, as well as whether or how the potential unfairness of such processes can be mitigated. Statistical discrimination describes a set of informational issues that can induce rational (i.e., Bayesian) decision-making to lead to unfair outcomes even in the absence of discriminatory intent. In this article, we provide overviews of these two related literatures and draw connections between (...) them. The comparison illustrates both the conflict between rationality and fairness and the importance of endogeneity (e.g., “rational expectations” and “self-fulfilling prophecies”) in defining and pursuing fairness. Taken in concert, we argue that the two traditions suggest a value for considering new fairness notions that explicitly account for how the individual characteristics an algorithm intends to measure may change in response to the algorithm. (shrink)

In both the academic and societal debates, it is widely assumed that cognitive advertising defenses can reduce children's susceptibility to advertising effects. Empirical evidence supporting this crucial assumption is however missing. It is precisely this gap that the present study aims to fill In a survey of 296 children, we investigate whether children's cognitive defenses reduce the relationship between the amount of television advertising they are exposed to and their desire for advertised product categories. Interaction analysis in regression shows that (...) of all the cognitive defense variables, only understanding advertising's persuasive intent was effective in reducing the impact of advertising exposure on children's advertised product desire. However, this only applies to the older children in the sample. For the younger children, understanding the persuasive intent even increased the impact of advertising. (shrink)

Trust is a central element of any well-functioning democracy, and the fact that it is widely reported to be on the wane is a worrisome phenomenon of contemporary politics. It is therefore critical that political and social philosophers focus on efforts by which to rebuild trust relations. I argue that a shared public culture is up to the task of trust-building, for three reasons. First, a shared public culture gives citizens an insight into the motivations that inspire fellow citizens to (...) action. Second, a shared public culture serves to generate both positive and negative sanctions, an understanding of which helps citizens to predict how their fellow citizens will behave. Third, a shared public culture generates a sense that we belong together. There are, of course, many communities that can reasonably be interpreted as having a shared public culture, even though they are characterized by low levels of trust. This observation leads me to suggest two features that a shared public culture must have in order to facilitate the emergence of trust relations: citizens must be willing to cooperate and they must be willing to submit to common institutions that will be responsible for coordinating this large-scale cooperation. If these conditions are fulfilled, a shared public culture will serve as a reliable source of trust relations. (shrink)

This paper provides a new rationale for equating brain death with the death of the human organism, in light of well-known criticisms made by Alan D Shewmon, Franklin Miller and Robert Truog and a number of other writers. We claim that these criticisms can be answered, but only if we accept that we have slightly redefined the concept of death when equating brain death with death simpliciter. Accordingly, much of the paper defends the legitimacy of redefining death against objections, before (...) turning to the specific task of defending a new rationale for equating brain death with death as slightly redefined. (shrink)

The evaluation of competency in the field of psychology has gained international attention in recent years. Focusing on international competencies can promote high standards of care and identify common values of the profession. However, there is little research regarding international perceptions of competency. Examining ethics codes from different countries can highlight international standards of competent practice, as ethics codes outline professional expectations of the field. The current study compared the ethics standards found in 47 codes of ethics representing 51 countries. (...) Seventeen competency standards emerged after ethics codes were analyzed. Implications for the international practice of psychology are discussed. (shrink)