According to radical moral particularists such as Jonathan Dancy, there are no substantive moral principles. And yet, few particularists wish to deny that something very like moral principles do indeed play a significant role in our everyday moral practice. Loathe at dismissing this as mere error on the part of everyday moral agents, particularists have proposed a number of alternative accounts of the practice. The aim of all of these accounts is to make sense of our appeal to general moral (...) truths in both reaching and justifying our particular moral judgments without thereby violating the particularists' stricture against substantive moral principles. In this paper, I argue that the most prominent non-substantive accounts of moral generalities appealed to by radical particularists – the heuristic account and default reasons accounts – fail in this aim. (shrink)

Tough Choices for Teachers examines ethical issues in today’s educational settings using a case study approach. Fourteen descriptive case studies offer readers the opportunity to reflect upon current ethical dilemmas, and pertinent questions provide prompts to improve their decision-making process.

In Tough Choices for Teachers: Ethical Challenges in Today's Schools and Classrooms, Infantino and Wilke help student teachers, new teachers, and experienced teachers think more deeply about ethical concerns. The case studies included by the authors involve ethical dilemmas dealing with honesty, integrity, and proper professional behavior.

Background: The concept of moral distress has been the subject of nursing research for the past 30 years. Recently, there has been a call to move from developing an understanding of the concept to developing interventions to help ameliorate the experience. At the same time, the use of the term moral distress has been critiqued for a lack of clarity about the concepts that underpin the experience. Discussion: Some researchers suggest that a closer examination of how socio-political structures influence healthcare (...) delivery will move moral distress from being seen as located in the individual to an experience that is also located in broader healthcare structures. Informed by new thinking in relational ethics, we draw on research findings from neuroscience and attachment literature to examine the reciprocal relationship between structures and agents and frame the experience of moral distress. Conclusion: We posit moral distress as a form of relational trauma and subsequently point to the need to better understand how nurses as moral agents are influenced by—and influence—the complex socio-political structures they inhabit. In so doing, we identify this reciprocity as a framework for interventions. (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

Symbolic representation acquisition is the complex cognitive process consisting of learning to use a symbol to stand for something else. A variety of non-human animals can engage in symbolic representation learning. One particularly complex form of symbol representation is the associations between orthographic symbols and speech sounds, known as grapheme–phoneme correspondence. To date, there has been little evidence that animals can learn this form of symbolic representation. Here, we evaluated whether an Umbrella cockatoo (Cacatua alba) can learn letter-speech correspondence using (...) English words. The bird-participant was trained with phonics instruction and then tested on pairs of index cards while the experimenter spoke the word. The words were unknown to the bird and the experimenter was blinded to the correct card position. The cockatoo’s accuracy (M = 71%) was statistically significant. Further, we found a strong correlation between the bird’s word-identification success and the number of overlapping letters between words, where the more overlapping letters between words, the more likely the cockatoo answered incorrectly. Our results strongly suggest that parrots may have the ability to learn grapheme–phoneme correspondences. (shrink)

Decisions about how and where they deliver their baby are extremely important to pregnant women. There are very strong ethical norms that women’s autonomy should be respected, and that plans around birth should be personalised. However, there appear to be profound challenges in practice to respecting women’s choices in pregnancy and labour. Choices carry risks and consequences—to the woman and her child; also potentially to her caregivers and to other women.What does it mean for women’s autonomy to be respected in (...) obstetrics? How should health professionals respond to refusals of treatment or requests for care outside normal guidelines? What are the ethical limits to autonomy? In this clinical ethics round table, service users, midwives, obstetricians, philosophers and ethicists respond to two hypothetical cases drawn from real-life scenarios. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

Lynne Rudder Baker, Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, xii + 177 pp. Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987, xi + 388 pp. Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness Cambridge: MIT Press, revised edition, 1988, xii + 184 pp.

Unrealistic optimism is a bias that leads people to believe, with respect to a specific event or hazard, that they are more likely to experience positive outcomes and/or less likely to experience negative outcomes than similar others. The phenomenon has been seen in a range of health-related contexts—including when prospective participants are presented with the risks and benefits of participating in a clinical trial. In order to test for the prevalence of unrealistic optimism among participants of early-phase oncology trials, we (...) conducted a survey with patients over 18 years of age who were enrolled in a phase I, phase I/II, or phase II clinical cancer trial in the New York City area between August 2008 and October 2009. Participants in our study were asked to compare their own chances of experiencing a range of risks and benefits related to the trial they were enrolled in with the chances of the other trial participants. We found a significant optimistic bias in their responses. Respondents tended to overestimate the benefits of the trial they were enrolled in and underestimate its risks. In addition, we found no significant relationship between respondents’ understanding of the trial’s purpose and how susceptible they were to unrealistic optimism. Our findings suggest that improving the consent process for oncology studies requires more than addressing deficits in understanding. (shrink)

One thing wrong with lying is that it can be manipulative. Understanding why lying can be a form of manipulation involves understanding how our telling someone something can give them a reason to believe it, and understanding this requires seeing both how our telling things can invite trust and how trust can be a reason to believe someone. This paper aims to outline the mechanism by means of which lies can be manipulative and through doing so identify a unique reason (...) for accepting testimony; a reason based on trusting a speaker’s telling. (shrink)

The child directed speech of twelve English‐speaking motherswas analyzed in terms of utterance‐level constructions. First, the mothers' utterances were categorized in terms of general constructional categories such as Wh‐questions, copulas and transitives. Second, mothers' utterances within these categories were further specified in terms of the initial words that framed the utterance, item‐based phrases such as Are you …, I'll …, It's …, Let's …, What did … The findings were: (i) overall, only about 15% of all maternal utterances had SVO (...) form (most were questions, imperatives, copulas, and fragments); (ii) 51% of all maternal utterances began with one of 52 item‐based phrases, mostly consisting of two words or morphemes (45% began with one of just 17 words); and (iii) children used many of these same item‐based phrases, in some cases at a rate that correlated highly with their own mother's frequency of use. We suggest that analyses of adult–child linguistic interaction should take into account not just general constructional categories, but also the item‐based constructions that adults and children use and the frequency with which they use them. (shrink)

Across mammals, when fathers matter, as they did for hunter-gatherers, sex-similar pair-bonding mechanisms evolve. Attachment fertility theory can explain Schmitt's and other findings as resulting from a system of mechanisms affording pair-bonding in which promiscuous seeking is part. Departures from hunter-gatherer environments (e.g., early menarche, delayed marriage) can alter dating trajectories, thereby impacting mating outside of pair-bonds.

Most countries compile evidence from witnesses and victims manually, whereby the interviewer assimilates what the interviewee says during the course of an interview to produce an evidential statement. This exploratory research examined the quality of evidential statements generated in real world investigations. Transcribed witness/victim interviews were compared to the resultant written statements produced by the interviewing officer and signed as an accurate record by the interviewee. A coding protocol was devised to assess the consistency of information between what was said (...) by the interviewee in the verbal interview and what was reported in the written statement. Statements contained numerous errors including omissions, distortions, and the inclusion of information not mentioned in the verbal interview. This exploratory work highlights an important area for future research focus. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed a growing concern that terminally illpatients are needlessly suffering in the dying process. This has ledto demands that physicians become more attentive in the assessment ofsuffering and that they treat their patients as `whole persons.'' Forthe most part, these demands have not fallen on deaf ears. It is nowwidely accepted that the relief of suffering is one of the fundamentalgoals of medicine. Without question this is a positive development.However, while the importance of treating suffering has generally (...) beenacknowledged, insufficient attention has been paid to the question ofwhether different types of terminal suffering require differnt responsesfrom health care professionals. In this paper we introduce a distinctionbetween two types of suffering likely to be present at the end of life,and we argue that physicians must distinguish between these types if theyare to respond appropriately to the suffering of their terminally illpatients. After introducing this distinction and explaining its basis,we further argue that the distinction informs a (novel) principle ofproportionality, one that should guide physicians in balancing theircompeting obligations in responding to terminal suffering. As weexplain, this principle is justified by reference to the intereststerminally ill patients have in restoration, as well as in therelief of suffering, at the end of life. (shrink)

This paper examines, on the basis of a longitudinal corpus of 50 early modern authors, how change at the aggregate level of the community interacts with variation and change at the micro-level of the individual language user. In doing so, this study aims to address the methodological gap between collective change and entrenchment, that is, the gap between language as a social phenomenon and the cognitive processes responsible for the continuous reorganization of linguistic knowledge in individual speakers. Taking up the (...) case of the prepositional passive, this study documents a strong community-wide increase in use that is accompanied by increasing schematicity. A comparison of the 50 authors reveals that regularities arising at the macro-level conceal highly complex and variable individual behavior, aspects of which may be explained by studying the larger (social) context in which these individuals operate (e. g., age cohorts, community of practice, biographical insights). Further analysis, focusing on how authors use the prepositional passive in unique and similar ways, elucidates the role of small individual biases in long-term change. Overall, it is demonstrated that language change is an emergent phenomenon that results from the complex interaction between individual speakers, who themselves may change their linguistic behavior to varying degrees. (shrink)

L’article étudie les relations étroites, aux débuts de l’époque moderne, entre la représentation des femmes âgées et des sorcières, à partir du tableau de Hans Baldung, Les Trois Âges et la Mort. Il s’intéresse au cycle de vie féminin qui définit les femmes par rapport aux hommes comme vierges, mères, puis veuves. Il se penche en dernier lieu sur la peur qui entoure la sexualité des femmes âgées au début de l’époque moderne.

During its 2018–2019 term, the United States Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of executing a prisoner with dementia. In Madison v. Alabama, the Court ruled that, in certain circumstances, executing a prisoner with dementia violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Vernon Madison was sentenced to death for killing a police officer in 1985. After many years on Alabama’s death row, he had a series of strokes and was diagnosed with vascular dementia. In 2016, Madison’s lawyers unsuccessfully (...) sought a stay of execution, arguing that, in light of his cognitive impairments, imposing the death penalty would violate the Constitution. After Alabama set a 2018 execution date, lawyers returned to the state court, arguing that the finding of competence should be reversed because Madison’s cognitive impairments had worsened. When the trial court refused to grant the stay of execution, Madison’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of the state court decision. (shrink)

I turn first to a Journal of Medicine and Philosophy article Pellegrino published the year after he became chairman of the council. He was facing a new challenge in his long and stellar career. He appreciated the difficulties he would encounter in his new role, and this was an opportunity to consider what was ahead."Bioethics and Politics: ‘Doing Ethics’ in the Public Square" (2006) criticized what Pellegrino saw as a troubling turn in bioethics at that time. The article began with (...) a comparison of the ways that Machiavelli and Aristotle envisioned the relationship between ethics and politics. Machiavelli thought that mixing ethics and politics would compromise both endeavors: "Politics would lose its practical .. (shrink)

Despite some important progress over the past decade, academic philosophy remains a male-dominated discipline. This raises questions about how established philosophers can best support and advise female students and junior academics in philosophy. We need to avoid encouraging them to adopt a fatalistic attitude to their success, while also avoiding encouraging them to believe that their success lies in their own hands and that therefore it must be their own fault if they don't succeed. I argue that we can do (...) this by reflecting on what success in a misogynistic culture looks like, and by guiding young female philosophers to distinguish between the changes that it is possible for them, as individuals, to make, and those that require action by many individuals. (shrink)

Drawing out literal and metaphorical meanings of 'foreignness' this wide-ranging volume offers much to scholars of postcolonial, gender, and cultural studies seeking new approaches to the study of alterity.

In the United States there is an increasing tendency to view the only educational research worthy of federal funding as that which is designed as an experiment using randomised controls. One of the foundational assumptions underlying this research design is that the results of such research are meant to be generalisable beyond any particular research study. The purpose of this paper is to historicise the assumption of generalisability by explaining the ways in which it is a particularly modern research project. (...) By historicising generalisability, I show the ways in which the current research standards are products of culturally specific historical circumstances. In other words, generalisability is a local phenomenon and not generalisable to other times and places. (shrink)