Background: Pre-licensure ethics nursing education does not adequately prepare and instill confidence in nurses to address ethical issues, and yet ethics education provides nurses with greater confidence to take moral action, which can mitigate the negative effects of moral distress. Objectives: To assess the feasibility and acceptability of a nursing ethics education program that included simulated case-based ethics competencies as a form of evaluation. The program aimed at building nurses’ ethical knowledge and confidence to respond to ethical challenges in practice. (...) Research design: A prospective, longitudinal, correlational, single-cohort feasibility study using an investigator-developed survey and intervention field data. Participants and research context: Registered nurses were recruited from an academic quaternary-care medical center and 9 small- to mid-sized regional hospitals within one health system in the Midwest United States. Ethical considerations: IRB approval was obtained. Participants could complete the educational program regardless of research process participation. Findings: Of 20 participants, 19 (95%) provided post-program surveys and 18 completed competencies. Median (IQR) scores with quartiles for scheduling, timing, and length of sessions were all 10.0 [9.0, 10.0], and participants perceived that the content was interesting, increased knowledge and confidence in ethics, increased skills in providing ethical care, and would recommend the program to colleagues. Of factors, an increase in ethics knowledge had the highest “always agree” (17, 89.5%) response. Most participants reported that ethics competencies were appropriate 9.0 [9.0, 10.0] and sufficiently challenging 10.0 [9.0, 10.0]. Discussion: The education program developed nurses’ ethics knowledge and confidence. The single-cohort feasibility design provided early-stage intervention outcomes; however, a larger randomized controlled trial would substantiate program value. Conclusion: This novel ethics education program was highly feasible and acceptable to hospital-based nurses who reported increased knowledge and confidence in providing ethical care. Simulated case-based ethics competencies were an appropriate evaluation method. (shrink)

Feminist critiques of intention challenge some aspects of traditional just war reasoning, including the criteria of right intention and discrimination. I take note of these challenges and propose some directions just war reasoners might take in response. First, right intention can be evaluated more accurately by judging what actors in war actually do than by attempting to uncover inward dispositions. Assessing whether agents in war have taken due care to minimize foreseeable collateral damage, avoided intentional targeting of noncombatants, corrected previous (...) mistakes in their later actions, and taken responsibility to repair unintended damage they cause are examples of ways in which just war reasoners can evaluate intention by looking at actions. (shrink)

Drawing on resources from pragmatist thought allows religious ethicists to take account of the central role traditions play in the formation and development of moral concepts without thereby espousing moral relativism or becoming traditionalists. After giving an account of this understanding of the concept of tradition, I examine the ways in which understandings of tradition play out in two contemporary examples of tradition-based ethics: works in comparative ethics of war by James Turner Johnson and John Kelsay. I argue that a (...) pragmatist approach to tradition-based ethics allows for a nuanced and flexible understanding of moral traditions, and one that holds great promise for international consensus-building around shared ethical norms for the use of armed force. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Chinese Just War Ethics: Origin, Development, and Dissent ed. by Ping-Cheung Lo, Sumner B. TwissRosemary B. KellisonChinese Just War Ethics: Origin, Development, and Dissent Edited by Ping-Cheung Lo and Sumner B. Twiss London: Routledge, 2015. 320pp. $160.00As Ping-Cheung Lo notes, Western stereotypes of Chinese culture and particularly of Confucian ethics have led many to describe ancient China as a place of peace and cooperation—a picture that is contrary (...) to historical evidence (249). This new volume, edited by Lo and Sumner Twiss, offers an important corrective to that image. The contributing authors describe the moral attitudes toward war and peace taken by Chinese thinkers in several schools during the Warring States Period of 475–221 BCE (along with one later figure, the sixteenth-century neo-Confucian Wang Yangming). In particular, they focus on five traditions: military strategy, Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, and legalism. The authors collectively demonstrate that ancient Chinese thought was marked by an intense interest in both peace and war, and that these topics were approached from moral as well as strategic and prudential perspectives. Moreover, in their historical contextualization of these materials, the authors emphasize the significance of the reality of war in shaping the arguments discussed. This attention to interpretation and real-life applications of these arguments, in both the ancient world and the contemporary activities of the People’s Liberation Army, is a particular strength of the book.This volume will be of special interest to comparative religious ethicists as well as to those interested in just war reasoning. As the inclusion of the phrase “just war” in the book’s title suggests, the identification of parallels to Western just war thinking in ancient Chinese thought is a major emphasis. Lo argues that although the Seven Military Classics are often read simply as strategy manuals, their discussions of strategy are complemented by concepts similar to the just war criteria of just cause, last resort, and discrimination. Twiss and Jonathan Chan suggest that the Confucian “true king” who is to oversee war [End Page 226] virtuously and with the goal of maintaining an ordered, humane society represents a requirement similar to the just war criterion of right authority; importantly, however, “right” in the Confucian tradition comes from the ruler’s virtue rather than his sovereignty. Hui-chieh Loy’s study of the Mohist tradition identifies concepts similar to six different jus ad bellum criteria while also revealing a lack of jus in bello criteria. Finally, Lo argues for the similarities between ancient legalism and contemporary Western realism as an alternative to just war thinking.Future scholarly development in this area should include a more robust articulation of the purpose of taking this comparative approach. Some reasons are implied in the book. For instance, Twiss and Chan argue for the overlap of Confucian punitive expeditions with the contemporary model of responsibility to protect, suggesting the possibility of international consensus on that norm. On the other hand, comparative work always runs the risk of distorting or overlooking material as a result of the desire to identify similarities or differences to a particular framework. Aaron Stalnaker, for example, points out that while Confucian thinker Xunzi may have embraced some concepts similar to those of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, he did not structure his own writing in those terms (135). Similarly, Ellen Zhang argues that the Daodejing differs from just war texts in that it approaches the question of war from the perspective of a particular conception of peace as an absence of coercion; the text thus takes the avoidance of war as its moral ideal. She also suggests that Confucian punitive expeditions may be better understood as domestic criminal discipline than as acts of war or humanitarian intervention (220). The chapters of this book thus provide a helpful and illustrative starting point for the kind of theoretical conversation about comparison mentioned here.Rosemary B. KellisonUniversity of West GeorgiaCopyright © 2016 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

How kids play in virtual worlds, how it matters for their offline lives, and what this means for designing educational opportunities.

While the need to protect vulnerable research participants is universal, conceptual challenges with the notion of vulnerability may result in the under or over-protection of participants. Ethics review bodies making assumptions about who is vulnerable and in what circumstance can be viewed as paternalistic if they do not consider participant viewpoints. Our study focuses on participant vulnerability in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research. We aim to illuminate students’ views on participant vulnerability to contribute to critical analysis of the (...) role and processes of ethics review. Additionally, we aim to highlight the importance of seeking the views of participant communities, especially in research environments beyond ethics review’s medical origins. Thirty-four students from a health-related faculty at a university in Aotearoa New Zealand, participated in five focus groups. Participants discussed factors affecting their potential participation in research drawing upon a series of vignettes based on examples of published SoTL projects. Themes, generated using reflexive thematic analysis, built a participant-informed picture of vulnerability. Findings indicate that students do not generally consider themselves vulnerable and instead consider participation in SoTL research through an agentic lens. Students expect that participation will be voluntary, not negatively impact their grades, and not single them out so that others could judge them. Our study also highlights the value students place on relationships with one another and teaching staff and the implications these have for SoTL research participation and future professional practice. This research challenges research ethics committees to think further about vulnerability in the context of SoTL whilst highlighting the importance of providing opportunities for research participants more broadly to explore and vocalize their views as members of participant communities. (shrink)

The expansion of ethics review, beyond its origins in medical research, is the subject of growing critical analysis internationally, especially from social science researchers. Our study builds on this analysis by considering ethics review specifically within tertiary-based educational research. As a foundation for a larger study, we explore the reporting of ethics review within articles from a snapshot of education journals. A cross-sectional review considered 125 articles from 24 journals spanning medical and nurse education, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, (...) and educational technology. Among similar types of research our findings highlight variation in institutional ethical review processes and outcomes. Despite most journals providing guidelines for reporting ethics review, adherence to these guidelines by authors or editors was not always evident, but more likely in health-related education journals. We argue that identified areas of variation may reflect the differing influence and proximity of biomedical values. This influence has been under examined in tertiary-based educational research but may contribute to inequitable learning, researching and publishing experiences, potentially adding to negative sentiment about ethics review. (shrink)

Innovative forms of green urban architecture aim to combine food, production, and design to produce food on a larger scale in and on buildings in urban areas. It includes rooftop gardens, rooftop greenhouses, indoor farms, and other building-related forms. This study uses the framework of sustainability to understand the role of ZFarming in future urban food production and to review the major benefits and limitations. The results are based on an analysis of 96 documents published in accessible international resources. The (...) analysis shows that ZFarming has multiple functions and produces a range of non-food and non-market goods that may have positive impacts on the urban setting. It promises environmental benefits resulting from the saving and recycling of resources and reduced food miles. Social advantages include improving community food security, the provision of educational facilities, linking consumers to food production, and serving as a design inspiration. In economic terms it provides potential public benefits and commodity outputs. However, managing ZFarming faces several challenges. For some applications, the required technologies are known but have not been used or combined in that way before; others will need entirely new materials or cultivation techniques. Further critical aspects are the problem of high investment costs, exclusionary effects, and a lack of acceptance. In conclusion, ZFarming is seen as an outside-the-box solution which has some potential in generating win–win scenarios in cities. Nevertheless, ZFarming practices are not in and of themselves sustainable and need to be managed properly. (shrink)

Over the past decade, representations of pregnant embodiment, foetal imagery and the maternal body have become the subject of intense feminist investigation across fields as diverse as philosophy, science and cultural studies. This body of work represents a sustained intervention in the politics of reproduction and the politics of representation that builds on earlier feminist discourses on motherhood. Within this article, I want to address the limits of, and ruptures in, the representation of the maternal body in relation to particular (...) examples of visual art practice. The article focuses on four pregnant figurations that seem to constitute certain limit points in the representation of maternal embodiment: the `phantom' pregnant body; the elderly prima gravida; the pregnant woman with disabilities; and young women undergoing abortion. My argument is that, in these particular visual texts, `being pregnant' is represented as an unnatural rather than a natural state and as a cultural rupturing of feminine and maternal norms. This seems to offer a useful starting point from which to interrogate the relations between prevailing discourses around the maternal subject and the unstable subject of pregnancy. (shrink)

The papers in the following section arose from a roundtable discussion organised by the AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, titled ‘Law, Gender and Sexuality: The Making of a Field’. Participants in the roundtable were asked to reflect on the challenges confronting law, gender and sexuality (LGS) as an area of research and scholarship, and to ask what benefits, possibilities, risks and dangers accompany the establishment of a research terrain. The papers address such questions as ‘what is (...) a field and how is it made?’; ‘has LGS attained the status of a field?’; ‘what does it mean to locate oneself within the field of LGS?’; and ‘what is the relationship between feminism and LGS?’. They also consider possible future directions for the field of LGS. Together, the papers provide a variety of differing, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives on the developing body of intellectual and political activity that might be labelled ‘law, gender and sexuality’. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to determine the development of moral judgement in first-year and senior baccalaureate nursing students. These students were enrolled in three separate nursing programmes, each of which differed significantly in ethical content. The sample totalled 180 students enrolled in three New England programmes. Programme A included an ethics course taught by a professor of ethics. Programme B integrated ethical issues into all nursing theory courses. Programme C did not include ethical content in theory courses. The (...) design was of a developmental cross-sectional study. The dependent variable was the development of moral judgement, as measured by Rest’s Defining Issues Test. The independent variable was the amount of ethics taught in the nursing programmes and the level of academic education. The senior nursing students from programme A scored significantly higher than the other senior groups on the Defining Issues Test. The conclusion is that an ethics course with group participation and a decision-making element significantly facilitated nursing students’ development of moral judgement. (shrink)

The outcomes of psychoanalysis, as with other psychotherapies, vary considerably. _Psychoanalytic Treatment in Adults _examines the results of a longitudinal study of change during psychoanalysis, illuminating the characteristics of patients, analysts and analyses which can help to predict outcomes of treatment. Written by experienced psychologists and psychoanalysts, chapters in the book draw upon sixty case studies to consider how patients with very different analytic outcomes respond at both the beginning and end of their analysis. Psychoanalysts used a clinician report measure, (...) the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure, to describe a patient at the beginning of psychoanalysis and every six months until the analysis ended. This allowed the authors to learn about changes over analysis and, in turn, improved treatment planning and practice for the well-being of other patients. Chapters explore five outcomes: a negative therapeutic reaction; attrition when the patient drops out; attrition due to external events; mutual agreement between patient and analyst without maximum benefits; and mutual agreement between patient and analyst with maximum benefits. The findings from these chapters will be of interest to researchers and academics in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychodynamic therapy, psychoanalytic education, psychiatry and psychology. The results should also help clinicians recognize potential problems early in analytic treatments so that they can work more effectively with patients. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:SENECA FALLS INHERITANCE: DISENTANGLING WOMEN, LEGISLATION AND VIOLENCE IN MONFREDO'S HISTORICAL CRIME FICTION Rosemary Erickson Johnsen National Coalition ofIndependent Scholars That men were not prevented by courts or clergy from mistreating their wives meant that, to society's institutions, women had no value. A man could be jailed, even hanged, for stealing another man's horse, but not even reproached for beating his wife. (Miriam Grace Monfredo, Through a Gold (...) Eagle) Miriam Grace Monfredo's feminist genre fiction, her "historymystery " series featuring nineteenth-century librarian Glynis Tryon, offers an opportunity to find a way ofreading literary texts that is not only feminist, but also Girardian. Girard's work provides two clear ways to construct feminist readings directly, without the mediation of overtly feminist theory. First ofthese is Girard's respect for the "quasi-theoretical" potential of literary texts, especially some of those which attend to apparently trivial matters. In Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Girard argues that (male) novelists offer insights unavailable elsewhere, including those scientific fields that claim to know more than everyone else. In its valuing of questions about snobbism, for example, Deceit, Desire and the Novel offers a woman-friendly model. The (male) novelist's question about snobbism is "too frivolous" for (men of) science, but Girard argues that "in his probe of snobbism the novelist is asking himself in his own way just what Rosemary Erickson Johnsen59 might be the hidden springs that make the social mechanism tick" (220). While I regret the fact that Girard's examples and language often ignore women, I believe his conviction that attention to matters socially coded as superficial and frivolous can produce great insight is one feminist critics can appreciate. The second Girardian tool feminists can rely upon is the method of reading texts of persecution described in The Scapegoat. Girard suggests how we might read texts ofpersecution written by naive persecutors in ways that identify with the persecuted and gather the information unintentionally supplied by the authors: "I call those persecutors naive who are still convinced that they are right and who are not so mistrustful as to cover up or censor the fundamental characteristics of their persecution. Such characteristics are either clearly apparent in the text and are directly revealing or they remain hidden and reveal indirectly" (8). Monfredo's crime novels, set in the mid-nineteenth century and focusing on such disenfranchised groups of citizens as women, slaves, Native Americans, and free African-Americans, depend for their verisimilitude on her ability to read historical sources and literary predecessors in just such a way. Accuracy requires that Monfredo's works be categorized as feminist historical crime novels, however awkward such a lengthy description may be. Her novels observe the principles not only of both genres—historical fiction and detective fiction—but also the political position offeminism, and they meet these multiple demands with considerable skill. Furthermore, resolution in crime fiction depends upon the law; working within that tradition, Monfredo is called upon to seek solutions within the system, to look for justice as the result ofa proper functioning ofthe legal and social systems. Information gathered, whether by the official representatives ofthe law or by amateurs, is turned over to the authorities. While her novels clearly respect that tradition, they also point out some limits to the judicial system's ability to contain violence. Girard's model ofits functioning, as described in Violence and the Sacred, depends upon an equality that whole segments of the society Monfredo is depicting do not in fact enjoy: "The judicial authority is beholden to no one. It is thus at the disposal ofeveryone" (23). Ifwomen cannot own property, enter into contracts or sit on juries, in what sense is the law at their disposal? Monfredo's exploration ofthis question takes its place alongside Girard's explanation of the legal system's proper functioning; ifhis theory reveals how it works when all are enfranchised, her fiction suggests some ofthe consequences that result from the existence of disenfranchised subjects. 60'Seneca Falls Inheritance' Our Seneca Falls Inheritance In her first book, Seneca Falls Inheritance (1992), Monfredo offers a theory for the reduction of violence against women: provide women with complete legal equality. The... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:66. ' HUME ON SPACE AND GEOMETRY * : A REJOINDER TO FLEW ' S 'ONE RESERVATION '.? Flew' s reservation about my assertion that the Enquiry contains no significant revision of the Treatise conception of geometry as a body of necessary and synthetic knowledge, appears to involve two charges. Firstly, he alleges that I dismiss but offer no substantial argument against his own view that the Enquiry restores (...) pure geometry "to its place alongside the other two elements of the trinity ". Secondly, he thinks that I have committed a serious sin of omission in failing to take into consideration a certain passage in the Enquiry (page 31, section 27) which, in his opinion, constitutes "a quite decisive reason" for supposing that Hume abandoned the Treatise position, in that it contains an account of applied mathematics, a subject on which the Treatise is silent. To the charge of omission I plead guilty, and I shall presently seek to remedy this defect and to state why I do not share Flew' s view of the significance of the said passage. To the former charge I am not so ready to plead guilty, and I shall counter-charge that Flew has failed not only to do justice to my proposed reading of Enquiry page 25, section 20, but also to provide clear and convincing support for his own. One difficulty encountered in answering Flew lies in understanding whether or not his claim about the status of geometry as a pure science in the Enquiry is put forward independently of his interpretation of E31. As originally presented in Hume's Philosophy of Belief this appears to be the case, and if so, on what evidence does it rest? 2 In his book, Flew' s statement about Hume replacing pure geometry alongside arithmetic and algebra follows directly upon a paragraph in which he comments that Hume's references to geometrical propositions at E25 signify "an important advance from the position of the Treatise". For whereas the status of perfect precision and certainty was 67. there withheld from geometry (T71), Hume now speaks of the certainty and evidence of the propositions of Euclidean geometry, and declares such propositions to be discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe. (E25) Now, I argued at some length in my paper (pp. 21-24) that Hume is prepared to grant scientific status to geometry in the Enquiry because he has come to regard its certainty as that proper to a mathematics of space. He has abandoned the Treatise contrast between an ideal or theoretical standard of equality, viewed therein as necessary to geometry considered as a science proper, and the merely sensible standard of equality upon which geometry as practised depends. It should not be forgotten that Hume recognises two kinds of certainty where "Relations of Ideas" are concerned, intuitive and demonstrative. Since he fails to provide any detail of the place of each of these in mathematics, the door is left open for speculation along the lines followed in pp. 28-29 of my paper. For there is nothing in?25 which implies that the certainty of all geometrical propositions is of the same kind, or that the process of geometrical demonstration is of the same logical nature as demonstrative reasoning in arithmetic and algebra. In his comment on my position Flew makes no reference to my proposed reason why Hume classes geometry as a science in the Enquiry.· Yet, even if this reclassification does mark an advance of a kind, the fact remains that E25 does not furnish incontrovertible evidence for that advance which Flew thinks he finds there. Nor, therefore, is it conclusive against my assertion that Hume in both works regards the propositions of geometry as necessary and synthetic truths. Given that Flew does not wish to deny the inclusion of a synthetic element even in the Enquiry account of mathematics (see H. P. B. pp. 64-66), I find it difficult to see why he supposes that the logical status of the propositions of geometry is different in the Enquiry from that in the Treatise, since in the latter too they are held 68. to be truths which depend... (shrink)

William Watson, a Fellow of the British Academy, was a scholar whose contribution to the field of Asian art and archaeology was both multifaceted and far-reaching. He earned a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge to read Modern and Medieval Languages, and it was at Cambridge that he met a fellow-student Katherine Armfield, whom he married in 1940. After World War II, Watson took up his first post in the arts in 1947, joining the (...) staff of the British and Medieval Department of the British Museum. In 1966, he left the British Museum and moved to the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art to become its Director and take up the professorship of Chinese Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Watson travelled widely and often, and he became fascinated with the arts and language of Japan. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Using solidarity as a touchstone, this integrated and cohesive volume illuminates the dynamic voices of a diverse group of contemporary feminist scholars from a wide range of religious traditions to demonstrate the evolution, value, and necessity of feminist contributions to the field of religious ethics.

In the history of Brazilian education, it is only since the 1980s, during the redemocratization of Brazil, that proposals for public education in a socialist perspective have been presented. The past two decades have been marked by a growing interest in Gramscian thought, mainly in the educational field, making possible the elaboration of proposals for public school organization in Brazil. However, intellectuals and pedagogues in Brazil have confused the Gramscian ‘unitary school’ with what is known in Brazil as the (...) ‘polytechnical school’, a vague idea of education which is attributed to Marx and taken up by Lenin in the course of the Soviet Revolution. The two conceptions of education differ because of the varying historical contexts in which Marx, Lenin and Gramsci lived and developed their thinking on the roles of State and school. These fundamental differences have been overlooked during the diffusion of Gramscian thought in Brazil, causing confusion in the understanding of the ‘unitary school’ and the ‘polytechnical school’. (shrink)

This book presents a collection of contemporary discourses that reconsider the relationship of democracy as a political ideology and American ideal and education as the foundation of preparing democratic citizens in America.

We study structures on the fields of characteristic zero obtained by introducing operations of raising to power. Using Hrushovski–Fraisse construction we single out among the structures exponentially-algebraically closed once and prove, under certain Diophantine conjecture, that the first order theory of such structures is model complete and every its completion is superstable.

What has come to be called critical disability studies is an emergent field of academic research, teaching, theory building, public scholarship, and something I'll call "educational advocacy." The critical part of critical disability studies suggests its alignment with areas of intellectual inquiry, sometimes awkwardly called identity studies, rooted in the political and social transformations of the mid-20th century brought forward by the broad civil and human rights movement. These movements pressed both the law and the social order toward an (...) expansion of rights for people previously marginalized or excluded from full participation in exercising the obligations and benefits of equal citizenship. The ideas of... (shrink)

Paul Thompson’s excellent book, From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone, argues that contemporary food ethics persistently ignores the nature and actual impact of GMOs, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, food aid to developing countries, and more. On Thompson’s view, such philosophical analyses must incorporate empirical knowledge. Additional strengths of Thompson’s book: its attention to quality-of-life issues, its openness to the concerns of the marginalized, and its emphasis on the interconnectedness of problems in food ethics. I raise one area (...) of disagreement with Thompson: his treatment of GMOs is, I argue, insufficiently skeptical. I suggest a three-fold revision of the book’s treatment of the precautionary principle, and I levy an additional argument against GMOs, the Inductive Argument. Using the herbicide Roundup as a case study of the ways in which industry urges the use of technologies that have not been fully vetted or monitored, I argue that products originally seen as safe often turn out instead to be harmful to the environment and health. Significant inductive experience with similar cases gives people additional reason to be even more suspicious of GMOs than Thompson suggests. (shrink)

In 2014, the editorial board of BMC Medical Ethics came together to devise sections for the journal that would give structure to the journal help ensure that authors’ research is matched to the most appropriate editors and help readers to find the research most relevant to them. The editorial board decided to take a practical approach to devising sections that dealt with the challenges of content management. After that, we started thinking more theoretically about how one could go about classifying (...) the field of medical ethics. This editorial elaborates and reflects on the practical approach that we took at the journal, then considers an alternative theoretically derived approach, and reflects on the possibilities, challenges and value of classifying the field more broadly. (shrink)

Context: Due to its grounding in a simplistic core model, mainstream theoretical work in economics is heavily conditioned by a realist epistemic framework that may be viewed as the “paradogma” – sensu Mitterer – of economics. Problem: The contribution delineates theoretical developments on the basis of a realist epistemology and their problem-laden consequences for the economic sciences. The subsequent critical discussion seeks to clarify whether economic theory formation is a suitable field for the application of Mitterer’s non-dualist ideas. Method: (...) In the context of a review of their historical background, the paper will explore the possibilities and limits of an application of Mitterer’s non-dualist argumentation to the economic sciences, and present a diagnosis of compatibility and a characterisation of necessary steps towards amplification. Results: It can be shown that the economic sciences would gain in expert knowledge and applicability by adopting the alternative of non-dualism, whose potential has been little appreciated so far. The solution to the meta-scientific problems caused by the pre-structuring of economics in terms of a realist epistemology seems at hand. To take up this new meta-scientific perspective, however, theoretical progress in both non-dualism and economics is required, particularly by paying more serious attention to the theoretical component of communication. Implications: Non-dualism can certainly be utilised by the economic sciences to induce radical innovations and conceptional revisions involving higher meta-scientific consistency. In future, pragmatic gaps will increasingly have to be filled conceptually in order to develop more highly-reflected economic theory formation and corresponding scientific practice. Hence the main idea is that economic actions are inevitably, but not exclusively, based on communication. Constructivist content: Theoretical approaches embracing epistemic relativism in the economic sciences will be properly assessed and developed further along the lines of a non-dualist conceptual revision on the basis of an ontology-free understanding of reality. (shrink)

This article revisits the question of ectogenesis (out-of-body gestation) as our neonatal care and biogenetic technologies bring us closer to the possibility. In 1923, J.B.S. Haldane wrote approvingly of ectogenesis as a eugenic technique, using a science fiction format. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminists debated whether ectogenesis, if possible, would be liberating or oppressive for women. Given current legal and bioethical issues, we must now take seriously the possible costs of ectogenesis: the possibility of growing bodies for use as (...) spare parts, the erosion of the autonomy of women in the reproductive process, the denigration of the body through the loss of the physicality of pregnancy and childbirth. (Abstract prepared by Aaron Lee.). (shrink)

Celebrity studies is an expansive and expanding field in European and American scholarship. Unfortunately, Africanist scholars have paid limited attention to this significant branch of scholarship. Drawing from varied secondary sources, including audio-visual materials, newspaper articles and journals, and books in the fields of celebrities and development, I examine Nigerian celebrity philanthropy in the age of internet technology. I argue that Nigerian celebrity philanthropy, given its mediatised nature and impact on its recipient, is a palliative measure to systemic and (...) structural crises of poverty. I show that this individualistic effort only gives temporary respite for some of its recipients while others are left even worse off after their encounters with celebrities helping. My research sits at the crossroads of multiple fields in the humanities and the social sciences and offers a new direction for celebrity studies in the global South. Future research may examine individual Nigerian celebrity philanthropy while centring on gender, class, education, ethnicity, religion, and location in celebrity humanitarians in the global South, particularly in Nigeria. (shrink)

The dynamical behaviour of a very general model of neural networks with random asymmetric synaptic weights is investigated in the presence of random thresholds. Using mean-field equations, the bifurcations of the fixed points and the change of regime when varying control parameters are established. Different areas with various regimes are defined in the parameter space. Chaos arises generically by a quasi-periodicity route.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rita Gross as Pioneer in the Study of Women and ReligionRosemary Radford RuetherRita Gross has been a pioneer in shaping both the theory and practice of women and religion and in Feminist theology. Her pathbreaking work in these fields has received insufficient recognition among both feminists and scholars of religion. This session at the 2010 AAR meeting devoted to her work is a small rectification of this neglect. Rita (...) has written more than 150 articles and written or edited around ten books. Three of these volumes—Beyond Androcentrism (1977), Feminism and Religion (1996), and A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religion Explorations (2009)—span her writing career and exemplify her contributions to the field of women and religion.As Rita Gross makes clear, she went to the University of Chicago in the 1960s to explore the field of comparative religion, not to study women in religion explicitly. She was forced into this focus on women and has continued to return to this concern because of the resistance of the scholars in this field to paying attention to the ways in which half of humanity—women—participates in religion. Her concerns with women's roles in religion were shaped in response to the attitude of her mentors at the University of Chicago who insisted that what women did in religion was unimportant and was, in any case, covered by studying what men did in religion. One of these mentors ridiculed her by asking if she did not realize that the masculine is generic for humanness as a whole and so "includes the feminine." At most one might mention men's view of women. What women themselves think and do is irrelevant. At that time there were very few women in doctoral studies in religion at Chicago, and their teachers made clear that any concern with women as subjects of religion was a sure way to terminate their careers in the field.It was in responding to these kinds of messages from her teachers that Rita began to craft, in the late 1960s and 1970s, a fundamental shift in the methodology of religious studies. This would shape her decision to write her doctoral thesis on women in Australian Aboriginal religion, to edit a group of essays in her 1977 volume, Beyond Androcentrism, as well as doing pioneering work with Nancy Falk in the volume Unspoken Worlds, where they demonstrated the transformative understanding of religions that opens up when scholars focused on women's roles.This methodological shift, which Rita Gross has returned to again and again [End Page 75] through her writings, she called the movement from androcentrism to androgyny. Androcentrism as a bias in religious studies, or any other field, means quite simply the assumption that the male (usually the elite male) is the normative human being. To understand the "essence" of the human in any field it is sufficient to study what this elite male thinks and does. For Rita this is not only an injustice to women, but it also means turning a blind eye to at least half of what is actually going on in this or any other field. In other words, what is wrong about androcentrism as a way of doing study in religion is that it gives one a partial and distorted picture of reality. It is bad empiricism.The shift to androgyny means really looking equally at what women are doing as subjects of religion, not simply adding information about what men think of women. It is not that this information is totally absent or impossible to get. Often it is right there in the primary data, but is ignored by the scholars because of their androcentric bias. Bringing in women's activities and viewpoints as equal does not merely add a missing corner to the picture; it means transforming the whole picture. What men are thinking and doing is relativized and put in a larger context. For example, in understanding Australian Aboriginal religion one discovers not only that are women excluded from men's key rituals, but also that men are excluded from women's key rituals. The whole religion shifts from being understood as male dominant to being... (shrink)

The tutelage of our mentors as scientists included the analogy that writing a good scientific paper was an exercise in storytelling that omitted unessential details that did not move the story forward or that detracted from the overall message. However, the advice to not get lost in the details had an important flaw. In science, it is the many details of the data themselves and the methods used to generate and analyze them that give conclusions their probative meaning. Facts may (...) sometimes slow or distract from the clarity, tidiness, intrigue, or flow of the narrative, but nevertheless they are important for the assessment of what was done, the trustworthiness of the science, and the meaning of the findings. Nevertheless, many critical elements and facts about research studies may be omitted from the narrative and become hidden from scholarly scrutiny. We describe a “baker’s dozen” shortfalls in which such elements that are pertinent to evaluating the validity of scientific studies are sometimes hidden in reports of the work. Such shortfalls may be intentional or unintentional or lie somewhere in between. Additionally, shortfalls may occur at the level of the individual or an institution or of the entire system itself. We conclude by proposing countermeasures to these shortfalls. (shrink)