During the mid-twentieth century, Soviet scientists developed the “natural focus” theory–practice framework to explain outbreaks of diseases endemic to wild animals and transmitted to humans. Focusing on parasitologist-physician Evgeny N. Pavlovsky and other field scientists’ work in the Soviet borderlands, this article explores how the natural focus framework’s concepts and practices were entangled in political as well as material ecologies of knowledge and practice. We argue that the very definition of endemic plague incorporated both hands-on materialist experience and ideological concepts (...) that supported Soviet colonization. Theorizing and fighting plague assisted with the goals of controlling and improving landscapes and peoples in southern Russia and Central Asia. The history of the natural focus framework illustrates how Soviet disease ecology co-developed with the needs of local and central political powers in the Soviet borderlands. (shrink)

Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship confronts a question that is central to Aristotle's political philosophy as well as to contemporary political theory: what is a citizen? Answers prove to be elusive, in part because late twentieth-century critiques of the Enlightenment called into doubt fundamental tenets that once guided us. Engaging the two major works of Aristotle's political philosophy, his Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics, Susan D. Collins poses questions that current discussions of liberal citizenship do not adequately address. (...) Drawing a path from contemporary disputes to Aristotle, she examines in detail his complex presentations of moral virtue, civic education, and law; his view of the aims and limits of the political community; and his treatment of the connection between citizenship and the human good. Collins thereby shows how Aristotle continues to be an indispensable source of enlightenment, as he has been for political and religious traditions of the past. (shrink)

Social impact investing is transforming the availability of private capital for nonprofits and social enterprises, but demand is not yet meeting supply. This paper analyzes the perceived barriers faced by nonprofits in engaging with SII, arguing the need to assess differences using a policy field framework. Four parameters of a subsector are conceptualized as shaping participation in SII: the scale of investment required, embeddedness in place, the need for radical innovation, and the configuration of intermediaries. Based on 25 interviews with (...) leaders of nonprofits and intermediaries in affordable housing and community economic development in Canada, the study finds that significant barriers are a lack of knowledge of the market, inadequate financial literacy, and the challenges of measuring and valuing social impacts. In addition, nonprofits report that, in spite of the inherent importance of social impact in this form of investing, they currently make limited use of evaluation and impact metrics, and perceive that intermediaries and investors, particularly in affordable housing, still put a greater emphasis on financial over social returns. (shrink)

We argue that a turn toward virtue ethics as a way of understanding medical professionalism represents both a valuable corrective and a missed opportunity. We look at three ways in which a closer appeal to virtue ethics could help address current problems or issues in professionalism education—first, balancing professionalism training with demands for professional virtues as a prerequisite; second, preventing demands for the demonstrable achievement of competencies from working against ideal professionalism education as lifelong learning; and third, avoiding temptations to (...) dismiss moral distress as a mere “hidden curriculum” problem. As a further demonstration of how best to approach a lifelong practice of medical virtue, we will examine altruism as a mean between the extremes of self-sacrifice and selfishness. (shrink)

Jecker makes three major points in her article, “A Broader View of Justice” (2008). First, she argues that justice in healthcare relates to justice in the broader social conditions of society as th...

In Giorgio Agamben’s eyes, Immanuel Kant’s work is the modern philosophical harbinger of the catastrophic ‘state of exception’. By focusing on the latter’s ‘author/subject corrective’, I make the connection between Agamben and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason more apparent. In doing so, I show how Kant’s corrective instrumentalises autonomy in such a way that it compromises the validity it seeks to rationalise; it does so by separating the individual from actuality, by ostracising law from political challenge, and by conflating individual (...) and state interests. Taken together, these three undercurrents are defining features of Agamben’s ‘Homo Sacer’ series. (shrink)

Samuel H. LiPuma and Joseph P. DeMarco argue for a positive right to continuous sedation until death (CSD) for any patient with a life expectancy less than six months. They reject any requirement of proportionality. Their proposed guideline makes CSD an option for a decisional adult patient with an appropriate terminal diagnosis regardless of whether suffering (physical or existential) is present. This guideline purports to “empower” the patient with the ability to control the timing and manner of her death. This (...) extends even to the option to “opt out” of the awareness and experience of dying and to avoid suffering altogether, even if one’s symptoms and suffering could be effectively treated.We respond first with a critique of their terminology. We then turn to some purely practical considerations of how this guideline might be enacted in the current atmosphere of American hospice and palliative care medicine. We close with a consideration of one philosophical concern that might ground the discussion of risks, benefits, and alternatives necessary for informed consent. (shrink)

Causation is one of philosophy's most venerable and thoroughly-analyzed concepts. However, the study of how ordinary people make causal judgments is a much more recent addition to the philosophical arsenal. One of the most prominent views of causal explanation, especially in the realm of harmful or potentially harmful behavior, is that unusual or counternormative events are accorded privileged status in ordinary causal explanations. This is a fundamental assumption in psychological theories of counterfactual reasoning, and has been transported to philosophy by (...) Hitchcock and Knobe (2009). A different view--the basis of the culpable control model of blame (CCM)--is that primary causal status is accorded to behaviors that arouse negative evaluative reactions, including behaviors that stem from nefarious motives, negligence or recklessness, a faulty character, or behaviors that lead to harmful or potentially harmful consequences. This paper describes four empirical studies that show consistent support for the CCM. (shrink)

European and North American scholars explore the political philosophy of Aristotle, with particular attention to questions arising from the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics.

Many bilingual speakers believe they engage in different forms of thinking when they shift languages. This experience of entering different thought worlds can be explained with the hypothesis that languages induce different forms of `thinking-for-speaking'-- thinking generated, as Slobin (1987) says, because of the requirements of a linguistic code. "`Thinking for speaking' involves picking those characteristics that (a) fit some conceptualization of the event, and (b) are readily encodable in the language"[2] (p. 435). That languages differ in their thinking-for-speaking demands (...) is a version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, the proposition that language influences thought and that different languages influence thought in different ways. (shrink)

Early humans formed language units consisting of global and discrete dimensions of semiosis in dynamic opposition, or ‘growth points.’ At some point, gestures gained the power to orchestrate actions, manual and vocal, with significances other than those of the actions themselves, giving rise to cognition framed in dual terms. However, our proposal emphasizes natural selection of joint gesture-speech, not ‘gesture-first’ in language origin.

The _Nicomachean Ethics_ is one of Aristotle’s most widely read and influential works. Ideas central to ethics—that happiness is the end of human endeavor, that moral virtue is formed through action and habituation, and that good action requires prudence—found their most powerful proponent in the person medieval scholars simply called “the Philosopher.” Drawing on their intimate knowledge of Aristotle’s thought, Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins have produced here an English-language translation of the _Ethics_ that is as remarkably (...) faithful to the original as it is graceful in its rendering. Aristotle is well known for the precision with which he chooses his words, and in this elegant translation his work has found its ideal match. Bartlett and Collins provide copious notes and a glossary providing context and further explanation for students, as well as an introduction and a substantial interpretive essay that sketch central arguments of the work and the seminal place of Aristotle’s _Ethics_ in his political philosophy as a whole. The _Nicomachean Ethics_ has engaged the serious interest of readers across centuries and civilizations—of peoples ancient, medieval, and modern; pagan, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish—and this new edition will take its place as the standard English-language translation. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 12, December 2019, Page 51-54.

Macromarketing attempts to address issues that engage marketing and society and previous ethical scholarship has focused on distributive justice and on exchanges that occur in conventional markets. As our research highlights, however, the distributive justice approach alone is insufficient for managing the complexities, ethical paradoxes, and out-of-market conditions associated with wicked, cross-national social concerns. In this article, we integrate macromarketing with the theory of the common good in order to provide a foundation for framing societal change that can encompass nonmarket (...) value, stakeholder rights, collective social priorities, organizational responsibilities, and political action. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have begun to lay the groundwork to justify a distinct application of ethics to the field of public health. They have highlighted important features that differentiate public health ethics from bioethics, especially public health’s emphasis on population health rather than issues of individual health. Articulations of public health ethics also tend to emphasize the role of social justice compared to the predominance of autonomy in the bioethical literature. Now that the field of public health ethics is (...) developing a unique focus and a language of its own, including a code of ethics disseminated by the American Public Health Association, the future of public health ethics may well be global health ethics, focusing on issues of global justice. As public health ethics evolves from its nascent stage of reflection to a place of action and application in the national and global arenas, two interrelated developments will need to occur: public health professionals, including practitioners, policymakers, and scholars, will need a richer understanding of the ethical challenges practitioners face on a daily basis and scholars will need to develop useful tools that practitioners may employ for identifying and tackling these ethical challenges. (shrink)

This text brings together for the first time two complete key works from classical antiquity on the politics of Athens: Plato's Menexenus and Pericles' funeral oration.

Theory of mind competence and knowledge of emotions were studied longitudinally in a sample of preschoolers aged 3 (n=263) and 4 (n=244) years. Children were assessed using standard measures of theory of mind and emotion knowledge. Three competing hypotheses were tested regarding the developmental associations between children's theory of mind abilities and their knowledge of emotions. First, that an understanding of emotion develops early and informs children's understanding of others’ thinking. Alternatively, having a basic theory of mind may help children (...) learn about emotions. Third, that the two domains are separate aspects of children's social cognitive skills such that each area develops independently. Results of hierarchical regressions supported the first hypothesis that early emotion understanding predicts later theory-of-mind performance, and not the reverse. (shrink)

Few scholars have investigated the considerations of over-empowered teams from a non-consequential ethics approach. Leveraging a virtue-based ethics lens of team empowerment, we provide a framework of team ethical orientation and over-empowerment using highly influential market research teams as a basis for our analysis. The purpose of this research is to contrast how teams founded on virtue-based ethics can attenuate ethical dilemmas and negative organizational outcomes from team over-empowerment. We provide a framework of four conditions that include Sophisticated, Suppressed, Contagion, (...) and Impeded to discuss alignment between team ethical orientation and team empowerment. Through this framework, we aim to further our understanding of empowered team behavior between action that is virtuous, moral, and ethical and activity that threatens organizational values and goals. (shrink)

An ethnographic field study about the informed consent process in investigational drug trials for seriously ill persons with hepatitis C suggests that nurses and physicians referred to these trials as giving treatment, even though they involved placebos. Interview data and informed consent documents contained frequent references to the term `treatment trial' or `treatment'. Although these findings were unexpected and not the original focus of our study, we consider them in the light of an extensive literature on the `therapeutic misconception' that (...) has been described among physicians and patients with AIDS and other serious illnesses. We also suggest that certain organizational and professional characteristics of nursing and medicine reinforce this tendency to refer to the trials as treatment. Implications for further research are provided. (shrink)

Judgments of direct comparisons, probabilities, proportions, and ranks can all be considered referent-specific judgments, for which a good estimate requires a target to be compared against...

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is often cited as a major reason for low research participation rates among racial/ethnic minorities. We use data from a random-digit-dial telephone survey of 510 African Americans and 253 Latinos drawn from low income Los Angeles neighborhoods to investigate associations between knowledge of the study and endorsement of HIV/aids conspiracy theories. Results indicate African Americans were significantly more likely than Latinos to endorse HIV/aids conspiracy theories and were more aware of the study. Nevertheless, few Americans and (...) Latinos had ever heard of Syphilis Study suggesting that awareness is not a major factor in low participation rates. (shrink)

Although children learn more when teachers gesture, it is not clear how gesture supports learning. Here, we sought to investigate the nature of the memory processes that underlie the observed benefits of gesture on lasting learning. We hypothesized that instruction with gesture might create memory representations that are particularly resistant to interference. We investigated this possibility in a classroom study with 402 second‐ and third‐grade children. Participants received classroom‐level instruction in mathematical equivalence using videos with or without accompanying gesture. After (...) instruction, children solved problems that were either visually similar to the problems that were taught, and consistent with an operational interpretation of the equal sign (interference), or visually distinct from equivalence problems and without an equal sign (control) in order to assess the role of gesture in resisting interference after learning. Gesture facilitated learning, but the effects of gesture and interference varied depending on type of problem being solved and the strategies that children used to solve problems prior to instruction. Some children benefitted from gesture, while others did not. These findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms underlying the beneficial effect of gesture on mathematical learning, revealing that gesture does not work via a general mechanism like enhancing attention or engagement that would apply to children with all forms of prior knowledge. (shrink)

This paper is the companion to “Assessment of Information on Public Health Law Best Practices for Obesity Prevention and Control,” and the fourth of four action papers produced as part of the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control, convened June 2008 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Society for Law, Medicine Ethics. The four action papers present options to address gaps in the four core elements of (...) public health legal preparedness as outlined in the relevant companion papers. The four core elements are: laws and legal authorities; legal competencies for public health professionals to apply those laws and authorities; coordination of law-based efforts across jurisdictions and sectors, and information on public health law best practices. (shrink)

Inspired by the success of generative linguistics and transformational grammar, proponents of the linguistic analogy (LA) in moral psychology hypothesize that careful attention to folk-moral judgments is likely to reveal a small set of implicit rules and structures responsible for the ubiquitous and apparently unbounded capacity for making moral judgments. As a theoretical hypothesis, LA thus requires a rich description of the computational structures that underlie mature moral judgments, an account of the acquisition and development of these structures, and an (...) analysis of those components of the moral system that are uniquely human and uniquely moral. In this paper we present the theoretical motivations for adopting LA in the study of moral cognition: (a) the distinction between competence and performance, (b) poverty of stimulus considerations, and (c) adopting the computational level as the proper level of analysis for the empirical study of moral judgment. With these motivations in hand, we review recent empirical findings that have been inspired by LA and which provide evidence for at least two predictions of LA: (a) the computational processes responsible for folk-moral judgment operate over structured representations of actions and events, as well as coding for features of agency and outcomes; and (b) folk-moral judgments are the output of a dedicated moral faculty and are largely immune to the effects of context. In addition, we highlight the complexity of the interfaces between the moral faculty and other cognitive systems external to it (e.g., number systems). We conclude by reviewing the potential utility of the theoretical and empirical tools of LA for future research in moral psychology. (shrink)