Drawing on the Ideal Standards Model, the current study investigated whether the relationship events and experiences that occur on a given day in romantic relationships were associated with partner evaluations. Individuals in a current romantic relationship completed daily measures of positive and negative relationship events and experiences and partner evaluations for seven consecutive days. As hypothesized, findings demonstrated that on a given day negative relationship events and experiences were associated with evaluating partners as falling short of mate ideals, while positive (...) relationship events and experiences were associated with evaluating partners as more closely meeting ideals. The findings demonstrate the importance of the relational context in evaluations of a partner against ideal standards. (shrink)

This essay examines the implications for modernist studies of using the term after in After Modernism to suggest three meanings: after assuming an end-date for modernism based on linear periodizati...

Fergus Kelly: Thinking in Threes: The Triad in Early Irish Literature Brian Pullan: Charity and Usury: Jewish and Christian Lending in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy Noel Malcolm: The Crescent and the City of the Sun: Islam and the Renaissance Utopia of Tommaso Campanella H. R. Woudhuysen: The Foundations of Shakespeare's Text J. G. A. Pocock: The Re-Description of Enlightenment Andrew Hadfield: Michael Drayton and the Burden of History Eric Foner: Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator? Gillian Beer: Revenants and Migrants: (...) Hardy, Butler, Woolf and Sebald Stephen Banfield: Scholarship and the Musical: Reclaiming Jerome Kern Brian Simpson: The Rule of Law in International Affairs Christopher Bayly: 'The Nation Within': British India at War 1939-47 John Vickers: Economics for Consumer Policy Gillian Feeley-Harnik: The Geography of Descent Susan Gathercole: Working Memory and Learning During the School Years Lothar Ledderose: Carving Stone Sutras before the World Ends: The Inscription of 1118 CE at Cloud Dwelling Monastery near Beijing. (shrink)

Event synopsis: Professor Susan James inverses Leo Strauss’ reading of Spinoza. Whereas Strauss emphasized the hidden subtext of Spinoza’s arguments, James revives the explicit debates of his time within which Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise was situated. But this is not a simple historical reconstruction. James’ close reading of the Treatise offers a radically new perspective on Spinoza’s revolutionary book – a reading that presents startling new perspective on the political, metaphysical and theological implications of the book. Given the importance of (...) Spinoza’s political writings in contemporary radical democratic approaches to the state, James intervention has the potential to reshape the way we think of a Spinozan politics. (shrink)

Marshalling a mind-numbing array of data, Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, shows that on virtually every conceivable measure, civic participation, or what he refers to as “social capital,” is plummeting to levels not seen for almost 100 years. And we should care, Putnam argues, because connectivity is directly related to both individual and social wellbeing on a wide variety of measures. On the other hand, social capital of the “bonding kind” brings with it the (...) ugly side effect of animosity toward outsiders. Given the increasing heterogeneity of our world, the goal therefore must be to enhance connectivity of the “bridging sort,” i.e., connecting across differences. This, in turn, requires that we first clarify what bridging communicative styles looks like. Examining communication as it might transpire in Kant’s kingdom of ends, through the perspective of Habermas’ “communicative action,” and within the scientific community, offers a compelling suggestion that there is a way of communicating such that, if adopted, one would come to view others as if they were persons, i.e., that a bridging communicative style facilitates a kind of bonding that sees through differences toward the commonality of personhood. This paper will briefly explore how communicating toward personhood might be promoted. (shrink)

This collection of new essays focuses on metaethical views from outside the mainstream European tradition. The guiding motivation is that important discussions about the ultimate nature of morality can be found far beyond ancient Greece and modern Europe. The volume’s aim is to show how rich the possibilities are for comparative metaethics, and how much these comparisons can add to contemporary discussions of the foundations of morality. Representing five continents, the thinkers discussed range from ancient Egyptian, ancient Chinese, and the (...) Mexica (Aztec) cultures to more recent thinkers like Augusto Salazar Bondy, Bimal Krishna Matilal, Nishida Kitarō, and Susan Sontag. The philosophical topics discussed include religious language, moral discovery, moral disagreement, essences’ relation to evaluative facts, metaphysical harmony, naturalism, moral perception, and the nature of moral realism. This volume will be of interest to anyone interested in metaethics or comparative philosophy. (shrink)

Science has developed technology to the point that computers are networked, “talking” to each other and artificial intelligence is a real possibility in the future. In a parallel development, nanotechnology examines interaction on a subparticle level, too small to be seen. Yet, humankind is lagging in development of social co-operation and communication. Violence is still the “weapon of choice” on a personal level as well as a national level. Two major developments seek to address conflict resolution. On a personal level, (...) Marshall B. Rosenburg’s study of Nonviolent Communication seeks to facilitate individual interaction. And on the macro level, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr’s work in Passive Resistance has had great success in social change without loss of life. This article, in an effort to promote civil discourse asks the questions: How do these two movements relate to each other? Is there a point of connection which may offer a window through which individuals and groups might resolve conflict successfully? (shrink)

We first got to know TEDMED, a partner of TED (known for its entertaining talks on important ideas), in November 2011, when Jay Walker, its ebullient curator and chairman, visited The Hastings Center to discuss our common interests. What took place was an energizing conversation with Hastings Center staff and several members of the center's board of directors about some of the most intractable health care problems. Jay sketched his vision of marshaling creative and motivated leaders from business, public policy, (...) and medicine to address them. He imagined these people drawing on their areas of expertise to make unforeseen connections—perhaps some insight from business would spark a new idea for combatting childhood obesity or eliminating medical errors. They would use their influence to put the best ideas into practice. Soon after, Walker's colleagues were back in touch with a plan for launching his movement: The Great Challenges of Health and Medicine program. (shrink)

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityMy deepest condolences to Pepe, Dom and Marcus and to Jim’s grandchildren. Tina and I spent a lot of time at the Marshall family home, often attending dinn...

This essay considers the issue of informed consent as it arose in the context of 1960s living kidney donors. In one of the earliest empirical inquiries into informed consent, psychiatrists Carl H. Fellner and John R. Marshall interviewed donors about their decision‐making process and their experience and reflections on donorship. In their much‐cited 1970 paper, the physicians reported that living donors, rather than reaching a reasoned, intellectual, and unemotional decision about donating a kidney (as stipulated in the Ethical Guidelines (...) for Organ Transplantation issued by the American Medical Association's Judicial Council), instead made instantaneous and “irrational” decisions about participation. Fellner and Marshall's studies contributed to the public debate and professional discussion about the moral and ethical dimensions of donorship, even as they challenged the developing consensus on informed consent. (shrink)

As a mono-energy-economy, Russia’s fortunes are closely linked to the price of energy. That same link explains why when energy prices hit record highs, there was such strong public support for Vladimir Putin. But when energy prices plummeted in late 2008, Russia found itself with an economic downturn which brought with it, factory closings, worker layoffs and political grumbling. Because of Russia’s inexperience with economic upheaval, Russia is likely to go through greater turmoil and political uncertainty if not unrest, than (...) more traditional market economies which over the years have had to learn how to deal with economic cycles of this sort. (shrink)

I describe a realist, ontologically objective interpretation of probability, "far-flung frequency (FFF) mechanistic probability". FFF mechanistic probability is defined in terms of facts about the causal structure of devices and certain sets of frequencies in the actual world. Though defined partly in terms of frequencies, FFF mechanistic probability avoids many drawbacks of well-known frequency theories and helps causally explain stable frequencies, which will usually be close to the values of mechanistic probabilities. I also argue that it's a virtue rather than (...) a failing of FFF mechanistic probability that it does not define single-case chances, and compare some aspects of my interpretation to a recent interpretation proposed by Strevens. (shrink)

Susan Hekman believes we are witnessing an intellectual sea change. The main features of this change are found in dichotomies between language and reality, discourse and materiality. Hekman proposes that it is possible to find a more intimate connection between these pairs, one that does not privilege one over the other. By grounding her work in feminist thought and employing analytic philosophy, scientific theory, and linguistic theory, Hekman shows how language and reality can be understood as an indissoluble unit. (...) In this broadly synthetic work, she offers a new interpretation of questions of science, modernism, postmodernism, and feminism so as to build knowledge of reality and extend how we deal with nature and our increasingly diverse experiences of it. (shrink)

Health care reform proposals threaten to exacerbate tensions physicians already face in trying to balance traditional duties to individual patients against increasing pressure to serve broader societal and institutional goals. To cope with reform, medical ethics must clarify physicians' moral obligations, change existing ethical codes, and develop an ethics of institutions.

The current explosion of genetic knowledge and the rapid proliferation of genetic tests has rightly provoked concern that we are approaching a future in which people will be labeled and disadvantaged based on genetic information. Indeed, some have already suffered harm, including denial of health insurance. This concern has prompted an outpouring of analysis. Yet almost all of it approaches the problem of genetic disadvantage under the rubric of “genetic discrimination.”This rubric is woefully inadequate to the task at hand. It (...) ignores years of commentary on race and gender demonstrating the limits of antidiscrimination analysis as an analytic framework and corrective tool. Too much discussion of genetic disadvantage proceeds as if scholars of race and gender had not spent decades critiquing and developing antidiscrimination theory.Indeed, there are multiple links among race, gender, and genetics. Dorothy Roberts has discussed the historical links between racism and genetics, while she and others have begun to map connections between gender and genetics. (shrink)

To explain the causal relation between institutional rules and people’s actions and expectations, Searle relies upon his concept of the Background, the thesis that intentional states function only given a background of capacities that do not themselves consist in intentional phenomena. Any sentence, for instance, only acquires truth conditions or other conditions of satisfaction against a background of capacities, dispositions, know-how, etc. that are not themselves part of the content of the sentence. The Background also structures expectations. La Rouchefoucauld said, (...) for instance, that few people would fall in love if they had never read about it. (shrink)

Drawing on William F. Ogburn's cultural lag thesis, an inherent conflict is proposed between the rapid speed of modern technological advances and the slower speed by which ethical guidelines for utilization of new technologies are developed. Ogburn's cultural lag thesis proposes that material culture advances more rapidly than non-material culture. Technology is viewed as part of material culture and ethical guidelines for technology utilization are viewed as an adaptive aspect of non-material culture. Cultural lag is seen as a critical ethical (...) issue because failure to develop broad social consensus on appropriate applications of modern technology may lead to breakdowns in social solidarity and the rise of social conflict. Reasons for cultural lag between technology and ethics include the social structural and market conditions under which each are developed. The thesis is illustrated by reviews of technological trends involving computer-telecommunications electronics and bio- genetic engineering, and the implications of these and other technologies for privacy rights, electronic commerce, control of essential resources and social definitions of life are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT After a brief review of environmental ethics this paper examines how terrestrial environmental values can be developed into policies to protect extraterrestrial environments. Shallow environmentalism, deep environmentalism and the libertarian extension of rights are compared and then applied to the environmental protection of extraterrestrial bodies. Some scientific background is given. The planet Mars is used as a test case from which an ethical argument emerges for the protection of environments beyond Earth. The argument is based on the necessity to (...) recognise the intrinsic value of all living species and natural environments. At present, the treatment of extraterrestrial environments by makers of space policy is ethically undernourished. This paper explains why such an attitude endangers those environments and calls for the policy‐makers to incorporate non‐anthropocentric ethics into extraterrestrial environmental policy. (shrink)

The debate about what constitutes the discipline of ethics and who qualifies as an ethics consultant is linked unavoidably to a debate that is potentiated by the reality of a rapidly changing and high-stakes health care consultation marketplace. Who we are and what we can offer to the moral gesture that is medicine is shaped by our fundamental understanding of the place of expert knowledge in the transformation of social reality. The struggle for self-definition is particularly freighted since clinical ethics (...) consultation aspires to be more than academic contemplation. Two recent books (Ethics Consultation by John La Puma and David Schiedermayer and The Health Care Ethics Consultant: A Practical Guide, edited by Francoise Baylis) exemplify the two most popular but most widely divergent positions on these issues. We argue that while useful, neither book addresses fully the particular and distinct role of the professional ethicist. (shrink)

It is now generally accepted that human beings are naturally, possibly even essentially, intersubjective. This chapter offers a robust defence of an enhanced and extended intersubjectivity, criticising the paucity of individuating notions of agency and emphasising the community and reciprocity of our affective co-existence with other living organisms and things. I refer to this modified intersubjectivity, which most closely expresses the implicit intricacy of our pre-reflective neuro-muscular experiential entanglement, as ‘enkinaesthesia’. The community and reciprocity of this entanglement is characterised as (...) dialogical, and in this dialogue, as part of our anticipatory preparedness, we have a capacity for intentional transgression, feeling our way with our world but, more particularly, co-feeling our way with the mind and intentions of the other. Thus we are, not so much ‘mind’-reading, as ‘mind’-feeling, and it is through this enkinaesthetic ‘mind’-feeling dialogue that values-realising activity originates and we uncover the deep roots of morality. (shrink)

Suddenly unable to walk, I found resources for facing disability in the works of Aristotle and Nietzsche, even though their respective ethical schemes are incommensurable. Implementing Amélie Rorty's notion of crop rotation, I show how each scheme offers the patient something quite indispensable, having to do with how each has its own judgmentally-motivated psychological underpinnings. Aristotle's notion of empathy, wherein the moral move occurs whenever we take up someone else's good as our own, is empowering, especially to those who face (...) an imperiled embodiment. However, Nietzsche teaches us that pity is demeaning both to the pitier and to the pitied, because it falsely assumes that life should be easy so that we are filled with ressentiment when it isn't. Those facing disability need empathy, not pity. The richness of this distinction is vividly conveyed in narratives that show how empathy and pity play out in lived situations, thereby avoiding the dissociation that too often characterizes ethical theorizing. By honoring narrative accounts of how these relational moves are either snagged or successfully made, the attuned moral agency of medical practitioners can be fostered. (shrink)

Whether the mind is thought to be physical or non-physical, philosophers generally agree that there is an intimate connection between the mind and the self. Dualists have always maintained that the person is his mind and that he just happens to have a particular body. There has also been support for this in classical and contemporary literature on personal identity in the discussions of numerous hypothetical cases involving the transfer of “mental contents” from one body to another, often in the (...) form of “brain transplants”. In connection with each case the following question was raised: Does mental continuity guarantee that one will be the same person or is spatio-temporal continuity necessary? Most philosophers have thought that spatio-temporal continuity is not necessary, but that mental continuity is. Finally, very recently there has been much interest in two types of abnormal phenomena—the “split-brain” and multiple personalities—which give indications of there being more than one mental stream associated with a single body and, as a result, philosophers discussing these phenomena have thought that there is good reason to think of there being more than one self involved in such cases. (shrink)

Sewall Wright ’s FST is a mathematical test widely used in empirical applications to characterize genetic and other differences between subpopulations, and to identify causes of those differences. Cockerham and Weir’s popular approach to statistical estimation of FST is based on an assumption sometimes formulated as a claim that actual populations tested are sampled from.