Marilyn Strathern argues against the possibility of feminist research bringing about a paradigm shift in social anthropology. In an earlier paper, my interpretation of Strathern’s argument, or one of them, is similar to Janaki Nair’s response in broad outline. But it is different in detail and I also object to Strathern’s argument, whereas Nair endorses the argument she extracts. Here I identify differences and I object to the Nair-Strathern argument as well.

Brain dead organ donors are the principal source of transplantable organs. However, it is controversial whether brain death is the same as biological death. Therefore, it is unclear whether organ removal in brain death is consistent with the ‘dead donor rule’, which states that organ removal must not cause death. Our aim was to evaluate the public9s opinion about organ removal if explicitly described as causing the death of a donor in irreversible apneic coma. We conducted a cross-sectional internet survey (...) of the American public (n=1096). Questionnaire domains included opinions about a hypothetical scenario of organ removal described as causing the death of a patient in irreversible coma, and items measuring willingness to donate organs after death. Some 71% of the sample agreed that it should be legal for patients to donate organs in the scenario described and 67% agreed that they would want to donate organs in a similar situation. Of the 85% of the sample who agreed that they were willing to donate organs after death, 76% agreed that they would donate in the scenario of irreversible coma with organ removal causing death. There appears to be public support for organ donation in a scenario explicitly described as violating the dead donor rule. Further, most but not all people who would agree to donate when organ removal is described as occurring after death would also agree to donate when organ removal is described as causing death in irreversible coma. (shrink)

pt. 1. Collection of Sastri's writings and a kavya on him -- pt. 2. Select research papers presented at the birth centenary seminars.

The didactic proposal of the post-constructivist (Grossi, 2005), takes into account the relationship between the subject, reality, others and the Other interior and considers the learning potential of all students. Its theoretical foundation is, among other things, the principle that learning is a social phenomenon, and that the spatial organization of the class, in groups of adults, promotes the teaching-learning process. Post-constructivism is a didactic proposition that allows us to respond to the purpose of teaching all students. This article on (...) group work in post-constructivism aims to analyze the change in posture of teachers, and the professional development that follows, and which demonstrates a break with the traditional form of education. The trick of the identified researcher is then to take up in a teacher training, through the aulic groups in the Geempa class and the weekly study group, the scientific approach of post-constructivism. (shrink)

The concept of death and its relationship to organ transplantation continue to be sources of debate and confusion among academics, clinicians, and the public. Recently, an international group of scholars and clinicians, in collaboration with the World Health Organization, met in the first phase of an effort to develop international guidelines for determination of death. The goal of this first phase was to focus on the biology of death and the dying process while bracketing legal, ethical, cultural, and religious perspectives. (...) The next phase of the project will include a broader group of stakeholders in the development of clinical practice guidelines and will use expert consensus on biomedical criteria for death from the first phase as scientific input into normative deliberation about appropriate policies and practices. Surely, science alone cannot resolve the normative and philosophical questions intertwined in debates about moral status, legal and moral rights, the ethics of killing, and personhood and the nature of the self; however, scientific input is necessary for informed moral deliberation. An objective and unbiased investigation of the biology of death is independent of, and should be undertaken prior to, an analysis of the normative questions engendered by debate about determination of death. This strategy is explicitly endorsed by the International Guidelines for Determination of Death and reflects the prevailing view of these issues in the mainstream medical literature. However, this mainstream literature, exemplified by the IGDD group's recent report, does not exhibit any of the characteristics usually associated with a scientifically rigorous investigation, such as making empirically testable and falsifiable claims, a commitment to evidence and logic over authoritative assertion, or a willingness to revise hypotheses and theories in light of new evidence. Indeed, the core claims and methodologies of the mainstream medical literature on death, both of which are represented by the IGDD report, are not merely scientifically unjustified; they are not science at all. This situation creates a problem for the integrity of science and the academy, and it unjustly obscures and prevents legitimate democratic and moral deliberation about issues that, at bottom, are normative, not scientific. (shrink)

Business ethics researchers and practitioners are interested in understanding the temporal mechanisms of various managerial activities, processes, and policies. In this direction, I borrow notions of time from Virginia Woolf’s _Mrs. Dalloway_ to examine how social time intersperses with the paid and (unpaid) care work of female employees during the pandemic. I explore how discussions of social time in connection to care work appear in newspaper discourses of “shecession”, i.e. the large-scale job/income losses experienced by women during the COVID-19 pandemic. (...) Since shecession is a byproduct of the pandemic times, exploring the role of time in it is crucial. In fact, my findings show that the macro social time of the pandemic affects working women with care responsibilities who are situated at the intersection of multiple vulnerable social categories by simultaneously being a penalizer and a lost opportunity. Similarly, I also find that the micro social times of working women embed, stratify, and synchronize differently during the pandemic when compared to normal times. Working women with care responsibilities are thus adversely affected by both micro and macro social time changes. My findings, therefore, could be instrumental in developing and implementing inclusive policies and processes in business organizations and labor markets. In so doing, my study also indicates how a consideration of social time enriches the application of care ethics in work contexts. Ultimately, this article is also about developing caring organizations, societies, and families which care for the caregivers (working women), since receiving care is a precondition of giving care. (shrink)

This article focuses on the everyday practices that make the place of the neighbourhood – social control, legitimacy and support, while also looking at how gender is produced in everyday life in the neighbourhood. In doing this, the discussion underlines the tremendous social and cultural influence of neighbours and the neighbourhood and argues that neighbourhoods need to be seen as a social formation as important as caste, class, ethnicity or religion. This is particularly important given that a strong focus on (...) identities in recent decades has tended to eclipse social formations such as the neighbourhood. This ethnographic discussion is based on fieldwork carried out in neighbourhoods in two towns in India, Thalassery in Kerala, South India and Bikaner in Rajasthan, North India. (shrink)

This article focuses on the everyday practices that make the place of the neighbourhood – social control, legitimacy and support, while also looking at how gender is produced in everyday life in th...

One family of maximizing act consequentialist theories are actualist direct theories. Indeed, historically there are at least three different forms of actualist direct consequentialism (due to Bentham, Moore, and contemporary consequentialists). This paper is about the logical differences between these three actualist direct theories and the differences between actualist direct theories and their competitors. Three main points emerge. First, the sharpest separation between actualist direct theories and their competitors concerns the so-called inheritance principle. Second, there are a myriad of other (...) logical differences among actualist direct theories. Third, one theory (Moore's theory) stands out among actualist direct theories because it entails a variety of logical principles. This fact may count in favor of that theory. (shrink)

The organ transplantation enterprise is morally flawed. “Brain‐dead” donors are the primary source of solid vital organs, and the transplantation enterprise emphasizes that such donors are dead before organs are removed—or in other words that the dead donor rule is followed. However, individuals meeting standard diagnostic criteria for brain death—unresponsiveness, brainstem areflexia, and apnea—are still living, from a physiological perspective. Therefore, removing vital organs from a heart‐beating, mechanically ventilated donor is lethal. But neither donors nor surrogates nor the public in (...) general are typically informed of this obviously relevant information. Therefore, donors or surrogates do not provide valid consent for a lethal medical procedure. This is a serious moral failing on the part of the transplant community. To address this concern, I advocate for accurate and fully transparent communication of information to the public to allow for an informed civic dialogue about the ethics and legality of lethal organ procurement. Furthermore, I advocate that systems be put in place by the transplant community to allow for valid consent for lethal organ procurement. (shrink)

Physicians participate in several kinds of activities in their professional lives. Clinical care is the core function of the physician. Medical education is overwhelmingly oriented toward this func...

Drawing on a recent case report of a pregnant, brain‐dead woman who gave birth to a healthy child after over seven months of intensive care treatment, this essay rejects the established doctrine in medicine that brain death constitutes the biological death of the human being. The essay describes three policy options with respect to determination of death and vital organ transplantation in the case of patients who are irreversibly comatose but remain biologically alive.

pt. 1. Collection of Sastri's writings and a kavya on him -- pt. 2. Select research papers presented at the birth centenary seminars.

Some patients who have been diagnosed as “dead by neurologic criteria” continue to exhibit certain brain functions, most commonly, neuroendocrine functions. This preservation of neurologic function after the diagnosis of “brain death” or “brainstem death” is an ongoing source of controversy and concern in the medical, bioethics, and legal literatures. Most obviously, if some brain function persists, then it is not the case that all functions of the entire brain have ceased and hence, declaring such a patient to be “dead” (...) would be a false positive, in any nation with so-called “whole brain death” laws. Furthermore, and perhaps more concerning, the preservation of any brain function necessarily entails the preservation of some amount of brain perfusion, thereby raising the concern as to whether additional areas of neural tissue may remain viable, including areas in the brainstem. These and other considerations cast significant doubt on the reliability of diagnosing either “brain death” or “brainstem death.”. (shrink)

We thank the authors of commentaries for their thoughtful discussion of our target article. Here we briefly summarize the points made in the target article (Nair-Collins and Joffe 2023). Then we em...

CSR in India is mandated through Section 135 of the Companies Act (2013), covering the practice and reporting of social responsibility projects. This paper examines India's CSR framework and reports findings on governance, planning, and implementation from a survey of and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Overall findings reveal several positive aspects and inform us of the challenges that companies and NGOs consider essential. First, an overwhelming majority of companies focused on three investment areas: health, education, and the environment. Second, 88% of (...) companies undertook long-term continuing projects, a positive signal from a social development perspective. Third, 68% reported that their CSR strategy was aligned with their core business strategy. Fourth, a significant majority of the companies have established the required structure for policy development, planning, and periodic monitoring from a governance perspective. Finally, findings on NGOs indicate several elements of preparedness; however, the retention of talented employees is a continual challenge. (shrink)

Since at least the 1960s, deontic logicians and ethicists have worried about whether there can be normative systems that allow conflicting obligations. Surprisingly, however, little direct attention has been paid to questions about how we may reason with conflicting obligations. In this paper, I present a problem for making sense of reasoning with conflicting obligations and argue that no deontic logic can solve this problem. I then develop an account of reasoning based on the popular idea in ethics that reasons (...) explain obligations and show that it solves this problem. (shrink)

How do multiple reasons combine to support a conclusion about what to do or believe? This question raises two challenges: How can we represent the strength of a reason? How do the strengths of multiple reasons combine? Analogous challenges about confirmation have been answered using probabilistic tools. Can reductive and nonreductive theories of reasons use these tools to answer their challenges? Yes, or more exactly: reductive theories can answer both challenges. Nonreductive theories, with the help of a result in confirmation (...) theory, can answer one, and there are grounds for optimism that they can answer the other. (shrink)

Reasons can interact in a variety of ways to determine what we ought to do or believe. And there can be cases where two reasons to do an act or have a belief are individually worse than a reason to not do that act or have that belief, but the reasons together are better than the reason to not do that act or have that belief. So the reasons together―which we can call the accrual of those reasons—can have a strength (...) that is an increasing function of the strengths of the individual reasons. In this paper, we will look at how reasons determine what we ought to do and believe in cases where the accrual of reasons is relevant. Our focus will not primarily be on questions about the nature of individual reasons and their weight. Instead, we will at the outset rely on our pretheoretical grip on what reasons there are and how weighty they are individually and ask the more formal or structural question of how to determine the strength of their accrual based on these facts. In looking at these issues, my goal will not be anything as ambitious as developing a full theory of the accrual of reasons. Rather, my goal will be more modest: I will introducing some of the challenges for providing an adequate model and argue that a promising approach to resolving these challenges involves making use of the familiar distinction in moral philosophy between derivative and non-derivative normative notions. (shrink)

Spoken communication occurs in a “noisy channel” characterized by high levels of environmental noise, variability within and between speakers, and lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Given these properties of the received linguistic input, robust spoken word recognition—and language processing more generally—relies heavily on listeners' prior knowledge to evaluate whether candidate interpretations of that input are more or less likely. Here we compare several broad-coverage probabilistic generative language models in their ability to capture human linguistic expectations. Serial reproduction, an experimental paradigm where (...) spoken utterances are reproduced by successive participants similar to the children's game of “Telephone,” is used to elicit a sample that reflects the linguistic expectations of English-speaking adults. When we evaluate a suite of probabilistic generative language models against the yielded chains of utterances, we find that those models that make use of abstract representations of preceding linguistic context (i.e., phrase structure) best predict the changes made by people in the course of serial reproduction. A logistic regression model predicting which words in an utterance are most likely to be lost or changed in the course of spoken transmission corroborates this result. We interpret these findings in light of research highlighting the interaction of memory-based constraints and representations in language processing. (shrink)

A presente pesquisa realiza um estudo de caso de uma rádio transmitida por meio do aplicativo WhatsApp e suas dinâmicas interativas em páginas em redes sociais online. Entre os objetivos deste estudo de inspiração etnográfica de uma rádio segmentada estão a descrição e análise dos processos de transmissão, circulação da produção de textos audioverbovisuais, modelo de negócio e interação com os ouvintes usuários do aplicativo. Pretende-se compreender possíveis experiências de pessoas comuns em ambientes digitais que provocam tensões entre os modos (...) de fazer rádio, as tecnologias digitais, a visibilidade e o suposto empoderamento do ouvinte. (shrink)

A recent publication project entitled Asian Business Discourse has brought to the attention of the international readership an original body of research on business discursive practices and organizational communication issues in a variety of Asian cultures. In this Forum, we discuss some of the topics highlighted by the project, which arise from the recent indigenous research in business discourse as a multidisciplinary field.

The established view regarding ‘brain death’ in medicine and medical ethics is that patients determined to be dead by neurological criteria are dead in terms of a biological conception of death, not a philosophical conception of personhood, a social construction or a legal fiction. Although such individuals show apparent signs of being alive, in reality they are dead, though this reality is masked by the intervention of medical technology. In this article, we argue that an appeal to the distinction between (...) appearance and reality fails in defending the view that the ‘brain dead’ are dead. Specifically, this view relies on an inaccurate and overly simplistic account of the role of medical technology in the physiology of a ‘brain dead’ patient. We conclude by offering an explanation of why the conventional view on ‘brain death’, though mistaken, continues to be endorsed in light of its connection to organ transplantation and the dead donor rule. (shrink)