Differences across fields and experience levels are frequently considered in discussions of ethical decision making and ethical behavior. In the present study, doctoral students in the health, biological, and social sciences completed measures of ethical decision making. The effects of field and level of experience with respect to ethical decision making, metacognitive reasoning strategies, social-behavioral responses, and exposure to unethical events were examined. Social and biological scientists performed better than health scientists with respect to ethical decision making. Furthermore, the ethical (...) decision making of health science students decreased as experience increased. Moreover, these effects appeared to be linked to the specific strategies underlying participants' ethical decision making. The implications of these findings for ethical decision making are discussed. (shrink)

In recent years, we have seen a new concern with ethics training for research and development professionals. Although ethics training has become more common, the effectiveness of the training being provided is open to question. In the present effort, a new ethics training course was developed that stresses the importance of the strategies people apply to make sense of ethical problems. The effectiveness of this training was assessed in a sample of 59 doctoral students working in the biological and social (...) sciences using a pre-post design with follow-up and a series of ethical decision-making measures serving as the outcome variable. Results showed not only that this training led to sizable gains in ethical decision making but also that these gains were maintained over time. The implications of these findings for ethics training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

Ethical decision making measures are widely applied as the principal dependent variable used in studies of research integrity. However, evidence bearing on the internal and external validity of these measures is not available. In this study, ethical decision making measures were administered to 102 graduate students in the biological, health, and social sciences, along with measures examining exposure to ethical breaches and the severity of punishments recommended. The ethical decision making measure was found to be related to exposure to ethical (...) events and the severity of punishments awarded. The implications of these findings for the application of ethical decision making measures are discussed. (shrink)

It is commonly held that early career experiences influence ethical behavior. One way early career experiences might operate is to influence the decisions people make when presented with problems that raise ethical concerns. To test this proposition, 102 first-year doctoral students were asked to complete a series of measures examining ethical decision making along with a series of measures examining environmental experiences and climate perceptions. Factoring of the environmental measure yielded five dimensions: professional leadership, poor coping, lack of rewards, limited (...) competitive pressure, and poor career direction. Factoring of the climate inventory yielded four dimensions: equity, interpersonal conflict, occupational engagement, and work commitment. When these dimensions were used to predict performance on the ethical decision-making task, it was found that the environmental dimensions were better predictors than the climate dimensions. The implications of these findings for research on ethical conduct are discussed. (shrink)

Equipoise is an essential condition to justify a clinical trial. The term, describes a state of uncertainty: the data suggest but do not prove a drug's safety and efficacy The only way to resolve this uncertainty is further study In many cases, a clinical trial seems to be the most efficient way to prove safety and efficacy Equipoise is therefore not an esoteric philosophic construct applied to research ethics. Rather, since it is vital for the justification of clinical trials, it (...) is part of how society regulates medical progress. Where there is equipoise, drug design and development proceeds according to Food and Drug Administration and Health and Human Services regulations. When that equipoise ends, a drug is either not approved or becomes standard care. (shrink)

Equipoise is an essential condition to justify a clinical trial. The term, describes a state of uncertainty: the data suggest but do not prove a drug's safety and efficacy The only way to resolve this uncertainty is further study In many cases, a clinical trial seems to be the most efficient way to prove safety and efficacy Equipoise is therefore not an esoteric philosophic construct applied to research ethics. Rather, since it is vital for the justification of clinical trials, it (...) is part of how society regulates medical progress. Where there is equipoise, drug design and development proceeds according to Food and Drug Administration and Health and Human Services regulations. When that equipoise ends, a drug is either not approved or becomes standard care. (shrink)

Epistasis plays an important role in the genetic architecture of common human diseases and can be viewed from two perspectives, biological and statistical, each derived from and leading to different assumptions and research strategies. Biological epistasis is the result of physical interactions among biomolecules within gene regulatory networks and biochemical pathways in an individual such that the effect of a gene on a phenotype is dependent on one or more other genes. In contrast, statistical epistasis is defined as deviation from (...) additivity in a mathematical model summarizing the relationship between multilocus genotypes and phenotypic variation in a population. The goal of this essay is to review definitions and examples of biological and statistical epistasis and to explore the relationship between the two. Specifically, we present and discuss the following two questions in the context of human health and disease. First, when does statistical evidence of epistasis in human populations imply underlying biomolecular interactions in the etiology of disease? Second, when do biomolecular interactions produce patterns of statistical epistasis in human populations?Answers to these two reciprocal questions will provide an important framework for using genetic information to improve our ability to diagnose, prevent and treat common human diseases. We propose that systems biology will provide the necessary information for addressing these questions and that model systems such as bacteria, yeast and digital organisms will be a useful place to start. BioEssays 27:637–646, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive roadmap to the burgeoning area of affective sciences, which now spans several disciplines. The Handbook brings together, for the first time, the various strands of inquiry and latest research in the scientific study of the relationship between the mechanisms of the brain and the psychology of mind. In recent years, scientists have made considerable advances in understanding how brain processes shape emotions and are changed by human emotion. Drawing on a wide range of neuroimaging techniques, (...) neuropsychological assessment, and clinical research, scientists are beginning to understand the biological mechanisms for emotions. As a result, researchers are gaining insight into such compelling questions as: How do people experience life emotionally? Why do people respond so differently to the same experiences? What can the face tell us about internal states? How does emotion in significant social relationships influence health? Are there basic emotions common to all humans? This volume brings together the most eminent scholars in the field to present, in sixty original chapters, the latest research and theories in the field. The book is divided into ten sections: Neuroscience; Autonomic Psychophysiology; Genetics and Development; Expression; Components of Emotion; Personality; Emotion and Social Processes; Adaptation, Culture, and Evolution; Emotion and Psychopathology; and Emotion and Health. This major new volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers that will define affective sciences for the next decade. (shrink)

Pleiotropy, in which one mutation causes multiple phenotypes, has traditionally been seen as a deviation from the conventional observation in which one gene affects one phenotype. Epistasis, or gene–gene interaction, has also been treated as an exception to the Mendelian one gene–one phenotype paradigm. This simplified perspective belies the pervasive complexity of biology and hinders progress toward a deeper understanding of biological systems. We assert that epistasis and pleiotropy are not isolated occurrences, but ubiquitous and inherent properties of biomolecular networks. (...) These phenomena should not be treated as exceptions, but rather as fundamental components of genetic analyses. A systems level understanding of epistasis and pleiotropy is, therefore, critical to furthering our understanding of human genetics and its contribution to common human disease. Finally, graph theory offers an intuitive and powerful set of tools with which to study the network bases of these important genetic phenomena. (shrink)

In many democracies, voter turnout is low and getting lower. If the people choose not to govern themselves, should they be forced to do so? For Jason Brennan, compulsory voting is unjust and a petty violation of citizens' liberty. The median non-voter is less informed and rational, as well as more biased, than the median voter. According to Lisa Hill, compulsory voting is a reasonable imposition on personal liberty. Hill points to the discernible benefits of compulsory voting (...) and argues that high turnout elections are more democratically legitimate. The authors - both well-known for their work on voting and civic engagement - debate questions such as: • Do citizens have a duty to vote, and is it an enforceable duty? • Does compulsory voting violate citizens' liberty? If so, is this sufficient grounds to oppose it? Or is it a justifiable violation? Might it instead promote liberty on the whole? • Is low turnout a problem or a blessing? (shrink)

In this highly original book, Jason Hill defends a strong form of moral cosmopolitanism and lays the groundwork for a new view of the self. To achieve a radical cosmopolitan identity, he argues it may be necessary to forget aspects of one's racial and ethnic socialization. The idea of forgetting where one came from demands that morally recreated persons disown parts or even all of their cultures if these cultures are oppressive or denigrate human life. Hill draws (...) on existentialism, developmental psychology, and his own experiences as a Caribbean immigrant to the United States to present a philosophy for the new millennium. (shrink)

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the lands that are now the United States (the forty-eight contiguous states, Alaska and Hawaii), there must have been many hundreds of distinct languages. Fewer than two hundred remain, and the future of these is decidedly insecure, even where the remoteness of the location (in the case of Inuit in Northern Alaska) or the large size of the speech community (in the case of Navajo in the Southwest) might seem to protect the (...) community from language loss. Yet even this vastly reduced reservoir of linguistic diversity constitutes one of the great treasures of humanity, an enormous storehouse of expressive power and profound understandings of the universe. The loss of the hundreds of languages that have already passed into history is an intellectual catastrophe in every way comparable in magnitude to the ecological catastrophe we face today as the earth's tropical forests are swept by fire. Each language still spoken is fundamental to the personal, social and - a key term in the discourse of indigenous peoples - spiritual identity of its speakers. They know that without these languages they would be less than they are, and they are engaged in the most urgent struggles to protect their linguistic heritage. The goal of this paper is to review the contexts and practices of this struggle, in the hope that people everywhere will support it. (shrink)

During the 1970s and 1980s, political psychologists at the State University of New York at Stony Brook focused political scientists’ attention on online processing. Borrowing from the new field of social cognition in psychology, they argued that voters’ evaluations of candidates are the products of a summing up of reactions to happenings during a campaign. Voters might not remember the specific events later on, but their running tallies of reactions over the duration of the campaign would ensure that they take (...) the forgotten information into account when entering the voting booth. Later, these same scholars yet again borrowed from (a very changed) psychology, and argued that many people, especially the most politically sophisticated, try to confirm their current political evaluations—for example, by seeking out confirmatory evidence and dismissing evidence that challenges their attitudes. We ask whether online processing and motivated reasoning have the same or different implications for democratic governance, and whether the two empirical perspectives can be reconciled. (shrink)

During the 1970s and 1980s, political psychologists at the State University of New York at Stony Brook focused political scientists’ attention on online processing. Borrowing from the new field of social cognition in psychology, they argued that voters’ evaluations of candidates are the products of a summing up of reactions to happenings during a campaign. Voters might not remember the specific events later on, but their running tallies of reactions over the duration of the campaign would ensure that they take (...) the forgotten information into account when entering the voting booth. Later, these same scholars yet again borrowed from (a very changed) psychology, and argued that many people, especially the most politically sophisticated, try to confirm their current political evaluations—for example, by seeking out confirmatory evidence and dismissing evidence that challenges their attitudes. We ask whether online processing and motivated reasoning have the same or different implications for democratic governance, and whether the two empirical perspectives can be reconciled. (shrink)

Hans Lipps compares pragmatism (William James and John Dewey) existentialism (Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger) in this 1936 article translated from French. He claims that they aim at the same goals, e.g., a return to lived experience and a rejection of the Cartesian legacy in philosophy. While summarizing the commonalities of each, he engages in a polemic against philosophy then that remains relevant now into the next century.

In Beyond Blood Identities, Jason D. Hill presents a bold defense of a form of cosmopolitanism according to which only individual persons—not cultures, races, or ethic groups—are the bearers of rights and the possessors of an inviolable status worthy of respect.

In Beyond Blood Identities, Jason D. Hill presents a bold defense of a form of cosmopolitanism according to which only individual persons_not cultures, races, or ethic groups_are the bearers of rights and the possessors of an inviolable status worthy of respect.

Scott Aikin recently claimed that pragmatism and phenomenology are incompatible. Pragmatic naturalism is incompatible with phenomenology’s anti-naturalism. Therefore, pragmatists trying to appropriate insights from phenomenology encounter a dilemma: either reject naturalism and thereby pragmatism, or reject anti-naturalism and thereby phenomenology. I will argue that Aikin’s dilemma is unmerited, especially in the case of John Dewey, because he has misidentified its horns. Given his definition of pragmatic naturalism, the classical pragmatists are neither naturalists nor pragmatists. His discussion of “phenomenology” misconstrues phenomenological (...) method as subjective self-reporting, which hamstrings his assessment of phenomenology and its prospects of reconciliation with pragmatism. I hope to engage and dispel not only Aikin’s dilemma, but also common preconceptions about the intersection of pragmatism and phenomenology. They may be reconciled, although there are antipathies, of which I will discuss Dewey’s principle of continuity. (shrink)

Introduction -- Moral reasoning from a cosmopolitan perspective : the problem of culture -- Culturalism and moral reasoning -- Towards a moral conceptual base of culture -- Cosmopolitanism : a definition and the question of tolerance -- Who owns culture : a moral cosmopolitan inquiry -- Culture-faith : the mystification of culture -- Culture-faith applied : cultural privacy and the ownership of native culture -- Counter arguments against applied culture faith : the right to cultural privacy -- Representation without authorization (...) -- Who has the right to speak for whom? -- Ethnocide or culture killings : is it so bad? -- Dismantling the tribes from within : modernization and the capabilities approach -- Moral culture is public culture : cosmopolitanism and culture warfare -- Sylvia Plath : daddy and the creation of moral culture -- Moral incommensurability and the clash of cultures -- The anatomy of anti-assimilationism and the logic of contagion -- The cult of death and the worship of ancestry : the genesis of group arcissism -- The psychopathology of tribalism : an exposé -- The tribalist as moral appropriator -- Symbolic ethnicity -- Ethnic vs. ethnic : the problem of definition -- Tribalism, untouchability, and human slime -- The art of symbolic necrophilia -- Imagistic and emblematic representations : tribal epistemology and the impossibility of knowing the other -- Moral masochism and Black identity : a tragic tale -- Jim in Africa -- Theorizing post humanity : radical inclusion, Jews as the chosen people, and the identity politics of St. Paul -- Laissez-faire existential engagement -- Post human in the flesh : Jews and the fragility of chosennes -- How God became a cosmopolitan -- The identity politics of St. Paul. (shrink)

This essay on pragmatist aesthetics explains how imagination extends the environment into the possible. While there is no lack of pragmatic theories claiming that imagination extends the environment, few explain how in the scholarship on John Dewey. After discussing the incompleteness of Mark Johnson's scholarship on this question, I expand upon Thomas Alexander's work to construct a Deweyan-pragmatic view of the dynamic structure of imaginative function that emphasizes continuity, temporality, and the emergence of meaning. Pragmatist scholars must address the question (...) of how, else they are blind to the limitations of imagination while making promises on its transformative power. Though the present work is rooted in historic scholarship, it promises to flower in contemporary debates in aesthetics, realist phenomenology, and reconciling naturalism and phenomenology. (shrink)

Developing cells acquire mature fates in part by selective (i.e. qualitatively different) expression of a few cell‐specific genes. However, all cells share the same basic repertoire of molecular and subcellular building blocks. Therefore, cells must also specialize according to quantitative differences in cell‐specific distributions of those common molecular resources. Here we propose the novel hypothesis that evolutionarily‐conserved transcription factors called scaling factors (SFs) regulate quantitative differences among mature cell types. SFs: (1) are induced during late stages of cell maturation; (2) (...) are dedicated to specific subcellular domains; and, thus, (3) allow cells to emphasize specific subcellular features. We identify candidate SFs and discuss one in detail: MIST1 (BHLHA15, vertebrates)/DIMM (CG8667, Drosophila); professional secretory cells use this SF to scale up regulated secretion. Because cells use SFs to develop their mature properties and also to adapt them to ever‐changing environmental conditions, SF aberrations likely contribute to diseases of adult onset. (shrink)

Uses an ongoing legal controversy to explore the controversial subject of religious liberty and education.

As concerns over the negative social and environmental impacts of industrial agriculture become more widespread, efforts to define and regulate sustainable agriculture have proliferated in the US. Whereas the USDA spearheaded previous efforts, today such efforts have largely shifted to Tripartite Standards Regimes (TSRs). Using a case study of the Leonardo Academy’s initiative to develop a US sustainable agriculture standard, this paper examines the standards-development process and efforts by agribusiness to influence the process. Specifically, we analyze how politics operate in (...) seemingly “depoliticized” TSRs, and how agribusiness and the USDA use “framing practices” and procedural complaints to influence the standard-development process. We contend that although governance mechanisms are a potentially powerful tool for advocates of alternative agrifood, their efficacy may be constrained by science-based requirements, an agribusiness countermovement, and a captured state. (shrink)

To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

In this paper I argue for three theses. First, most philosophical analyses of the problem of normative conflict, being based on the impossibility-of-joint-compliance test for conflict, are inadequate. Second, expanding on suggestions made by H. L. A. Hart and Stephen Munzer, I develop an understanding of normative conflict which is not tied to the concept of obedience. Such an understanding of normative conflict is expressly functional: normative conflicts arise when one norm interferes with the intended functioning of another. Third, working (...) from a functional concept of normative conflict, I develop a taxonomical classification scheme for the phenomenon of normative conflict. Normative conflict is the genus within which there are three species: normative contradiction, normative collision, and normative competition. Department of Philosophy, Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau, MO 63701, U.S.A. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that emotionally-valenced words are given higher judgements of learning (JOLs) than are neutral words. The current study examined potential explanations for this emotional salience effect on JOLs. Experiment 1 replicated the basic emotionality/JOL effect. In Experiments 2A and 2B, we used pre-study JOLs and assessed memory beliefs qualitatively, finding that, on average, participants believed that positive and negative words were more memorable than neutral words. Experiment 3 utilised a lexical decision task, resulting in lower reaction times (...) (RTs) for positive words than for neutral words, but equivalent RTs for negative and neutral words, suggesting that processing fluency may partially account for higher JOLs for positive words, but not for negative words. Finally, we conducted a series of moderation analyses in Experiment 4 which assessed the relative contributions of fluency and beliefs to JOLs by measuring both factors in the same participants, showing that RTs made no significant contribution to JOLs for either positive or negative words. Our findings suggest that although positive words may be more fluently processed than neutral words, memory beliefs are the primary factor underlying higher JOLs for both positive and negative words. (shrink)