This article suggests that ?evolutionary vision,? the unifying paradigm of physical, biological, and sociocultural evolution, needs to be fully embodied and deeply experienced in the human being, and that this can be effected by the experience at the heart of the ?perennial wisdom tradition,? 1 that is, that of ?non-dual perception.? The article suggests an ?action-based? experiment paralleling the method of a ?thought experiment,? based on the assumption that one way that one can experience this embodiment is by ?trying on? (...) the lens of non-dual perception, as practiced by the many traditions of perennial wisdom. (shrink)

While a vast body of research has been dedicated to understanding social problems and psychological disorders, we know remarkably little about the positive aspects of life, the things that make life worth living. This volume brings together the latest findings on the causes and consequences of human happiness and well-being. The book covers a wide variety of disciplines, encompassing evolutionary biology, positive psychology, economics and social science, neuroscience and peace studies. Contributors to the volume include some of the most distinguished (...) scholars in the field: social scientist Robert Putnam, evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, psychologist Howard Gardner, economist Robert Frank, the founder of the Positive Psychology movement Martin Seligman, and the economic psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. (shrink)

To be self-compassionate is to show compassion not (only) for others but for yourself. Research in psychology suggests that self-compassion leads to improved well-being and functioning. With the psychological research in the background, we give a philosophical account of self-compassion and its ethical significance. We build a definition of self-compassion, suggesting that self-compassion is different from but closely analogous to compassion for others. Our definition departs from the most prominent definition in the psychological literature but is well-equipped to guide ongoing (...) empirical research. We then argue that self-compassion is a virtue. Self-compassion makes ordinary people happier and more likely to act well, and the self-compassionate person understands and values herself correctly; she sees herself accurately as a needy, vulnerable, limited human whose interests matter. If we are right, then the ethical relationship with self is more complicated than philosophical treatments have so far acknowledged. The virtuous person does not only meet moral duties to herself or exercise permissions to favor her own interests. She also has an emotional relationship with herself, which incorporates enlightened self-understanding and self-care. (shrink)

Stem cell research. Drug company influence. Abortion. Contraception. Long-term and end-of-life care. Human participants research. Informed consent. The list of ethical issues in science, medicine, and public health is long and continually growing. These complex issues pose a daunting task for professionals in the expanding field of bioethics. But what of the practice of bioethics itself? What issues do ethicists and bioethicists confront in their efforts to facilitate sound moral reasoning and judgment in a variety of venues? Are those immersed (...) in the field capable of making the right decisions? How and why do they face moral challenge -- and even compromise -- as ethicists? What values should guide them? In The Ethics of Bioethics, Lisa A. Eckenwiler and Felicia G. Cohn tackle these questions head on, bringing together notable medical ethicists and people outside the discipline to discuss common criticisms, the field's inherent tensions, and efforts to assign values and assess success. Through twenty-five lively essays examining the field's history and trends, shortcomings and strengths, and the political and policy interplay within the bioethical realm, this comprehensive book begins a much-needed critical and constructive discussion of the moral landscape of bioethics. (shrink)

There is a global shortage of nurses that affects healthcare delivery, which will be exacerbated with the increasing demand for healthcare professionals by the aging population. The growing shortage requires an ethical exploration on the issue of nurse migration. In this article, we discuss how migration respects the autonomy of nurses, increases cultural diversity, and leads to improved patient satisfaction and health outcomes. We also discuss the potential for negative impacts on public health infrastructures, lack of respect for cultural diversity, (...) and ethical concerns related to autonomy and justice, including coercion and discrimination. This analysis is written from a rights-based ethics approach by referring to rights held by nurses and patient populations. Nurse migration highlights conflicts between nurses and between nurses and healthcare systems. Increased awareness of ethical challenges surrounding nurse migration must be addressed to enhance the well-being of nurses and patient populations. (shrink)

Number terms and quantifiers share a range of linguistic (syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) properties. On the basis of these similarities, one might expect these 2 classes of linguistic expression to pose similar problems to children acquiring language. We report here the results of an experiment that explicitly compared the acquisition of numerical expressions (two, four) and quantificational (some, all) expressions in younger and older 3-year-olds. Each group showed adult-like preferences for “exact” interpretations when evaluating number terms; however they did not (...) use the corresponding upper bounded interpretation when evaluating the quantifier some. Apparently, children follow different procedures for learning and evaluating numerals and quantifiers. These findings have implications for theories of number representation in child and adult grammars. (shrink)

This article reviews the history of medical and research abuses experienced by American Indians since European colonization. This article examines the unethical research of American Indians/Alaska Natives in light of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Literature citations indicate that significant unethical research and medical care incidents occurred both before and after the Tuskegee Syphilis Study among American Indians/Alaska Natives. The majority of these unethical abuses were committed by the federal government and within the historical context (...) of a long-term contentious relationship between American Indians and the federal government. Although President Clinton issued a highly visible public apology to the African American survivors of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in 1997, American Indians have yet to experience such visible federal acknowledgment. To ensure ethical research in which benefits outweigh risks and findings are not value-laden or misrepresented, tribes have instituted their own Institutional Review Boards coupled with community-participatory activities. (shrink)

Nurses have traditionally been regarded as clinicians that deliver compassionate, safe, and empathetic health care (Nurses again outpace other professions for honesty & ethics, 2018). Caring is a fundamental characteristic, expectation, and moral obligation of the nursing and caregiving professions (Nursing: Scope and standards of practice, American Nurses Association, Silver Spring, MD, 2015). Along with caring, nurses are expected to undertake ever‐expanding duties and complex tasks. In part because of the growing physical, intellectual and emotional demandingness, of nursing as well (...) as technological advances, artificial intelligence (AI) and AI care robots are rapidly changing the healthcare landscape. As technology becomes more advanced, efficient, and economical, opportunities and pressure to introduce AI into nursing care will only increase. In the first part of the article, we review recent and existing applications of AI in nursing and speculate on future use. Second, situate our project within the recent literature on the ethics of nursing and AI. Third, we explore three dominant theories of caring and the two paradigmatic expressions of caring (touch and presence) and conclude that AI—at least for the foreseeable future—is incapable of caring in the sense central to nursing and caregiving ethics. We conclude that for AI to be implemented ethically, it cannot transgress the core values of nursing, usurp aspects of caring that can only meaningfully be carried out by human beings, and it must support, open, or improve opportunities for nurses to provide the uniquely human aspects of care. (shrink)

Although clinical ethics consultation is a high-stakes endeavor with an increasing prominence in health care systems, progress in developing standards for quality is challenging. In this article, we describe the results of a pilot project utilizing portfolios as an evaluation tool. We found that this approach is feasible and resulted in a reasonably wide distribution of scores among the 23 submitted portfolios that we evaluated. We discuss limitations and implications of these results, and suggest that this is a significant step (...) on the pathway to an eventual certification process for clinical ethics consultants. (shrink)

Of the stories describing the adventures full of deep significances of the various rabbis from the glorious Talmudic era, the most famous but also the most exploited is undoubtedly that of the “four sages who entered the Pardes”. If in the Talmudic-Midrashic literature it was used to point out the dangers and achievements that were related to speculations, rather than experiences, and in the mystical literature it was used to point out the dangers that could befall the mystic on his (...) way to God, to the kabbalists, Pardes was an unexplained parable for an unrevealed secret, a generalized metaphor for the danger zones of religious experience, seen as something which was good for the few, but pernicious for others. This article traces the manner in which Moshe Idel analyzes, in his books and lectures, the meanings of this legend, taking the reader on a fascinating journey in time and space, throughout various types of kabbalistic thinking and even maimonidean philosophy. (shrink)

This article explores insights of physicist David Bohm on the source of thought and the creative intelligence that emerges from this source. It highlights a link that Bohm sees between this creativ...

A common contention of literary criticism is that literary forms can express, reflect, shape, represent or otherwise give form to human life. Literature can seem to offer the same idea as a promise of life’s meaningfulness; where expressive form is powerful, life need not be empty. Can literary forms give form to human life? I will argue for one sense in which this is true. As will become clear, at stake in this inquiry is not simply an idea about the (...) meaningfulness of literature’s poetry, but a way of answering the question of what it means to be human. (shrink)

Depuis sa fondation comme discipline indépendante, la psychologie semble contourner les questions épistémologiques constitutives d’une science de l’esprit. Cet article s’attache à présenter brièvement quelques-unes de ces questions, à travers la psychologie historique d’Ignace Meyerson.

What does it mean to know who you are? Is it a matter of knowing your name? The things that you’ve done? The people you love? Such indispensible knowledge is somehow not enough; I can know all of these things, and still feel puzzled about who I am. “I am not the person I once was,” “I am not myself today,” and “I am learning who I am,” are all commonplace poems of a kind: expressive sentences completely at home both (...) in literature and ordinary life. Such a poem is the sentence “I know who I am.” This last is one of the many grand and emblematic boasts of Miguel de Cervantes’s hilariously self-fashioned knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, a boast that can seem both impossible and yet utterly sensible, part quixotic and... (shrink)

En danse comme dans les autres arts – même en science – écrit Hélène Marquié, le premier pas pour les études de genre est de donner de la visibilité aux femmes dans l’archive historique afin de reconstruire une histoire « mixte » (p. 218). L’auteure explique que c’est seulement avec les rapports de 2006 et de 2009 sur « l’accès égal » des hommes et des femmes aux performances et aux structures chorégraphiques que le féminisme à tonalité politique a commencé (...) à s’implanter dans la danse françai... (shrink)

To construct their first lexicon, infants must determine the relationship between native phonological variation and the meanings of words. This process is arguably more complex for bilingual learners who are often confronted with phonological conflict: phonological variation that is lexically relevant in one language may be lexically irrelevant in the other. In a series of four experiments, the present study investigated English-Mandarin bilingual infants’ abilities to negotiate phonological conflict introduced by learning both a tone and a non-tone language. In a (...) novel word learning task, bilingual children were tested on their sensitivity to tone variation in English and Mandarin contexts. Their abilities to interpret tone variation in a language-dependent manner were compared to those of monolingual Mandarin learning infants. Results demonstrated that at 12 to 13 months, bilingual infants demonstrated the ability to bind tone to word meanings in Mandarin, but to disregard tone variation when learning new words in English. In contrast, monolingual learners of Mandarin did not show evidence of integrating tones into word meanings in Mandarin at the same age even though they were learning a tone language. However, a tone discrimination paradigm confirmed that monolingual Mandarin learning infants were able to tell these tones apart at 12 to 13 months under a different set of conditions. Later, at 17 to 18 months, monolingual Mandarin learners were able to bind tone variation to word meanings when learning new words. Our findings are discussed in terms of cognitive adaptations associated with bilingualism that may ease the negotiation of phonological conflict and facilitate precocious uptake of certain properties of each language. (shrink)

Clinical ethics consultation is largely outside the scope of regulation and oversight, despite its importance. For decades, the bioethics community has been unable to reach a consensus on whether there should be accountability in this work, as there is for other clinical activities that influence the care of patients. The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, the primary society of bioethicists and scholars in the medical humanities and the organizational home for individuals who perform CEC in the United States, has (...) initiated a two‐step quality attestation process as a means to assess clinical ethics consultants and help identify individuals who are qualified to perform this role. This article describes the process. (shrink)

This article employs the animated feature film WALL-E to examine a contemporary incarnation of paternal authority, the anal father of enjoyment. Slavoj Zizek coined the expression “anal father of enjoyment” to identify a metaphorical father who operates counter to Sigmund Freud’s oedipal. Unlike the oedipal father, the anal father does not command the subject to sacrifice enjoyment as a price for entry into the social order. Rather, the anal father directs the subject to enjoy excessively. This article reasons that the (...) anal father figuration is a result of global capitalism. While a post-apocalyptic event, such as climate change, may destroy the planet, it does not end capitalism. Yet, WALL-E suggests that with the demise of the anal father, capitalism can be replaced with an alternative economic system. (shrink)

My little girl has leukemia; she has had it for over a year, and now she needs at least five pints of blood a day. Not the whole blood, just the platelets. Most of our relatives and friends have given at least a few times. But we need more. Now I have to go to strangers.So begins Roberta Silman's short story, “Giving Blood,” a story about illness and charity. When the narrator's husband solicited blood donations at his workplace, “he thought (...) everyone would help…He must have asked a hundred people. Thirty gave. His officemate…turned green and said, ‘Oh, no, anything but that. I'm scared of needles.'”. (shrink)

Terminally ill elderly and long-term disabled persons under our system of health care are eligible for Medicare and may qualify for the hospice care benefit. Despite such provisions, research shows that individuals still frequently do not receive the health care they need. But, as inadequate as end-of-life care can be for the general population, these inadequacies are exacerbated for individuals incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. Although inmates are guaranteed a basic level of health care under the Eighth Amendment and (...) Due Process Clause, they lack the mobility or freedom to choose their health care coverage, and they are dependent on an institutional system for such care. Inside prison, security and access issues affect the care inmates receive. Further, the availability of adequate clinical resources, especially for high-cost procedures, may be problematic in some jurisdictions.In addition to the practical, institutional, and legal barriers to providing and improving general end-of-life care, efforts to improve end-of-life care for prisoners may also encounter a lack of public sympathy. (shrink)

Terminally ill elderly and long-term disabled persons under our system of health care are eligible for Medicare and may qualify for the hospice care benefit. Despite such provisions, research shows that individuals still frequently do not receive the health care they need. But, as inadequate as end-of-life care can be for the general population, these inadequacies are exacerbated for individuals incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. Although inmates are guaranteed a basic level of health care under the Eighth Amendment and (...) Due Process Clause, they lack the mobility or freedom to choose their health care coverage, and they are dependent on an institutional system for such care. Inside prison, security and access issues affect the care inmates receive. Further, the availability of adequate clinical resources, especially for high-cost procedures, may be problematic in some jurisdictions.In addition to the practical, institutional, and legal barriers to providing and improving general end-of-life care, efforts to improve end-of-life care for prisoners may also encounter a lack of public sympathy. (shrink)

Summary In about 1735, Emilie Du Châtelet began to translate Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. Her work, which is largely ignored by scholars, did, as this article demonstrates, turn out to be one of transformation rather than of translation and came at a crucial moment in the emerging French luxury debate. So far commercial society and luxury had been defended in purely economic terms, for instance in Melon's Essai politique, or as an aspect of divine providence for fallen man, by (...) Pierre Nicole amongst others. There was as yet no coherent defence on the level of secular ethics. As this article shows, Du Châtelet set out to remedy this. In co-operation with Voltaire, with whose recent praise of English society in the Lettres philosophiques she strongly identified, she rewrote the Fable to offer a defence of modern commercial society as both natural and moral. The article argues that she was able to do so by taking recourse to classic Epicureanism in the guise of Lucretius' De rerum natura, as an alternative to the Neo-Epicureanism, with its Augustinian overtones, as espoused by Mandeville. Voltaire in turn used her translation to lay the foundations for his defence of commercial society and progress in his Traité de métaphysique in which he uses the precise passages she had inserted into Mandeville's original. This article analyses the further aspects Voltaire adds to her arguments. Taken together, Du Châtelet's ?translation? and Voltaire's Traité offer a coherent defence of bourgeois society that would underlie Voltaire's later historiographical and philosophical works and which were crucial to his concept of ?Enlightenment? and ?progress? (shrink)

With technological possibilities in healthcare steadily increasing, more tools for digital cognitive rehabilitation become available. Acceptance of such technological advances is crucial for successful implementation. Therefore, we examined technology acceptance specifically for this form of rehabilitation in a sample of healthcare providers involved in cognitive rehabilitation. An adjusted version of the Technology Acceptance Model questionnaire was used, including the subscales for perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, subjective norm, and intention to use, which all contribute to actual use of a (...) specific technology. Results indicate a generally favorable attitude toward the use of digital cognitive rehabilitation and positive responses toward the TAM constructs. Only for subjective norm, a neutral mean response was found, indicating that this could pose a potential obstacle toward implementation. Potential differences between subgroups of different age, gender, and professional background were assessed. Age and gender did not affect the attitude toward digital cognitive rehabilitation. Occupational therapists showed lower scores than healthcare psychologists and physiatrists with regard to perceived usefulness, possibly linked to a difference in operational and managerial tasks. The findings of his study stimulate further implementation of digital cognitive rehabilitation, where the role of subjective norms should be specifically considered. (shrink)

Historically nurses have lacked significant input in end-of-life decision-making, despite being an integral part of care. Nurses experience negative feelings and moral conflict when forced to aggressively deliver care to patients at the EOL. As a result, nurses participate in slow codes, described as a limited resuscitation effort with no intended benefit of patient survival. The purpose of this study was to explore and understand the process nurses followed when making decisions about participation in limited resuscitation. Five core categories emerged (...) that describe this theory: (1) recognition of patient and family values at the EOL; (2) stretching time and reluctance in decision-making; (3) harm and suffering caused by the physical components of CPR; (4) nurse’s emotional and moral response to delivering aggressive care, and; (5) choosing limited resuscitation with or without a physician order. Several factors in end-of-life disputes contribute to negative feelings and moral distress driving some nurses to perform slow codes in order to preserve their own moral conflict, while other nurses refrain unless specifically ordered by physicians to provide limited care through tailored orders. (shrink)

This article deals both with greatly extended finite life and with immortality and uses the term ‘greatly extended life’ to cover both. Except where indicated, it proceeds from some assumptions adapted from Christine Overall. First, people would know the life expectancy in their society or would know that they were immortal. Second, everyone would have the opportunity to choose greatly extended life. Third, greatly extended life would not be mandatory; people would be able to opt out at any point.

Death can be good— I’ll tell you how. Just have it come Decades from now.1 Full disclosure: The above poem expresses my outlook, and I have trouble empathising with people who want to die. But that does not make me unable to evaluate objections to the expressivist argument against PAS. Reed sets forth the expressivist argument as follows: ‘[W]hen we allow PAS for individuals who are terminally ill or facing some severe disease or disability, we send a message of disrespect (...) to all individuals who face such adversities in that we imply that they are inferior or their lives are not worth living (or at least less worth living than they otherwise would be) precisely insofar as they are diseased or disabled’.2 The passage of mine that Reed quotes, however, was not intended to set forth an expressivist view. Rather than saying the double standard of selective legalisation ‘send[s] a message of disrespect’,3 it says this double standard in fact involves a systematic devaluation of some people’s lives. I will argue that there are conditions under which this double standard does send a message of disrespect, but first I want to disassociate myself from the expressivist formulations of Coleman and Keown that …. (shrink)