This research systematically evaluates via prototype analysis how conceptualizations of Western adult's monotheistic God are structured. Over 4 studies, using U.S. student and community samples of predominantly Christians, features of God are identified, feature centrality is documented, and centrality influence on cognition is evaluated. Studies 1 and 2 produced considerable overlap in feature frequency and centrality ratings across the samples, with “God is love” being the most frequently listed central feature. In Studies 3 (choice latency) and 4 (recall and recognition (...) memory), the centrality of features influenced cognitive processes: central features were more quickly identified as features of God than peripheral features; were correctly recognized more often; and central features were correctly recalled more often than peripheral features. Results indicated that participants meaningfully judged centrality and that centrality affected cognition. Thus, the two criteria necessary for demonstrating deity representations adhere to a prototype structure were met. Implications and future directions are discussed. (shrink)

Under the impact of cultural, economic and legislative forces the traditional role of the university health center is changing. The academic health center is rapidly evolving from a relatively undifferentiated general hospital, primarily responsible for the education of undergraduate students of medicine, into a center of clinical research, caring for very specialized mixes of patients, and having as its primary educational mission the training of subspecialists. The nature of the forces responsible for this change are analyzed, and some of its (...) possible consequences for the definition of quality health care, for the shape of medical practice and medical education, and for the allocation of resources for health care are explored. This exploration suggests that the functional separation of the medical school from the highly technical, clinical research center is inevitable. This in turn may exacerbate tensions within medicine between the physician as scientist and as healer, between curative and preventive practice and between personal and public health. Although the effects of this separation on medical education remain obscure, it has already occasioned the most comprehensive review of the medical curriculum since the time of Flexner. Out of this is likely to develop a more generalist view of the education of future physicians. (shrink)

Primary affects exist at an ecological-communicative level of analysis, and therefore are not identifiable with specific brain regions. The constructionist view favored in the target article, that emotions emerge from “more basic psychological processes,” does not specify the nature of these processes. These more basic processes may actually involve specific neurochemical systems, that is, primary motivational-emotional systems (primes), associated with specific feelings and desires that combine to form the “cocktail” of experienced emotion.

Within the last five years, a number of specific growth factors have been localized in developing lesions of atherosclerosis. This localization of growth factors that is not observed in normal vessels, together with the pleotrophic activities of growth factors, have suggested a role for growth factors in atherosclerotic lesion progression. However, based on in vitro studies, many of the growth factors identified in lesions have overlapping target cells and are derived from the same cellular sources. What is the relative role (...) of the specific growth factors identified? How is the their activity altered by the local conditions in the vessel wall? How do different risk factors for atherosclerosis alter the balance between growth factors and their natural regulators? Evidence for the involvement of specific growth factors in the progression of lesions of atherosclerosis is discussed, as well as the multiple levels at which the activities of these growth factors may be regulated by the vessel wall. (shrink)

The psychosocial morbidity associated with HIV infection and responses to such infection may exceed morbidity associated with medical sequelae of such infection. This paper argues that negative judgements on those with HIV infection or in groups associated with such infection will cause avoidable psychological and social distress. Moral judgements made regarding HIV infection may also harm the common good by promoting conditions which may increase the spread of HIV infection. This paper examines these two lines of argument with regard to (...) the ethical aspects of psychological bases of health care, clinical contact, public perceptions of AIDS and the comparative perspective. It is concluded that the psychosocial aspects of HIV infection impose ethical psychological, as well as medical, obligations to reduce harm and prevent the spread of infection. (shrink)

The objectives of this study were to develop a high-density chromosome bin map of homoeologous group 7 in hexaploid wheat, to identify gene distribution in these chromosomes, and to perform comparative studies of wheat with rice and barley. We mapped 2148 loci from 919 EST clones onto group 7 chromosomes of wheat. In the majority of cases the numbers of loci were significantly lower in the centromeric regions and tended to increase in the distal regions. The level of duplicated loci (...) in this group was 24% with most of these loci being localized toward the distal regions. One hundred nineteen EST probes that hybridized to three fragments and mapped to the three group 7 chromosomes were designated landmark probes and were used to construct a consensus homoeologous group 7 map. An additional 49 probes that mapped to 7AS, 7DS, and the ancestral translocated segment involving 7BS also were designated landmarks. Landmark probe orders and comparative maps of wheat, rice, and barley were produced on the basis of corresponding rice BAC/PAC and genetic markers that mapped on chromosomes 6 and 8 of rice. Identification of landmark ESTs and development of consensus maps may provide a framework of conserved coding regions predating the evolution of wheat genomes. (shrink)

One of the biggest challenges facing modern societies is how to monitor one’s intelligence community while maintaining the necessary level of secrecy. Indeed, while some secrecy is needed for mission success, too much has allowed significant abuse. Moreover, extending this secrecy to democratic oversight actors only creates another layer of unobserved actors and removes the public scrutiny that keeps their power and decision-making in check. This article will therefore argue for a new type of oversight through a specialised ethical whistleblowing (...) framework. This includes, first, outlining what intelligence wrongdoings justify whistleblowing; second, whether whistleblowing is the correct remedy – something not necessarily clear with intelligence; and finally, what form the whistleblowing should take. This framework will examine the Snowden case to determine whether he was correct leaking intelligence data and whether the means were appropriate, and second, whether those involved in the Central Intelligence... (shrink)

The Right and the Good, a classic of twentieth-century philosophy by the eminent scholar Sir David Ross, is now presented in a new edition with a substantial introduction by Philip Stratton-Lake, a leading expert on Ross. Ross's book is the pinnacle of ethical intuitionism, which was the dominant moral theory in British philosophy for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Intuitionism is now enjoying a considerable revival, and Stratton-Lake provides the context for a proper understanding (...) of Ross's great work today. (shrink)

The surge in threats aided by or carried out through cyberspace has placed significant pressure on the intelligence community to adapt or leave itself open to attack. Indeed, many in both political and intelligence circles argue for access to ever greater amounts of cyber information in order to catch potential threats before they become real. By collecting all our digital information, the intelligence community argues that it is not only able to detail what people have done or are currently doing (...) but also predict what their next move might be. However, the ethical implications are unclear and the backlash following Edward Snowden’s revelations have shown that such activities are not without controversy. This leaves the debate stuck between the important, ethical role that intelligence can play and the potential for its unrestrained use to cause undue harm. This paper will resolve this by giving greater detail to cyber-intelligence practices, highlighting the different levels of harm that the various intelligence operations can cause. The essence of this paper is not that cyber-intelligence should be banned outright, but that it can be justified given the necessary circumstances. Therefore, the paper will develop a specialised set of Just Cyber-Intelligence Principles, built on the just war tradition, to outline if and when such activities are justified. (shrink)

The authors, on the basis of brief arguments, have dismissed tensor networks as a viable response to Jackendoff's challenges. However, there are reasons to believe that connectionist approaches descended from tensor networks are actually very well suited to answering Jackendoff's challenges. I rebut their arguments for dismissing tensor networks and briefly compare the approaches.

Anonymising technologies are cyber-tools that protect people from online surveillance, hiding who they are, what information they have stored and what websites they are looking at. Whether it is anonymising online activity through ‘TOR’ and its onion routing, 256-bit encryption on communications sent or smart phone auto-deletes, the user’s identity and activity is protected from the watchful eyes of the intelligence community. This represents a clear challenge to intelligence actors as it prevents them access to information that many would argue (...) plays a vital part in locating and preventing threats from being realised. Moreover, such technology offers more than ordinary information protections as it erects ‘warrant-proof’ spaces, technological black boxes that no matter what some authority might deem as being legitimately searchable is protected to the extent that there are very limited or non-existent means of forcing oneself in. However, it will be argued here that not only is using such anonymising technology and its extra layer of protection people’s right, but that it is ethically mandatory. That is, due to the en masse surveillance—from both governments and corporations—coupled with people’s limited awareness and ability to comprehend such data collections, anonymising technology should be built into the fabric of cyberspace to provide a minimal set of protections over people’s information, and in doing so force the intelligence community to develop more targeted forms of data collection. (shrink)

The ethical value of intelligence lies in its crucial role in safeguarding individuals from harm by detecting, locating, and preventing threats. As part of this undertaking, intelligence can include protecting the economic well-being of the political community and its people. Intelligence, however, also entails causing people harm when it violates their vital interests through its operations. The challenge, therefore, is how to reconcile this tension, which Cécile Fabre's recent book Spying through a Glass Darkly does by arguing for the “ongoing (...) and preemptive imposition of defensive harm.” Fabre applies this underlying argument to the specifics of economic espionage to argue that while states, businesses, and individuals do have a general right over their information that prevents others from accessing it, such protections can be forfeited or overridden when there is a potential threat to the fundamental rights of third parties. This essay argues, however, that Fabre's discussion on economic espionage overlooks important additional proportionality and discrimination concerns that need to be accounted for. In addition to the privacy violations it causes, economic espionage can cause harms to people's other vital interests, including their physical and mental well-being and autonomy. Given the complex way in which the economy interlinks with people's lives and society, harms to one economic actor will have repercussions on those secondary economic entities dependent on them, such as workers, buyers, and investors. This, in turn, can produce further harms on other economic actors, causing damages to ripple outward across society. (shrink)

Torture-lite has been advanced as a new form of interrogation that raises the prospect of offering a more ethical way of colleting the intelligence needed to protect the state. However, this paper will argue that there can be no such thing as torture-lite as this misunderstands what interrogational torture is in the first place. Interrogational torture is a form of behavioural modification that relies on breaking the individual and conditioning their responses. Torture-lite would never be able to create the self-betraying (...) effect necessary for cases such as the ticking time bomb scenario without crossing over into the higher harms caused by full torture, and is unable to force the individual to provide the required information to serve as the good in the consequentialist argument. (shrink)

The ability of machines to make truly independent and autonomous decisions is a goal of many, not least of military leaders who wish to take the human out of the loop as much as possible, claiming that autonomous military weaponry—most notably drones—can make decisions more quickly and with greater accuracy. However, there is no clear understanding of how autonomous weapons should be conceptualized and of the implications that their “autonomous” nature has on them as ethical agents. It will be argued (...) that autonomous weapons are not full ethical agents due to the restrictions of their coding. However, the highly complex machine-learning nature gives the impression that they are making their own decisions and creates the illusion that their human operators are protected from the responsibility of the harm they cause. Therefore, it is important to distinguish between autonomous AI weapons and an AI with autonomy, a distinction that creates two different ethical problems for their use. For autonomous weapons, their limited agency combined with machine-learning means their human counterparts are still responsible for their actions while having no ability to control or intercede in the actual decisions made. If, on the other hand, an AI could reach the point of autonomy, the level of critical reflection would make its decisions unpredictable and dangerous in a weapon. (shrink)

In recent years the power and reach of prominent hacker groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec has been clearly demonstrated. However, in a world where hackers are able to wield significant online power, can they do so ethically as legitimate agents? To answer this question this paper will develop an ethical framework based on the premise that hackers have exhibited instances where they have acted to protect people from harm at a time when there was no one else to do (...) so. At its core this paper will argue that political hacking can be justified when it is done to protect the vital interests of oneself or others. Moreover, it will also argue that just because hackers are outside the state does not automatically discount them as ethical actors and that when the state fails to protect people – whether it is due to a lack of ability, political will or because the state is the source of the threat – hackers can fill the void. In order to achieve this, first it is necessary to highlight the space for hackers to operate; second, guide hacker activity by creating an ethical framework detailing what actions are justified towards what end; third, to offer mechanisms that can aid in reaching these ethically justified decisions; and as a result, inform further ethical debates on how to react to these political hackers. This means that the framework can be used to both justify and condemn hacking depending on the circumstances, allowing those on the outside to distil and evaluate a political hack, both past and present, while guiding hacker collectives by providing clearer ethical tools for determining the appropriate agendas and methods. (shrink)

The question of punishment is one which has always interested and usually puzzled moralists, and which forms a crucial example for the testing of moral theories. A utilitarian theory, whether of the hedonistic or of the ‘ ideal ’ kind, if it justifies punishment at all, is bound to justify it solely on the ground of the effects it produces. The suffering of pain by the person who is punished is thought to be in itself a bad thing, and the (...) bringing of this bad thing into the world is held to need justification, and to receive it only from the fact that the effects are likely to be so much better than those that would follow from his non-punishment as to outweigh the evil of the pain. (shrink)

Arguably, every new technology creates hidden ejfects in its environment, rearranging the social order it penetrates. Many ofthese effects are inextricably linked to ethical issues. Some are eternal issues such as censorship andfree speech, but others have new names and dimensions, and may even be new issues. Forty of these issues pertaining to the new communication technologies of the 1990s and next millennium are catalogued here. The author argues that each new communication technology either retrieves, amplifies, transforms, obsolesces, or mixes (...) ethical issues from the past or creates new issues for the future. However, as in the Ross Hume Hall (1974) effect, it is also likely there are issues yet unknown due to untested eflects of combining new technologies. (shrink)