Consensus plays an ambiguous role in deliberative democracy. While it formed the horizon of early deliberative theories, many now denounce it as an empirically unachievable outcome, a logically impossible stopping rule, and a normatively undesirable ideal. Deliberative disagreement, by contrast, is celebrated not just as an empirically unavoidable outcome but also as a democratically sound and normatively desirable goal of deliberation. Majority rule has generally displaced unanimity as the ideal way of bringing deliberation to a close. This article offers an (...) epistemic perspective on this question of consensus versus disagreement. For ensuring the production of better decisions, we argue, the normative appeal of consensus varies depending on the deliberative task – whether it entails problem solving or prediction. We argue that in pure problem-solving contexts, consensus retains a strong normative appeal and forms the ideal deliberative outcome of deliberation. In contrast, on predictive tasks, consensus should generally not be used as a stopping rule noris it likely to be epistemically desirable as an outcome. Instead deliberators may be better served by ending the deliberation with a form of deliberative disagreement we call ‘positive dissensus’, which paves the way for more accurate aggregate predictions. (shrink)

BackgroundResearch Ethics Boards, or Institutional Review Boards, protect the safety and welfare of human research participants. These bodies are responsible for providing an independent evaluation of proposed research studies, ultimately ensuring that the research does not proceed unless standards and regulations are met.Main bodyConcurrent with the growing volume of human participant research, the workload and responsibilities of Research Ethics Boards (REBs) have continued to increase. Dissatisfaction with the review process, particularly the time interval from submission to decision, is common within (...) the research community, but there has been little systematic effort to examine REB processes that may contribute to inefficiencies. We offer a model illustrating REB workflow, stakeholders, and accountabilities.ConclusionBetter understanding of the components of the research ethics review will allow performance targets to be set, problems identified, and solutions developed, ultimately improving the process. (shrink)

Background: Compassion fatigue is recognized as impacting the health and effectiveness of healthcare providers, and consequently, patient care. Compassion fatigue is distinct from “burnout.” Reliable measurement tools, such as the Professional Quality of Life scale, have been developed to measure the prevalence, and predict risk of compassion fatigue. This study reviews the prevalence of compassion fatigue among healthcare practitioners, and relationships to demographic variables. Methods: A systematic review was conducted using key words in MEDLINE, PubMed, and Ovid databases. Data were (...) extracted from a total of 71 articles meeting inclusion criteria, from studies measuring compassion fatigue in healthcare providers using a validated instrument. Quantitative and qualitative data were extracted and compiled by three independent reviewers into an evidence table that included basic study characteristics, study strength and quality determination, measurements of compassion fatigue, and general findings. Meta-analysis, where data allowed, was stratified by Professional Quality of Life version, heterogeneity was quantified, and pooled means were reported with 95% confidence interval. A table of major study characteristics and results was created. Ethical consideration: This paper contains no primary data obtained directly from research participants. Data obtained from previously published resources have been acknowledged within references. Psychological distress, particularly compassion fatigue, can be insidious, no health profession is immune, and may significantly impact the ability to provide care. Results: A total of 71 studies were included. Compassion fatigue was reported across all practitioner groups studied. Relationships to most demographic variables such as years of experience and specialty were either not statistically significant or unclear. Variability in reporting of Professional Quality of Life results was found. Interpretation: Compassion fatigue exists across diverse practitioner groups. Prevalence is highly variable, and its relationship with demographic, personal, and/or professional variables is inconsistent. Questions are raised about how to mitigate compassion fatigue. (shrink)

The notion of mind‐independence plays a central role in the contemporary realism/anti‐realism debate, but the notion is severely ambiguous and consequently the source of considerable misunderstanding. In this paper, four kinds of mind‐independence are distinguished: ontological, causal, structural, and individuative independence. Appreciating these distinctions entails that one can reject the individuative independence of the natural world, and still maintain that the natural world is causally and structurally independent of us. This paper argues that so‐called anti‐realists, especially Rorty, Putnam, and Goodman, (...) are not opposed to the causal and structural independence of the natural world, as is frequently alleged, but rather its individuative independence. An acceptance of these points will hopefully put an end to the prevalence of strawmen in the debate, and focus attention on meatier issues. (shrink)

Epistemic justifications for democracy have been offered in terms of two different aspects of decision-making: voting and deliberation, or ‘votes’ and ‘talk.’ The Condorcet Jury Theorem is appealed to as a justification in terms votes, and the Hong-Page “Diversity Trumps Ability” result is appealed to as a justification in terms of deliberation. Both of these, however, are most plausibly construed as models of direct democracy, with full and direct participation across the population. In this paper, we explore how these results (...) hold up if we vary the model so as to reflect the more familiar democratic structure of a representative hierarchy. We first recount extant analytic work that shows that representation inevitably weakens the voting results of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, but we question the ability of that result to shine light on real representative systems. We then show that, when we move from votes to talk, as modeled in Hong-Page, representation holds its own and even has a slight edge. (shrink)

BackgroundPersonal health information and biospecimens are valuable research resources essential for the advancement of medicine and protected by national standards and provincial statutes. Research ethics and privacy standards attempt to balance individual interests with societal interests. However these standards may not reflect public opinion or preferences. The purpose of this study was to assess the opinions and preferences of patients with kidney disease about the use of their health information and biospecimens for medical research.MethodsA 45-item survey was distributed to a (...) convenience sample of patients at an outpatient clinic in a large urban centre. The survey briefly addressed sociodemographic and illness characteristics. Opinions were sought on the research use of health information and biospecimens including consent preferences.ResultsTwo hundred eleven of 400 distributed surveys were completed. Respondents were generally supportive of medical research and trusting of researchers. Many respondents supported the use of their information and biospecimens for health research and also preferred consent be sought for use of health information and biospecimens. Some supported the use of their information and biospecimens for research without consent. There were significant differences in the opinions people offered regarding the research use of biospecimens compared to health information. Some respondent perspectives about consent were at odds with current regulatory and legal standards.ConclusionsClinical health data and biospecimens are valuable research resources, critical to the advancement of medicine. Use of these data for research requires balancing respect for individual autonomy, privacy and the societal interest in the greater good. Incongruence between some respondent perspectives and the regulatory standards suggest both a need for public education and review of legislation to increase understanding and ensure the public’s trust is maintained. (shrink)

Complexity science has witnessed a number of advances since the publication of Jervis's System Effects. These advances better allow us to untangle the messy elements in a system and predict sets of likely outcomes. However, just because a system is complex doesn't mean that all the ideas relating to complexity—such as agent-based modeling, path dependency, tipping points, between-class versus within-class effects, and networks—are necessarily relevant. One of our tasks is to determine whether they are—and, if so, their implications. As examples, (...) we use China's role in the formation of the United States housing bubble; the federal government's bailout of AIG and Bear Stearns but not Lehman Brothers; and China's failure to experience a regime change such as the Middle East's Arab Spring. (shrink)

In this paper, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions on team based tasks in order for a selection criterion applied to individuals to produce optimal teams. We assume only that individuals have types and that a team’s performance depends on its size and the type composition of its members. We first derive the selection principle which states that if a selection criterion exists, it must rank types by homogeneous team performance, the performance of a team consisting only of that type. (...) We then prove that a selection criterion exists if and only if replacing the team’s lowest ranked type, as measured by homogeneous team performance, with a higher ranked type increases team performance. Finally, we show that the replace the lowest ranked property rules out most common types of team complementarities, including benefits to diverse types and types that fill structural holes. (shrink)

Epistemic justifications for democracy have been offered in terms of two different aspects of decision-making: voting and deliberation, or 'votes' and 'talk.' The Condorcet Jury Theorem is appealed to as a justification in terms of votes, and the Hong-Page "Diversity Trumps Ability" result is appealed to as a justification in terms of deliberation. Both of these, however, are most plausibly construed as models of direct democracy, with full and direct participation across the population. In this paper, we explore how these (...) results hold up if we vary the model so as to reflect the more familiar democratic structure of a representative hierarchy. We first recount extant analytic work that shows that representation inevitably weakens the voting results of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, but we question the ability of the result to shine light on real representative systems. We then show that, when we move from votes to talk, as modeled in Hong-Page, representation holds its own and even has a slight edge. (shrink)

The majority of antimicrobials that are produced are administered to animals, particularly food animals. While the overall impact of antimicrobial use in animals on antimicrobial resistance in humans and the environment is unclear, it undeniably has a role. Yet, some degree of antimicrobial use in animals is necessary for animal health and welfare purposes. Balancing the benefits and risks of antimicrobial use in animals is challenging because of the complexity of the problem and limitations in available data. However, a range (...) of measures can be implemented to reduce, refine and optimize antimicrobial use in animals, with a goal of minimizing the impact on human and environmental health while maintaining necessary therapeutic use in animals. A pandemic instrument can provide the necessary foundation for the whole-of-society and whole-of government One Health approach that is required to strengthen surveillance, communication, collaboration, and action. (shrink)

Country constitutes the very anchor of life for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia. It is central to Indigenous identities and history, and is a powerful signifier of overall health and well-being; yet, the significance of country to Indigenous people living in large urban localities such as Sydney, Australia, remains an enigma. Through the production of a series of three murals on a university campus, this project was designed to explore the significance of country for three Darug (...) artists working alongside 90 pre-service teachers enrolled in teacher education. The authors were working with the notion that Aboriginal art comes from country and should stay on country; hence, the painting was directed by Darug artists because we were teaching and learning on Darug country. Our objective, though, was to explore through practice how country teaches in the city, and to produce new stories of coexistence. Narratives developed around terms of engagement and the relationships that developed through project partnerships. (shrink)

Im antiken Athen und Rom war moralkonformes Verhalten eine Ressource von Ansehen. Aber welche konkrete Relevanz hatte Moral in diesem Sinne als soziales Kapital? Welchen Stellenwert hatte sie in den sozialen Zusammenhängen des gegenseitigen Kennens und Anerkennens? Und in welchen Foren, durch welche Medien und in welchen Textgattungen wurden Verhaltensnormen definiert oder ausgehandelt und kommuniziert? 0Die Autorinnen und Autoren zeigen in ihren Beiträgen die nachweisbaren sozialen Konsequenzen eines guten oder schlechten Rufes auf und stellen verschiedene Moraldiskurse vor: von Majestätsprozessen und (...) aristokratischer Moral in der frühen Kaiserzeit über Freizeitbeschäftigungen als Spiegel moralischen Wandels im spätklassischen Athen bis hin zu Klatsch, Gerüchten und fama als moralischem Kapital im spätrepublikanischen und frühkaiserzeitlichen Rom. (shrink)

Ethics review of research involving humans has become something of an institution in recent years. It is intended to protect participants from harm and, to that end, follows rigorous standards. Giv...

The task of designing effective economic and political institutions requires substantial foresight. The designer must anticipate not only the behavior of individual actors, but also how that behavior will aggregate. Rising complexity brought about by increases in speeds of adaptation, diversity, connectedness, and interdependence make institutional design all the more challenging. Given the focus on equilibria, the extant literature on mechanism design might appear incapable of coping with this complexity. Yet, I suggest that a deeper engagement with the origins of (...) the mechanism-design framework reveals insights that may help us design robust, adaptive institutions that can harness complexity. (shrink)

In 1992, in a historic move, the Church of England voted to allow women's ordination to priesthood and in 1994 the first women priests started to be ordained. Despite much research interest, the experiences of priests who are mothers to dependent children have been minimally investigated. Based on in-depth interviews with seventeen mothers ordained in the Church, this paper will focus on how the sacred-profane boundary is managed. Priests who are mothers have a particular insight into the Church hierarchy as (...) they symbolically straddle the competing discourses of sacred and profane. However, instead of reifying these binaries, the experiences of these women show how such dualisms are challenged and managed in everyday life. Indeed, in terms of experience, ritual, ministry and preaching, priests who are mothers are resisting, recasting and renegotiating sacred terrain in subtle and nuanced ways. Mothers thus not only negotiate the practical and sacramental demands placed on priests, but also illuminate how the sacred domain is regulated and constructed. (shrink)

Across the UK, there has been an increase in anti-abortion activism outside abortion clinics. The activism deployed includes explicitly religious activities such as ‘prayerful witnessing’ and ‘pavement counselling’, which aim to discourage women from entering clinics. This article stems from a wider ethnographic study of public activism over abortion to determine what claims about motherhood are being made within these debates. Two arguments are presented. First, how women’s role as mothers is central and essentialised in anti-abortion discourses, with the body (...) of the mother often disappearing as activists seek to erode the distinction between a foetus and a baby by constructing pregnancy as a foetal environment. Motherhood is constructed as ‘natural’ and sacred, therefore abortion must be damaging because it destroys women’s ‘natural’ position. Second, the article argues that although the activists’ arguments are always religiously framed, their activism takes place in a largely secular context, meaning that they have to find ways of appealing to secular audiences. This leads to a complex interrelationship between secular and religious discourses, where theological viewpoints sit alongside ‘scientific’ claims to buttress activists’ views. This article explores how the presence and absence of mothers within activists’ narratives is due to the tensions between religiously based understandings of motherhood, and the need to appeal to a secular audience. (shrink)

Individuative Realism is the thesis that reality is individuated intrinsically-that is, that reality is divided up into objects that are circumscribed by boundaries that are totally independent of our gerrymandering. One strategy for substantiating the thesis would involve discovering some of reality’s inherent joints by direct observation. This paper critically considers the observational strategy by examining a number of proposals for how reality might be individuated intrinsically, and demonstrating case-by-case that the individuation in question is likely imposed by us, rather (...) than inherent in nature. It is additionally suggested that even if objects with crisply unambiguous boundaries were discovered, it would still not be enough to vindicate Individuative Realism. (shrink)

The ordination of women to the priesthood in the Church of England in 1994 signified great change. The impact of the new priests was well documented, and their integration became the focus of much research in the following years. One important area of change was the altered dynamics of gender identity. New roles had opened up for women, but new identities had also emerged for men. While women priests were a new historical emergence, so too were clergy husbands. This paper (...) will consider the historical construction of masculinities and femininities within the church and will go on to look at this in the context of clergy spouses, specifically focusing on men occupying this role. Some provisional findings, acting as work in progress, will be considered. (shrink)

Individuative Realism is the thesis that reality is individuated intrinsically-that is, that reality is divided up into objects that are circumscribed by boundaries that are totally independent of our gerrymandering. One strategy for substantiating the thesis would involve discovering some of reality’s inherent joints by direct observation. This paper critically considers the observational strategy by examining a number of proposals for how reality might be individuated intrinsically, and demonstrating case-by-case that the individuation in question is likely imposed by us, rather (...) than inherent in nature. It is additionally suggested that even if objects with crisply unambiguous boundaries were discovered, it would still not be enough to vindicate Individuative Realism. (shrink)

_The Shadow and the Counsellor_ introduces the concept of shadow, the darker side to ourselves that we do not wish to acknowledge, or do not even recognise. It examines how it comes into being and explores its impact within counselling. _The Shadow and the Counsellor_ is structured around a six stage model which is designed to help the counsellor recognise, confront and deal with their 'shadow' side. This can then be a framework for reflection and practical action. With case studies (...) including short clinical examples to longer examples running through the book, this will give counsellors a new way of approaching their practice. (shrink)

Even if unconditional truth is unattainable in principle, the ideal of unconditional truth has an important role to play in practice, according to Habermas. Habermas' position can be construed as descriptive or prescriptive. Either way, it faces considerable challenges. As a description, it raises classic philosophical problems. As a prescription, it raises many of the practical problems of religious fundamentalism, as Rorty argues. Trying to avoid the theoretical problems inherent to the concept of unconditional truth by non-epistemic means is not (...) promising. (shrink)

This is the intellectual book of the year, and it ought to become one of the great classics of intellectual history. In it James Franklin brilliantly describes the early development and application of the concept of probability, by which is meant not just the sort of probability associated with dice throwing (which he calls `factual probability'), but also what we often refer to as `likelihood" (and which is sometimes termed `logical probability'). That is, the book deals with the early history (...) of non-demonstrative ('inductive') reasoning, where some degree of likelihood can be established from the evidence, but not certainty (in other words, not logical entailment). Such reasoning is often treated cursorily in logic classes, but it is the reasoning we most often have to employ in the sciences, medicine, the law and everyday life. For example, the `big bang' theory is supported by some good arguments, good enough to justify a belief in it, but we cannot be certain that it is true. The same applies to my belief that I will not die by going for a drive in my car today - it is entirely likely that I will survive, but I cannot be certain. As such, non-- demonstrative reasoning is one of the most important areas of study there is. (shrink)

Zimbabwe's communal farmers are now less food secure than they were two generations ago. The roots of this decline lie not only in the confinement of Africans to marginal land but also in the historic forced replacement of their sustainable, indigenous farming system with one whose productivity now relies on the use of large amounts of expensive chemical inputs. Environmentally-friendly, traditional farming practices such as pyro-culture, minimum tillage, mixed cropping, and bush fallowing were completely wiped out and replaced with a (...) highly technical western or ganic farming system based on plough cultivation and continuous monocultures of commodity crops, that were supposed to be sustained by liberal amounts of green and animal manures. This gave rise to an effective agricultural hegemony that was due, mainly, to the zealous dedication of an American Mormon missionary whose motives were evangelical rather than scientific. (shrink)

This article presents findings from research on young adults in the UK from diverse religious backgrounds. Utilizing questionnaires, interviews and video diaries, it assesses how religious young adults understood and managed the tensions in popular discourse between gender equality as an enshrined value and aspirational narrative, and religion as purportedly instituting gender inequality. The article shows that, despite varied understandings, and the ambivalence and tension in managing ideal and practice, participants of different religious traditions and genders were committed to gender (...) equality. Thus, they viewed gender-unequal practices within their religious cultures as an aberration from the essence of religion. In this way, they firmly rejected the dominant discourse that religion is inherently antithetical to gender equality. (shrink)