This article explains the attempts of nurses to practice humanistic, holistic care in line with their professionalizing strategy. Ideally, the intention of nurses is to broaden their concerns beyond the physiological needs of patients, thereby circumventing biomedical control over their work. However, the author argues that resource constraints, and the coalescing of biomedical and managerial definitions of patients, suggest that holistic notions of care are subjected to a new form of calculus and normalizing technology. Critically, nurses are more preoccupied with (...) the day-to-day struggle to free up resources for healthcare, in particular bed spaces, and to pre-empt the problem of bed blocking. Such work suggests that the ‘emptying of beds’ is not just a symbol of accomplishment for nursing work. From the governmentality theory of Foucault, the administration of ‘beds’ has become part of the managerial power/knowledge discourse and an instrument for making nurses toe the financial bottom-line. (shrink)

In this book, David B. Wong defends an ambitious and important new version of moral relativism. He does not espouse the type of relativism that says anything goes, but he does start with a relativist stance against alternative theories such that there need not be only one universal truth. Wong proposes that there can be a plurality of true moralities existing across different traditions and cultures, all with one core human question as to how we can all live (...) together. (shrink)

There are a number of recent attempts to introduce Confucian values to the ethical analysis of technology. These works, however, have not attended sufficiently to one central aspect of Confucianism, namely Ritual (‘Li’). Li is central to Confucian ethics, and it has been suggested that the emphasis on Li in Confucian ethics is what distinguishes it from other ethical traditions. Any discussion of Confucian ethics for technology, therefore, remains incomplete without accounting for Li. This chapter aims to elaborate on the (...) concept of Confucian Li and discuss its relevance to ethics of technology. Particularly, by referring to Li’s communicative, formative, and aesthetic function, I formulate an approach to ethics of technology with an emphasis on community, performance, and the aesthetic and demonstrate how this approach proceeds with the ethical analysis of technology. In doing so, I attempt to answer the question: why Confucianism matters in ethics of technology. (shrink)

The view defended is one sense externalist on the relation between moral reasons and motivation: A's having a moral reason to do X does not necessarily imply that A has a motivation that would support A's doing X via some appropriate deliberative route. However, it is in another sense externalist in holding that there are the kind of moral reasons there are only if the relevant motivational capacities are "generally present" in human beings, if not in all individuals. The process (...) of socialization is an attempt to embed the recognition of what we have moral reason to do in the intentional content of one's feelings. E.g., learning that about others' suffering embeds their suffering as a reason to help in the intentional content of incipient compassionate feelings. This endows the reason with motivational efficacy while conferring further direction to the feelings in ways that shape us for social cooperation. (shrink)

I thought the paper by Kai-yee Wong and Chris Fraser was fascinating and insightful. Two things I especially appreciated are the clarity with which they summarize my views. I think they are quite fair and accurate. Second, I appreciate their suggestion that the way to deal with the practical problem of weakness of will has much to do with the role of the Background in shaping our actions. I think they are especially on the right track when they say (...) that the improvement of Background skills may actually narrow the range of real options for action, (p. 21) nonetheless, they do not decrease freedom. As they say, “It is a process of strengthening the self, and the agent is likely to experience the concomitant restriction of ‘live’ options not as a limitation but as strength of character.” (p. 21). That seems to me very much on the right track. What they are suggesting, and it is a powerful addition to my own writings, is that we should not just think of the Background as facilitating languages, games and social practices generally, but for morality as well (p. 23). (shrink)

The essence of the associated-proposition strategy is to distinguish the necessary proposition _expressed by_ a sentence.

ObjectivePrevious research has shown that adolescents in single-mother households are at heightened risk for adjustment problems. However, limited studies have investigated the mechanisms leading to adolescent problem behaviors in single-mother households. To address this research gap, this study applied the Family Stress Model to examine how single mothers’ material hardship is linked to adolescent problem behaviors, focusing on the mediating roles of mothers’ depression and mother-adolescent closeness. The moderating role of adolescent school connectedness in the relationships between mother-adolescent closeness and (...) school connectedness and between mothers’ depression and school connectedness was also investigated.Materials and methodsThe study analyzed data from 1,384 adolescents and their single mothers who participated in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study at Wave 6. The associations between study variables were analyzed using structural equation modeling by decomposing the direct, indirect, and total effects of material hardship on adolescent problem behaviors. School connectedness’s interactions with mother-adolescent closeness and mothers’ depression were also examined.ResultsResults showed a significant indirect relationship between material hardship and adolescent problem behaviors through sequential mediation of mothers’ depression and mother-adolescent closeness. Mothers’ depression also significantly mediated the relationship between material hardship and problem behaviors. Lastly, school connectedness moderated the relationship between mother-adolescent closeness and adolescents’ internalizing behaviors. The association between mother-adolescent closeness and adolescents’ internalizing behavior was weaker for adolescents with higher levels of school connectedness.ConclusionThe results indicate the important indirect effect of economic strain on adolescents’ problems behaviors in single-mother households, which has been less emphasized compared to the effects in earlier childhood. High rates of material hardship and adolescent problem behaviors in single-mother families call for multifaceted interventions focusing on family processes and protective factors, including school environment. (shrink)

The present research seeks to utilize Implicit Theories of Intelligence and Achievement Goal Theory to understand students’ intrinsic motivation and academic performance in mathematics in Singapore. 1,201 lower-progress stream students, ages ranged from 13 to 17 years, from 17 secondary schools in Singapore took part in the study. Using structural equation modeling, results confirmed hypotheses that incremental mindset predicted mastery-approach goals and, in turn, predicted intrinsic motivation and mathematics performance. Entity mindset predicted performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals. Performance-approach goal was positively (...) linked to intrinsic motivation and mathematics performance; performance-avoidance goal, however, negatively predicted intrinsic motivation and mathematics performance. The model accounted for 35.9% of variance in intrinsic motivation and 13.8% in mathematics performance. These findings suggest that intrinsic motivation toward mathematics and achievement scores might be enhanced through interventions that focus on incremental mindset and mastery-approach goal. In addition, performance-approach goal may enhance intrinsic motivation and achievement as well, but to a lesser extent. Finally, the study adds to the literature done in the Asian context and lends support to the contention that culture may affect students’ mindsets and adoption of achievement goals, and their associated impact on motivation and achievement outcomes. (shrink)

The present study investigates the dynamics of emotional processing and awareness using an affective facial priming paradigm in conjunction with a multimodal assessment of awareness. Key facial primes are visually masked, and are presented for brief and extended durations. Using a preference measure, we examine whether the effects of the primes differ qualitatively . We show that: unconscious affective priming with faces emerges strongly in initial presentations and diminishes rapidly with repetition; conscious affective priming also emerges strongly in initial presentations, (...) however it persists in strength with repetition; and in contrast to other reports on the salience of negative stimuli, happy faces appear more salient than sad faces when presented outside awareness. We discuss the limits and extensions of unconscious affective priming with faces, and consider several methodological and conceptual questions concerning emotional processing out of awareness. (shrink)

This paper is to inform the recent situations of work by the foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Hong Kong through the lens of Covid-19. Through the interviews with seven informants — two employers and five FDWs, stories describing the changes in their working conditions, rights and entitlement, and the contextual environment related to the impacts of Covid-19 were collected. They were analysed through three theoretical tools — visibility/invisibility, mobility/immobility, and work boundary. The findings show that under the Covid-19 crisis, the (...) FDWs experienced more hardships and struggles in both the home country and host country. The paradoxes of visibility/invisibility and mobility/immobility together with blurred work boundary were found in their experience of work, rights and entitlement, and the contextual environment. On one hand, the employers’ power of controlling FDWs has increased, but the agency to resist by the FDWs has decreased making them to turn to more passive means of resistance which could harm the FDWs’ physical and mental health and wellbeing. (shrink)

Although healthcare workers play a crucial role in helping curb the hazardous health impact of coronavirus disease 2019, their lives and major functioning have been greatly affected by the pandemic. This study examined the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the quality of life of Malaysian healthcare workers and its predictive factors. An online sample of 389 university-based healthcare workers completed questionnaires on demographics, clinical features, COVID-19-related stressors, psychological experiences, and perceived social support after the movement lockdown was lifted. All (...) domains of QoL were within the norms of the general population except for social relationship QoL, which was lower than the norm. Multiple linear regression analysis indicated that COVID-19-related stressors and psychological sequelae predicted lower QoL. Conversely, greater perceived social support from friends and significant others predicted higher QoL. Clinical and demographic characteristics predicted QoL to a lesser extent: A history of pre-existing medical illness was associated only with lower physical health QoL, whereas older age and being single, divorced, or widowed were only predictive of higher environmental QoL. Efforts to enhance QoL among healthcare workers in response to the pandemic should focus on mitigating COVID-19-related stressors and psychological sequelae and facilitating social support. (shrink)

This is a critical discussion of Paul Humphreys's fusion view of emergence, focusing on the basal loss feature of his ontology. The discussion yields some general morals for special science ontology.

As behavioural economics reveals, human decision-making deviates from neoclassical assumptions about human behaviour and people (often) fail to make the ‘right’ welfare-enhancing choice. The purpose of Sunstein and Thaler’s concept of ‘nudge’ is to improve individual welfare. To provide normative justification, they argue that the only relevant normative criterion is whether the individual is ‘better off as judged by themselves’, so that the direction in which people are to be nudged is defined by their own preferences. In light of behavioural (...) findings, however, people’s choices do not provide a sound basis for eliciting preferences and thus for assessing welfare. In this paper, I aim to challenge Sunstein and Thaler’s normative view, arguing that it is unreasonable to rely on conventional welfare economics, particularly considering the given context. Sunstein and Thaler depend on an approach of ‘preference purification’ which assumes informed, latent, and true preferences: As a result they face crucial methodological, epistemological, and practical objections, and cannot show how their approach enhances individual welfare. By building on the concepts of R. Sugden and C. Schubert, I develop an alternative normative framework for behavioural public policy, based on a contractualist perspective in which people may consent to collective choice rules in order to align future behaviour with values, to achieve particular goals or to preserve personal integrity. Individual consent and citizens’ participation and deliberation are crucial to this approach. This contractualist approach may provide a normative justification for behavioural public policy, and help to reconcile behavioural and normative economics. (shrink)

I argue that it is a main theme of Davidson's theory of interpretation that interpretive charity implies the impossibility of massive disagreement. There is clear textual support for that. I then argue that from the first-person point of view of a full-blooded interpreter, the theme must be accepted; and that is precisely why Davidson accepts it. If massive disagreement between speaker and interpreter seems to us easy to imagine, it is only because the imagination involved is third-personal and not full-blooded.

The Art of War application to education is about solving problems to improve student and school success. The Art of War describes the significance of a leader and his knowledge and prudent application of the strategies. At the core of theses strategies is the non-negotiable moral purpose of the leader to be reinforced by other fine qualities as wisdom, commitment, discipline, and courage.

The study of logic usually focuses on either the proof theoretic or the model theoretic properties of logic. Yet the pragmatics of logic is often ignored. In this paper we would like to demonstrate that a logic can be practical in the sense that it can assist us in evaluating and measuring the amount of information in an inconsistent set of data. The underlying notion of information is inspired by Shannon's communication theory. It defines the amount of information of a (...) message in terms of the probability of the message being true. The logic presented here is the paraconsistent logic QC. As such QC logic can be seen as an analytical tool for evaluating data. (shrink)

New technologies not only contribute greatly to society and the economy; they also involve fundamental societal shifts, challenging our values and ideas about ourselves and the world. With a view to aligning technological change and innovation with ethical values, the concept of responsible innovation advocates the inclusion of a variety of stakeholders, in particular from society. In shifting moral responsibility towards the producers of innovations, responsible innovation rejects the standard normative economic view that the ethical evaluation of innovations is a (...) matter of individual consumers’ market-based choices. However, in this article we argue that responsible innovation should not abandon all normative consideration of the individual outright, to which end we present an alternative normative economic approach based on preference learning. We show how this approach can provide an enhanced understanding of responsible innovation by clarifying the redistribution of moral responsibility and casting individuals in the normative role of co-innovators, rather than mere consumers. We argue that responsible innovation should enable individuals to form preferences and evaluate innovations, so as to align innovation with ethical demands. Finally, we show how our proposed approach can be put into practice in so-called laboratories in real-world contexts, using methods from the field of design. In short, drawing on normative economics, this article aims to establish a new understanding of responsible innovation that is conceptually sound and can form the basis for novel innovation practices. (shrink)

This paper starts by investigating Ackermann's interpretation of finite set theory in the natural numbers. We give a formal version of this interpretation from Peano arithmetic (PA) to Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the infinity axiom negated (ZF−inf) and provide an inverse interpretation going the other way. In particular, we emphasize the precise axiomatization of our set theory that is required and point out the necessity of the axiom of transitive containment or (equivalently) the axiom scheme of ∈-induction. This clarifies the (...) nature of the equivalence of PA and ZF−inf and corrects some errors in the literature. We also survey the restrictions of the Ackermann interpretation and its inverse to subsystems of PA and ZF−inf, where full induction, replacement, or separation is not assumed. The paper concludes with a discussion on the problems one faces when the totality of exponentiation fails, or when the existence of unordered pairs or power sets is not guaranteed. (shrink)

Hegel’s famous criticism of Laozi in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, has been a center of controversy in comparative philosophy. It is often regarded as an example of the unfair treatment of Chinese philosophy by its Western counterpart, that the West is measuring the East according to its own standard, imposing on the latter its understanding of what philosophy should be, passing judgment on China that it has no mature philosophy, or, if it has, that it is still (...) in an unsophisticated, primitive stage. However, there has been little serious and detailed discussion about Hegel’s argument in this important and representative document in the dialogue between Western and Chinese philosophy. Most of the .. (shrink)

When The Sound of One Hand Clapping came out in Japan in 1916 it caused a scandal. Zen was a secretive practice, its wisdom relayed from master to novice in strictest privacy. That a handbook existed recording not only the riddling koans that are central to Zen teaching but also detailing the answers to them seemed to mark Zen as rote, not revelatory. For all that, The Sound of One Hand Clapping opens the door to Zen like no other book. (...) Including koans that go back to the master who first brought the koanteaching method from Japan to China in the eighteenth century, this book offers, in the words of the translator, editor, and Zen initiate Yoel Hoffmann, "the clearest, most detailed, and most correct picture of Zen" that can be found. What we have here is an extraordinary introduction to Zen thought as lived thought, a treasury of problems, paradoxes, and performance that will appeal to artists, writers, and philosophers as well as Buddhists and students of religion. (shrink)

In October 2019, the Belgian government announced the opening of an asylum center in a former retirement home, leading to civic and political protest that escalated into arson. We examine the construction of the events before, on, and after the arson by analyzing 135 articles from Flemish newspapers, the public broadcaster’s news website, and alternative media between October 25 and November 30, 2019 using qualitative content analysis. Our analysis emphasizes journalists’ role as gatekeepers, deciding which actors get access and legitimation (...) in media coverage. Focus is on the dynamic process of how events become discursively constructed through the interventions of journalists and their sources attempting to gain primary definer status. Our analysis confirms that institutional sources remain more likely to achieve primary definer status in legacy news media. Alternative media perform similar discursive interventions as legacy news media but utilize them to provide access and legitimacy to different actors and standpoints. In the first days of news coverage, in particular, the narratives developed in right-leaning alternative media seemed to spread in legacy news media. In the following days, governmental actors and experts, through their interventions in legacy news media, were able to steer the discourse in a different direction. (shrink)

The negative co‐variation of life‐history traits such as fecundity and lifespan across species suggests the existence of ubiquitous trade‐offs. Mechanistically, trade‐offs result from the need to differentially allocate limited resources to traits like reproduction versus self‐maintenance, with selection favoring the evolution of optimal allocation mechanism. Here I discuss the physiological (endocrine) mechanisms that underlie optimal allocation rules and how such rules evolve. The hormone testosterone may mediate life‐history trade‐offs due to its pleiotropic actions in male vertebrates. Conservation in the actions (...) of testosterone in vertebrates has prompted the ‘evolutionary constraint hypothesis,’ which assumes that testosterone signaling mechanisms and male traits evolve as a unit. This hypothesis implies that the actions of testosterone are similar across sexes and species, and only the levels of circulating testosterone concentrations change during evolution. In contrast, the ‘evolutionary potential hypothesis’ proposes that testosterone signaling mechanisms and male traits evolve independently. In the latter scenario, the linkage between hormone and traits itself can be shaped by selection, leading to variation in trade‐off functions. I will review recent case studies supporting the evolutionary potential hypothesis and suggest micro‐evolutionary experiments to unravel the mechanistic basis of life‐history evolution. BioEssays 29: 133–144, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Although the same environmental regulations apply to all regions in China, legal enforcement can be different due to local economic development priorities. There is still a lack of knowledge about how regional disparities affect the operating performance results of the implementation of corporate environmental management practices, thus providing little information for foreign companies when they invest and develop their production base in China. To fill this research gap, this paper collects data from the Fortune 500 Chinese firms to investigate the (...) moderating role of regional disparities in affecting the performance results of corporate environmental management efforts based on the institutional theory. The disclosed corporate environmental responsibility practices serve as proxy to represent corporate environmental management practices. Content analysis approach was applied to collect and analyze CER practices published in the corporate reports of Chinese manufacturers. The results show that CER has a positive impact on operating income, while regional disparities influence the relationship between CER and corporate operating income. Specifically, CER and operating income are positively related in Eastern China; on the contrary, they are negatively related in Western China. This paper adds to the body of knowledge about environmental discrepancies in the same emerging economy, and provides insights for systematic consideration in terms of the issues of government environmental regulations and corporate environmental strategies. (shrink)

The practice of covertly administering medication is controversial. Although condemned by some as overly paternalistic, others have suggested that it may be acceptable if patients have permanent mental incapacity and refuse needed treatment. Ethical, legal, and clinical considerations become more complex when the mental incapacity is temporary and when the medication actually serves to restore autonomy. We discuss these issues in the context of a young man with schizophrenia. His mother had been giving him antipsychotic medication covertly in his soup. (...) Should the doctor continue to provide a prescription, thus allowing this to continue? We discuss this case based on the “four principles” ethical framework, addressing the conflict between autonomy and beneficence/non-maleficence, the role of antipsychotics as an autonomy restoring agent, truth telling and the balance between individual versus family autonomy. (shrink)

The Chinese ethical tradition has often been thought to oppose Western views of the self as autonomous and possessed of individual rights with views that emphasize the centrality of relationship and community to the self. The essays in this collection discuss the validity of that contrast as it concerns Confucianism, the single most influential Chinese school of thought. Alasdair MacIntyre, the single most influential philosopher to articulate the need for dialogue across traditions, contributes a concluding essay of commentary. This is (...) the only consistently philosophical collection on Asia and human rights and could be used in courses on comparative ethics, political philosophy and Asian area studies. (shrink)

With advances in genetic technology, there are increasing concerns about the way in which genetic information may be abused, particularly in people at increased genetic risk of developing certain disorders. In a recent case in Hong Kong, the court ruled that it was unlawful for the civil service to discriminate in employment, for the sake of public safety, against people with a family history of mental illness. The plaintiffs showed no signs of any mental health problems and no genetic testing (...) was performed. This was the first case concerning genetic discrimination in common law jurisdictions, therefore the court's judgment has implications for how genetic discrimination cases may be considered in the future. The court considered it inappropriate to apply population statistics or lifetime risks to individuals while examining fitness for work. It recommended an individualised assessment of specific risks within the job, relative to other risks posed by that workplace. (shrink)