This paper relates Donaldson and Dunfee’s Integrative Social Contracts Theory to the problem of gender discrimination. We make the assumption that multinational managers might seek some guidance from ISCT to resolve ethical issues of gender discrimination in countries indifferent or hostile to gender equaIity. The role of Donaldson and Dunfee’s “hypernorms” seems especially cruciaI, and we find that, under their writings thus far, no “hypernorms” exist to make unethical the most blatant acts of sex discrimination in a host country whose (...) local norms tolerate such discrimination. The genesis of “hypernorms” as “global moral minimums” is recounted, and specific application of ISCT to a familiar ethics case (“A Foreign Assignment”) is provided. (shrink)

Urban communities in 21st century America are facing severe economic challenges, ones that suggest a mandate to contemplate serious changes in the way America does business. The middle class is diminishing in many parts of the country, with consequences for the economy as a whole. When faced with the loss of its economic base, any business community must make some difficult decisions about its proper role and responsibilities. Decisions to support the community must be balanced alongside and against responsibilities to (...) owners, shareholders and relevant “stakeholders” in a relatively new context. Corporations in urban communities “hollowed out” by white flight or urban sprawl must decide what level of support they can and should provide. This paper examines corporate decisions within the emerging urban prosperity initiatives, using the framework of integrative social contract theory proposed by Donaldson and Dunfee. We suggest that urban prosperity initiatives present a mandate on corporations sufficiently strong as to qualify as an authentic norm. Further, we argue that strict adherence to a corporate bottom line approach or “corporate isolationism” is not congruent with contemporary community standards. (shrink)

U.S. multinational enterprises must now follow the policies of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in their overseas operations, at least with respect to U.S. expatriate employees. Doing so in a culture which discourages gender equality in the workplace raises difficult issues, both practically and ethically. Vigorously importing U.S. attitudes toward gender-equality into a social culture such as Japan or Saudi Arabia may seem ethnocentric, a version of ethical imperialism. Yet adapting to host country norms risks a (...) kind of moral relativism. This article supports the view that MNEs which promote workplace equality in a host country such as Japan, which is actively involved in the international economic and political community, is not ethical imperialism in any pejorative sense and is preferable to a moral relativism or social contract approach.We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain rights — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (shrink)

The intersection of ethics, computing, and genetics plots a space not yet adequately mapped, despite its importance, indeed, its rapidly growing importance. Its subdomains are well-enough known: or the study of ethical issues in genetics and genomics, is part of core curricula everywhere. Ethics and computing is an established subfield. Computing and geneticshas in little more than a decade progressed from subsubspecialty to the sine qua non of contemporary biomedical research, and it bids fair to transform clinical practice. We must (...) prepare for the complete digitization of the genomes of individual patients and the storage of millions of these genomes in very large databases. (shrink)

One of the main challenges in medicine is to guarantee an appropriate drug supply according to the real needs of patients. Closed-loop strategies have been widely used to develop automatic solutions based on feedback variables. However, when the variable of interest cannot be directly measured or there is a lack of knowledge behind the process, it turns into a difficult issue to solve. In this research, a novel algorithm to approach this problem is presented. The main objective of this study (...) is to provide a new general algorithm capable of determining the influence of a certain clinical variable in the decision making process for drug supply and then defining an automatic system able to guide the process considering this information. Thus, this new technique will provide a way to validate a given physiological signal as a feedback variable for drug titration. In addition, the result of the algorithm in terms of fuzzy rules and membership functions will define a fuzzy-based decision system for the drug delivery process. The method proposed is based on a Fuzzy Inference System whose structure is obtained through a decision tree algorithm. A four-step methodology is then developed: data collection, preprocessing, Fuzzy Inference System generation, and the validation of results. To test this methodology, the analgesia control scenario was analysed. Specifically, the viability of the Analgesia Nociception Index as a guiding variable for the analgesic process during surgical interventions was studied. Real data was obtained from fifteen patients undergoing cholecystectomy surgery. (shrink)

This work focuses on the application of machine learning techniques to assist the clinicians in the administration of analgesic drug during general anaesthesia. Specifically, the main objective is to propose the basis of an intelligent system capable of making decisions to guide the opioid dose changes based on a new nociception monitor, the analgesia nociception index. Clinical data were obtained from 15 patients undergoing cholecystectomy surgery. By means of an off-line study, machine learning techniques were applied to analyse the possible (...) relationship between the analgesic dose changes performed by the physician due to the hemodynamic activity of the patients and the evolution of the ANI. After training different classifiers and testing the results under cross validation, a preliminary relationship between the evolution of ANI and the dosage of remifentanil was found. These results evidence the potential of the ANI as a promising index to guide the infusion of analgesia. (shrink)

Thesis: Those affected by mental disorders whose actions are episodically influenced by their disorder are often overlooked by philosophers of moral and ethical responsibility. Allen gives us reasons for thinking it is inappropriate to either: a) “summarily exclude people with mental problems out of the universe of moral agents, reducing them to the status of rocks, trees, animals, and infants” b) “include the group on the false assumption that their moral lives are precisely like the paradigmatic moral lives of the (...) epistemically-sound and well-regulated people never personally touched by a mental condition” We must explore a revised approach to moral and ethical responsibility and obligation for this group. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es proporcionar algunas claves históricas y conceptuales para comprender la historia del socialismo británico libertarian y su relación con la concepción fiduciaria del poder político y del poder económico. Las expresiones de este socialismo no son homogéneas, convivieron con otras ideas rivales llegando en ocasiones a mezclarse con ellas; y fueron formuladas siempre como respuestas concretas ante los problemas que planteaba cada momento histórico. Desde el socialismo republicano de algunos seguidores de Robert Owen hasta los (...) desafíos que planteó la New Left, las teorías fiduciarias encontraron hueco para abrirse paso en los escritos de estos socialistas libertarian. The objective of this paper is to provide some historical and conceptual keys to understand the history of libertarian British socialism, and its relationship with the fiduciary conception of political power and economic power. The expressions of this libertarian socialism are not homogeneous, they coexisted with other rival conceptions, sometimes mixing with them. Those articulations were always formulated as concrete responses to the problems laid out by different historical moments. From the republican socialism of some Robert Owen’s followers to the challenges exposed by the New Left, fiduciary theory found room to break through in the writings of these libertarian socialists. (shrink)

In traditional linguistic accounts of context, one thinks of the immediate features of a speech situation, that is, a situation in which an expression is uttered. Thus, features such as time, location, speaker, hearer and preceding discourse are all parts of context. But context is a wider and more transcendental notion than what these accounts imply. For one thing, context is a relational concept relating social actions and their surroundings, relating social actions, relating individual actors and their surroundings, and relating (...) the set of individual actors and their social actions to their surroundings. (shrink)

Today, more corporations disclose information about their environmental performance in response to stakeholder demands of environmental responsibility and accountability. What information do corporations disclose on their websites? This paper investigates the environmental management policies and practices of the 200 largest corporations in the world. Based on a content analysis of the environmental reports of Fortune’s Global 200 companies, this research analyzes the content of corporate environmental disclosures with respect to the following seven areas: environmental planning considerations, top management support to (...) the institutionalization of environmental concerns, environmental structures and organizing specifics, environmental leadership activities, environmental control, external validations or certifications of environmental programs, and forms of corporate environmental disclosures. (shrink)

Ethics applications to conduct research with children who have experienced domestic violence will frequently raise a red flag to ethics committees about the potential for risk and re-traumatization. On the other hand, such sensitive research can enable a hidden, marginalized population to have their voices heard. It can deliver findings about children’s lives that can inform otherwise adult-centric research, policy and practice initiatives. The authors highlight ethical concerns and practical solutions using examples from domestic violence, family law and child abuse (...) research with children. Ethical planning is explored according to methodologies, context and whether the violence has been named. Also discussed are consent procedures, confidentiality and the development of protocols for disclosure, distress, safety and risk assessment, which support ethical and safe research with children. (shrink)

How do I know whether there are any minds beside my own? This problem of other minds in philosophy raises questions which are at the heart of all philosophical investigations--how it is that we know, what is in the mind, and whether we can be certain about any of our beliefs. In this book, Anita Avramides begins with a historical overview of the problem from the Ancient Skeptics to Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, and Wittgenstein. The second part of (...) the book investigates the views of influential contemporary philosophers such as Strawson, Davidson, Nagel and Searle. (shrink)

Recent developments in neuroscience have enabled technological advances to modulate cognitive functions of the brain. Despite ethical concerns about cognitive enhancement, both individuals and society as a whole can benefit greatly from these technologies, depending on how we regulate their use. To date, regulatory analyses of neuromodulation technologies have focused on a technology itself – for instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulation of a brain stimulation device – rather than the use of a technology, such as the use (...) of a brain stimulation device at work or school. Given that some forms of cognitive enhancement have already started to penetrate the general public’s everyday life, we should begin our discussion on potential regulatory issues regarding their use in various real-world situations. The goal of the article is to fill the gap by providing an analytic framework to examine these regulatory issues. More specifically, it aims to illustrate the issues around respecting autonomy and preventing coercive use of cognitive enhancement. The proposed framework categories the real-world settings where a neuromodulation technology can be used for cognitive enhancement based on two criteria – who is subjected to cognitive enhancement and who imposes cognitive enhancement. Based on this framework, the article analyzes regulatory issues arising out of every combination of subject/imposing party by taking one example case. Focusing on the regulations in the U.S., this analysis shows the current lack of adequate safeguards against the coercive use and calls for more attention from government agencies and researchers to develop sound policies regarding current and potentially more widespread use of cognitive enhancement. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to evaluate the notion of collective guilt feeling both in the light of research in affectivity and in collective intentionality. The paper is divided into an introduction and three main sections. Section 1) highlights relevant features of guilt‐family emotions such as the relation between feeling guilt and objective guilt, the relation between feeling guilt and its content, and the relation between feeling guilt and the ‘self’. Moreover, the distinction between feeling guilt and feeling (...) regret is given due attention. Section 2) examines Margaret Gilbert's arguments in favor of a collectivist view of collective guilt feeling , according to which groups do genuinely feel guilt. Against the collectivist position I argue for an individualist ‘membership account’ of collective guilt feeling in terms of individual members' we‐feeling of guilt. The membership account of collective guilt feeling is vindicated on grounds of a naturalist and non‐judgmentalist understanding of emotions, as well as on the logic of personal pronouns. It combines individualism regarding the subject of the feeling with collectivism regarding the irreducibility of we‐feelings and provides, as I further argue, the required moral force attributed to collective guilt feeling. The concern of section 3) is the question of the appropriate emotional response to collective wrongdoing. I argue against the view that group members are categorically ‘committed to feel guilt as a body’ for wrongdoings committed by the group. Given that individual members often do not participate in their groups' wrongdoings, it seems unjust to impose a requirement for feeling guilt upon them. I suggest that in a general account of the appropriate assessment of collective wrongdoing, feeling regret is the better candidate than feeling guilt for the role of the minimally required emotional response.For us collectively to feel guilt over our action A is for us to be jointly committed to feeling guilt as a body over our action A. [. . .] The parties [. . .] constitute, as far as possible, a single subject of guilt feelings .[A] collective cannot respond affectively [. . .], only its constitutive members can. The lack of an affective counter‐response is troubling, because the efficacy of responses of accountability partially depends upon affect. The response of shame, guilt, and regret help to register the significance of the harm. (shrink)

Anita Chari revives the concept of reification from Marx and the Frankfurt School to spotlight the resistance to neoliberal capitalism now forming at the level of political economy and at the more sensate, experiential level of subjective transformation. Reading art by Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg, Claire Fontaine, Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg, as well as the politics of Occupy Wall Street, Chari identifies practices through which artists and activists have challenged neoliberalism's social and political logics, exposing its inherent tensions (...) and contradictions. (shrink)

One of the most intriguing of philosophical puzzles concerns other minds. How do you know there are any? Yes, you're surrounded by living organisms that look and behave much as you do. They even say they have minds. But do they? Perhaps other humans are mindless zombies: like you on the outside, but lacking any inner conscious life, including emotions, thoughts, experiences and even pain. What grounds do you possess for supposing that other humans aren't zombies? Perhaps less than you (...) think. Anita Avramides tackles this fascinating question. (shrink)

The Gricean account of language is at the center of much current work in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Anita Avramides maintains that Grice's paradigm can be used to defend very different conceptions of mind and of meaning. In this clearly argued book she describes Grice's analysis of meaning and proposes two interpretations of it, one reductive and one nonreductive. Much current work in cognitive science assumes that the content of words and thoughts can be (...) explained in naturalistic terms. A leading idea (advanced mainly by Stephen Schiffer and Brian Loar) is that the naturalistic account of content will proceed in two stages: a reduction of the semantic features of word; to the contents of propositional attitudes and then a reduction of the latter to physical or functional notions. The appeal of Grice's work on meaning to this two stage reductionist strategy is that Gricean definitions seem to provide the only way of reducing the semantic to the psychological, a reduction that is required for a naturalistic account of intentionality. While Avramides defends the method of analysis as one suited to the concept of meaning, she rejects a reductive interpretation of the analysis. She argues that any attempt to reduce the semantic to the psychological leads to a mistaken conception of mind. She exposes the assumptions behind the reductive interpretation and offers fresh and original arguments for the antireductionist position. Against the reductive Gricean she defends the idea that there is a deep epistemological symmetry between semantic and propositional attitude notions, a result of which is that semantically characterized linguistic behavior is central to our concept of belief. Anita Avramides is Lecturer in Philosophy at The Queens College, The University of Oxfor. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

'Anita L. Allen breaks new ground...A stunning indictment of women's status in contemporary society, her book provides vital original scholarly research and insight.' |s-NEW DIRECTIONS FOR WOMEN.

This paper can be treated as a simplification of the Gentzen formalization of SCI-tautologies presented by A. Michaels in [1].

It is possible to tease out two questions in connection with the epistemological problem of other minds: (i) How do I know what others think and feel? and (ii) How do I know that others think and feel? Fred Dretske offers a perceptual account of our knowledge of other minds that yields an answer to (i) but not (ii). Quassim Cassam uses Dretske’s perceptual account to show how we can answer both (i) and (ii). In this paper I show how (...) we can use Dretske’s work to understand some work by Stanley Cavell. I suggest that, where Dretske claims that we cannot answer (ii), Cavell holds that (ii) is a question that reflects a misunderstanding of our relations to others. In the place of asking how I can know that others think and feel, Cavell holds that I must acknowledge the other. And at the heart of this acknowledgment is an acceptance of others as separate from me. I must acknowledge the other as an other to me. (shrink)

This article engages Axel Honneth’s recent work on Georg Lukács’ concept of reification in order to formulate a politically relevant and historically specific critique of capitalism that is applicable to theorizing contemporary democratic practice. I argue that Honneth’s attempt to reorient the critique of reification within the terms of a theory of recognition has done so at the cost of sacrificing the core of the concept, which forged a connection between the socio-political analysis of capitalist domination and an analysis of (...) the unengaged, spectatorial stance of human beings toward the world, showing how they together impede emancipatory social transformation. In order to accomplish the unfinished task of rendering the critique of reification applicable to contemporary critical theory, I seek to synthesize the advantages of Honneth’s approach, which focuses on the normative aspects of the critique of reification, with Lukács’ emphasis on the practical, political-economic dimensions of reification and the historically specific pathologies of the capitalist social form. (shrink)

The first contribution of this article is a politico-philosophical map that, drawing upon two common sets of arguments against modern natural rights, might help to explain the prevailing neo-republican position on natural rights. Under the label ‘abstraction argument’, we explore the view that natural rights are a metaphysical construct that usually ends in a violent application of speculative principles to society. Under ‘self-interest argument’, we discuss the notion that natural rights endorse an atomistic and selfish conception of the human being. (...) Second, we show how Cold War authors replicated these two arguments, conveying a biased, largely anti-republican and anti-democratic view of natural rights to the twentieth century. Third, drawing on these two arguments, we critically assess the narrow view of natural rights inherited by neo-republican scholars. (shrink)

El presente artículo analiza la conexión humana que acaece en el proceso cinematográfico. Se analiza la conexión desde su capacidad de influencia: emisores y receptores se influyen mutuamente. Se abandona así una concepción mecánica y lineal de la conexión para abordar una conexión más humana y polidireccional. En este sentido, se muestra que, desde una perspectiva productiva, perceptiva y cognitiva, el proceso cinematográfico implica la existencia, en mayor o menor grado, de interacción entre autores, contexto y público. Para comprender cómo (...) tiene lugar la conexión en el cine, se examina desde el psicoanálisis, la sociología y la filosofía del proceso de identificación. Se analizan en detalle seguidamente los distintos procesos humanos de conexión que suceden en el cine, prestando especial atención a la existente entre: emisores/autores y receptores/público, por medio del objeto cinematográfico, la película. (shrink)

L’article inscrit la guerre d’Ukraine dans le cadre d’une politique clausewitzienne de contre-révolution mondiale. Cette guerre interétatique est le résultat du cycle de déploiement des printemps et des soulèvements de la dernière décennie et a des répercussions synchroniques sur un clivage interne qui traverse d’autres pays. L’article se conclut par une vision alternative entre un conflit inter-impérialiste dans lequel l’Europe est menacée par le bloc atlantiste et une dichotomie autocraties/démocraties.

À partir d’auteurs comme Negri, Cocco, Viveiros de Castro et Fanon, cet article discute le devenir-indien comme un concept pour les forces expressives de luttes et de réinvention dans le Sud. À travers de formes concrètes d’intervention, on analyse un mode de résistance à la fois créatif et alternatif, qui prend le contre-pied de l’actuel agenda capitaliste et néo-développementiste.