We agree with van der Pijl et al that the question of how to ensure consent is obtained for procedures which occur during labour and childbirth is vitally important, and worthy of greater attention.1 However, we argue that the modified opt-out approach to consent outlined in their paper may not do enough to protect the choice and agency of birthing people. Moreover, while their approach reflects a pragmatic attempt to facilitate legal clarity and certainty in this context, this is not (...) necessarily responsive to the messy realities of decision-making during labour (and beyond). We outline some of our concerns with their proposals and demonstrate how these illuminate some broader, longstanding tensions around consent and medical law. The authors place significant focus on the particularities of labour, outlining six ways in which maternity care is ‘unlike the usual healthcare setting’ (van der Pijl M et al,1p4). We support the need for attentiveness to these particularities and the problematic nature of consent in this context. Recent scholarly attention on the possible ‘political, ethical and theoretical implications and meanings of birthing embodiment’ (Chadwick R,2p2) has invited more nuanced conversation about consent, agency and decision-making during labour. However, while recognising the embodied particularities of labour, we must also avoid essentialising the differences of labouring bodies and thereby reinforcing exclusionary norms of consent. This points to a long-standing tension in feminist theory between the universal and the particular; between recognising and responding to the powerlessness of individuals without …. (shrink)

In this paper I assess the labour ward admission policies introduced by some National Health Service trusts during the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that these intersected with other policies in a manner which may have coerced birthing people into consenting to vaginal examinations they might have otherwise refused. In order to fully understand the potential severity of these policies, I situate this critique in the historical and contemporary context of the problematic relationship between consent and vaginal examinations. Identifying the legal wrongs (...) associated with performing coerced vaginal examinations, I highlight that the law is inadequately equipped to provide appropriate redress. Further, I illustrate that the issue explored in this paper reflects broader problems which exist with regard to the focus of, and the investment in, the maternity services. (shrink)

Those giving birth within modern maternity systems are recognised as facing a number of barriers to person-centred care. In this paper, I argue that in order to best facilitate the conditions for positive change, work needs to be done to provide a more granular articulation of the specific barriers. I then offer a nuanced and contextually aware articulation of one key component of the overall failure to ensure person-centred care: medical authority and the expectation of conformity. Articulating these barriers with (...) increased specificity is valuable, as it creates a stronger foundation from which to challenge existing problems which serve to constrain the autonomy of birthing individuals. The analysis offered in this paper also underscores the need for change at an institutional, rather than individual, level. (shrink)

This book surveys research in quantification starting with the foundational work in the 1970s. It paints a vivid picture of generalized quantifiers and Boolean semantics. It explains how the discovery of diverse scope behavior in the 1990s transformed the view of quantification, and how the study of the internal composition of quantifiers has become central in recent years. It presents different approaches to the same problems, and links modern logic and formal semantics to advances in generative syntax. A unique feature (...) of the book is that it systematically brings cross-linguistic data to bear on the theoretical issues, discussing French, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Russian, Japanese, Telugu (Dravidian), and Shupamem (Grassfield Bantu), and pointing to formal semantic literature involving quantification in around thirty languages. -- -/- 1. What this book is about and how to use it; 2. Generalized quantifiers and their elements: operators and their scopes; 3. Generalized quantifiers in non-nominal domains; 4. Some empirically significant properties of quantifiers and determiners; 5. Potential challenges for generalized quantifiers; 6. Scope is not uniform and not a primitive; 7. Existential scope versus distributive scope; 8. Distributivity and scope; 9. Bare numeral indefinites; 10. Modified numerals; 11. Clause-internal scopal diversity; 12. Towards a compositional semantics of quantifier words. (shrink)

The article deals with the influence of organizational ethics program components on managerial ethical behavior. The main aim was to establish which EP components are perceived as valuable and useful to foster the ethical behavior of managers. Moreover, we also aimed to investigate the role of ethics training in this context and to explore whether it can potentially increase managers’ trust in EP components as effective tools for the promotion of ethical behavior. The article advances the EP theory in several (...) ways. It offers novel insights into both business ethics and EP development in the specific cultural and social circumstances of a former socialist country in the Central and Eastern European region, Slovakia. It shows that codes of ethics and related reporting and control mechanisms are perceived as the most effective EP components to shape managerial ethical behavior. Furthermore, based on empirical evidence, and to some extent contrary to prior theory, the article unveils three EP functions, namely the ‘compliance with group norms,’ the ‘ethics education through collective discussion,’ and the ‘counselling and resolving of ethical issues’ at workplace. In addition, the article shows that ethics trainings can help to boost the trust of managers toward EP components and might be conceptualized as a precursor for an effectively functioning EP. (shrink)

This article demonstrates that emotion concepts—including the so‐called basic ones, such as anger or sadness—can be defined in terms of universal semantic primitives such as “good”, “bad”, “do”, “happen”, “know”, and “want”, in terms of which all areas of meaning, in all languages, can be rigorously and revealingly portrayed.The definitions proposed here take the form of certain prototypical scripts or scenarios, formulated in terms of thoughts, wants, and feelings. These scripts, however, can be seen as formulas providing rigorous specifications of (...) necessary and sufficient conditions (not for emotions as such, but for emotion concepts), and they do not support the idea that boundaries between emotion concepts are “fuzzy.” On the contrary, the small set of universal semantic primitives employed here (which has emerged from two decades of empirical investigations by the author and colleagues) demonstrates that even apparent synonyms such as sad and unhappy embody different—and fully specifiable—conceptual structures. (shrink)

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

According to the PCCP thesis, the probability of a conditional A → C is the conditional probability P. This claim is undermined by Lewis’ triviality results, which purport to show that apart from trivial cases, PCCP is not true. In the present article we show that the only rational, “Dutch Book-resistant” extension of the agent’s beliefs concerning non-conditional sentences A and C to the conditional A → C is by assuming that P = P. In other cases a diachronic Dutch (...) Book against the agent can be constructed. There is a tension between our findings and Lewis’ results, which needs to be explained. Therefore, we present a probability space which corresponds in a natural way to the diachronic Dutch Book—and which allows the conditional A → C to be interpreted as an event in a mathematically sound way. It also allows to formalize the notion of conditionalizing A → C on ¬C which plays a crucial role in Lewis’ proof. Our conclusion is that Lewis’ proof is circular, so it cannot be considered to be a sound argument against PCCP. (shrink)

This article discusses two normative questions raised by cases of colonial settlement. First, is it sometimes wrong to migrate and settle in a previously inhabited land? If so, under what conditions? Second, should settler countries ever take steps to undo wrongful settlement, by enforcing repatriation and return? The article argues that it is wrong to settle in another country in cases where one comes with intent to colonize the population against their will, or one possesses an adequate territorial base somewhere (...) else, lacks an urgent interest in moving, and seeks to settle in a new place under conditions where settlement would severely harm the practices of prior occupants. It also argues for a presumption of repatriation and return in the first generation of wrongful settlement and holds that these remedies may be extended to second and higher generations in some – but not all – cases. (shrink)

Semantics of natural language; includes some Australian language examples.

The paper develops a philosophical account of emotions experienced and communicated on the internet, and, in particular, in the context of social media use. A growing body of research across disciplines has investigated the distinctive features of emotions in the digital age, and a key question in this regard concerns whether online emotions are the same kind of phenomena as those undergone offline. In this paper, I contribute to addressing this question by suggesting that the structure and characteristic features of (...) internet-mediated emotions can be accounted for within the perspective of Peter Goldie’s narrative theory of emotion. To do so, I first offer a reconstruction of Goldie’s conception of emotions as complex, dynamic, episodic and structured phenomena. I then move to show how the experience of emotions on social media like Facebook displays the characteristics which are at the core of Goldie’s account, proceeding to suggest that this enables us to better understand some of the features of emotions undergone on the internet. More specifically, I argue that the intensity, persistence and contagiousness of some online emotions can be better understood if we adopt Goldie’s framework. (shrink)

This chapter argues that human and animal minds indeed depend on a collection of domain-specific, task-specific, and encapsulated cognitive systems: on a set of cognitive ‘modules’ in Fodor's sense. It also argues that human and animal minds are endowed with domain-general, central systems that orchestrate the information delivered by core knowledge systems. The chapter begins by reviewing the literature on spatial reorientation in animals and in young children, arguing that spatial reorientation bears the hallmarks of core knowledge and of modularity. (...) It then considers studies of older children and adults, arguing that human spatial representations change qualitatively over development and show capacities not found in any other species. Finally, it presents two new experiments that investigate the role of emerging spatial language in uniquely human navigation performance. (shrink)

Biosemiotics deals with the processes of signs in all dimensions of nature. Semiosis is the primary form of intelligence. Intelligent behaviour becomes immediately understandable in this approach because semiosis combines causality with the triadic structure of the semiotic sign. Intelligence is a process created in a given context. In the course of evolution organisms have learned to create increasingly sophisticated internal representations of external state. Semiosis is the precursor of the emergence of a feature we consider intelligence. Biosemiotics also draws (...) attention to the distributed intelligence, which relies on external semiotic scaffoldings as much as on the subject’s abilities and knowledge. (shrink)

While John Tomasi's Free Market Fairness is ambitious, provocative, and does much to reinvigorate debate about economic justice, his argument for market democracy is not compelling. I discuss two objections. First, I offer doubts about whether “thick” economic freedom is a condition of democratic legitimacy. While Tomasi raises the intriguing possibility that liberal commitments may justify a somewhat more expansive list of economic rights than traditionally recognized, he fails to give a well-worked-out account of these rights. Instead, he argues for (...) unfettered economic liberty without adequately connecting it to citizens' self-authorship, or showing how it could feasibly be protected alongside other basic liberties. Second, I argue that a concern for citizens' agency and economic self-authorship should lead us to endorse a social-democratic regime, not a market-democratic one. Market democracy leaves out or heavily revises key aspects of justice as fairness as developed by Rawls, including fair equality of opportunity and the fair value of the political liberties. Moreover, while Tomasi claims that social democracy rests on a perfectionist prioritizing of citizens' status over their agency, I argue that social democracy is best defended on agency-based grounds. (shrink)

The main purpose of the paper is to justify the thesis that the presence of biological information is conditional for existence and persistence of life. We will begin with the notion of biological information. In this proposition information is identified with impact, and it is shown the dependence of its location and functioning on the level of organization of animate matter. In accordance with a suggestion of Thomas Aquinas, it seems that precisely information is the reason for the appearance of (...) socalled immanent activities where new life appears. (shrink)

Recoge: Aspectos históricos de la revolución química; Aplicación de los modelos; Nuevo enfoque para la construcción de modelos de dinámica científica.

Research involving children or other incompetent subjects who are deemed unable to provide informed consent is complex, particularly in the case of research that does not directly benefit the research subjects themselves. The Helsinki Declaration, the World Medical Association's landmark document for research ethics, therefore states that incompetent research subjects must not be included in such research unless it entails only minimal risk and minimal burden. In this paper, we argue that now that research in these groups is expected to (...) expand, this undifferentiated minimal risk and burden requirement does not suffice any more. In the upcoming revision of the Declaration, the paragraph at stake should be refined in such a way that it is not unnecessarily restrictive or more permissive than can be ethically justified. Our first recommendation is to stimulate research ethics committees to identify more accurately those risks and burdens that the research subjects must undergo solely for research purposes by distinguishing between two types of study procedures instead of between two types of studies. Our second recommendation is to allow for exceptions to the minimal risk and burden requirement in cases of exceptionally valuable studies that involve subjects who can give their assent to participate in the study and that involve at most a minor increase over minimal risk and/or burden. (shrink)

For each research protocol that they review, institutional review boards must assess whether the risks of the protocol are acceptable in relation to the potential direct benefits to study participants and/or society. This requirement means that an IRB should first identify risks that are not compensated by direct benefits to the subjects and then judge whether these so-called net risks are acceptable in relation to the benefits to society. We argue that the conventional approach to risk-benefit assessment is not accurate (...) enough to identify all net risks involved in any given protocol. Two relatively new approaches—the component analysis approach and the net risks test—can be of much more use to review boards, especially when used together. (shrink)

Stakeholder maneuvers such as Internet media attacks or consumer boycotts can have devastating effects on companies. By contrary, vital relationships between companies and their stakeholders can be highly beneficial. A review of the existing stakeholder-management literature suggests to engage stakeholders in business activities in a positive manner. However, the types of successful engagement activities differ across industries. The purposes of this article are to develop an explanatory framework based on the literature findings, to introduce stakeholder-engagement literature to a segment of (...) the water sourcing industry, and to unfold industry’s stakeholder-engagement measures. Based on a content analysis of 11 cases, we investigate if and how companies in the natural mineral water bottling industry in Austria inform, communicate, and therefore engage with stakeholders. It became evident that fewer than three of eleven companies published information on sustainability or corporate social responsibility reports, open house days, workshops, or international community activities. Most companies maintained a website for their bottled natural mineral water or communicated quality consciousness. We conclude that most companies in the Austrian mineral water industry could increase their stakeholder-engagement activities to positively respond to challenging business environments. (shrink)

This article is the first to bring into scientific discussion and to provide a historico-philosophical analysis of a manuscript “Neoplatonic Philosophy from the archive of Pamfil Danylovych Yurkevych. The reviewed manuscript belongs to P. D. Yurkevych’s handwritten nachlass stored in the funds of the Institute of Manuscript of V. I. Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in the city of Kyiv. Additional archival materials are involved to answer several research questions. The author of this article provides arguments in favor of proving (...) that the manuscript is to be attributed to P. D. Yurkevych’s own handwriting, to be dated circa 1856, and that the purposing of its content is to be qualified as didactic. As it is established in the article, textual content of the manuscript in question is an original concise description and analysis of neoplatonic philosophy, which belongs to the set of materials created by P. D. Yurkevych in preparation for teaching the course on Ancient Philosophy in Kyiv Theological Academy during Kyivan period of his work. Turning to the inner critique of the manuscript, author of this article emphasizes an analysis that P. D. Yurkevych conducts concerning Plotinus’s ideas of the process of emanation of the world from the One and the role that philosophy has in true cognition. While comparing the manuscript “Neoplatonic Philosophy” with one of P. D. Yurkevych’s substantial philosophical works “Idea”, additional light is shed upon the prosess of genesis and development of Christian-Platonic worldview of the thinker. Furthermore, it is established that the manuscript in question played a major role in P. D. Yurkevych’s own schooling, particulary concerning his view on the philosophy of Plotinus, and his general reception of the Platonic tradition. (shrink)