Activists’ investigations of animal cruelty expose the public to suffering that they may otherwise be unaware of, via an increasingly broad-ranging media. This may result in ethical dilemmas and a wide range of emotions and reactions. Our hypothesis was that media broadcasts of cruelty to cattle in Indonesian abattoirs would result in an emotional response by the public that would drive their actions towards live animal export. A survey of the public in Australia was undertaken to investigate their reactions and (...) responses to. The most common immediate reaction was feeling pity for the cattle. Women were more likely than men to feel sad or angry. Most people discussed the media coverage with others afterwards but fewer than 10 % contacted politicians or wrote to newspapers. We conclude that the public were emotionally affected by the media coverage of cruelty to cattle but that this did not translate into significant behavioral change. We recommend that future broadcasts of animal cruelty should advise the public of contact details for counseling and that mental health support contacts, and information should be included on the websites of animal advocacy groups to acknowledge the disturbing effect animal cruelty exposes can have on the public. (shrink)
In Medical Sexism: Contraception Access, Reproductive Medicine, and Health Care, Jill B. Delston uses a feminist lens to examine the overwhelmingly common gynecological practice of declining to write prescriptions for oral contraceptives unless a woman agrees to an annual Pap smear, which is used to detect precancerous changes, as well as cancer of the cervix. Employing a comprehensive evaluation of the medical literature, Delston methodically builds a strong argument that these measures not only do not follow evidence-based medical guidelines, but (...) they also carry a significant potential of harm to the patient. Furthermore, cervical cancer prevention has absolutely nothing to do with... (shrink)
Current United States guidelines for neonatal resuscitation note that there is no mandate to resuscitate infants in all situations. For example, the fetus that at the time of delivery is determined to be so premature as to be non-viable need not be aggressively resuscitated. The hypothetical case of an extremely premature infant was presented to neonatologists from the United States and four other European countries at a September 2006 international meeting sponsored by the World Health Organization Collaborating Center in Reproductive (...) Health of Atlanta (currently, the Global Collaborating Center in Reproductive Health). Responses to the case varied by country, due to differences in legal, ethical and related practice parameters, rather than differences in medical technology, as similar medical technology was available within each country. Variations in approach seemed to stem from physicians’ perceptions of their ability to remove the neonate from life support if this appeared non-beneficial. There appears to be a desire for greater convergence in practice options and more open discussion regarding the practical problems underlying the variability. Specifically, the conference attendees identified four areas that need to be addressed: (1) lack of international consensus guidelines in viability and therapeutic options, (2) lack of bodies capable of generating these guidelines, (3) variation in laws between countries, and (4) the frequent failure of physicians and families to confront death at the beginning of life. (shrink)
The Horsemen of Israel: Horses and Chariotry in Monarchic Israel. By Deborah O’Daniel Cantrell. History, Archaeology, and Culture of the Levant, vol. 1. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2011. Pp. xii + 150, illus. $39.50.
The essays in this volume apply philosophical analysis to address three kinds of questions: What are the implications of genetic science for our understanding of nature? What might it influence in our conception of human nature? What challenges does genetic science pose for specific issues of private conduct or public policy?
A key element of the distinction between explicit and implicit cognitive functioning is the presence or absence of conscious awareness. In this review, we consider the proposal that neuropsychological disorders can best be considered in terms of a decoupling between preserved implicit or unconscious processing and impaired explicit or conscious processing. Evidence for dissociations between implicit and explicit processes in blindsight, amnesia, object agnosia, prosopagnosia, hemi-neglect, and aphasia is examined. The implications of these findings for a) our understanding of a (...) variety of neuropsychological disorders, b) the conceptualization of normal cognitive functioning, c) the neural basis of consciousness, and d) the clinical rehabilitation of brain-injured individuals are also discussed. (shrink)
Since the advent of the women's movement, women have made unprecedented gains in almost every field, from politics to the professions. Paradoxically, doctors and mental health professionals have also seen a staggering increase in the numbers of young women suffering from an epidemic of depression, eating disorders, and other physical and psychological problems. In The Cost of Competence, authors Brett Silverstein and Deborah Perlick argue that rather than simply labeling individual women as, say, anorexic or depressed, it is time (...) to look harder at the widespread prejudices within our society and child-rearing practices that lead thousands of young women to equate thinness with competence and success, and femininity with failure. They argue that continuing to treat depression, anxiety, anorexia and bulimia as separate disorders in young women can, in many cases, be a misguided approach since they are really part of a single syndrome. Furthermore, their fascinating research into the lives of forty prominent women from Elizabeth I to Eleanor Roosevelt show that these symptoms have been disrupting the lives of bright, ambitious women not for decades, but for centuries. Drawing on all the latest findings, rare historical research, cross-cultural comparisons, and their own study of over 2,000 contemporary women attending high schools and colleges, the authors present powerful new evidence to support the existence of a syndrome they call anxious somatic depression. Their investigation shows that the first symptoms usually surface in adolescence, most often in young women who aspire to excel academically and professionally. Many of the affected women grew up feeling that their parents valued sons over daughters. They identified intellectually with their successful fathers, not with their traditional homemaker mothers. Disordered eating is one way of rejecting the feminine bodies they perceive as barriers to achievement and recognition. Silverstein and Perlick uncover medical descriptions matching their diagnosis in Hippocratic texts from the fourth century B.C., in anthropological studies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in case studies of many noted psychologists and psychiatrists, including the "hysteric" patients Freud used to develop his theories on psychoanalysis. They have also discovered that statistics on disordered eating, depression, and a host of other symptoms soared in eras in which women's opportunities grew--particularly the 1920s, when record numbers of women entered college and the workforce, the boyish silhouette of the flapper became the feminine ideal, and anorexia became epidemic, and again from the 1970s to the present day. The authors show that identifying this devastating syndrome is a first step toward its prevention and cure. The Cost of Competence presents an urgent message to parents, educators, policymakers, and the medical community on the crucial importance of providing young women with equal opportunity, and equal respect. (shrink)
Chefs have been recognized as potentially important partners in efforts to promote local food systems. Drawing on the diffusion of innovation framework we (a) examine the characteristics of chefs and restaurants that have adopted local foods; (b) identified local food attributes valued by restaurants; (c) examine how restaurants function as opinion leaders promoting local foods; (d) explored network linkages between culinary and production organizations; and (e) finally, we consider some of the barriers to more widespread adoption of local foods in (...) the culinary community. Analyzing quantitative and qualitative data collected from interviews with individuals from 71 restaurants, we compare and contrast restaurants that utilize relatively large amounts of locally-produced ingredients with restaurants using few, if any, local products. Results reveal that chefs are most interested in intrinsic food qualities, such as taste and freshness, and less interested in production standards. As opinion leaders, chefs utilize signage, wait staff, and cooking classes to promote local foods; however, the diffusion process across restaurants, and between restaurants and producers, is limited by network associations. Structural barriers such as distribution problems and lack of convenience were identified as limiting more widespread use of locally-grown foods. We offer several implications of this research for further work that seeks to engage chefs as opinion leaders who are important to building greater support for local food systems. (shrink)
This paper reports on an ongoing ARC Discovery Project that is conducting design research into learning in collaborative virtual worlds (CVW).The paper will describe three design components of the project: (a) pedagogical design, (b)technical and graphics design, and (c) learning research design. The perspectives of each design team will be discussed and how the three teams worked together to produce the CVW. The development of productive failure learning activities for the CVW will be discussed and there will be an interactive (...) demonstration of the project's CVW. (shrink)
Is theistic evolution (TE) a philosophically tenable position? Leidenhag argues in his article “The Blurred Line between Theistic Evolution and Intelligent Design” that it is not, since it, Leidenhag claims, espouses a view of divine action that he labels “natural divine causation” (NDC), which makes God explanatory redundant. That is, in so far as TE does not invoke God as an additional cause alongside natural causes, it is untenable. Theistic evolutionists should therefore “reject NDC and affirm a more robust notion (...) of divine agency.” However, this will, Leidenhag claims, have the effect that theistic evolutionists “will move their position significantly closer to Intelligent Design,” and so the line between TE and intelligent design is (or ought to be?) blurred. If successful, the criticism by Leidenhag would be bad news for theists who want to take science seriously and good news for those scientistic atheists according to whom there simply is no scientifically respectable way of combining theism and modern natural science in an overarching worldview. So, is TE stuck between a rock (of redundancy) and a hard place (of pseudo‐science)? No, at least not due to the criticism offered by Leidenhag—but maybe religious naturalism is? (shrink)
The body is a rich object for aesthetic inquiry. We aesthetically assess both our own bodies and those of others, and our felt bodily experiences have aesthetic qualities. The body features centrally in aesthetic experiences of visual art, theatre, dance and sports. It is also deeply intertwined with one's identity and sense of self. Artistic and media representations shape how we see and engage with bodies, with consequences both personal and political. This volume contains sixteen original essays by contributors in (...) philosophy, sociology, dance, disability theory, critical race studies, feminist theory, medicine, and law. They explore bodily beauty, sexual attractiveness, the role of images in power relations, the distinct aesthetics of disabled bodies, the construction of national identity, the creation of compassion through bodily presence, the role of bodily style in moral comportment, and the somatic aesthetics of racialized police violence. -/- Contents: Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, "Black Silhouettes on White Walls: Kara Walker’s Magic Lantern"; A. W. Eaton, "Taste in Bodies and Fat Oppression"; C. Winter Han, "From 'Little Brown Brothers' to 'Queer Asian Wives': Constructing the Asian Male Body"; Deborah L. Rhode, "Appearance as a Feminist Issue"; Shirley Anne Tate, "A Tale of Two Olympians—Beauty, 'Race,' Nation"; Glenn Parsons, "The Merrickites"; Stephen Davies, "And Everything Nice"; Tobin Siebers, "In/Visible: Disability on the Stage"; Jill Sigman, "Live, Body-Based Performance: An Account from the Field"; Barbara Gail Montero, "Aesthetic Effortlessness"; Peg Brand Weiser and Edward B. Weiser, "Misleading Aesthetic Norms of Beauty: Perceptual Sexism in Elite Women's Sports"; Yuriko Saito, "Body Aesthetics and the Cultivation of Moral Virtues"; George Yancy, "White Embodied Gazing, the Black Body as Disgust, and the Aesthetics of Un-Suturing"; Richard Shusterman, "Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating"; Ann J. Cahill, "Sexual Desire, Inequality, and the Possibility of Transformation"; Sheila Lintott and Sherri Irvin, "Sex Objects and Sexy Subjects: A Feminist Reclamation of Sexiness" -/- . (shrink)
Contents Preface General Introduction 1 | Science and Pseudoscience Introduction Karl Popper, Science: Conjectures and Refutations Thomas S. Kuhn, Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research? Imre Lakatos, Science and Pseudoscience Paul R. Thagard, Why Astrology Is a Pseudoscience Michael Ruse, Creation-Science Is Not Science Larry Laudan, Commentary: Science at the Bar---Causes for Concern Commentary 2 | Rationality, Objectivity, and Values in Science Introduction Thomas S. Kuhn, The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions Thomas S. Kuhn, Objectivity, Value Judgment, and (...) Theory Choice Ernan McMullin, Rationality and Paradigm Change in Science Larry Laudan, Kuhn’s Critique of Methodology Helen E. Longino, Values and Objectivity Kathleen Okruhlik, Gender and the Biological Sciences Commentary 3 | The Duhem-Quine Thesis and Underdetermination Introduction Pierre Duhem, Physical Theory and Experiment W. V. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism Donald Gillies, The Duhem Thesis and the Quine Thesis Larry Laudan, Demystifying Underdetermination *Colin Howson and Peter Urbach, The Duhem Problem Commentary 4 | Induction, Prediction, and Evidence Introduction Peter Lipton, Induction Karl Popper, The Problem of Induction Wesley C. Salmon, Rational Prediction Carl G. Hempel, Criteria of Confirmation and Acceptability Peter Achinstein, Explanation v. Prediction: Which Carries More Weight? *Nelson Goodman, The New Riddle of Induction Commentary 5 | Confirmation and Relevance: Bayesian Approaches Introduction Wesley C. Salmon, Rationality and Objectivity in Science *Deborah G. Mayo, A Critique of Salmon’s Bayesian Way *Alan Chalmers, The Bayesian Approach Paul Horwich, Therapeutic Bayesianism Commentary 6 | Models of Explanation Introduction Rudolf Carnap, The Value of Laws: Explanation and Prediction Carl G. Hempel, Two Basic Types of Scientific Explanation Carl G. Hempel, The Thesis of Structural Identity Carl G. Hempel, Inductive-Statistical Explanation Peter Railton, A Deductive-Nomological Model of Probabilistic Explanation *Philip Kitcher, Explanatory Unification *James Woodward, The Manipulability Conception of Causal Explanation Commentary 7 | Laws of Nature Introduction A. J. Ayer, What Is a Law of Nature? Fred I. Dretske, Laws of Nature D. H. Mellor, Necessities and Universals in Natural Laws Nancy Cartwright, Do the Laws of Physics State the Facts? Commentary 8 | Intertheoretic Reduction Introduction Ernest Nagel, Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations Paul K. Feyerabend, How to Be a Good Empiricist *Jerry A. Fodor, Special Sciences Philip Kitcher, 1953 and All That: A Tale of Two Sciences Commentary 9 | Empiricism and Scientific Realism Introduction Grover Maxwell, The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities Bas C. van Fraassen, Arguments Concerning Scientific Realism Alan Musgrave, Realism versus Constructive Empiricism Larry Laudan, A Confutation of Convergent Realism *Juha T. Saatsi, On the Pessimistic Induction and Two Fallacies Ian Hacking, Experimentation and Scientific Realism David B. Resnik, Hacking’s Experimental Realism *Martin Carrier, What Is Right with the Miracle Argument Arthur Fine, The Natural Ontological Attitude Alan Musgrave, NOA’s Ark---Fine for Realism Commentary Glossary Bibliography Name Index Subject Index. (shrink)
The history of evolutionary thought / Michael Ruse -- The origin of life / Jeffrey L. Bada and Antonio Lazcano -- Paleontology and the history of life / Michael Benton -- Adaptation / Joseph Travis and David N. Reznick -- Molecular evolution / Francisco J. Ayala -- Evolution of the genome / Brian Charlesworth and Deborah Charlesworth -- The pattern and process of speciation / Margaret B. Ptacek and Shala J. Hankison -- Evolution and development / Gregory A. Wray (...) -- Social behavior and sociobiology / Daniel J. Rubenstein -- Human evolution / Henry M. McHenry -- Evolutionary biology of disease and Darwinian medicine / Michael F. Antolin -- Beyond the Darwinian paradigm : understanding biological forms / Brian Goodwin -- Philosophy of evolutionary thought / Kim Sterelny -- Evolution and society / Manfred D. Laubichler and Jane Maienschein -- Evolution and religion / David N. Livingstone -- American antievolutionism : retrospect and prospect / Eugenie C. Scott. (shrink)
In the following essay, I will discuss D.Johnson's argument in her ETHICOMP99 KeynoteSpeech (Johnson 1999) regarding the possiblefuture disappearance of computer ethics as anautonomous discipline, and I will analyze somelikely objections to Johnson's view.In the future, there are two ways in whichcomputer ethics might disappear: (1) therejection of computer ethics as an aspect ofapplied ethics, or (2) the rejection ofcomputer ethics as an autonomous discipline.The first path, it seems to me, would lead tothe death of the entire field of appliedethics, (...) while the second path would lead onlyto the death of computer ethics as a separatesubject. Computer technology is becoming very pervasive,and each scientific field includes somediscipline-specific computing. For the likelyforeseeable future, disciplines such asbioethics and engineering ethics will have todeal with ethical issues involving the role ofcomputers. I will argue that computer ethics inthis sense is unlikely to disappear, even ifcomputer ethics ceases to be considered as aseparate discipline.In order to understand which path will befollowed by computer ethics, I will compareJohnson's argument with ideas of earlierthinkers like N. Wiener (1950) and B. Russell(1932). Although Russell did not specificallyconsider computer technology, he had somegood intuitions about the development ofsocieties by means of technology.My conclusion will be two-fold: (1) thatapplied ethics will not die, but it may make nosense in the future to talk about computerethics as a separate field; and (2) thatcomputer ethics will not simply become``ordinary ethics'', contrary to Johnson's view. (shrink)
According to a widely accepted constraint on the content of intentions, here called the exclusivity constraint, one cannot intend to perform another agent’s action, even if one might be able to intend that she performs it. For example, while one can intend that one’s guest leaves before midnight, one cannot intend to perform her act of leaving. However, Deborah Tollefsen’s (2005) account of joint activity requires participants to have intentions-in-action (in John Searle’s (1983) sense) that violate this constraint. I (...) argue that the exclusivity constraint should not be accepted as an unconditional constraint on the contents of intentions-in-action: one may intend to perform a basic action that belongs both to oneself and to another agent. Based on the phenomenology of tool use, I first argue that intentions-in-action of one’s basic actions may be technologically extended, meaning that their contents are not restricted to concern the agent’s bodily movements. In analogy with this, I then argue that the phenomenology of some skillful joint activities supports the idea that one’s basic intentions-in-action may be socially extended, in violation of the widely accepted exclusivity constraint. Tollefsen’s account is specifically constructed to account for the joint activities of infants and toddlers who lack the capacity to think of others as planning agents and grasp their plan-like intentions (a capacity required by Michael Bratman’s (1992, 1993, 2009a, b) influential account of joint activity). At the end of the paper, I raise some doubts regarding the extent to which infants and toddlers have socially extended intentions-in-action. (shrink)
: Bayesians and error statisticians have relied heavily upon examples from physics in developing their accounts of scientific inference. The present essay demonstrates it is possible to analyze H.B.D. Kettlewell's classic study of natural selection from Deborah Mayo's error statistical point of view (Mayo 1996). A comparison with a previous analysis of this episode from a Bayesian perspective (Rudge 1998) reveals that the error statistical account makes better sense of investigations such as Kettlewell's because it clarifies how core elements (...) in the design of experiments are used to minimize erroneous inferences rather than dwelling on whether the strategies used are reasonable. (shrink)
