Several disciplines share an interest in the evolutionary selection pressures that shaped human physical functioning and appearance, psyche, and behavior. The methodologies invoked from the disciplines studying these domains are often based on different rhetorics, and hence may conflict. Progress in one field is thereby hampered from effective transfer to others. Topics at the intersection of anthropometry and psychometry, such as the impact of sexual selection on the hominin face, are a typical example. Since the underlying theory explicitly places facial (...) form in the middle of a causal chain as the mediating variable between biological causes and psychological effects, a particularly convenient conceptual and analytic scenario arises as follows. Modern morphometrics allows analysis of shape both “backwards” and “forwards” . The two computations are commensurate, hence the two kinds of effects can be compared and evaluated as directions in the same morphospace. We suggest translating the morphometric methodology of “Darwinian aesthetics” into this space, where psychological and other processes of interest can be coded commensurately. Such a translation permits researchers to relate the effects of biological processes on form to the perceptions of the same processes in one unified “psychomorphospace.”. (shrink)

Over evolutionary time, humans have developed a selective sensitivity to features in the human face that convey information on sex, age, emotions, and intentions. This ability might not only be applied to our conspecifics nowadays, but also to other living objects (i.e., animals) and even to artificial structures, such as cars. To investigate this possibility, we asked people to report the characteristics, emotions, personality traits, and attitudes they attribute to car fronts, and we used geometric morphometrics (GM) and multivariate statistical (...) methods to determine and visualize the corresponding shape information. Automotive features and proportions are found to covary with trait perception in a manner similar to that found with human faces. Emerging analogies are discussed. This study should have implications for both our understanding of our prehistoric psyche and its interrelation with the modern world. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous weaknesses in pandemic preparedness and response, including underfunding, inadequate surveillance, and inequitable distribution of countermeasures. To overcome these weaknesses for future pandemics, WHO released a zero draft of a pandemic treaty in February, 2023, and subsequently a revised bureau's text in May, 2023. COVID-19 made clear that pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response reflect choices and value judgements. These decisions are therefore not a purely scientific or technical exercise, but are fundamentally grounded in ethics. The latest (...) treaty draft reflects these ethical considerations by including a section entitled Guiding Principles and Approaches. Most of these principles are ethical—they establish core values that undergird the treaty. Unfortunately, the treaty draft's set of principles are numerous, overlapping, and show inadequate coherence and consistency. We propose two improvements to this section of the draft pandemic treaty. First, key guiding ethical principles should be clearer and more precise than they currently are. Second, the link between ethical principles and policy implementation should be clearly established and define boundaries on acceptable interpretation, ensuring that signatories abide by these principles. (shrink)

The prospect of consumable meat produced in a laboratory setting without the need to raise and slaughter animals is both realistic and exciting. Not only could such in vitro meat become popular due to potential cost savings, but it also avoids many of the ethical and environmental problems with traditional meat productions. However, as with any new technology, in vitro meat is likely to face some detractors. We examine in detail three potential objections: 1) in vitro meat is disrespectful, either (...) to nature or to animals; 2) it will reduce the number of happy animals in the world; and 3) it will open the door to cannibalism. While each objection has some attraction, we ultimately find that all can be overcome. The upshot is that in vitro meat production is generally permissible and, especially for ethical vegetarians, worth promoting. (shrink)

Research on sustainability assurance is still in its beginnings. One of the key questions in this field that also is of the highest practical relevance is concerned with the quality of the assurance process. However, a common understanding of assurance quality and how it should be measured is still missing. We try to close this gap by building on the financial audit literature. We introduce a definition of assurance quality that comprises two key aspects: the depth of the assurance process (...) and the breadth of the assurance statement. Based on prior research, we hypothesize that a firm’s sustainability performance is related to the depth of the assurance process, while the type of the assurance provider, more precisely the affiliation to the accounting profession, is related to the breadth of the assurance statement. Results for a sample of 122 European firms reveal a negative relationship between sustainability performance and assurance process depth as well as between the affiliation to the accounting profession and assurance statement breadth. Thus, we find evidence that poor sustainability performers ask for in-depth assurance services, most likely as a means to enhance their internal sustainability-related processes and systems. Assurance providers that do not belong to the accounting profession in turn are associated with broader assurance statements. (shrink)

This article focusses on the social and legal implications that blockchain technology brings about, not only due to its ideological framework, but also, and especially, due to the concept of law it inaugurates. Thus, this article claims, that, by interlocking technological and legal structures, blockchain technology initiates a profound displacement of legal symbolics and imaginaries. It shows how blockchain law, by emancipating itself from three essential dimensions of law—language, territory, and the body—implies a profound disruption of how we perceive law (...) and its legitimacy. Starting with an overview of the technological details of blockchain, the paper then addresses its ideological context and traces the underlying ideas, values and functions and their relation with—and impact on—the general perception of law and legal issues. By critically assessing the claim that blockchain will liberate the subject from any heteronymic constraints, this paper analyses to what extent this technology has social and legal implications that reach far beyond its virtual, purely blockchain-related scope of applications—and why this technology should matter to us all. (shrink)

In view of the numerous accounting and corporate scandals associated with various forms of moral misconduct and the recent financial crisis, economics and business programs are often accused of actively contributing to the amoral decision making of their graduates. It is argued that theories and ideas taught at universities engender moral misbehavior among some managers, as these theories mainly focus on the primacy of profit-maximization and typically neglect the ethical and moral dimensions of decision making. To investigate this criticism, two (...) overlapping effects must be disentangled: the self-selection effect and the treatment effect. Drawing on the concept of moral judgment competence, we empirically examine this question with a sample of 1773 bachelor’s and 501 master’s students. Our results reveal that there is neither a self-selection nor a treatment effect for economics and business studies. Moreover, our results indicate that—regardless of the course of studies—university education in general does not seem to foster students’ moral development. (shrink)

How does the brain generate our experience of being in control over our actions and their effects? Here, we argue that the perception of events as self-caused emerges from a comparison between anticipated and actual action-effects: if the representation of an event that follows an action is activated before the action, the event is experienced as caused by one’s own action, whereas in the case of a mismatch it will be attributed to an external cause rather than to the self. (...) In a subliminal priming paradigm we show that participants overestimated how much control they had over objectively uncontrollable stimuli, which appeared after free- or forced-choice actions, when a masked prime activated a representation of the stimuli immediately before each action. This prime-induced control-illusion was independent from whether primes were consciously perceived. Results indicate that the conscious experience of control is modulated by unconscious anticipations of action-effects. (shrink)

While interdisciplinarity is not a new concept, the political and discursive mobilisation of interdisciplinarity is. Since the 1990s, this movement has intensified, and this has affected central funding bodies so that interdisciplinarity is now a de facto requirement in successful grant application. As a result, the literature is ripe with definitions, taxonomies, discussions and other attempts to grasp and define the concept of interdisciplinarity. In this paper, we explore how strategic demands for interdisciplinarity meet, interact with and change local research (...) practices and results of higher education and research. Our aim is to question and trace the consequences of applying the slippery and difficult term interdisciplinarity in research. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish interdisciplinary research programme, where we observed and analysed practices of writing, publishing, collaboration and educational development in five different research projects. We show how the call for interdisciplinarity was mobilised in a way that rendered the incentives and motives behind the programme unclear. Furthermore, we argue that the absence of clear definitions and assessment criteria produced a dominant, all-inclusive, but vague, configuration of interdisciplinarity that affected the research outcome, and ultimately, promoted and reproduced the existing monodisciplinary research and power structures. (shrink)

We live in the Information Age. Advances over the past 50 years in computing technology have enabled ever-expanding capacity to generate, store, transfer, process and analyse information about people, societies, products, services, the environment—nearly every aspect of the world. In parallel, concerns over how such data is being used have emerged, focusing especially on issues of privacy and confidentiality. Yet as technological capabilities continue to expand, the debate over ethical uses of data inevitably has evolved as well. Whereas we used (...) to just talk about data, now there is great concern over Big Data. This chapter explores what, exactly, Big Data is; the ethical ramifications of its emergence, particularly for consent and anonymization; and what sorts of policy solutions are being proposed to address these emerging challenges. We will not defend one particular approach, but hope this chapter can be a useful reference for those who are contemplating difficult questions surrounding responsible management of Big Data. (shrink)

This book closely examines texts from Chinese and Western traditions that hold up ethics as the inviolable ground of human existence, as well as those that regard ethics with suspicion. The negative notion of morality contends that because ethics cannot be divorced from questions of belonging and identity, there is a danger that it can be nudged into the domain of the unethical since ethical virtues can become properties to be possessed with which the recognition of others is solicited. Ethics (...) thus fosters the very egoism it hopes to transcend, and risks excluding the unfamiliar and the stranger. The author argues inspirationally that the unethical underbelly of ethics must be recognized in order to ensure that it remains vibrant. (shrink)

Texts and textures: approaching an age of human-made nature through the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. We have entered the Anthropocene era—a geological age of our own making, in which what we have understood to be nature is made by man. We need a new way to understand the dynamics of a new epoch. These volumes offer writings that approach the Anthropocene through the perspectives of grain, vapor, and ray—the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. The first three volumes—each (...) devoted to one of the three textures—offer a series of paired texts, with contemporary writers responding to historic writings. A fourth volume offers a guide to the project as a whole. Grain: Granular materials add up to concrete forms; insignificant specks accumulate into complex entities. The texts in this volume narrate some of the fundamental qualities of the granular. In one pairing of texts, Robert Smithson compares the accumulation of thoughts to the aggregation of sediment, and an environmental historian writes about the stakes for earthly knowledge today. Other authors include Alfred Russel Wallace, Denis Diderot, and Georges Bataille. Vapor: The vaporous represents matter's transformations. In this volume, a political scientist compares Kafka's haunting “Odradek” to “vibrant matter”; a media theorist responds to poems and diagrams by Buckminster Fuller; and more, including texts by Hippocrates, Italo Calvino, and James Clerk Maxwell. Ray: A ray is an act of propagation and diffusion, encompassing a chain of interdependencies between energy and matter. This volume includes texts by Spinoza (with a reconceptualization by a contemporary philosopher), Jacques Lacan (followed by an anthropologist's reflections on temporality), Thomas Pynchon (accompanied by an interpretation of Pynchon's “electro-mysticism”), and others. These volumes constitute a unique experiment in design and composition as well as content. The mingling of texts and the juxtaposition of different areas of knowledge represented in a variety of forms express the dynamics of a world in change. (shrink)

This article explores Franz Brentano's opposition to papal infallibility, and sets this in the context of his development as a Catholic scholar. An active participant in the Catholic revival of the nineteenth century, Brentano contributed to the emergence of neoscholasticism through his philosophical rehabilitation of Aristotle. Brentano ultimately left the Church however as the result of intensive scrutiny of his faith occasioned by his analysis of infallibility. This article explores this crisis of faith by analyzing, for the first time, Brentano's (...) position on papal infallibility, and suggesting ways that it informed his philosophical development. (shrink)

This study explores the attitude of German psychiatrists in leading positions towards joint crisis plans and psychiatric advance directives. This topic was examined by contacting 473 medical directors of German psychiatric hospitals and departments. They were asked to complete a questionnaire developed by us. That form contained questions about the incidence and acceptance of joint crisis plans and psychiatric advance directives and previous experiences with them. 108 medical directors of psychiatric hospitals and departments responded . Their answers demonstrate that in (...) their hospitals these documents are rarely used. Among the respondents, joint crisis plans are more accepted than psychiatric advance directives. There is a certain uncertainty when dealing with these instruments. Our main conclusion is that German psychiatry needs an intensified discussion on the use of instruments for patients to constitute procedures for future critical psychiatric events. For this purpose it will be helpful to collect more empirical data. Furthermore, the proposal of joint crisis plans in psychiatric hospitals and departments should be discussed as well as the possibility of consulting an expert during the preparation of a psychiatric advance directive. (shrink)

This paper examines whether adults can adapt to novel accents of their native language that contain unfamiliar context-dependent phonological alternations. In two experiments, French participants listen to short stories read in accented speech. Their knowledge of the accents is then tested in a forced-choice identification task. In Experiment 1, two groups of listeners are exposed to newly created French accents in which certain vowels harmonize or disharmonize, respectively, to the rounding of the preceding vowel. Despite the cross-linguistic predominance of vowel (...) harmony over disharmony, the two groups adapt equally well to both accents, suggesting that this typological difference is not reflected in perceptual learning. Experiment 2 further explores the mechanism underlying this type of phonological learning. Participants are exposed to an accent in which some vowels harmonize and others disharmonize, yielding an increased featural complexity. They adapt less well to this regularity, showing that adaptation to novel accents involves feature-based inferences. (shrink)

For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they add to their common ground in an orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees have understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these (...) result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for a variety of features of everyday conversations. (shrink)

The predominant view is that a study using health data is observational research and should require individual consent unless it can be shown that gaining consent is impractical. But recent arguments have been made that citizens have an ethical obligation to share their health information for research purposes. In our view, this obligation is sufficient ground to expand the circumstances where secondary use research with identifiable health information is permitted without explicit subject consent. As such, for some studies the Institutional (...) Review Board/Research Ethics Committee review process should not assess the practicality of gaining consent for data use. Instead the review process should focus on assessing the public good of the research, public engagement and transparency. (shrink)

The subjective experience of time in depression has been described to be altered in complex ways, with sensations of particular slowness, delay or stillness being the most often named articulations. However, the attempts to provide empirical evidence to the phenomenon of “time slowing down in depression” have resulted in inconsistent findings. In consequence, the overall claim that depressive time somehow differs from ordinary time has often been discarded as unfounded. The article argues against such conclusion, contending that the described ambiguity (...) might be caused by the methods employed to assess the phenomenon under observation. In the first part of the article, a reconceptualization of the experience of time in depression is proposed on the grounds of classic and contemporary phenomenological psychiatry. This leads to identify the essential features of depressive time as described both in clinical and philosophical contexts. In the second part, a critique of the existing methods of time perception assessment is conducted, with a specific focus on duration estimation and time passage perception tasks. The above-mentioned core features serve as guidelines in discussing to what degree such methods fit the phenomenon at stake. Finally, an alternative and innovative method is put forward, that might not only help to explore the scope of existing methods but might itself present an alternative to such: the micro-phenomenological interview. (shrink)

Ethical decision-making frameworks assist in identifying the issues at stake in a particular setting and thinking through, in a methodical manner, the ethical issues that require consideration as well as the values that need to be considered and promoted. Decisions made about the use, sharing, and re-use of big data are complex and laden with values. This paper sets out an Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research developed by a working group convened by the Science, Health and (...) Policy-relevant Ethics in Singapore Initiative. It presents the aim and rationale for this framework supported by the underlying ethical concerns that relate to all health and research contexts. It also describes a set of substantive and procedural values that can be weighed up in addressing these concerns, and a step-by-step process for identifying, considering, and resolving the ethical issues arising from big data uses in health and research. This Framework is subsequently applied in the papers published in this Special Issue. These papers each address one of six domains where big data is currently employed: openness in big data and data repositories, precision medicine and big data, real-world data to generate evidence about healthcare interventions, AI-assisted decision-making in healthcare, public-private partnerships in healthcare and research, and cross-sectoral big data. (shrink)

Katrin Flikschuh offers an accessible introduction to divergent conceptions of freedom in contemporary liberal political philosophy.

When it comes to improving the health of the general population, mHealth technologies with self-monitoring and intervention components hold a lot of promise. We argue, however, that due to various factors such as access, targeting, personal resources or incentives, self-monitoring applications run the risk of increasing health inequalities, thereby creating a problem of social justice. We review empirical evidence for “intervention-generated” inequalities, present arguments that self-monitoring applications are still morally acceptable, and develop approaches to avoid the promotion of health inequalities (...) through self-monitoring applications. (shrink)

We provide a detailed description of an interleaved and heavily annotated copy of Florae Berolinensis Prodromus, a flora of Berlin published by the German apothecary and botanist Karl Ludwig Willdenow in 1787, which today is preserved at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. We demonstrate that this is the copy that the author himself used and carried with him during his botanical excursions in and around Berlin to prepare a second edition of the work. By analyzing this document as (...) paper technology, we reveal that even seemingly trifling aspects of its material organization enabled far-reaching biological research agendas that were not originally intended. The hybrid form of manuscript and printed book, used in field excursions, enabled a kind of natural-historical observation that was at once detailed and bound by strict convention, a combination that inadvertently opened new research questions and suggested new objects of research. We thereby contribute to an understanding of the history of natural history that goes beyond the history of ideas and the intended uses of techniques, giving an example of how routine work on paper within a scientific tradition could generate innovation. (shrink)

When it comes to improving the health of the general population, mHealth technologies with self-monitoring and intervention components hold a lot of promise. We argue, however, that due to various factors such as access, targeting, personal resources or incentives, self-monitoring applications run the risk of increasing health inequalities, thereby creating a problem of social justice. We review empirical evidence for “intervention-generated” inequalities, present arguments that self-monitoring applications are still morally acceptable, and develop approaches to avoid the promotion of health inequalities (...) through self-monitoring applications. (shrink)

Ziel des Aufsatzes ist es, das Projekt angewandter interkultureller Philosophie „Briefe über Philosophie weltweit“ vorzustellen. Der Beitrag ist in vier Teile gegliedert. Im ersten Abschnitt werden Anlass und Profil des Projektes vorgestellt. Der „akademische Nomadismus“ der Gegenwart verstärkt die immer schon interkulturelle Verfasstheit der akademischen Praxis und stellt den lebensweltlichen Anlass des Projektes dar, dies in Form von Briefen über die verschiedenen Bedingungen des Philosophierens auch zu reflektieren. Im zweiten Abschnitt wird genauer nach Erfahrungen gefragt, die in den Briefen zum (...) Ausdruck kommen und die wir als „interkulturelle Erfahrungen“ bezeichnen und näher bestimmen wollen. Thema des dritten Abschnitts ist die gewählte Darstellungsform für derartige interkulturelle Erfahrungen, nämlich die Briefform als Medium für Perspektivität. Im vierten Abschnitt machen wir abschließend den Versuch, das Projekt als Form angewandter interkultureller Philosophie zu profilieren. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy's (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof's (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

We investigated the impact of attention during encoding on later retrieval. During study, participants read some words aloud and named the print color of other words aloud . Then one of two memory tests was administered. The explicit test—recognition—required conscious recollection of whether a word was studied. Previously read words were recognized more accurately than were previously color named words. This contrasted sharply with performance on the implicit test—repetition priming in lexical decision. Here, words that were color named during study (...) showed priming equivalent to words that were read during study; both were responded to faster than unstudied words. Thus, an attentional manipulation during study had a strong effect on an explicit test of memory, but almost no effect on an implicit test. Focal attention during study is crucial for remembering consciously but not necessarily for remembering without awareness. (shrink)

The future of health research will be characterised by three continuing trends: rising demand for health data; increasing impracticability of obtaining specific consent for secondary research; and decreasing capacity to effectively anonymise data. In this context, governments, clinicians and the research community must demonstrate that they can be responsible stewards of health data. IRBs and RECs sit at heart of this process because in many jurisdictions they have the capacity to grant consent waivers when research is judged to be of (...) particular value. However, several different terms are used to refer to this value, indicating a lack of conceptual clarity regarding the appropriate test for access to health data for research without consent. In this paper we do three things. First we describe the current confusion and instability in terminology relating to public interest in the context of consent waivers. Second we argue for harmonisation of terminology on the grounds of clarity, transparency and consistency. Third we argue that the term ‘public interest’ best reflects the normative work required to justify consent waivers because it is the broadest of the competing terms. ‘Public interest’ contains within its scope positive and negative implications of a study, as well as welfare, justice and rights considerations. In making this argument, we explain the normative basis for consent waivers, and provide a starting place for further discussion about the precise conditions in which a given study can be said to advance the public interest. Ipsos MORI study found that: … the public would be broadly happy with administrative data linking for research projects provided Those projects have social value, broadly defined. Data are de-identified. Data are kept secure. Businesses are not able to access the data for profit. (shrink)