Walter Map was a twelfth-century courtier and royal servant. He was a prolific writer, but De Nugis Curialium is the only surviving work confidently attributed to him. The book is a collection of short stories and anecdotes about the court, religion and history. Map's references demonstrate that he read widely, not only biblical and theological works, but also classical authors such as Horace, Virgil, Ovid and Juvenal. The only surviving manuscript of the work is a fourteenth-century copy once belonging to (...) the monk John Wells of Ramsey Abbey. The Cambridge bibliographer M. R. James would have been attracted to the breadth of Map's referencing, and the author's light-hearted writing style which was intended to entertain. James' 1914 Oxford publication corrected the earlier work of Thomas Wright who published an edition for the Camden Society in 1850. (shrink)

The rise of neurotechnologies, especially in combination with artificial intelligence (AI)-based methods for brain data analytics, has given rise to concerns around the protection of mental privacy, mental integrity and cognitive liberty – often framed as “neurorights” in ethical, legal, and policy discussions. Several states are now looking at including neurorights into their constitutional legal frameworks, and international institutions and organizations, such as UNESCO and the Council of Europe, are taking an active interest in developing international policy and governance guidelines (...) on this issue. However, in many discussions of neurorights the philosophical assumptions, ethical frames of reference and legal interpretation are either not made explicit or conflict with each other. The aim of this multidisciplinary work is to provide conceptual, ethical, and legal foundations that allow for facilitating a common minimalist conceptual understanding of mental privacy, mental integrity, and cognitive liberty to facilitate scholarly, legal, and policy discussions. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that a greater understanding of the part of ethics in leadership will improve leadership studies. Debates over the definition of leadership are really debates over what researchers think constitutes good leadership. The ultimate question is not "What is leadership?" but "What is good leadership?" The word good is refers to both ethics and competence. Research into leadership ethics would explore the ethical issues of current leadership research, serve as a critical study of the field, analyze (...) and expand normative theories of leadership, and develop new theories, research questions and ways of thinking about leadership. (shrink)

Stem cell research. Drug company influence. Abortion. Contraception. Long-term and end-of-life care. Human participants research. Informed consent. The list of ethical issues in science, medicine, and public health is long and continually growing. These complex issues pose a daunting task for professionals in the expanding field of bioethics. But what of the practice of bioethics itself? What issues do ethicists and bioethicists confront in their efforts to facilitate sound moral reasoning and judgment in a variety of venues? Are those immersed (...) in the field capable of making the right decisions? How and why do they face moral challenge -- and even compromise -- as ethicists? What values should guide them? In The Ethics of Bioethics, Lisa A. Eckenwiler and Felicia G. Cohn tackle these questions head on, bringing together notable medical ethicists and people outside the discipline to discuss common criticisms, the field's inherent tensions, and efforts to assign values and assess success. Through twenty-five lively essays examining the field's history and trends, shortcomings and strengths, and the political and policy interplay within the bioethical realm, this comprehensive book begins a much-needed critical and constructive discussion of the moral landscape of bioethics. (shrink)

Contesting much contemporary epistemology and cognitive science, noted philosopher Kenneth M. Sayre argues that, while some cognitive attitudes such as believing take propositions as objects, there are many others whose objects are instead states of affairs.

The papers in this volume are drawn from a workshop on delusion and self-deception, held at Macquarie University in November of 2004. Our aim was to bring together theorists working on delusions and self-deception with an eye towards identifying and fostering connections—at both empirical and conceptual levels—between these domains. As the contributions to this volume testify, there are multiple points of contact between delusion and self-deception. This introduction charts the conceptual space in which these points of contact can be located (...) and introduces the reader to some of the general issues that frame the discussion of subsequent chapters. (shrink)

: Medical research is widely thought to have a fundamentally therapeutic orientation, in spite of the fact that clinical research is thought to be ethically distinct from medical care. We need an entirely new conception of clinical research ethics—one that looks to science instead of the doctor-patient relationship.

A crucial aspect of the human mind is the ability to project the self along the time line to past and future. It has been argued that such self-projection is essential to re-experience past experiences and predict future events. In-depth analysis of a novel paradigm investigating mental time shows that the speed of this “self-projection” in time depends logarithmically on the temporal-distance between an imagined “location” on the time line that participants were asked to imagine and the location of another (...) imagined event from the time line. This logarithmic pattern suggests that events in human cognition are spatially mapped along an imagery mental time line. We argue that the present time-line data are comparable to the spatial mapping of numbers along the mental number line and that such spatial maps are a fundamental basis for cognition. (shrink)

Five-year-old children categorized as skilled versus unskilled counters were given verbal estimation and number word comprehension tasks with numerosities 20 – 120. Skilled counters showed a linear relation between number words and nonsymbolic numerosities. Unskilled counters showed the same linear relation for smaller numbers to which they could count, but not for larger number words. Further tasks indicated that unskilled counters failed even to correctly order large number words differing by a 2 : 1 ratio, whereas they performed well on (...) this task with smaller numbers, and performed well on a nonsymbolic ordering task with the same numerosities. These findings provide evidence that large, approximate numerosity representations become linked to number words around the time that children learn to count to those words reliably. (shrink)

Cartographies contributes to the growing debates on the value of poststructuralist theory. Grounded in a theoretical framework, it combines poststructural semiotics and a philosophy of the body. While interest in poststructuralism is well established, the currently felt need to anchor that interest in a political, material reality is where these readings gain their critical edge. They address the material - social, political and economic - effects of representation, marking anew direction in the debate.

This paper uses a declarative mapping sentence approach to explore and amend design thinking - a project development and management technique recently disseminated in Africa. We contend that there are problems in the manner in which design thinking has been exported to Africa, namely, that design thinking is rooted in the linear, binary, human-centric systems present in Western philosophy and that the exportation of design thinking is potentially neo-colonial. We, therefore, attempt to ameliorate these difficulties by decoupling design thinking (...) from its Western philosophical perspectives. We will also seek to broaden the understanding of design thinking by adopting the more communitarian perspective found in philosophy that has been developed in Africa. The amended form of design thinking we present considers the user’s existential paradigms and facilitates a flexible and reflexive process void of deliberate finality. Furthermore, we claim that amending design thinking’s philosophical foundations to incorporate a communitarian perspective has the potential to make design thinking more ecologically-centric. (shrink)

In this paper, we highlight some problems for accounts of disability and enhancement that have not been sufficiently addressed in the literature. The reason, we contend, is that contemporary debates that seek to define, characterise or explain the normative valence of disability and enhancement do not pay sufficient attention to a wide range of cases, and the transition between one state and another. In section one, we provide seven cases that might count as disability or enhancement. We explain why each (...) case might count, and on what basis, and why it is been neglected. Each case is explained as a transition in what we call capacity space. We then argue that no definition of disability or enhancement addresses all of these cases, except for strict welfarist accounts of disability that do not rely on a depiction of any particular capacity. We argue further, however, that this is a serious deficiency of welfarist conceptions of disability. We then address objections to our account. (shrink)

Many ICT services require that users explicitly consent to conditions of use and policies for the protection of personal information. This consent may become ‘routinised’. We define the concept of routinisation and investigate to what extent routinisation occurs as well as the factors influencing routinisation in a survey study of internet use. We show that routinisation is common and that it is influenced by factors including gender, age, educational level and average daily internet use. We further explore the reasons users (...) provide for not reading conditions and policies and show that they can be grouped in meaningful ways that may delineate different types of routinsation. (shrink)

The relationship between abstract formal procedures and the activities of actual physical systems has proved to be surprisingly subtle and controversial, and there are a number of competing accounts of when a physical system can be properly said to implement a mathematical formalism and hence perform a computation. I defend an account wherein computational descriptions of physical systems are high-level normative interpretations motivated by our pragmatic concerns. Furthermore, the criteria of utility and success vary according to our diverse purposes and (...) pragmatic goals. Hence there is no independent or uniform fact to the matter, and I advance the ‘anti-realist’ conclusion that computational descriptions of physical systems are not founded upon deep ontological distinctions, but rather upon interest-relative human conventions. Hence physical computation is a ‘conventional’ rather than a ‘natural’ kind. (shrink)

Five-year-old children categorized as skilled versus unskilled counters were given verbal estimation and number word comprehension tasks with numerosities 20 – 120. Skilled counters showed a linear relation between number words and nonsymbolic numerosities. Unskilled counters showed the same linear relation for smaller numbers to which they could count, but not for larger number words. Further tasks indicated that unskilled counters failed even to correctly order large number words differing by a 2 : 1 ratio, whereas they performed well on (...) this task with smaller numbers, and performed well on a nonsymbolic ordering task with the same numerosities. These findings provide evidence that large, approximate numerosity representations become linked to number words around the time that children learn to count to those words reliably. (shrink)

Even though integrity is widely considered to be an essential aspect of research, there is an ongoing debate on what actually constitutes research integrity. The understanding of integrity ranges from the minimal, only considering falsification, fabrication and plagiarism, to the maximum, blending into science ethics. Underneath these obvious contrasts, there are more subtle differences that are not as immediately evident. The debate about integrity is usually presented as a single, universal discussion, with shared concerns for researchers, policymakers and ‘the public’. (...) In this article, we show that it is not. There are substantial differences between the language of research integrity in the scientific arena and in the public domain. Notably, scientists and policymakers adopt different approaches to research integrity. Scientists tend to present integrity as a virtue that must be kindled, while policy documents and newspapers stress norm enforcement. Rather than performing a conceptual analysis through philosophical reasoning and discussion, we aimed to clarify the discourse of ‘scientific integrity’ by studying its usage in written documents. To this end, large numbers of scientific publications, policy documents and newspaper articles were analysed by means of scientometric and content analysis techniques. The texts were analysed on their usage of the term ‘integrity’ and of frequently co-occurring terms and concepts. A comparison was made between the usage in the various media, as well as between different periods in which they were published through co-word analysis, mapping co-occurrence networks of significant terms and themes. (shrink)

One of the many problems posed by the collective effort to tackle COVID-19 is non-compliance with restrictions. Some people would like to obey restrictions but cannot due to their job or other life circumstances; others are not good at following rules that restrict their liberty, even if the potential consequences of doing so are repeatedly made very clear to them. Among this group are a minority who simply do not care about the consequences of their actions. But many others fail (...) to accurately perceive the harms that they might be causing. One of the main reasons for this is that the harms done by transmitting COVID-19 to someone else are morally distant from the agent, particularly in cases where infection is asymptomatic. In this paper, I describe seven different aspects of moral distance in the context of COVID-19, explore how they affect motivation to obey restrictions, and suggest several ways in which such moral distance can be reduced — primarily through enhanced-contact tracing that makes it clear to individuals and the public precisely who they could be harming and how. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Medical ethics in times of war are fundamentally different from those in times of peace. War brings military and medical values into conflict, often overwhelming other moral obligations, such as a doctor's charge to relieve suffering, in the face of military necessity.

In a recent line of cases, senior judges in the UK have been called upon to adjudicate in complaints over the failure of health and local authorities to meet the welfare needs of citizens. Local authorities claimed that the disputes had been precipitated by a lack of resources allocated by central government to meet local demand. This article examines the role of the courts in resolving a fundamental tension between central government policy of financial cost-cutting on the one hand and (...) welfarist principles embodied in legislation for the delivery of public services on the other. Questions are raised about the relevance and appropriateness of rights-based adjudication in welfare needs contexts and about the reluctance of courts to intervene in the resolution of resource allocation disputes even where fundamental rights, particularly in areas such as health, community care, and education where notions of rights are inextricably bound up with use of financial resources. These key cases have arisen prior to the implementation of the Human Rights Act 1998. Where relevant, the likely impact of the Act on welfare needs disputes is considered. (shrink)

Medical ethics in times of war are fundamentally different from those in times of peace. War brings military and medical values into conflict, often overwhelming other moral obligations, such as a doctor's charge to relieve suffering, in the face of military necessity.

In this paper we present Drama, a distributed model of analogical mapping that integrates semantic and structural constraints on constructing analogies. Specifically, Drama uses holographic reduced representations (Plate, 1994), a distributed representation scheme, to model the effects of structure and meaning on human performance of analogical mapping. Drama is compared to three symbolic models of analogy (SME, Copycat, and ACME) and one partially distributed model (LISA). We describe Drama's performance on a number of example analogies and assess the (...) model in terms of neurological and psychological plausibility. We argue that Drama's successes are due largely to integrating structural and semantic constraints throughout the mapping process. We also claim that Drama is an existence proof of using distributed representations to model high‐level cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

To support healthcare professionals in dealing with ethically difficult situations, Clinical Ethics Support (CES) services like Moral Case Deliberation (MCD) are increasingly implemented. To assess the impact of CES, it is important to evaluate outcomes. Despite general claims about outcomes from MCD experts and some qualitative research, there exists no conceptual analysis of outcomes yet. Therefore, the aim of this study was to systematically define and categorize MCD outcomes. An additional aim was to compare these outcomes with the outcomes in (...) the Euro-MCD Instrument from 2014, to further validate this Instrument. The concept mapping method was used and involves qualitative and quantitative steps including brainstorming, individual structuring, computation of concept maps (by principal component analysis and cluster analysis), group interpretation and utilization. In total, 12 experienced MCD participants from a variety of professional backgrounds participated in two sessions. The focus group brainstorm resulted in a list of 85 possible MCD outcomes, of which a point map and concept maps were constructed. After a thorough discussion of each cluster, final consensus was reached on the names and position of 8 clusters of MCD outcomes: 1) Organisation and Policy; 2) Team development; 3) Personal development focused on the Other Person; 4) Personal development as Professional, focused on Skills; 5) Personal development as Professional, focused on Knowledge; 6) Personal development as an Individual; 7) Perception and Connection; and 8) Concrete action. This study explored and categorized MCD outcomes in a concept mapping focus group. When comparing the results with the Euro-MCD Instrument, our study confirms that outcomes of MCD can be categorized in clusters referring to the organisational level, team development, personal development (both as an individual and a professional) and the concrete case-level. In developing CES evaluation tools, it is important to be explicit if an outcome refers to the individual or the team, to knowledge or skills, to the organisation or the specific case. The findings will be used in the further validation of the Euro-MCD Instrument. The current study further contributes to the field of evaluating CES in general and defining outcomes of MCD in particular. (shrink)