Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of (...) small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life. Key Words: altruism; cooperation; cross-cultural research; experimental economics; game theory; ultimatum game; public goods game; self-interest. (shrink)

We would like to thank the commentators for their generous comments, valuable insights and helpful suggestions. We begin this response by discussing the selfishness axiom and the importance of the preferences, beliefs, and constraints framework as a way of modeling some of the proximate influences on human behavior. Next, we broaden the discussion to ultimate-level (that is evolutionary) explanations, where we review and clarify gene-culture coevolutionary theory, and then tackle the possibility that evolutionary approaches that exclude culture might be sufficient (...) to explain the data. Finally, we consider various methodological and epistemological concerns expressed by our commentators. (shrink)

v. 1. Interpretation and theology -- v. 2. Biblical studies.

Seasonal influenza poses a significant public health risk in many countries worldwide. Lower immunity and less influenza virus circulating during the pandemic has resulted in a significant increase in cases since the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions in 2022. The seasonal influenza vaccine offers effective protection and is safe for use in large numbers of the population. This article asserts that a moral obligation to vaccinate against influenza can be understood as an Institutional Duty of Rescue. The traditional understanding of the (...) Duty of Rescue encounters issues with force and scope, making it difficult to apply to rescue cases in general, as well as being overdemanding for the individual agent. An Institutional view of the Duty of Rescue addresses these difficulties, looks at the wider context of rescue and leaves room for discussion on collective, preventative rescue measures. This makes the concept well suited to supporting a moral obligation to vaccinate against influenza as part of a collective effort on the part of institutional organisations. (shrink)

In this paper, I contend that the use of the notion of non-inevitability on the part of many social constructionists and non-social constructionists alike is either vague or relies too heavily on intuition. I propose two readings, namely the Dependence and Alterability Readings, to provide a principled criterion for determining whether and to what extent something may be argued to be non-inevitable. By utilizing the examples of gender and human emotion as case studies, my ultimate goals herein are not to (...) provide a wholly foolproof criterion to delimit the non-inevitable, but to proffer one attempt at fleshing out a structured analysis at what non-inevitability might amount to and, also, to highlight the importance of why the notion of non-inevitability must be précised in order for social constructionist or non-social constructionist programs to hold weight. (shrink)

Introduction: Middle-Earth, The lord of the rings, and international relations -- Order, justice, and Middle-Earth -- Thinking about international relations and Middle-Earth -- Middle-Earth and three great debates in international relations -- Middle-Earth, levels of analysis, and war -- Middle-Earth and feminist theory -- Middle-Earth and feminist analysis of conflict -- Middle-Earth as a source of inspiration and enrichment -- Conclusion: international relations and our many worlds.

This book considers what responsibilities affluent individuals have toward global poverty, given that global poverty is a problem with structural, political causes, and one that generally requires collective action. By looking at the intersection of moral, political, and legal philosophy, this book gives a pluralistic and differentiated account of individual duties based on a person's moral agency, her roles within collective groups , and her institutional identities as citizen and consumer.

Donald A. Barr's Introduction to U.S. Health Policy: The Organization, Financing, and Delivery of Health Care in America (second edition, 2007) offers a lucid and informative overview of the U.S. health system and the dilemmas policy makers currently face. Barr has provided a balanced introduction to the way health care is organized, financed, and delivered in the United States. The thirteen chapters of the book are quite comprehensive in the topics they cover. Even those knowledgeable about the U.S. (...) health care system are likely to find much to stimulate their thinking in the text. The book can also appropriately serve as a basic text for a health policy course or in the medical or nursing school curriculum. (shrink)

Recently, commentators close to and within the UK government have claimed that patient choice can increase equity in the context of the National Health Service. This article critically examines the basis for this claim through analysis of recent speeches and publications authored by secretaries of state for health and their policy advisers. It is concluded that this claim has not developed prospectively from an analysis of the causes of healthcare inequity, or even with a consistent normative definition of equity. The (...) limited justification that is “framed in causal explanations” of inequity has suffered from an apparent disregard of the available evidence. (shrink)

The predominant narratives of addiction—Disease and Choice narratives—frame addiction as a personal problem to be addressed by controlling an individual’s behavior. By analyzing the epistemic function of narratives of addiction, this paper shows that these narratives construct a story about the nature of addiction by assuming simplistic views about human agency, leading to drug policies that narrowly focus on individual behavior. Assumptions embedded within narratives must be made transparent so that the partial, perspectival, and situated nature of the knowledge that (...) narratives convey is made evident and can be evaluated. As a result of their over-simplistic assumptions about human agency, Disease and Choice narratives neglect a significant factor in addiction: the social context which informs and sets limits on the reasons and values that enter into decision-making. This paper argues for the adoption of Social Constraint narratives, which would require policy agendas to focus on the social contexts that make drug use so appealing. As a result, agencies dealing with drug policy would need to collaborate with other agencies focusing on relevant social issues in order to create structural change, thus affecting the social environment and not merely the individual. (shrink)

Responding to the polemic critiques of Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film, Django Unchained, this essay uses Lacanian and Žižekian discussions of the gaze in order to understand what the film communicates about the racist ideology of American slavery. Tarantino’s film is at once more nuanced than most Hollywood films about the period and also more clearly problematic. Unlike other recent films about slavery in the United States, such as the recent Lincoln, in Django Unchained, every character other than a German bounty (...) hunter, Dr. King Schultz, is interpellated in the racist ideology that supports the institution of slavery; and the characters of the film, black and white alike, go to great lengths to preserve the ideology that rests on the subjugation of all black Americans. Tarantino’s rendition of this interpellation is made still more enjoyable as his main characters, Schultz, and the slave-turned-bounty-hunter, Django, embody two manifestations of the gaze, the screen and the stain or spot. However, because the Lacanian letter insists on arriving at the end of the film, the conclusion to Django Unchained also appears to suggest that the film’s villain, though physically defeated, was correct in his pronouncement that 9,999 out of 10,000 black people are biologically servile. (shrink)

In the past three decades, feminist scholars have produced an extraordinary rich body of theoretical writing in humanities and social science disciplines. This revised and updated second edition of Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences, is a genuinely interdisciplinary anthology of significant contributions to feminist theory.This timely reader is creatively edited, and contains insightful introductory material. It illuminates the historical development of feminist theory as well as the current state of the field. Emphasizing common themes and (...) interests in the humanities and social sciences, the editors have chosen topics that remain relevant to current debates, reflect the interests of a diverse community of thinkers, and have been central to feminist theory in many disciplines.The contributors include leading figures from the fields of psychology, literary criticism, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, art history, law, and economics. This is the ideal text for any advanced course on interdisciplinary feminist theory, one that fills a long-standing gap in feminist pedagogy. (shrink)

In Darwinian Heresies, which was originally published in 2004, prominent historians and philosophers of science trace the history of evolutionary thought, and challenge many of the assumptions that have built up over the years. Covering a wide range of issues starting in the eighteenth century, Darwinian Heresies brings us through the time of Charles Darwin and the Origin, and then through the twentieth century to the present. It is suggested that Darwin's true roots lie in Germany, not his native England, (...) that Russian evolutionism is more significant than many are prepared to allow, and that the true influence on twentieth-century evolution biology was not Charles Darwin at all, but his often-despised contemporary, Herbert Spencer. The collection was intended to interest, to excite, to infuriate, and to stimulate further work. (shrink)

The distinctly contemporary proliferation of pornography and hate speech poses a challenge to liberalism's traditional ideal of a 'marketplace of ideas' facilitated by state neutrality about the content of speech. This new study argues that the liberal state ought to depart from neutrality to meet this challenge.

The Dutch philosopher of religion Hent de Vries has explored and complicated the boundaries between religion and modern thought in order to create the space for an innovative “minimal theology.” This article reconstructs de Vries's interpretation of the changes in Theodor W. Adorno's thought between Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics in order to demonstrate its fecundity for a philosophical account of otherness. It also examines and defends de Vries's own rhetorical mode of reading texts as an exemplary approach to (...) philosophical dialogue. Finally, however, the essay challenges de Vries's privileging of the religious as the site of ethical relationality and his intentional bracketing of Adorno's critical social theory. (shrink)

Background Human brain organoids are a valuable research tool for studying brain development, physiology, and pathology. Yet, a host of potential ethical concerns are inherent in their creation. There is a growing group of bioethicists who acknowledge the moral imperative to develop brain organoid technologies and call for caution in this research. Although a relatively new technology, brain organoids and their uses are already being discussed in media literature. Media literature informs the public and policymakers but has the potential for (...) utopian or dystopian distortions. Thus, it is important to understand how this technology is portrayed to the public. Methods To investigate how brain organoids are displayed to the public, we conducted a systematic review of media literature indexed in the Nexis Uni database from 2013–2019. News and media source articles passing exclusion criteria (_n_ = 93) were scored to evaluate tone and relevant themes. Themes were validated with a pilot sample before being applied to the dataset. Thematic analysis assessed article tone, reported potential for the technology, and the scientific, social, and ethical contexts surrounding brain organoids research. Results Brain organoid publications became more frequent from 2013 to 2019. We observed increases in positively and negatively toned articles, suggesting growing polarization. While many sources discuss realistic applications of brain organoids, others suggest treatment and cures beyond the scope of the current technology. This could work to overhype the technology and disillusion patients and families by offering false hope. In the ethical narrative we observe a preoccupation with issues such as development of artificial consciousness and “humanization” of organoid-animal chimeras. Issues of regulation, ownership, and accuracy of the organoid models are rarely discussed. Conclusions Given the power that media have to inform or misinform the public, it is important this literature provides an accurate and balanced reflection of the therapeutic potential and associated ethical issues regarding brain organoid research. Our study suggests increasing polarization, coupled with misplaced and unfounded ethical concern. Given the inhibitory effects of public fear or disillusion on research funding, it is important media literature provides an accurate reflection of brain organoids. (shrink)

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many have become increasingly dissatisfied with how science funding is distributed. Traditional grant funding processes are seen as stifling the creativity of researchers, in addition to being bureaucratic, slow, and inefficient. Consequently, there have been increasing popular calls to make “fast funding” – fast, unbureaucratic grant applications – a new standard for scientific funding. Though this approach to funding, implemented by Fast Grants, has been successful as a pandemic response strategy, we believe there (...) are serious costs to its wide-scale adoption, particularly for transparency and equity, and that the purported benefits – increased creativity and efficiency – are unlikely to materialize. While traditional funding mechanisms are certainly not perfect, scientific communities should think twice before adopting fast funding as a new standard for funding. (shrink)

Conversions: A Philosophic Memoir belongs to the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau: the "confession" of a life that is a quest for truth. It is in large part the story of two major episodes from Abigail Rosenthal's early adulthood, bought putting personal identity dramatically at risk. As a young Fulbright scholar in Paris, Rosenthal met and entered reluctantly into a love affair with a young Greek communist philosopher who believed (along with many Parisian intellectuals of that era) that force (...) and deception were justified by a utopian vision of world history. In the inevitable collision of values—between Jew and Greek, liberal and revolutionary, theist and atheist, woman and man in unequal truggle—they separated. Suffering in the aftermath, she at last turned for help to a young African American woman graduate student whom she met in London. This woman's Gnostic Christian rejection of personal and cultural history eventually left Rosenthal without defense against her new mentor's remarkable use of charisma, ridicule, and moralistic reproach to usurp the author's life story. These stratagems of mind control reached a climactic phase in Portugal, where the two went—Rosenthal to paint the other woman to write—in what would turn out to be the terrifying reverse of a summer idyll. With the U.S. State Department, the Portuguese Policía Internacional devised an extraordinary rescue. This arresting narrative, which deals with relations between blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, and men and women, delivers its own philosophic theory of the individual in history. Author note: Abigail L. Rosenthal is Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York and the author of A Good Look at Evil (Temple). (shrink)

The problem of the manipulation of data that arises when there is both opportunity and incentive to mislead is better accepted and studied — though by no means solved — in financial accounting than in medicine. This article analyzes pharmaceutical company manipulation of medical research as part of a broader problem of corporate manipulation of data in the creation of accounting profits. The article explores how our understanding of accounting fraud and misinformation helps us understand the risk of similar information (...) manipulation in the medical sciences. This understanding provides a framework for considering how best to improve the quality of medical research and analysis in light of the current system of medical information production. I offer three possible responses: (1) use of the Dodd-Frank whistleblower provisions to encourage reporting of medical research fraud; (2) a two-step academic journal review process for clinical trials; and (3) publicly subsidized trial-failure insurance. These would improve the release of negative information about drugs, thereby increasing the reliability of positive information. (shrink)

Good decision-making requires reliable information. In medicine, relevant information comes from clinical trials and other forms of scientific research. In business, one source is in corporate annual financial statements. As for-profit, publicly traded companies whose business is discovering, manufacturing, and marketing drugs, pharmaceutical companies sit at the nexus of these two fields. Determining the safety and efficacy of a pharmaceutical product and determining the profitability of a complex enterprise are similarly difficult tasks: each is fraught with deeply ambiguous information that (...) requires sophisticated judgment to interpret reasonably. (shrink)

The international protest surrounding the Copenhagen Zoo’s recent decision to kill a healthy giraffe in the name of population management reveals a deep moral tension between contemporary zoological display practices—which induce zoo-goers to view certain animals as individuals, quasi-persons, or friends—and the traditional objectives of zoos, which ask us only to view animals as specimens. I argue that these zoological display practices give rise to moral obligations on the part of zoos to their visitors, and thus ground indirect duties on (...) behalf of zoos to their animals. I conclude that zoos might take on interspecies friendship as a new zoological objective. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the way that mental illness stigma impacts epistemic credibility in people who have mental illness. While any kind of stigma has the potential to discredit a person’s epistemic agency, in the case of mental illness the basis for discrediting is in some cases and to some extent justifiable, for impairments in rationality, control, and reality perception can indeed be obstacles to participating appropriately in epistemic activities such as normal conversation and public discourse. People with mental (...) illness are still potentially subject to epistemic injustices, however, especially when we rely on stereotypes and fail to make complicated and nuanced judgments which are more accurate. In this paper, I explain some of the ways that people with mental illness may be subject to epistemic injustices, and I propose some suggestions for how epistemic injustice can be avoided. (shrink)

Phenomenologically speaking, we perceive the present, recall the past, and anticipate the future. We offer an account of the temporal content of the perceptual present that distinguishes it from the recalled past and the anticipated future. We distinguish two views: the Token Reflexive Account and the Minimal Account. We offer reasons to reject the Token Reflexive Account, and defend the Minimal Account, according to which the temporal content of the perceptual present is exhausted by its direct reference to the interval (...) of time over which it occurs. (shrink)

With no statutory definition of death, the accepted medical definition relies on brain stem death criteria as a definitive measure of diagnosing death. However, the use of brain stem death criteria in this way is precarious and causes widespread confusion amongst both medical and lay communities. Through critical analysis, this paper considers the insufficiencies of brain stem death. It concludes that brain stem death cannot be successfully equated with either biological death or the loss of integrated bodily function. The overemphasis (...) of the brain-stem and its consequences leaves the criteria open to significant philosophical critique. Further, in some circumstances, the use of brain stem death criteria causes substantial emotional conflict for families and relatives. Accordingly, a more holistic and comprehensive definition of death is required. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Psychological or political criticism of the parent‐child relation presupposes a normative account of that relation. Such an account is here provided. The normative account can shed most light when the parent‐child relation is presented recognizably, not in Utopian disguise. The purposes of reasonable people partly depend on their interpretations of those of their parents. This is so whether such people accept or reject any particular parental purposes. The filial art sticks to the project of working out the enacted interpretation—until (...) it gets it approximately right. There is a corresponding parental art, neither compensatory nor sacrificial. (shrink)

Early research suggested that migration changed gender roles by offering women new wages and exposing them to norms of gender equity. Increasingly, however, scholars have drawn attention to the role of structural factors, such as poverty and undocumented status, in mediating the relationship between migration and gender. This article takes such insights a step further by showing that migrant communities’ reactions to structural marginality—and their efforts to build alternatives in their home villages—may also draw women into new gender roles. I (...) demonstrate this mechanism through the case of San Miguel, a Mixtec sending community in Southern Mexico where, in the context of U.S. migration, once-excluded women came to predominate in civic affairs. In response to harsh conditions in the United States, migrants from San Miguel returned to their village. To make this economically feasible, they sought state development resources. Men, who often stayed in the United States as breadwinners, relied on sympathetic women back in the sending community to advocate on their behalf. Meanwhile, women’s own rejection of migrant life gave them new interest in sustaining their village. For both, incorporating women into politics offered a strategy to secure needed resources and avoid assimilating into an undocumented underclass. (shrink)

Contemporary egalitarian liberals—unlike their classical counterparts—have lived through many contentious events where the right to freedom of expression has been tested to its limits—the Skokie, Illinois, skinhead marches, hate speech incidents on college campuses, Internet pornography and hate speech sites, Holocaust deniers, and cross-burners, to name just a few. Despite this contemporary tumult, freedom of expression has been nearly unanimously affirmed in both the U.S. jurisprudence and philosophical discourse. In what follows, I will examine Ronald Dworkin's influential contemporary justification for (...) freedom of expression, which claims that a thoroughgoing right to freedom of expression is justified by the fact that it guarantees and preserves liberalism's commitment to equality by offering everyone an opportunity to speak, whereas any other policy, such as state regulation, would fail to offer this equal opportunity. This justification has been challenged by feminists and critical race theorists, who find the cases of pornography and hate speech to be sufficient threats to the freedom of expression and equality of their targets—women and minorities—to warrant limiting freedom of expression in these cases. I will argue that if Dworkin is to take equality as seriously as he claims to, then, by his own lights, he must back away from an unrestricted freedom of expression, in light of these distinctly contemporary challenges of the harms of systemic racism and sexism, which underlie hate speech and pornography. (shrink)

A philosophical study of the ethics of good and evil. Ch. 6 (pp. 163-207), "Banality and Originality, " takes issue with Hannah Arendt's thesis of the banality of evil. Contends that no legally sane Nazi was free of evil. The individual has free choice in regard to doing good and evil, and is responsible for his evil acts. Takes issue, also, with Raul Hilberg's view that the Jews did not resist the Nazi terror, and asks "What is the right way (...) to act during one's Holocaust?" Ch. 7 (pp. 209-220), "Thinking Like a Nazi, " analyzes the Nazi mentality, again showing that the individual cannot claim to have been led astray or to have been controlled by his subconscious - at every stage he was a free agent deliberately choosing evil. (shrink)