AbstractThe Belmont Report continues to be held in high regard, and most bioethical analyses conducted in recent years have presumed that it affects United States federal regulations. However, the assessments of the report’s creators are sharply divided. Understanding the historic reputation of this monumental report is thus crucial. We first recount the historical context surrounding the creation of this report. Subsequently, we review the process involved in developing ethical guidelines and describe the report’s features. Additionally, we analyze the effect of (...) unfolding events on the subsequent creation of federal regulations, especially on gene therapy clinical trials. Moreover, throughout this paper we evaluate the ethical principles outlined in this report and describe how they overlap with the issue of protecting socially vulnerable groups. Based on the analysis, we conclude that the features of the Belmont Report cannot be considered as having affected the basic sections of the federal regulations for ethical reviews that were made uniform in 1981. Nevertheless, regarding the regulations on gene therapy clinical trials—which were at first expected to be applicable to research involving children—in addition to implementing policies regarding the public review of protocols that passed ethical review, this report’s principles are clearly reflected in the key notes that should have been referred to when the report was created. (shrink)

日本人が追求してきた「生き方と生活の美学」を古代から近世の日本文化に即して解き明かす、意欲的な日本論。.

Debates concerning mask wearing continue in Japan. Here we critically examine the reasons for relaxing these regulations from a public health ethics perspective. We focus on three issues: government responsibility, political motivation, and cultural orientation, also discussing how these issues might have broader application in other parts of the world.

BackgroundSolitary death (kodokushi) has recently become recognized as a social issue in Japan. The social isolation of older people leads to death without dignity. With the outbreak of COVID-19, efforts to eliminate solitary death need to be adjusted in line with changes in lifestyle and accompanying changes in social structure. Health monitoring services that utilize wearable devices may contribute to this end. Our goals are to outline how wearable devices might be used to (1) detect emergency situations involving solitary older (...) people and swiftly connect them with medical treatment, to (2) reduce the frequency of deaths that remain undiscovered and (3) to reduce social isolation by promoting social interaction. MethodsTheoretical and philosophical approaches were adopted to examine ethical issues surrounding the application of wearable devices and cloud-based information processing systems to prevent solitary death in the world with/after COVID-19.Main body(1) Technology cannot replace social connections; without social support necessary to foster understanding of the benefits of health management through wearable devices among older adults, such devices may remain unused, or not used properly. (2) Maturity of the technology; systems face the difficult task of detecting and responding to a wide range of health conditions and life-threatening events in time to avert avoidable morbidity and mortality. (3) Autonomy and personhood; promoting the voluntary use of wearable devices that are a part of larger efforts to connect isolated individuals to a community or social services might be effective. Legal force should be avoided if possible. There is some concern that landlords may require an older person to sign a contract agreeing to wear a device. The autonomy of solitary older people should be respected. (4) Governance: policies must be developed to limit access to data from wearables and the purposes for which data can be used.ConclusionIf thoughtfully deployed under proper policy constraints, wearable devices offer a way to connect solitary older people to health services and could reduce cases of solitary death while respecting the personhood of the user. (shrink)

of (from Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy).

In the Shadow of Justice presents a powerful reconstruction of Anglophone political philosophy. Although the central focus of the book is on the origin and influence of John Rawls's theory of justice, it also uncovers the significance of British political theories in ways that contrast them with the Rawlsian liberal egalitarian idea. The book is, thus, a work of intellectual history that engages with the traditions of normative political theories.By referring extensively to the literature of philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, (...) and the archived materials of Rawls, Katrina Forrester puts forward two provocative theses. First is that the core idea of Rawls's... (shrink)

Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental speech disorder characterized by the symptoms of speech repetition, prolongation, and blocking. Stuttering-related dysfluency can be transiently alleviated by providing an external timing signal such as a metronome or the voice of another person. Therefore, the existence of a core motor timing deficit in stuttering has been speculated. If this is the case, then motoric behaviors other than speech should be disrupted in stuttering. This study examined motoric performance on four complex bimanual tasks in 37 adults (...) who stutter and 31 fluent controls. Two tasks utilized bimanual rotation to examine motor dexterity, and two tasks used the bimanual mirror and parallel tapping movements to examine timing control ability. Video-based analyses were conducted to determine performance accuracy and speed. The results showed that individuals who stutter performed worse than fluent speakers on tapping tasks but not on bimanual rotation tasks. These results suggest stuttering is associated with timing control for general motor behavior. (shrink)

The pervasive use of distributional semantic models or word embeddings for both cognitive modeling and practical application is because of their remarkable ability to represent the meanings of words. However, relatively little effort has been made to explore what types of information are encoded in distributional word vectors. Knowing the internal knowledge embedded in word vectors is important for cognitive modeling using distributional semantic models. Therefore, in this paper, we attempt to identify the knowledge encoded in word vectors by conducting (...) a computational experiment using Binder et al.'s (2016) featural conceptual representations based on neurobiologically motivated attributes. In an experiment, these conceptual vectors are predicted from text‐based word vectors using a neural network and linear transformation, and prediction performance is compared among various types of information. The analysis demonstrates that abstract information is generally predicted more accurately by word vectors than perceptual and spatiotemporal information, and specifically, the prediction accuracy of cognitive and social information is higher. Emotional information is also found to be successfully predicted for abstract words. These results indicate that language can be a major source of knowledge about abstract attributes, and they support the recent view that emphasizes the importance of language for abstract concepts. Furthermore, we show that word vectors can capture some types of perceptual and spatiotemporal information about concrete concepts and some relevant word categories. This suggests that language statistics can encode more perceptual knowledge than often expected. (shrink)

In this article, we address the problem of how people understand predicative metaphors such as “The rumor flew through the office,” and argue that predicative metaphors are understood as indirect (or two-stage) categorizations. In the indirect categorization process, the verb (e.g., fly) of a predicative metaphor evokes an intermediate entity, which in turn evokes a metaphoric category of actions or states (e.g., “to spread rapidly and soon disappear”) to be attributed to the target noun (e.g., rumor), rather than directly evoking (...) a metaphoric category as argued by CitationGlucksberg's (2001) categorization theory. We test our argument using two experiments, namely, offline comprehension and online priming. The offline comprehension experiment showed that interpretation of predicative metaphors had greater overlap with words indirectly associated with the verb than those directly associated with the verb. The online priming experiment demonstrated that indirectly associated words were activated during predicative metaphor comprehension, but directly associated words were not. These results provide convergent evidence for our argument, and thus the psychological validity of two-stage categorization as a process of predicative metaphor comprehension was confirmed. (shrink)

Was Nāgārjuna a thinker of philosophy or religion? This must be a question of the kind to which the answer depends heavily on the definition of “philosophy” and “religion”. Therefore, we may prefer to rephrase this question as: “Can Nāgārjuna legitimately be called a thinker of philosophy or religion?” Although it has been and may still be defined by its method or the objects of “philosophical thinking”, philosophy is, in most cases, expected to have the following characteristics: (1) Philosophy is (...) a type or product of human thought. (2) It is motivated by the human inclination for inquiry into the fundamental basis of being, whether human, social, or natural. (3) It is, theoretically at least, free from any types of dogmatic premises, whether traditional, social, or religious. (4) It requires a thoroughly logical and unequivocal usage of words and sentences. Likewise, although it has been and may still be defined by the existence or number of the absolute(s), be they god(s), spirit(s) or mental state(s), religion is, in most cases, expected to have the following characteristics: (1) Religion is a type of human beliefsystemor a product thereof. (2) It is motivated by the human inclination for ultimate reliance upon the absolute being or state. (3) It is, in practice, not completely free from some types of authoritative premises, whether traditional, customary, or founded by a certain individual. (4) It requires a purified mind, a deep understanding oftradition, constant practice and a careful observance of certain rules and regulations. Taking into account of the above characteristics of philosophy and religion, can we legitimately regard Nāgārjuna as a thinker of philosophy, religion, both, or neither? Let me focus on this question with an analysis of Nāgārjuna’s discussion as found in his magnum opus, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and related works. (shrink)

In contemporary political philosophy, reflections on poverty demand careful treatment in the light of key ethical concepts—especially autonomy. While the negative effects of poverty on autonomy are acknowledged, the welfare dependency of the poor is seen as an autonomy-undermining factor, which I call the “autonomy–poverty dilemma.” This chapter discusses contemporary political theories about autonomy and poverty in terms of how they relate to this dilemma. The features and problems of three pertinent theories are addressed in such a way as to (...) resolve the autonomy–poverty dilemma. The first is luck egalitarianism, which weighs individual responsibility in defining just distributions, but may leave some of the incapacitated unattended in order not to annul their personal responsibility and may stigmatize those who are dependent (such as people with mental disabilities) who are not personally responsible. Such stigmatization is also a problem with relational egalitarianism, which bases egalitarian justice on the equal standing of individuals, in that the ideal of socially embedded autonomous agents could be degrading to the dependent. While the capability approach overcomes that problem by providing a powerful buttress for the dependent and allowing them to emerge from poverty, it runs the risk of a paternalistic, perfectionist idealism. In closing, this chapter proposes an alternative view, which I call the “radical pluralist view of egalitarian justice,” based on a consideration of the features and problems of these three key theories. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 370-394, September 2022.

In political philosophy, reflective equilibrium is a standard method used to systematically reconcile intuitive judgments with theoretical principles. In this paper, we propose that survey experiments and a model selection method—i.e., the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC)-based model selection method—can be viewed together as a methodological means of satisfying the epistemic desiderata implicit in reflective equilibrium. To show this, we conduct a survey experiment on two theories of distributive justice, prioritarianism and sufficientarianism. Our experimental test case and AIC-based model selection method (...) demonstrate that the refined sufficientarian principle, a widely accepted principle of distributive justice, is no more plausible than the prioritarian principle. This tells us that some changes of certain intuitions revolving around sufficientarianism should be examined (separately) based on the findings of the survey experiment and AIC model selection. This shows the potential of our approach—both practically and methodologically—as a novel way of applying reflective equilibrium in political philosophy. (shrink)

Informed consent, decision-making styles and the role of patient-physician relationships are imperative aspects of clinical medicine worldwide. We present the case of a 74-year-old woman afflicted with advanced liver cancer whose attending physician, per request of the family, did not inform her of her true diagnosis. In our analysis, we explore the differences in informed-consent styles between patients who hold an "independent" and "interdependent" construal of the self and then highlight the possible implications maintained by this position in the context (...) of international clinical ethics. Finally, we discuss the need to reassess informed-consent styles suitable to the needs of each patient regardless of whether he or she resides in the United States or in Japan. (shrink)

It is often argued that relational egalitarianism has a fundamental problem with intergenerational justice when compared to other theories of justice such as utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and luck egalitarianism. Recently, Timothy Sommers argued that there is no such comparative disadvantage for relational egalitarianism. His argument is quite modest: it merely aims to reject the claim that there could be no way to extend relational egalitarianism to intergenerational justice. This may be called the ‘No Comparative Disadvantage Thesis’. The present article challenges Sommers’s (...) argument in two ways. First, I show that Sommers fails to provide a reasonable constraint on causal efficacy, which is crucial to his argument for our relation (not relationship) to future generations. Second, I show that the chain-relatedness problem casts a shadow over Sommers’s argument for the No Comparative Disadvantage Thesis. More specifically, compared to the other theories of justice, relational egalitarianism (as it stands) can less easily justify that present persons have duties to future others. This is because relational egalitarianism cannot appeal to a specific principle in regard to the duties in question, because its principle is sensitive to current context and practice. I conclude that the No Comparative Disadvantage Thesis does not hold much promise. (shrink)

We treat a class of multi-person bargaining mechanisms based on games in coalitional form. For this class of games we identify properties of non-cooperative solution concepts, which are necessary and sufficient for the equilibrium outcomes to coincide with the core of the underlying coalitional form game. We view this result as a non-cooperative axiomatization of the core. In contrast to most of the literature on multi-person bargaining we avoid a precise specification of the rules of the game. Alternatively, we impose (...) properties of such games, which give rise to a large class of mechanisms, all of which are relevant for our axiomatization. (shrink)

On 11 March 2011, Japan experienced a major disaster brought about by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and a massive tsunami that followed. This disaster caused extensive damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant with the release of a large amount of radiation, leading to a crisis level 7 on the International Atomic Energy Agency scale. In this report, we discuss the obligations of physicians to provide care during the initial weeks after the disaster. We appeal to the obligation of general (...) beneficence and argue that physicians should go to disaster zones only if there is no significant risk, cost or burden associated with doing so. We conclude that physicians were not obligated to go to Fukushima given the high risk of radiation exposure and physical and psychological harm. However, we must acknowledge that there were serious epistemic difficulties in accurately assessing the risks or benefits of travelling to Fukushima at the time. The discussion that follows is highly pertinent to all countries that rely on nuclear energy. (shrink)

The trolley problem is a classic thought experiment that evokes an ethical dilemma. Thomson’s “bystander” and “footbridge” versions of the trolley problem induce different intuitive judgments about what to choose in the ethical dilemma. However, we can question how robust these intuitive judgments are. We thus conducted an online survey experiment of Thomson’s versions of the trolley problem which showed that more respondents tended to choose not pulling the lever in the bystander version and pushing a person off the bridge (...) in the footbridge version when they believed they were not being watched. These results illustrate that people’s decisions deviate from the social norms in the absence of the public’s attention. To activate the practice of holding the manufacturers to a normative expectation based on the social norms, we suggest the law must be changed. (shrink)

This chapter purports to give empirical feedback on impartial reasoning to justice by using online survey experiments. More precisely, the study focuses on whether and how the different conceptions of the veil of ignorance and John Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium affect real people’s impartial reasoning to justice. The findings show that, while ordinary people support impartial reasoning to the difference principle (maximin), their endorsement of it echoes neither John Harsanyi’s nor Rawls’s reasoning. The results illuminate that findings in human (...) psychology, such as the principles of loss aversion and “perceived luckiness,” cannot be dismissed for denoting the relevant impartial reasoning to justice. (shrink)

La psicología es una rama científica relativamente nueva y a la que todavía le faltan bases metodológicas consistentes para fundamentar sus investigaciones. Dada su inmadurez, tal ciencia tiene dificultades para delimitar su estatuto ontológico, lo que genera diversos equívocos epistemológicos y metodológicos. Así, se impone una cuestión fundamental para la aclaración del objeto de la psicología: el problema mente-cuerpo. En ese sentido, el objetivo de este artículo, basado en la fenomenología de Edith Stein, es analizar algunos trabajos de la filósofa, (...) a saber: “Causalidad Psíquica” e “Introducción a la Filosofía”. De esa manera, a través de las investigaciones de Stein acerca de la psique y del cuerpo, se concluye que es posible concebir la cuestión psique/mente-cuerpo como una unidad-dual que se instancia en el Leib.Psychology is a relatively new scientific branch that still lacks consistent methodological foundations to support their investigations. Given their immaturity, that science still faces difficulties to delimit its ontological status, which raises various epistemological and methodological misconceptions. Thus, there is a fundamental question for an elucidation of the object of Psychology: the mindbody problem. The proposal of this article, in this sense, is to discuss the mind-body problem in the light of the Phenomenology of Edith Stein, seeking from there lay the fundation of Psychology. For this, some works of the philosopher was analysed, namely: “Psychic Causality” and “Introduction to Philosophy”. In this way, through the investigations of Stein about the psyche and body, concluded that it is possible to conceive the psyche/mind-body issue while a dual-unit that instantiates in the Leib. (shrink)