Environmental ethics has been dominated by an idealist logic that limits its positive impact on the natural world about which environmental philosophers care deeply. Environmental ethicists need to alter the ways we think and talk about what we value and the relations among ideas, values, and actions. Drawing on the sociology of religion and Marxian philosophy among other sources, a new approach may increase our understanding of how ideas are lived out and how we might increase the impact of our (...) ideas about the value of nature. (shrink)

Video games are ideal platforms for the study of skill acquisition for a variety of reasons. However, our understanding of the development of skill and the cognitive representations that support skilled performance can be limited by a focus on game scores. We present an alternative approach to the study of skill acquisition in video games based on the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. Our investigation was motivated by a detailed analysis of the behaviors responsible for the superior performance of (...) one of the highest scoring players of the video game Space Fortress. This analysis revealed how certain behaviors contributed to his exceptional performance. In this study, we recruited a participant for a similar training regimen, but we collected concurrent and retrospective verbal protocol data throughout training. Protocol analysis revealed insights into strategies, errors, mental representations, and shifting game priorities. We argue that these insights into the developing representations that guided skilled performance could only easily have been derived from the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. We propose that the described approach could be applied to understand performance and skill acquisition in many different video games and help reveal mechanisms of transfer from gameplay to other measures of laboratory and real-world performance. (shrink)

Video games are ideal platforms for the study of skill acquisition for a variety of reasons. However, our understanding of the development of skill and the cognitive representations that support skilled performance can be limited by a focus on game scores. We present an alternative approach to the study of skill acquisition in video games based on the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. Our investigation was motivated by a detailed analysis of the behaviors responsible for the superior performance of (...) one of the highest scoring players of the video game Space Fortress. This analysis revealed how certain behaviors contributed to his exceptional performance. In this study, we recruited a participant for a similar training regimen, but we collected concurrent and retrospective verbal protocol data throughout training. Protocol analysis revealed insights into strategies, errors, mental representations, and shifting game priorities. We argue that these insights into the developing representations that guided skilled performance could only easily have been derived from the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. We propose that the described approach could be applied to understand performance and skill acquisition in many different video games and help reveal mechanisms of transfer from gameplay to other measures of laboratory and real-world performance. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false-positive recognition of sentences with prototypical transitive semantics, young children showed no such effect. We examined two main implications of the results. First, it adds a novel data point to a growing body of research in cognitive linguistics and construction (...) grammar that shows abstract linguistic categories can behave in similar ways to non-linguistic categories, for example, by showing graded membership of a category. Thus, the findings lend psychological validity to the existing cross-linguistic evidence for prototypical transitive semantics. Second, we discuss a possible explanation for the fact that prototypical sentences were processed differently in adults and children, namely, that children’s transitive semantic network is not as interconnected or cognitively coherent as adults’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Developmental research has long sought to understand children’s social ideas, and particularly how those ideas influence their judgments and behaviors toward other people. We examine the idea of common humanity, a social idea that has been investigated historically and philosophically, to re-consider what is already known about children’s notions of social equality and difference and to suggest how research in this area might be expanded. We review the social cognition literature to argue that studying the idea of common humanity—which (...) combines abstract notions of universal equality with explicit attention to social group differences—could substantially advance our understanding of children’s social-cognitive frameworks. We then discuss a subset of the literature related to children’s prejudice and describe how the study of common humanity could shed light on the mechanisms behind interventions that successfully reduce prejudice. (shrink)

Peterson’s book offers an appraisal of current approaches to environmental and animal ethics and deftly critiques the traditional division between the two fields. Attempts to unite the two fields, Peterson claims, have made little progress. Most have concluded that the divide between the two is irreconcilable, but Peterson argues that the divide is counterintuitive, does not reflect our current practice, and does not represent nature, nonhuman-animals, or humanity, correctly.Throughout the book Peterson attempts to demonstrate why other theories have failed, arguing (...) that the mutual exclusivity of the two fields derives from each relying on an incorrect idea of how nature, nonhumans, and humans relate to—and depend upon—each other. Our actual behaviour shows that we do not think that we must be either an environmental or an animal ethicist, but that we act as if we are both. Peterson argues that by challenging this idea of mutual exclusivity a new theory can be put forward that represen .. (shrink)

BackgroundThe U.S. Food and Drug Administration traditionally has kept confidential significant amounts of information relevant to the approval or non-approval of specific drugs, devices, and biologics and about the regulatory status of such medical products in FDA’s pipeline.ObjectiveTo develop practical recommendations for FDA to improve its transparency to the public that FDA could implement by rulemaking or other regulatory processes without further congressional authorization. These recommendations would build on the work of FDA’s Transparency Task Force in 2010.MethodsIn 2016-2017, we convened (...) a team of academic faculty from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Yale Medical School, Yale Law School, and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to develop recommendations through an iterative process of reviewing FDA’s practices, considering the legal and policy constraints on FDA in expanding transparency, and obtaining insights from independent observers of FDA.ResultsThe team developed 18 specific recommendations for improving FDA’s transparency to the public. FDA could adopt all these recommendations without further congressional action.FundingThe development of the Blueprint for Transparency at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. (shrink)

Bianchi et al. argue that for some patients with severe and enduring anorexia nervosa approaches that do not aim for complete clinical recovery are ethically warranted. We believe tha...

Productivity is a central concept in the study of language and language acquisition. As a test case for exploring the notion of productivity, we focus on the noun slots of verb frames, such as __want__, __see__, and __get__. We develop a novel combination of measures designed to assess both the flexibility and creativity of use in these slots. We do so using a rigorously controlled sample of child speech and child directed speech from three English-speaking children between the ages of (...) 2–3 years and their caregivers. We find different levels of creativity and flexibility between the adult and child samples for some measures, for some slots, and for some developmental periods. We discuss these differences in the context of verb frame semantics, conventionality versus creativity and child errors, and draw some tentative conclusions regarding developmental changes in children's early grammatical representations. (shrink)

Canine rescue is a growing movement that affects the lives of tens of thousands of nonhuman animals and people every year. Rescue is noteworthy not only for its numbers, but also because it challenges common understandings of animal advocacy. Popular accounts often portray work on behalf of animals as sentimental, individualistic, and apolitical. In fact, work on behalf of animals has always been political, in multiple ways. It is characterized both by internal political tensions, especially between animal rights and welfare (...) positions, and by complex relations to the broader public sphere. I analyze canine rescue, with a focus on pit bull rescue, to show that an important segment of canine rescue movements adopts an explicitly political approach which blurs the divide between rights and welfare, addresses the social context of the human-animal bond, and links animal advocacy to social justice. (shrink)

Themes of Christian martyrdom were central to popular political mobilization in El Salvador, as in much of Latin America, during the 1970s and 1980s. The story of Christ's sacrifice provided a powerful narrative for explaining injustice and political violence, a frame for interpretation as well as action during the twelve-year Salvadoran civil war, which ended in 1992 by a negotiated settlement. In the first part of this article we trace the politics of martyrdom and sacrifice through the war. The final (...) sections of the article examine the place of narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice in post-civil war El Salvador. While most Salvadorans today continue to experience high levels of inequality, poverty, and violence, the narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice that animated the revolutionary movements and liberation theology of the 1980s have lost much of their resonance. We suggest that the dispersion of both the perceived sources of, and the imagined solutions to, injustice contribute to the diminution in the importance of Christian narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice in El Salvador today. (shrink)

Works Righteousness explores the ways that different ethical theories relate to what people actually do. Peterson argues that the most dominant philosophical and religious approaches have largely ignored practice, assuming that internal mental states are what matter for ethics and that ideas and practices are related in a simple, linear fashion. However, some alternative models, including pragmatism, Marxism, and religious pacifism, present a more complex view of the relations between values and practices. These traditions show how attention to practices opens (...) up new ways of thinking about moral theory and concrete issues like hate speech, euthanasia, and climate change. (shrink)

Despite the reality that self-learning artificial intelligence systems are gaining in sophistication, humanity’s focus regarding SLAIS-human interactions are unnervingly centred upon transnational commercial sectors and, most generally, around issues of intellectual property law. But as SLAIS gain greater environmental interaction capabilities in digital spaces, or the ability to self-author code to drive their development as algorithmic models, a concern arises as to whether a system that displays a “deceptive” level of human-like engagement with users in our physical world ought to (...) be uniquely protected. Although many voices in the legal and technology realms have continued to argue against unique protections for digital entities, the fact at hand is that SLAIS design is becoming increasingly anthropomorphic so as to make these systems more capable of interacting with a wide range of vulnerable populations—generally as a means to enhance these populations’ overall well-being. To frame this concern in a different way, the specific question at hand is whether a human’s “ownership” of such an advanced SLAIS is legal, considering that it may possess intelligence on par with a human or a convincing-enough display of such behaviour. Given that “ownership” over entities with intelligent behaviours consistent with human populations has been effectively banned by the international community, an examination into this subject and its implications is wholly necessary given humanity’s quest to exist solely in digital environments through whatever means possible. (shrink)

The concept of artificial intelligence is not new nor is the notion that it should be granted legal protections given its influence on human activity. What is new, on a relative scale, is the notion that artificial intelligence can possess citizenship—a concept reserved only for humans, as it presupposes the idea of possessing civil duties and protections. Where there are several decades’ worth of writing on the concept of the legal status of computational artificial artefacts in the USA and elsewhere, (...) it is surprising that law makers internationally have come to a standstill to protect our silicon brainchildren. In this essay, it will be assumed that future artificial entities, such as Sophia the Robot, will be granted citizenship on an international scale. With this assumption, an analysis of rights will be made with respect to the needs of a non-biological intelligence possessing legal and civic duties akin to those possessed by humanity today. This essay does not present a full set of rights for artificial intelligence—instead, it aims to provide international jurisprudence evidence aliunde ab extra de lege lata for any future measures made to protect non-biological intelligence. (shrink)

Increased investment in ethics education has prompted a variety of instructional objectives and frameworks. Yet, no systematic procedure to classify these varying instructional approaches has been attempted. In the present study, a quantitative clustering procedure was conducted to derive a typology of instruction in ethics education. In total, 330 ethics training programs were included in the cluster analysis. The training programs were appraised with respect to four instructional categories including instructional content, processes, delivery methods, and activities. Eight instructional approaches were (...) identified through this clustering procedure, and these instructional approaches showed different levels of effectiveness. Instructional effectiveness was assessed based on one of nine commonly used ethics criteria. With respect to specific training types, Professional Decision Processes Training and Field-Specific Compliance Training appear to be viable approaches to ethics training based on Cohen’s d effect size estimates. By contrast, two commonly used approaches, General Discussion Training and Norm Adherence Training, were found to be considerably less effective. The implications for instruction in ethics training are discussed. (shrink)

School gardens and garden-based learning continue to gain great popularity in the United States, and their pedagogical potential, and ability to impact students’ fruit and vegetable consumption and activity levels have been well-documented. Less examined is their potential to be agents of food system reskilling and transformation. Though producer and consumer are inextricably linked in the food system, and deskilling of one directly influences the other, theorists often focus on production-centered and consumption-centered deskilling separately. However, in a school garden, the (...) production/consumption disconnect is erased, by virtue of the design of the site itself and how it is utilized by the actors within it. School gardens provide the critical component of education in alternative food networks, and contribute to the producer/consumer reskilling that is a necessary part of food system transformation. We conducted a case study of an established school garden program during its transition from autonomous non-profit to official, district-funded program of a rural school district in the Midwest. By participating in the full “seed to plate” life cycle of a garden crop, students in the garden were actively involved in the reconnection of producer and consumer, while educators were fostering in students an appreciation for fresh, healthy foods and actively challenging the “McDonaldization” of both students’ diets and education. Based upon these findings, we argue that school gardens in rural areas could leverage the dominant role of rural America in developing and shifting food system paradigms. (shrink)

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence systems has generated a means whereby assistive bionic prosthetics can become both more effective and practical for the patients who rely upon the use of such machines in their daily lives. However, de lege lata remains relatively unspoken as to the legal status of patients whose devices contain self-learning CIS that can interface directly with the peripheral nervous system. As a means to reconcile for this lack of legal foresight, this article approaches the topic (...) of CIS-nervous system interaction and the impacts it may have on the legal definition of “persons” under the law. While other literature of this nature centres upon notions of transhumanism or self-enhancement, the approach herein approached is designed to focus solely upon the legal nature of independent CIS actions when operating alongside human subjects. To this end, it is hoped that further discussion on the topic can be garnered outside of transhumanist discourse to expedite legal consideration for how these emerging relationships ought to be received by law-generating bodies internationally. (shrink)