The Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic is affecting many areas of life and has led to major changes in undergraduate medical education. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, high mental burden of medical students has frequently been reported in the literature. Additional pandemic-specific stressors could exacerbate this situation. This study aimed to assess mental health outcomes among medical students during the first semester after the COVID-19 outbreak and perception of the students on how the learning environment has changed. In May 2020, we (...) conducted a cross-sectional survey among undergraduate medical students at a large medical school in Germany. The survey included validated mental health instruments and self-developed items to examine the perception of the study situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Open-ended questions were analyzed by conventional content analyses. The response rate was 59.2%. Overall, 61.9% of the students reported distress levels above the cutoff. Year 1 students reported significantly higher levels of distress, anxiety and depression than students during their second to fourth year of studies. 48.3% of the students indicated a decrease in their study motivation since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic with significant differences between study years. The binary logistic regression model showed that male gender, being in study year 2, higher distress scores and higher symptoms of depression were significantly associated with a higher likelihood for experiencing serious worries. In the open-ended questions on current concerns related to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their studies, students most frequently reported concerns about missing relevant practical learning experience, difficulties with self-regulated learning and self motivation as well as study-related worries. Year 4 students reported significantly more worries about the lack of practical training than students from study years 1 to 3. Analysis of gender differences showed that female students reported more frequently diverse worries. In contrast, female students shared more frequently helpful strategies in all the categories compared to male students. Our findings suggest that medical students experience significant levels of distress and mental burden during the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight the need for ongoing psychological and educational support for medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic and after. (shrink)

We studied the role of time in the experience of boredom and its relationship with various psychological states using virtual reality. Sixty-six participants visited nine virtual waiting rooms and evaluated their perception of time and psychological experiences, including boredom, exhaustion, restlessness, amotivation, frustration, anger, unhappiness, spontaneous and deliberate mind-wandering, fantasy, and absorption. Results confirmed the relationship between boredom and time perception, showing that the higher the levels of boredom, the slower time seems to pass. However, manipulating time-related information via a (...) slower/faster ticking clock did not affect boredom. We also found that boredom increased as participants progressed through the nine virtual rooms, and its affective characterisation over time remained stable, while its cognitive characterisation fluctuated. While boredom was consistently associated with exhaustion, restlessness, amotivation, and frustration, its relationship with fantasy, absorption, spontaneous mind-wandering and deliberate mind-wandering, evolved over time. These findings provide novel insights into the intricate and differentiated cognitive and affective consequences of being bored. (shrink)

In this chapter we argue that poverty should be seen as a violation of dignity, drawing on two of Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative – the formula of humanity and the formula of the kingdom of ends. In our view, poverty should not be seen primarily in terms of exploitation, nor of failures to help people in need. A Kantian perspective should give proper weight to the actual and potential agency of those who suffer poverty. This is a question (...) about power, not just the distribution of material resources. Theoretically, we will place particular emphasis on the rarely remarked reference to “ends and means” in the formula of the kingdom of ends. People are sometimes treated merely as means, which is one sort of disrespect for their equal moral status. Another form of disrespect, deeper and more general in form, is the denial of decent opportunities to act as means for others. The resulting powerlessness, we suggest, should be central to an adequate understanding of poverty and its violations of dignity. (shrink)

I was optimistic of a new beginning in an open society when I came to America in 1999. Since then, I have indeed benefited from many aspects of American life. I have learned a lot – especially through my experience with small farms and farmers. But now, it's time to move on. And it was reading Debt and Dispossession, a book about American agriculture and human values, that crystallized in me why I wanted to leave. By telling the story of (...) the 1980s farm crisis through the words of the residents of a Minnesota town, the book prizes open many of the contradictions of American society. The 1970s were boom times for mid-western farms; farmers took advantage of “easy” farm credit to finance expansion. By the 1980s, the boom burst and slump loomed. Lenders wanted their money back and thousands of farmers were dispossessed. Debt and Dispossession probes beneath the surface of a community apparently united in protest against the dispossessions. Underneath, it finds a tangled picture of a society at war with itself, pitting farmer against farmer in a fratricidal struggle. The book let me glimpse the paradox of American individualism, all-American contradictions centering on government and consumerism, frugality and morality. Just like my experience of American agriculture and farmers as a whole, Debt and Dispossession helped me see the best side of America, but also revealed the fragility of life in a one-on-one society. (shrink)

From June 26 to 27, the workshop Ironists, Reformers, or Rebels? The Role of the Social Sciences in Participatory Policy Making took place at the Collegium Helveticum of the UZH/ETH in Zurich. The organisers’ motivation was the apparently missing involvement of social scientists in public engagement processes. This impression persists because, while social scientists often observe public debates or develop participatory methods for public policy-making, they rarely take part in those processes themselves. A closer look at ethics commissions, expert committees (...) or public hearings concerned with science and technology issues shows natural scientists, physicians, lawyers and the occasional philosopher. Sociologists, anthropologists and other social scientists, on the other hand, are often not involved. Because of this imbalance, the organisers’ aim was to bring together scholars and researchers from different areas of the social sciences to consider the role of their disciplines in public policy making. This article will focus on some of the ideas about specific roles of social scientists in participatory policy-making, discussed at the workshop, and their implications and give a commentary on some future prospects of the social sciences. (shrink)

Are there strong positive obligations? We obviously consider it a strong obligation to save a drowning child. The first part of this work investigates the factors that define the strength of such an obligation to help and how this is to be differentiated from actions that transcend obligation and from charitable obligations. The second part examines the question whether this case can be transposed to our relationship with those suffering from poverty and cites morally relevant factors that differentiate the cases.

This article offers a Kantian account of dignity violations in the context of contemporary migration to western states. It considers three major issues: “modern slavery,” statutory detention, and lack of rights to engage in economic activity. While most Kantian accounts emphasize the dignity violations of treating people as “mere means,” we point out that this does not capture the central issue: the “hostile environment” that so many migrants face. The first part of the article briefly sets out a Kantian account (...) of dignity violations. The second part highlights two key differences between modern slavery and its historical forebears. It emphasizes the interpersonal rather than institutional character of modern slavery, and distinguishes trafficking from smuggling. The third part argues that migrants who lack formal rights to remain and work face institutional exclusions that violate human dignity. Policies that aim to discourage and restrict immigration demean people’s status as ends in themselves. Moreover, they do so by actively denying opportunities to act as means for others. As such, the article draws a link between Kant’s well-known cosmopolitan right not to be treated with hostility and his less well-known ethical duty, “to be a useful member of the world.” Dignity can be found in acting as a means for others; hostility and exclusion can violate dignity just as much as instrumentalization. (shrink)

The creation of biobanks depends upon people’s willingness to donate their samples for research purposes and to agree to sample storage. Moreover, biobanks are a public good that requires active participation by all interested stakeholders at every stage of development. Therefore, knowing public’s attitudes towards participation in a biobank and biobank management is important and deserves investigation.

In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 schools around the world have been closed to protect against the spread of coronavirus. In several countries, homeschooling has been introduced to replace classroom schooling. With a focus on individual differences, the present study examined 138 schoolers regarding their self-control and boredom proneness. The results showed that both traits were important in predicting adherence to homeschooling. Schoolers with higher levels of self-control perceived homeschooling as less difficult, which in turn increased homeschooling adherence. In (...) contrast, schoolers with higher levels of boredom proneness perceived homeschooling as more difficult, which in turn reduced homeschooling adherence. These results partially hold when it comes to studying in the classroom. However, boredom threatened adherence only in the homeschooling context. Our results indicate that boredom proneness is a critical construct to consider when educational systems switch to homeschooling during a pandemic. (shrink)

In three experiments involving 104 children and 86 adults we investigated the extent to which harm brought about by physical contact is judged to be worse than harm caused by impersonal, no-contact actions. In Experiment 1, Italian monolingual children aged 4 to 6 were asked to indicate whether they would prioritize saving five persons through contact over saving three persons without contact with both courses of action involving harm to a single victim. A preference for saving more persons did not (...) emerge until the age of 6 years. By contrast, in Experiment 2, children with a Slovenian-Italian linguistic and cultural background judged that to save five with contact was preferable even at the age of 4 and 5 years. In Experiment 3, Slovenian-Italian adults were also significantly more likely than Italian-only speakers to advocate using contact, although in a direct comparison, both groups prioritized saving five over three persons, regardless of the means. Moral diversity is discussed in terms of cultural and linguistic constraints that may serve to mediate the use of considerations of contact in an intuitive moral psychology. (shrink)

Collective dilemmas have attracted widespread interest in several social sciences and the humanities including economics, sociology and philosophy. Since Hardin’s intuitive example of the Tragedy of the Commons, many real-world public goods dilemmas have been analysed with a wide ranging set of possible and actual solutions. The plethora of solutions to these dilemmas suggests that people make different kinds of decision in different situations. Rather than trying to find a unifying kind of reasoning to capture all situations, as the paradigm (...) of rationality has done, this article develops a framework of agent decision-making for social simulation, that takes seriously both different kinds of decision making as well as different interpretations of situations. The Contextual Action Framework for Computational Agents allows for the modelling of complex social phenomena, like dilemma situations, with relatively simple agents by shifting complexity from an agent’s cognition to an agent’s context. (shrink)

Flow is a gratifying state of deep involvement and absorption that individuals report when facing a challenging activity and they perceive adequate abilities to cope with it. The flow concept was introduced by Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, and interest in flow research is growing. However, to our best knowledge, no scoping review exists that takes a systematic look at studies on flow which were published between the years 2000 and 2016. Overall, 252 studies have been included in this review. Our review (...) provides a framework to cluster flow research, gives a systematic overview about existing studies and their findings, and provides an overview about implications for future research. The provided framework consists of three levels of flow research. In the first “Individual” level are the categories for personality, motivation, physiology, emotion, cognition, and behavior. The second “Contextual” level contains the categories for contextual and interindividual factors and the third “Cultural” level contains cultural factors that relate to flow. Using our framework, we systematically present the findings for each category. While flow research has made progress in understanding flow, in the future, more experimental and longitudinal studies are needed to gain deeper insights into the causal structure of flow and its antecedents and consequences. (shrink)

The proposal of the new criteria for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease based on biomarker data is making possible a diagnosis of AD at the mild cognitive impairment or predementia/prodromal– stage. Given the present lack of effective treatments for AD, the opportunity for the individuals to personally take relevant decisions and plan for their future before and if cognitive deterioration occurs is one the main advantages of an early diagnosis. Advance directives are largely seen as an effective tool for planning (...) medical care in the event the subject becomes incompetent. Nevertheless, their value has been questioned with regard to people with dementia by scholars who refer to the arguments of personal identity and of patient’s changing interests before and after the onset of dementia. In this paper, I discuss the value of advance directives in Alzheimer’s disease and other kind of dementia. Despite critics, I argue that advance directives are especially advisable in dementia and provide reasons in favor of their promotion at an early stage of the disease as a valuable tool to respect patients’ values and preferences on medical treatment, including participation in research and end of life decisions. I mainly support advance directives that include both decisions regarding health care and the appointment of an attorney in fact. I conclude that patients with AD at a prodromal or early stage should be offered the opportunity to execute an advance directive, and that not to honor a demented individual’s directive would be an unacceptable form of discrimination towards those patients. (shrink)

Building on the computer science concept of _code smells_, we initiate the study of _law smells_, i.e., patterns in legal texts that pose threats to the comprehensibility and maintainability of the law. With five intuitive law smells as running examples—namely, duplicated phrase, long element, large reference tree, ambiguous syntax, and natural language obsession—, we develop a comprehensive law smell taxonomy. This taxonomy classifies law smells by when they can be detected, which aspects of law they relate to, and how they (...) can be discovered. We introduce text-based and graph-based methods to identify instances of law smells, confirming their utility in practice using the United States Code as a test case. Our work demonstrates how ideas from software engineering can be leveraged to assess and improve the quality of _legal_ code, thus drawing attention to an understudied area in the intersection of law and computer science and highlighting the potential of computational legal drafting. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 43 Heft: 1 Seiten: 250-259.

Als kulturgeschichtlich bedeutsame Phänomene entstammen Masken der Ritual- und Theaterpraxis und traten schon in der Antike als Metapher in den Sprachgebrauch über. Kaum ein Philosoph hat den Masken so viel Raum gegeben wie Friedrich Nietzsche: Sie sind ihm Hilfsmittel der Erkenntnis und conditio humana, sie ermöglichen Höflichkeit und Selbstschutz, fungieren aber auch als Darstellungsform. Corinna Schubert führt zentrale Themen seines Denkens unter einem neuen Gesichtspunkt zusammen und erschließt sie als Philosophie der Masken. Dabei geht es nicht nur darum, was (...) Nietzsche über Masken denkt, sondern auch, wie er mit und in Masken denkt. (shrink)

Moral, die erstens von inhaltlich überzogenen Moralvorstellungen, zweitens von der Missachtung des Eigenrechts von Handlungssphären und drittens von überzogenen Arten des Geltendmachens moralisch legitimer Forderungen herrühren kann. Wir charakterisieren diese Quellen des Moralismus näher, unterscheiden verschiedene Spielarten oder Subtypen und besprechen schließlich Phänomene aus dem Umkreis des Moralismus.

AbstractDuring the covid-19 pandemic a huge number of research projects have been promoted internationally, nationally and locally. This also happened in Italy which was the first affected European country. Among these studies, research protocols based on the use of online questionnaires to evaluate the reaction of health workers and researchers to the emergency situation and their state of well-being were promoted. This contribution focuses on research protocols based on the use of online questionnaires and presents as a case study three (...) different research proposals with the purpose of showing their different degree of compliance to scientific and ethical requirements and the need for a clear regulation. A guideline for the assessment of studies based on questionnaires is then suggested, in the absence of a national regulation on the issue. Having established rules, albeit flexible, can help to guarantee transparency in the evaluation process and contribute to the scientific and ethical compliance of the research. (shrink)

Background On December 2017 the Italian Parliament approved law n. 219/2017 “Provisions for informed consent and advance directives” regarding challenging legal and bioethical issues related to healthcare decisions and end-of-life choices. The law does not contain an explicit reference to Ethics Committees (ECs), but they could still play a role in implementing the law. Methods A questionnaire-based survey was performed among the ECs of the Italian Institute for Research and Care belonging to the Network of neuroscience and neurorehabilitation, with the (...) aim of (1) knowing whether the ECs participated and, if so, how in the process of implementation of law n. 219/2017 in the referring institutes; (2) investigating the point of view of the ECs regarding their possible involvement in the process; (3) exploring the contribution ECs can provide to give effective implementation to the law principles and provisions. Results Seventeen ECs out of thirty took part in the survey; the characteristics of the responding and non-responding committees are similar, so the responding ECs can be regarded as representative of all ECs in the Network. Nine ECs did not discuss the law in anyway: the main reason for this is that the referring institutions (6) and the health care professionals (3) did not ask for an EC intervention. Nevertheless, the large majority of the ECs believe that their involvement in the implementation of the law as a whole is appropriate (8) or absolutely appropriate (6), while 3 of them are neutral. No EC believes that the involvement is inappropriate. The aspect of the law on which the 14 ECs converge in considering the EC involvement appropriate/absolutely appropriate is the one related to the health facilities obligation to guarantee the full and proper implementation of the principles of the law. Conclusions Our survey confirms that ECs believe they can play a role in the implementation of law n. 219/2017, although this does not entirely correspond to what the committees have actually done in reality. This role could be better exercised by ECs specifically established for clinical practice, which would have a composition, functioning and a mandate better suited to the purpose. This supports the call for a national regulation of ECs for clinical practice. (shrink)

Written with insight and humor, College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone investigates a broad array of philosophical issues relating to student sex. Examines the ethical issues of dating, cheating, courtship, homosexual experimentation, and drug and alcohol use Considers student-teacher relationships, sexual experimentation, the meaning of sex in a college setting and includes two essays based on influential research projects on ‘friends with benefits’ Many of the authors teach classes that explore the philosophy of love and sex, and most are scholars (...) from the Society of the Philosophy of Sex and Love. (shrink)