Background Obtaining informed consent in the clinical setting is an important yet challenging aspect of providing safe and collaborative care to patients. While the medical profession has defined best practices for obtaining informed consent, it is unclear whether these standards meet the expressed needs of patients, their families as well as healthcare providers. The authors sought to address this gap by comparing the responses of these three groups with a standardised informed consent paradigm. Methods Piloting a web-based ‘reverse’ simulation paradigm, (...) participants viewed a video showing a standardised doctor engaging in an informed consent discussion. The scenario depicted a simulated patient with psychotic symptoms who is prescribed an atypical antipsychotic medication. 107 participants accessed the simulation online and completed a web-based debriefing survey. Results Survey responses from patients, family members and healthcare providers indicated disparities in information retention, perception of the doctor's performance and priorities for required elements of the consent process. Conclusions To enhance existing informed consent best practices, steps should be taken to improve patient retention of critical information. Adverse events should be described in the short-term and long-term along with preventative measures, and alternative psychosocial and pharmacological treatment options should be reviewed. Information about treatment should include when the medication takes therapeutic effect and how to safely maintain the treatment. The reverse simulation design is a model that can discern gaps in clinical practice, which can be used to improve patient care. (shrink)

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, (...) diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom. (shrink)

One of the reasons why empathy is a topic of enduring interest is the role it can play in understanding others. Empathy can help us to predict each other’s future actions and explain past ones; to...

This chapter contains sections titled: Democracy as a Way of Life The Values of a Democratic Way of Life Intrinsic and Instrumental Values of Democracy References.

This paper addresses the question of how to educate toward democracy, which has as its defining trait the ability to self-correct. We draw on a study that investigated Deep Reflective Thinking (DRT) as a classroom method for cultivating collective doubt, which is essential for developing students’ capacity for self-correction in a community of inquiry.

Given the extraordinary influence of the DSM-III and its successors, the DSM-III-R and the DSM-IV, it behooves humanistically oriented practitioners to appraise these new manuals most carefully. Toward this end, we discuss the goals that have guided the manuals' development and provide an overview of their basic structure. This is followed by a phenomenologically based critique, evaluating the claim that these manuals are "descriptive" and "atheoretical." We conclude with a discussion of five guiding principles for phenomenological diagnosis and assessment.

Individuals in capitalist societies are increasingly exposed to market risks. Luck egalitarian theories, which advocate neutralizing the influence of luck on distribution, fail to cope with this problem, because they focus on the wrong kinds of distributive constraints. Rules of distributive justice can specify (1) acceptable procedures for allocating goods, (2) the range of acceptable variations in distributive outcomes, or (3) which individuals should have which goods, according to individual characteristics such as desert or need. Desert-catering luck egalitarians offer rules (...) of the third type. Their theories fail because considerations of market efficiency, freedom, and dignity undermine the claims of desert to inform standards of justice for society as a whole. Responsibility-catering luck egalitarians offer rules of the first type. Their theories fail because such rules don’t constrain the downside risks of market choices. To solve this problem, we need rules of the second type, which allow market forces, and hence luck, to influence distributive outcomes, but only within an acceptable egalitarian range. The ideal of equality in social relations helps us devise acceptable constraints at the top, bottom, and middle of the income range. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:An Exposition of The Divine Names, The Book of Blessed Dionysius by Thomas AquinasMichael J. Rubin, Elizabeth C. Shaw, and Staff*AQUINAS, Thomas. An Exposition of The Divine Names, The Book of Blessed Dionysius. Translated and edited with an introduction by Michael A. Augros. Merrimack, N.H.: Thomas More College Press, 2021. xxv + 549 pp. Cloth, $65.00The profound influence that Pseudo-Dionysius had on Aquinas’s thought, especially in his (...) metaphysics of participation and his apophatic theology, has been known for some time now, thanks to the excellent work of such scholars as Fran O’Rourke. One would therefore think that Aquinas’s Exposition of the Divine Names (his only commentary on the works of Pseudo-Dionysius) would have been translated a lot sooner. This delay is assuredly due not just to the difficulty of translating this work but also to a certain embarrassment felt by Thomists over Aquinas’s sincere belief that the “Dionysius” who wrote the Divine Names was the Areopagite whose conversion at the teaching of St. Paul is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles. That the author calling himself “Dionysius” was in fact a theologian writing in the fifth or sixth centuries has been well established by modern scholarship. Hence, Thomists may have felt tempted to discount or at least pass over the influence of this author on Aquinas since it is discomfiting to think that the Church’s greatest theologian accorded such authority to an imposter.Michael Augros tackles these concerns head-on in the excellent introduction to his new translation of the Divine Names commentary. First, Augros points out that in past centuries a pseudonym was usually not an act of forgery but, rather, a way of concealing the author’s identity, which an early Christian theologian might well decide to do either out of humility or out of a desire “to avoid provoking certain prejudices” in those who disagreed with him in contemporary theological disputes. Moreover, it is likely that the work was never intended for the general public (who could easily mistake the pseudonym as genuine) but, rather, was written for those “already initiated in a particular Neoplatonic school of Christian theology,” who would recognize the author as being “one of their own” but without knowing his precise identity. Finally, in taking the particular name of “Dionysius,” the author of the Divine Names was indicating his intention for the work: Just as the biblical Dionysius was a Greek philosopher who converted to Christianity, so the works of Pseudo-Dionysius [End Page 345] are an attempt to reconcile Greek philosophy with the Christian faith.It therefore seems likely, as Augros observes, that Aquinas would still have accorded a great deal of respect to the Divine Names even if he had learned the truth of the author’s identity. The work would not have had the same deuterocanonical authority for him that comes with being written by a direct disciple of St. Paul himself, but “the inherent cogency, coherence, and beauty” of Pseudo-Dionysius’s theology would have been the same. Hence, Pseudo-Dionysius would surely have earned from Aquinas the “docile attitude” appropriate “for a philosopher and theologian of the first order, such as Boethius.”That Aquinas was right to see the author of the Divine Names as a master philosopher and theologian becomes evident when one dives into the text itself, in which Aquinas sees a truly dazzling order, both externally and internally. According to Aquinas, the Divine Names discusses those truths about God of which there are intelligible likenesses in creatures, such as goodness or wisdom, whereas the truths about God of which there are sensible likenesses (for example, “when God is called a lion, or a rock”) are treated by Pseudo-Dionysius in The Symbolic Theology; meanwhile, in the lost or fictional work The Divine Characteristics, Dionysius claims to have treated those truths about God (such as the Trinity) that cannot be known through any likenesses in creatures.Aquinas finds a still more intricate order within the Divine Names itself. Since this work is dedicated to “the divine names by which the processions of God to creatures are manifested,” the plan of the work... (shrink)

I argue that our traditional conception of the duties imposed by human rights is unable to acknowledge the nature of many contemporary human rights violations. The traditional conception is based on a broadly deontological view according to which human rights impose primarily negative and perfect duties, and these duties are held to be specific prohibitions on certain kinds of actions . I argue that given this conception of the nature of the duties imposed by human rights, not only claims to (...) aid, but in addition, claims against many of the most serious and prevalent contemporary active harms will not count as genuine human rights claims. These harms increasingly result from extremely complex causal chains involving the behaviour of a huge number of agents, few or none of whom can be singled out as responsible for a serious harm to any specific victim. Institutional structures can have just as central a role to play in specifying and allocating responsibility for fulfilling many of the negative duties imposed by human rights as the positive duties. These structures can therefore be equally important in the realisation of both kinds of rights. Before the necessary institutional reforms have taken place, both kinds of rights are equally genuine, and ground the imperative of justice to reform existing social institutions. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to advances research on walking, at a neighbourhood level of analysis for people with disabilities, by proposing a theoretical model that combines the knowledge of two disciplines: traffic planning and environmental psychology. The aim is to provide a guidance for a discussion and a planning of future interdisciplinary investigations, by proposing a model that accounts for the dynamic interaction between environmental characteristics, human processes, and walking experience among individuals with a disability. For this purpose, traffic (...) planners and environmental psychologists came together to discuss theories, concepts, and thematic of relevance in a series of focus group meetings. These meetings led to the selection of the Human Environment Interaction (HEI) model, originally developed from the field of environmental psychology, and operationalised to describe how walking experiences result from the interplay between individual abilities, emotional processes and physical and social characteristics of the environment (Küller, 1991). The proposed model aims to sustain interdisciplinary discussion and research planning around the topic of neighbourhood walking for people with disabilities. By operationalising each dimension in the model, a good fit between groups with disabilities and individual differences associated with walking experiences is assumed, which in turn will have the potential to provide a more conscious analysis of wellbeing-related outcomes such as, usability of the environment, frequency of mobility, and quality of life. However, to improve understanding of urban walking at a neighbourhood level for people with disabilities, empirical studies must be carried out to test the proposed model. (shrink)

The major aim of this research is to reopen the study of the subjective experience of upward mobility and to incorporate race and gender into our vision of the process. It examines evidence from a social science study of upward mobility among 200 Black and white professional-managerial women in the Memphis, Tennessee metropolitan area. The experiences of the women paint a different picture from the image of the mobility process that remains from scholarship conducted 20 to 30 years ago on (...) white males. Relationships with family of origin, partners, children, friends, and the wider community shaped the way these women envision and accomplish mobility and the way they sustain themselves as professionals and managers. (shrink)

This collection of original essays brings a dramatically different perspective to bear on the contemporary "crisis of journalism." Rather than seeing technological and economic change as the primary causes of current anxieties, The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered draws attention to the role played by the cultural commitments of journalism itself. Linking these professional ethics to the democratic aspirations of the broader societies in which journalists ply their craft, it examines how the new technologies are being shaped to sustain value commitments (...) rather than undermining them. Recent technological change and the economic upheaval it has produced are coded by social meanings. It is this cultural framework that actually transforms these "objective" changes into a crisis. The book argues that cultural codes not only trigger sharp anxiety about technological and economic changes, but provide pathways to control them, so that the democratic practices of independent journalism can be sustained in new forms. (shrink)

We consider what genealogical links, kinship and sociality are promised through the marketing of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). Using a mixed method of formal analysis of Facebook's algorithmic architectures and textual analysis of twenty-eight adverts for egg donation drawn from the Facebook Ad Library, we analyse the ways in which the figure of the ‘fertile woman’ is constituted both within the text and at the level of Facebook's targeted advertising systems. We critically examine the ways in which ART clinics address (...) those women whose eggs they wish to harvest and exchange, in combination with the ways in which Facebook's architecture identifies, and sorts those women deemed of ‘relevance’ to the commercial ART industry. We find that women variously appear in these adverts as empowered consumers, generous girlfriends, potential mothers and essentialised bodies who provide free-floating eggs. The genealogical and fertility possibility offered through ART is represented with banal ambiguity wherein potentially disruptive forms of biogenetic relatedness and arrangements of kinship are derisked by an overarching narrative of simplicity and sameness which excludes men, messy genealogies and explicitly queer forms of kinship. This rationalisation is supported by the simplicity and certainty of the Facebook targeted advertising algorithm which produces a coherent audience and interpellates users as fertile subjects whose choices are both biologically determined and only available through clinical intervention. (shrink)

This commentary responds to the article “What Is the Aim of Pediatric ‘Gender‐Affirming’ Care?,” by Moti Gorin, in the same issue of the journal. Gender‐affirming care is often treated as exceptional and subject to heightened scrutiny. This exceptionalization results in its being held to stricter evidentiary standards than other forms of medical interventions are. But values and value judgments are inextricable from the practice of evidence‐based medicine. For gender‐affirming care, values shape what counts as “strong” evidence, whether the legitimacy of (...) transgender identity is assumed versus treated as something to be investigated, how to characterize the testimonial accounts of trans and gender‐nonconforming patients, and more. We argue that these kinds of questions are part of the practice of medicine, not exceptional to transgender people and gender‐affirming care. However, litigation of evidence for gender‐affirming care in state and national policy underscores the moral urgency of thinking carefully about what values ought to guide evidence. (shrink)

Working in four scholarly teams focused on different global regions—North America, the European Union, the Middle East, and China—the contributors to _Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging_ examine how new political worlds intersect with locally specific articulations of religion and secularism. The chapters address many topics, including the changing relationship between Islam and politics in Tunisia after the 2010 revolution, the influence of religion on the sharp turn to the political right in Western Europe, understandings of Confucianism as a form of (...) secularism, and the alliance between evangelical Christians and neoliberal business elites in the United States since the 1970s. This volume also provides a methodological template for how humanities scholars around the world can collaboratively engage with sweeping issues of global significance. Contributors. Markus Balkenhol, Elizabeth Bentley, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, David N. Gibbs, Ori Goldberg, Marcia Klotz, Zeynep Kurtulus Korkman, Leerom Medovoi, Eva Midden, Mohanad Mustafa, Mu-chou Poo, Shaul Setter, John Vignaux Smith, Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Ernst van den Hemel, Albert Welter, Francis Ching-Wah Yip, Raef Zreik. (shrink)

An investigative reporter documents the destructive impact of the environmental movement in North America and beyond. When journalist Elizabeth Nickson sought to subdivide her twenty-eight acres on Salt Spring Island in the Pacific Northwest, she was confronted by the full force and power of the radical conservationists who had taken over the local zoning council. She soon discovered that she was not free to do what she wanted with her land, and that in the view of these arrogant stewards (...) it wasn’t really hers at all. Nickson’s long, frustrating, and eyeopening encounter with these zealots started her on a journey to investigate and expose the hugely destructive impact of the environmental movement on ordinary people and communities across North America—and the world. What she discovered is shocking. Forty million Americans have been driven from their land, and rural culture is being systematically crushed, even as wildlife, forests, and rangelands are dying. In Eco-Fascists, Nickson explores how environmental radicals have taken over government agencies at the local, state, and federal levels. The result? A wholesale sequestration of forest, range, and water—more than 40 percent of North America—impoverishing us all, especially the most vulnerable. This confiscation of America’s natural heritage is a major factor contributing to our current economic decline; until it is acknowledged and addressed, our economy will not recover. Nickson traces the tens of billions of dollars environmental nonprofits marshal every year to promote the notion that our essential natural systems are collapsing, and finds, in a brutal example of self-fulfilling prophesy, that their corrupted science is desertifying the heartland. She visits once-thriving communities that are turning to ghost towns because environmental legislation has forced mines, ranches, and mills to close and has forbidden critical forest, range, park, and wilderness maintenance. Eco-Fascists exposes the major fallacies of the environmental movement—from wildlife protection to zoning to forest-fire management—and introduces us to the individuals who are fighting back. Fast-paced, highly accessible, and sure to be controversial, this is a work that will change the national conversation about environmental protection and its impact. (shrink)

The volume explores the hitherto uncharted late medieval religious landscape of Northern Germany. Through discussion of a rich, varied selection of mystical and devotional texts, also translated into English, a fascinating regional "mystical culture" with a far-reaching impact is revealed.

© Mind Association 2017By any credible theory of justice, the creation and perpetuation of the ghetto—racially segregated metropolitan areas of concentrated disadvantage to which many poor blacks are consigned—is profoundly unjust. In Dark Ghettos, Tommie Shelby develops a nonideal moral perspective centred on the injustices of the ghetto, through which he critically examines state policies directed towards ameliorating these disadvantages. He also proposes an interpretation of the conduct of some of the more alienated ghetto residents as justified resistance rather than (...) moral vice. A powerful and distinctive feature of Dark Ghettos is its focus on ghetto residents as moral agents with ethical duties of justice as well as rights that need to be respected.Dark Ghettos advances a radical critique of current policies on the basis of surprisingly conventional conceptions of ideal theory and its relation to nonideal theory. Shelby accepts a Rawlsian theory of justice, focused on... (shrink)

This article discusses the use of metaphor in human attempts to communicate religious experience and insight. In particular, it argues that, all too often, metaphors are misunderstood because they are interpreted literally. Examples of primary school children's writing are provided to illustrate the problem of literalism in religious understanding. The article concludes by recommending the extensive teaching of metaphor throughout education.

If one wants to know what happened in Hellenistic poetic theory, Philodemus' survey of poetic theories in the fifth book of his On Poems is an excellent guide. Even though the survey is well preserved, it has been neglected. Jensen, who published the first complete edition of On Poems 5 in 1923, did not discuss this part of the text; and it has been treated only briefly by others. This is a pity because, as Philodemus shows, the Hellenistic period was (...) an era of great diversity and innovation in literary theory. Philodemus gives evidence of: a refined and highly systematic critical vocabulary; a new concern with verbal form; a new notion of mimesis; and in general, a great proliferation of theories that present alternatives to those of Plato and Aristotle. Hellenistic literary theorists studied Plato and Aristotle critically; some revised or elaborated their views, whereas others opposed them. Ancient poetic theory did not come to a standstill with Aristotle any more than philosophy did. (shrink)

Contemporary Greeks and Arabs are heirs of a common empire which ruled the lives of their ancestors for long centuries before it ended at the beginning of the twentieth century. These heirs imagined, constructed and experienced their post-Ottoman nations in connection with the existential crises of the empire. Their national selves emerged from political and military struggles, and were fashioned by ideas about enlightenment, modernization, selfhood and emancipation. Their journeys to national statehood were shaped by the different positions they held (...) in the empire; they were marked by different givens and different circumstances. Their post-independence eras witnessed numerous challenges and faced dramatic crises. They were often internally disenchanting and externally checked by geo-political pressures. But they were experienced in total isolation from each other’s situations. Today these journeys are critically reflected upon by the intellectuals of these nation-states but almost never in conjunction with the other’s experiences, despite their geographical contiguity, significant common historical past, and many shared social mores. This study looks at how these two estranged neighbors fared after they parted ways on their independence journeys in their definitions of cultural identity and practices of cultural critique, and compares these journeys, by establishing links that were rarely, if ever, made hitherto. It focuses on the respective contemporary debates on enlightenment and emancipation that look at the early ideas of independence and progress and assess their fate in the post-independence era to our present day. The study aims at revealing the commonalities and specificities of the struggles of these nation-states for enlightenment, emancipation, progress and modernization. It helps us raise a number of questions about the meaning of enlightenment in these post-Ottoman contexts. (shrink)

This paper is an investigation of the condition of ressentiment. It reviews the two most prominent philosophic accounts of ressentiment: Nietzsche's genealogy of ressentiment as the moral perversion resulting from the ancient Roman/Palestinian cultural conflict and giving birth to the ascetic ideal; and Scheler's phenomenology of ressentiment as a complex affective unit generative of its own affects and values. A single sketch of the typical elements of ressentiment is drawn from the review of these two accounts. One element in particular, (...) the exigency of rationality, is highlighted. The rationality of ressentiment is found to be essential to the phenomenon as a whole and to its constitutive parts. Curiously, while their accounts imply and suggest the role of rationality, neither Nietzsche or Scheler make the centrality of rationality to ressentiment implicit. (shrink)