Smoking has long been declared a health hazard. In 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General revealed that smoking was related to lung cancer. Subsequent reports linked smoking to numerous other health problems. Recent statements by the Surgeon General indicated smokers do have the right to decide to continue or quit; however, their choice to continue cannot interfere with the nonsmoker's right to breathe smoke-free air.The full impact of adverse health consequences of involuntary smoking may not be recognized yet. Smoke is now (...) known to affect everyone who breathes it. Even when one doesn't smoke, the nonsmoker is susceptible to the ill effects because of inhaling smoke. (shrink)

Introducing the practices of Eastern Hinduism, Shintoism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, a lavishly illustrated volume is complemented by full-color reproductions of sacred art, architecture, symbols, landscapes, ceremonies, and festivals.

For most pre‐modern philosophers, questions about the good life and the happy life were inseparable. Happiness is primarily a subjective notion. The Good Place suggests that relationships are key to the good life. It is a laboratory for testing moral theories, providing the show's writers opportunities to see which theories help the protagonists become better persons. An ethics of virtue is difficult and messy because it does not reduce morality to a simple formula. Instead, it involves an inner transformation of (...) character that leads to virtuous actions. In Aristotle's ethical system, true moral progress toward the good life is within reach. In spite of the verbal commitments made to Kant's ethics, the show ultimately proves to be a vindication of virtue ethics. A universe governed by Aristotelian morality is one in which moral development is possible. (shrink)

Limited research has been done among pregnant people participating in investigational drug trials. To enhance the ethical understanding of pregnant people’s perspectives on research participation, we sought to describe motives and risk perceptions of participants in a phase 1 trial of ledipasvir/sofosbuvir treatment for chronic Hepatitis C virus during pregnancy. Pregnant people with chronic HCV infection enrolled in an open-label, phase 1 study of LDV/SOF participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews to explore their reasons for participation and experiences within the study. (...) Pregnant people took 12 weeks of LDV/SOF and were interviewed at enrollment and at the end of study. We recorded the interviews, transcribed them verbatim, coded them using NVivo software, and performed inductive thematic analysis. Nine women completed the study yielding 18 interview transcripts. We identified two themes regarding motives and one regarding risk perception. Motives— Women conceptualized study participation as part of the caregiving role they associate with motherhood; participating was viewed as an act of caregiving for their infants, their families, themselves, and other pregnant women with chronic HCV. Women also noted that they faced multiple barriers to treatment prior to pregnancy that created a desire to receive therapy through trial participation. Risk perception— Women acknowledged personal and fetal risk associated with participation. Acceptance of risk was influenced by women’s concepts of motherhood, preexisting knowledge of HCV and medical research, family members, intimate partners, or by the study design. Women enrolled in a phase 1 trial for chronic HCV therapy during pregnancy acknowledged risks of participation and were motivated by hopes for fetal and personal benefit and by lack of prenatal access to treatment. Ethical inclusion of pregnant people in research should acknowledge structural factors that contribute to vulnerability and data deficiencies for treatment in pregnancy. (shrink)

As researchers and as adults, caution must be maintained in perpetuating the rational approach to all family experience. Limiting the study of the family to the adult and, more communicatively competent, older siblings creates an artificial barrier that blocks insight into early childhood socialization practices and understandings.This study has raised the notion that children have valuable experiences that they quickly learn, embody, re-produce, and can present to researchers. As family members, they create and perpetuate those practices that reify the patriarchal (...) order. As researchers, the lessons to be learned from such a study are educational. For children, families that “might make your ears pop out” are the social and affectional structure that organizes their lives. The meanings that are produced within this structure are creatively constituted and should be heard. Studying the talk of children about families enriches knowledge and understanding of family relationships and family communication. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 2, Page 132-150, April 2022. Limited research has been done among pregnant people participating in investigational drug trials. To enhance the ethical understanding of pregnant people’s perspectives on research participation, we sought to describe motives and risk perceptions of participants in a phase 1 trial of ledipasvir/sofosbuvir treatment for chronic Hepatitis C virus during pregnancy. Pregnant people with chronic HCV infection enrolled in an open-label, phase 1 study of LDV/SOF participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews to (...) explore their reasons for participation and experiences within the study. Pregnant people took 12 weeks of LDV/SOF and were interviewed at enrollment and at the end of study. We recorded the interviews, transcribed them verbatim, coded them using NVivo software, and performed inductive thematic analysis. Nine women completed the study yielding 18 interview transcripts. We identified two themes regarding motives and one regarding risk perception. Motives— Women conceptualized study participation as part of the caregiving role they associate with motherhood; participating was viewed as an act of caregiving for their infants, their families, themselves, and other pregnant women with chronic HCV. Women also noted that they faced multiple barriers to treatment prior to pregnancy that created a desire to receive therapy through trial participation. Risk perception— Women acknowledged personal and fetal risk associated with participation. Acceptance of risk was influenced by women’s concepts of motherhood, preexisting knowledge of HCV and medical research, family members, intimate partners, or by the study design. Women enrolled in a phase 1 trial for chronic HCV therapy during pregnancy acknowledged risks of participation and were motivated by hopes for fetal and personal benefit and by lack of prenatal access to treatment. Ethical inclusion of pregnant people in research should acknowledge structural factors that contribute to vulnerability and data deficiencies for treatment in pregnancy. (shrink)

Although many new ideas are generated, only a few are ever implemented. Thus, it seems reasonable to conclude that idea evaluation represents an important aspect of the creative process. In the present article, we examine the cognitive operations involved in idea evaluation. We argue that idea evaluation is a complex activity involving appraisal of ideas, forecasting of their implications, and subsequent revision and refinement. We note that the outcomes of these activities depend on both the standards applied in idea evaluation (...) and the context surrounding evaluation of a new idea. Implications for the development of idea evaluation skills are discussed. (shrink)

This paper stems from an ethnographic, multidisciplinary study that explored the views and experiences of practitioners and scientists on social, ethical and clinical dilemmas encountered when working in the area of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis for serious genetic disorders. We focus here on staff perceptions and experiences of working with embryos and helping women/couples to make choices that will result in selecting embryos for transfer and disposal of 'affected' embryos, compared to the termination of affected pregnancies following prenatal diagnosis. Analysis and (...) discussion of our data led us to consider the possible advantages of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and whether a gradualist account of the embryo's and fetus's moral status can account for all of these, particularly since a gradualist account concentrates on the significance of time (developmental stage) and makes no comment as to the significance of place (in vitro, in utero). (shrink)

"One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades."--John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as "a magisterial critique of top-down social planning" by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail--sometimes catastrophically--in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. "Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp (...) relief the nature of the world we now inhabit."--New Yorker "A tour de force."-- Charles Tilly, Columbia University. (shrink)

Stakeholder theory is widely recognized as a management theory, yet very little research has considered its implications for individual managerial decision-making. In the two studies reported here, we used stakeholder theory to examine managerial decisions about balancing stakeholder interests. Results of Study 1 suggest that indivisible resources and unequal levels of stakeholder saliency constrain managers’ efforts to balance stakeholder interests. Resource divisibility also influenced whether managers used a within-decision or an across-decision approach to balance stakeholder interests. In Study 2 we (...) examined instrumental and normative implications of these two approaches. We conclude by considering the contributions of this research. (shrink)

Should the assessment of decision‐making capacity (DMC) be risk sensitive, that is, should the threshold for DMC vary with risk? The debate over this question is now nearly five decades old. To many, the idea that DMC assessments should be risk sensitive is intuitive and commonsense. To others, the idea is paternalistic or incoherent, or both; they argue that the riskiness of a given decision should increase the epistemic scrutiny in the evaluation of DMC, not increase the threshold for DMC. (...) We respond to the critics’ main concerns by providing a comprehensive account of how risk‐sensitive DMC is coherent, avoids paternalism, and best fulfills the epistemic goal of DMC evaluations. (shrink)

Philosophy, science, and common sense all refer to propositions--things we believe and say, and things which are true or false. But there is no consensus on what sorts of things these entities are. Jeffrey C. King, Scott Soames, and Jeff Speaks argue that commitment to propositions is indispensable, and each defend their own views on the debate.

Despite the iconic roles of coelacanths, cycads, tadpole shrimps, and tuataras as taxa that demonstrate a pattern of morphological stability over geological time, their status as living fossils is contested. We responded to these controversies with a recommendation to rethink the function of the living fossil concept. Concepts in science do useful work beyond categorizing particular items and we argued that the diverse and sometimes conflicting criteria associated with categorizing items as living fossils represent a complex problem space associated with (...) answering a range of questions related to prolonged evolutionary stasis. Turner defends the living concept against a variety of recent skeptics, but his criticism of our approach relies on a misreading of our main argument. This misreading is instructive because it brings into view the value of three central themes for rethinking the living fossil concept—the function of concepts in biology outside of categorization, the methodological importance of distinguishing parts and wholes in conceptualizing evolutionary phenomena, and articulating diverse explanatory goals associated with these phenomena. (shrink)

Do contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like Gravity move something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful challenge to mainstream film theory, Cinema's Bodily Illusions demonstrates that this is the case. Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, on cinema's power to evoke illusions: feeling like you're flying through space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues that cinema (...) is, first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema becomes art by modulating viewers' embodied sense of space. It works primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad's The Flicker, eerie depth effects in Marcel Duchamp's Anémic Cinéma, the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space in Stanley Kubrick's 2001, Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and James J. Gibson's ecological approach to perception. The result is his distinctive ecological phenomenology, which allows us to refocus on the cinema's perceptual, rather than representational, power. Arguing against modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema's death or irrelevance, Richmond demonstrates that cinema's proprioceptive aesthetics make it an urgent site of contemporary inquiry. (shrink)

The dominant unspoken philosophical basis of medical care in the United States is a form of Cartesian reductionism that views the body as a machine and medical professionals as technicians whose job is to repair that machine. The purpose of this paper is to advocate for an alternative philosophy of medicine based on the concept of healing relationships between clinicians and patients. This is accomplished first by exploring the ethical and philosophical work of Pellegrino and Thomasma and then by connecting (...) Martin Buber's philosophical work on the nature of relationships to an empirically derived model of the medical healing relationship. The Healing Relationship Model was developed by the authors through qualitative analysis of interviews of physicians and patients. Clinician-patient healing relationships are a special form of what Buber calls I-Thou relationships, characterized by dialog and mutuality, but a mutuality limited by the inherent asymmetry of the clinician-patient relationship. The Healing Relationship Model identifies three processes necessary for such relationships to develop and be sustained: Valuing, Appreciating Power and Abiding. We explore in detail how these processes, as well as other components of the model resonate with Buber's concepts of I-Thou and I-It relationships. The resulting combined conceptual model illuminates the wholeness underlying the dual roles of clinicians as healers and providers of technical biomedicine. On the basis of our analysis, we argue that health care should be focused on healing, with I-Thou relationships at its core. (shrink)

No one who attended the 2010 national public health law conference hosted by the Public Health Law Association and the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics could miss the sense of excitement and momentum. The revival of this annual public health law meeting, with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the energetic leadership of the PHLA president and board, ASLME’s expert guidance, and a rousing address by Dr. Tom Frieden, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and (...) Prevention, symbolize the continued commitment of a wide range of important individuals and institutions to the proposition that law is of substantial importance to public health. But there is more than just symbolism to be excited about. CDC’s public health law program continues to champion efforts to promote the use and understanding of law as a public health tool. (shrink)

No one who attended the 2010 national public health law conference hosted by the Public Health Law Association and the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics could miss the sense of excitement and momentum. The revival of this annual public health law meeting, with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the energetic leadership of the PHLA president and board, ASLME’s expert guidance, and a rousing address by Dr. Tom Frieden, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and (...) Prevention, symbolize the continued commitment of a wide range of important individuals and institutions to the proposition that law is of substantial importance to public health. But there is more than just symbolism to be excited about. CDC’s public health law program continues to champion efforts to promote the use and understanding of law as a public health tool. (shrink)

Modelling that exploits visual elements and information visualisation are important areas that have contributed immensely to understanding and the computerisation advancements in many domains and yet remain unexplored for the benefit of the law and legal practice. This paper investigates the challenge of modelling and expressing structures and processes in legislation and the law by using visual modelling and information visualisation (InfoVis) to assist accessibility of legal knowledge, practice and knowledge formalisation as a basis for legal AI. The paper uses (...) a subset of the well-defined Unified Modelling Language (UML) to visually express the structure and process of the legislation and the law to create visual flow diagrams called lawmaps, which form the basis of further formalisation. A lawmap development methodology is presented and evaluated by creating a set of lawmaps for the practice of conveyancing and the Landlords and Tenants Act 1954 of the United Kingdom. This paper is the first of a new breed of preliminary solutions capable of application across all aspects, from legislation to practice; and capable of accelerating development of legal AI. (shrink)

According to both traditional positivist approaches and also to the sociology of scientific knowledge, social analysts should not themselves become involved in the controversies they are investigating. But the experiences of the authors in studying contemporary scientific controversies—specifically, over the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, fluoridation, and vitamin C and cancer—show that analysts, whatever their intentions, cannot avoid being drawn into the fray. The field of controversy studies needs to address the implications of this process for both theory and practice.

From the perspective of nonlinear science, it is argued that one may accept physicalism and reject substance dualism without being forced into reductionism. This permits a property dualism under which biological and mental phenomena may emerge from intricate positive feedback networks, involving many levels of both the biological and cognitive hierarchies.