In contrast to standardized guidelines, personalized medicine and person centered care are two notions that have recently developed and are aspiring for more individualized health care for each single patient. While having a similar drive toward individualized care, their sources are markedly different. While personalized medicine stems from a biomedical framework, person centered care originates from a caring perspective, and a wish for a more holistic view of patients. It is unclear to what extent these two concepts can be combined (...) or if they conflict at fundamental or pragmatic levels. This paper reviews existing literature in both medicine and related philosophy to analyze closer the meaning of the two notions, and to explore the extent to which they overlap or oppose each other, in theory or in practice, in particular regarding ethical assumptions and their respective practical implications. (shrink)

This paper presents a systematic account of ethical issues actualised in different areas, as well as at different levels and stages of health care, by introducing organisational and other procedures that embody a shift towards person centred care and shared decision-making (PCC/SDM). The analysis builds on general ethical theory and earlier work on aspects of PCC/SDM relevant from an ethics perspective. This account leads up to a number of theoretical as well as empirical and practice oriented issues that, in view (...) of broad advancements towards PCC/SDM, need to be considered by health care ethics researchers. Given a PCC/SDM-based reorientation of health care practice, such ethics research is essential from a quality assurance perspective. (shrink)

It has been reported as an ethical problem within prehospital emergency care that ambulance professionals administer physiologically futile cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to patients having suffered cardiac arrest to benefit significant others. At the same time it is argued that, under certain circumstances, this is an acceptable moral practice by signalling that everything possible has been done, and enabling the grief of significant others to be properly addressed. Even more general moral reasons have been used to morally legitimize the use of (...) futile CPR: That significant others are a type of patient with medical or care needs that should be addressed, that the interest of significant others should be weighed into what to do and given an equal standing together with patient interests, and that significant others could be benefited by care professionals unless it goes against the explicit wants of the patient. In this article we explore these arguments and argue that the support for providing physiologically futile CPR in the prehospital context fails. Instead, the strategy of ambulance professionals in the case of a sudden death should be to focus on the relevant care needs of the significant others and provide support, arrange for a peaceful environment and administer acute grief counselling at the scene, which might call for a developed competency within this field. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that a corporate purpose aiming to benefit all stakeholders has a positive effect on employee motivation and engagement, but no empirical studies into these specific effects were found. To examine this assumption, a corporate mission and vision matching the definition of a higher purpose were tested in two subsequent studies. The first study (N = 270) was a cross-sectional self-report study. The second study included a longitudinal design (N = 56) modeling purpose, motivation, and engagement in (...) a cross-lagged panel design over three time-points. The results associated purpose with motivation and engagement. The subsequent longitudinal analysis confirmed the presumed directionality from purpose to engagement, but not to motivation. Hence, while a corporate purpose can be added to the list of antecedents to work engagement, the relationship with motivation, despite the significant association with purpose in the cross-sectional study, remains more complicated. The present study adds to the knowledge of the beneficial effects of a broader purpose and responds to the current surge of interest in purpose as an instrument for sustainable business. (shrink)

By comparing alternative evolutionary models, the International Sexuality Description Project marks the transition of evolutionary psychology to the next level of scientific maturation. The lack of final conclusions might partly be a result of the composition of the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory and the sampled populations. Our own data suggest that correcting for both gives further support to the strategic pluralism model.

Cognitive models propose that both, negative interpretations of ambiguous social situations and ruminative thoughts about social events contribute to the maintenance of social anxiety disorder. It has further been postulated that ruminative thoughts fuel biased negative interpretations, however, evidence is rare. The present study used a multi-method approach to assess ruminative processing following a social interaction and negative interpretation bias in a student sample screened for high and low social anxiety. Results support the hypothesis that group differences in negative interpretations (...) of ambiguous social situations in HSAs vs. LSAs are mediated by higher levels of post-event processing assessed in the questionnaire. Exploratory analyses highlight the potential role of comorbid depressive symptoms. The current findings help to advance the understanding of the association between two cognitive processes involved in social anxiety and stress the importance of ruminative post-event processing. (shrink)

This article focuses on the early years of children from immigrant families in Germany. Research has documented disparities in young children’s development correlating with their family background, making clear the importance of early intervention. Institutional childcare—as an early intervention for children at risk—plays an important role in Germany, as 34.3% of children below the age of three and 93% of children above that age are in external childcare. This paper focuses on the extent to which children from families with a (...) background of migration differ in their social development when considering their age of entry into early external childcare. Data from the infant cohort study of the German National Educational Panel Study is used to analyze the impact of early institutional childcare before the age of 3 years on children’s social competence at the age of 5 years, controlling for gender, siblings, temperament, home learning activities, and socioeconomic status. Results show the effects of duration of early external childcare on peer problems for children from families with a background of migration, in such a way that children who attend early external childcare for more than 1 year before the age of three show less problem behavior with peers than those who attend for less than a year. These findings have equity implications for children with a migration background living in Germany, especially as the proportion of these children is trending upwards. (shrink)

Executive compensation has long been a prominent topic in the management literature. A main question that is also given substantial attention in the business ethics literature—even more so in the wake of the recent financial crisis—is whether increasing levels of executive compensation can be justified from an ethical point of view. Also, the relationship of executive compensation to instances of unethical behavior or outcomes has received considerable attention. The purpose of this paper is to explore the social, ecological, and existential (...) costs of economic incentives, by discussing how relying on increasing levels of executive compensation may have an adverse effect on managerial performance in a broad sense. Specifically, we argue that one-dimensional economic incentives may destroy existential, social, and systemic values that influence the manager’s commitment to ensure responsible business conduct, and have negative spillover effects that may reduce the manager’s performance. There are well-documented findings that demonstrate that reliance on sources of extrinsic motivation (such as economic incentives) may displace intrinsic motivation. Our perspective is a holistic one, in the sense that we will explore the influence of sources of extrinsic motivation on the manager’s intrinsic commitment to different types of values. We will in particular investigate how it may influence the manager’s ethical reflection and behavior or lack thereof. (shrink)

Studying teaching behavior in controlled conditions is difficult. It seems intuitive that a human learner might have trouble reliably recreating response patterns over and over in interaction. A robot would be the perfect tool to study teaching behavior because its actions can be well controlled and described. However, due to the interactive nature of teaching, developing such a robot is not an easy task. As we will show in this review, respective studies require certain robot appearances and behaviors. These mainly (...) should induce teaching behavior in humans, be interactive, match the study design, and be realizable in terms of effort. We discuss how remote controlling of the robot or simulating robot capabilities is used as an option. With this review, we introduce the field of research on studying human teaching behavior with robots as a tool in the experimental design. We will provide a structured overview of existing work, and identify main challenges of employing robots in such studies. (shrink)

A collection of essays in various fields of philosophy written in celebration of Paul Needham's fiftieth birthday.

We are living in a world which is severely crisis-ridden and faces some major challenges. The fact that we are currently facing a genuine global pandemic brings about even more uncertainty. The social and political institutions, which emerged and consolidated during the 20th century, and which created stability, have become fragile. The young generation born in the 1990s and onwards have experienced 9/11 and the ‘war against terrorism’, the financial crisis of 2008, changes to climate, environmental degradation, and most recently (...) the COVID-19 pandemic. The generation born between 1960 and 1990 have had the same experiences along with severe economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s and the Cold War. Some of these challenges are in different ways intertwined with capitalism and its crises, while others are linked to the rapid development of new technologies, in particular innovations within communication and information technologies. This introduction lists the most important grand challenges facing the world as they have emerged more recently. The five articles following this introduction address some of these challenges, with particular attention to the problems of capitalism and democracy and the relation between these two areas. Most authors agree that climate change and the destruction of the environment are the biggest and most pertinent problems to address, but it is their stance that we can only meet these challenges if democracy is functioning well. (shrink)

Exploring Textual Action questions how we analyse works of art after the performative turn and shows how the interplay of performativity (textual action), space and topography, and the converging of genres and art forms is essential in modern drama, theatre, prose fiction, poetry and film. The volume also fosters a keen concern for the development of congenial theory. Its 14 detailed essays analyse works of art ranging from Balzac, Melville and George Eliot, to Breton, Kafka, Benjamin, Blixen and Woolf; and (...) from W.C. Williams, Bresson and Scorsese, to Sarraute, Duras, Reygadas, Dumont and Waltz. The approach of these studies discloses the art works as creative and dynamic utterances with active and shaping forces so powerful, and consequential, that they have the potential to transform human perception and blur clear distinctions between art and "real" life. Using an alternative and dynamic method and suggesting a direction towards the detailed analysis of literature, art, media and culture, Exploring Textual Action addresses current debates within the humanities. (shrink)

Danto, A. The artworld.--Dickie, G. What is art?--Margolis, J. Works of art are physically embodied and culturally emergent entities.--Kjørup, S. Art broadly and wholly conceived.--Meyer, L. B. Forgery and the anthropology of art.--Brunius, T. Theory and ideologies in aesthetics.--Tilghman, B. R. Artistic puzzlement.--Binkley, T. Deciding about art.--Alexander, H. G. On defining in aesthetics.--Iseminger, G. Appreciation, the artworld, and the aesthetic.--Glickman, J. Creativity in the arts.--Sclafani, R. The theory of art.--Lyas, C. Danto and Dickie on art.--Beardsley, M. C. Is art essentially (...) institutional? (shrink)

Some libertarians argue that informed consent alone makes transactions in the labour market morally justified. In contrast, some of their critics claim that such an act of consent is no guarantee against coercion. To know whether agreements are voluntary, we need to assess the quality of the offers or the prevailing background conditions. ISCT theorists argue that it is imperative to take social norms into account when evaluating the labour market. We present a novel framework for moral assessment in the (...) labour market, which takes consent, background conditions and norms into account, but which mainly focuses on the offers and demands made. Consent renders a transaction legitimate in the same way we regard a fair election legitimate even if we object to its outcome. For offers to be substantially justified, exploitation must be avoided and offers must give expression to the value of community. Only then they are morally justified. (shrink)

A large body of evidence supports the idea that a common fronto-parietal network is activated across a range of diverse cognitive functions. Jung & Haier's (J&H's) review demonstrates a very similar pattern of activity, which correlates with individual differences in intelligence. We propose that these converging lines of evidence are best interpreted as a general role of the fronto-parietal network in integration and control.

Person‐centred care, with its central focus on the patient in partnership with healthcare practitioners, is considered to be the contemporary gold standard of care. This type of care implies effective communication from and by both the patient and the healthcare practitioner. This is often problematic in the case of the paediatric population, because of the many communicative challenges that may arise due to the child's developmental level, illness and distress, linguistic competency and disabilities. The principle of universal design put forth (...) in conventions and legislation means that the design of products and services should be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible. Augmentative and alternative communication encompasses strategies, for example pictures and apps, that are typically used with people with communication disability. In this position paper, we argue for the universal use of augmentative and alternative communication to support person‐centred communication and care for children, regardless of age or potential disability. Clinical examples are shared from three different paediatric care settings where pictorial supports were applied universally. Interviews were conducted with children and adolescents (with and without disabilities), parents and healthcare practitioners, and the principles of universal design were used as a framework to demonstrate how person‐centred communication is supported in paediatric care. (shrink)

Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their (...) groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents. (shrink)

Every day, thousands of polls, surveys, and rating scales are employed to elicit the attitudes of humankind. Given the ubiquitous use of these instruments, it seems we ought to have firm answers to what is measured by them, but unfortunately we do not. To help remedy this situation, we present a novel approach to investigate the nature of attitudes. We created a self-transforming paper survey of moral opinions, covering both foundational principles, and current dilemmas hotly debated in the media. This (...) survey used a magic trick to expose participants to a reversal of their previously stated attitudes, allowing us to record whether they were prepared to endorse and argue for the opposite view of what they had stated only moments ago. The result showed that the majority of the reversals remained undetected, and a full 69% of the participants failed to detect at least one of two changes. In addition, participants often constructed coherent and unequivocal arguments supporting the opposite of their original position. These results suggest a dramatic potential for flexibility in our moral attitudes, and indicates a clear role for self-attribution and post-hoc rationalization in attitude formation and change. (shrink)

Three paradigms of legal positivism -- The pure theory of law : science or political theory? -- Kelsen's principles of legality -- Kelsen's theory of democracy : reconciliation with social order -- Democratic constitutionalism : Kelsen's theory of constitutional review -- Kelsen's legal cosmopolitanism -- Conclusions : the pure theory of law and contemporary positivism.

In recent years the formerly quite strong interest in patient compliance has been questioned for being too paternalistic and oriented towards overly narrow biomedical goals as the basis for treatment recommendations. In line with this there has been a shift towards using the notion of adherence to signal an increased weight for patients’ preferences and autonomy in decision making around treatments. This ‘adherence-paradigm’ thus encompasses shared decision-making as an ideal and patient perspective and autonomy as guiding goals of care. What (...) this implies in terms of the importance that we have reason to attach to (non-)adherence and how has, however, not been explained. In this article, we explore the relationship between different forms of shared decision-making, patient autonomy and adherence. Distinguishing between dynamically and statically framed adherence we show how the version of shared decision-making advocated will have consequences for whether one should be interested in a dynamically or statically framed adherence and in what way patient adherence should be assessed. In contrast to the former compliance paradigm (where non-compliance was necessarily seen as a problem), using observations about (non-)adherence to assess the success of health care decision making and professional-patient interaction turns out to be a much less straightforward matter. (shrink)

Public reason liberals expect individuals to have justificatory reasons for their views of certain political issues. This paper considers how groups can, and whether they should, give collective public reasons for their political decisions. A problem is that aggregating individuals’ consistent judgments on reasons and a decision can produce inconsistent collective judgments. The group will then fail to give a reason for its decision. The paper considers various solutions to this problem and defends a deliberative procedure by showing how it (...) incentivizes information sharing and leads to outcomes most acceptable to the group members. (shrink)

Withholding and withdrawing treatment are widely regarded as ethically equivalent in medical guidelines and ethics literature. Health care personnel, however, widely perceive moral differences between withholding and withdrawing. The proponents of equivalence argue that any perceived difference can be explained in terms of cognitive biases and flawed reasoning. Thus, policymakers should clear away any resistance to accept the equivalence stance by moral education. To embark on such a campaign of changing attitudes, we need to be convinced that the ethical analysis (...) is correct. Is it? In this article, I take a closer look at the moral relation between withholding and withdrawing. My conclusion is that withholding and withdrawing are not in general ethically equivalent. Thus, medical guidelines should be rewritten, and rather than being “educated” away from their sound judgments, medical professionals and patients should have nuanced medico-ethical discussions regarding withholding and withdrawing treatment. (shrink)

In this book Lars Svendsen examines the nature of boredom, how it originated, its history, how and why it afflicts us, and why we cannot seem to overcome it by any act of will.

The revival of republicanism was meant to challenge the hegemony of liberalism in contemporary political theory on the grounds that liberals show insufficient concern with institutional protection against political misrule. This article challenges this view by showing how neorepublicanism, particularly on Philip Pettit’s formulation, demands no greater institutional protection than does political liberalism. By identifying neutrality between conceptions of the good as the constraint on institutional requirements that forces neorepublicanism into the liberal framework, the article shows that neutrality is what (...) neorepublicans must jettison to offer a tenable critique of liberalism. Only then can neorepublicans ensure greater protection against misrule by demanding that citizens participate more actively in politics. They can then also criticize liberalism for failing to appreciate the importance of such protection. (shrink)

Institutions promoting republican freedom as non-domination are commonly believed to differ significantly from institutions promoting negative freedom as non-interference. Philip Pettit, the most prominent contemporary defender of this view, also maintains that these republican institutions are neutral between the different conceptions of the good that characterise a modern society. This paper shows why these two views are incompatible. By analysing the institutional requirements Pettit takes as constitutive of republican freedom, I show how they also promote negative freedom by reducing overall (...) interference. To avoid this result, republican institutions must be more restrictive and require that citizens conform to a life of political engagement. But then republican freedom will not be a neutral ideal. Rejecting negative freedom therefore means sacrificing neutrality. (shrink)

In the debate on how we ought to define political freedom, some definitions are criticized for implying that no one can ever be free to perform any action. In this paper, I show how the possibility of freedom depends on a definition that finds an appropriate balance between absence of interference and protection against interference. To assess the possibility of different conceptions of freedom, I consider the trade-offs they make between these two dimensions. I find that pure negative freedom is (...) clearly possible. Republican freedom might also be possible, though its protection requirement is too vague for a definitive verdict. Finally, the recently proposed ‘freedom as independence’ is impossible since it is an attempt to avoid the unavoidable trade-off. (shrink)