While deliberation has traditionally played a central role in philosophical and behavioral accounts of ethical decision-making, several recent studies challenge the value of deliberation. These studies find that deliberative thinking, such as considering divergent views or different perspectives, leads to less ethical decisions. We observe, however, that these studies do not address normative deliberation, in which decision-makers consider or apply a normative standard. We predict that normative deliberation improves ethical decision-making. Across six experiments, we examine the effects of non-normative deliberation (...) and normative deliberation on ethical decision-making. We find that normative deliberation improves ethical decision-making and, in contrast to recent studies, no form of deliberation harms ethical decision-making. (shrink)

It is universally accepted that genetic control over basic aspects of cell and molecular biology is the primary organizing principle in development and homeostasis of living systems. However, instances do exist where important aspects of biological order arise without explicit genetic instruction, emerging instead from simple physical principles, stochastic processes, or the complex self‐organizing interaction between random and seemingly unrelated parts. Being mostly resistant to direct genetic dissection, the analysis of such emergent processes falls into a grey area between mathematics, (...) physics and molecular cell biology and therefore remains very poorly understood. We recently proposed a mathematical model predicting the emergence of a specific non‐Gaussian distribution of polygonal cell shapes from the stochastic cell division process in epithelial cell sheets; this cell shape distribution appears to be conserved across a diverse set of animals and plants.1 The use of such topological models to study the process of cellular morphogenesis has a long history, starting almost a century ago, and many insights from those original works influence current experimental studies. Here we review current and past literature on this topic while exploring some new ideas on the origins and implications of topological order in proliferating epithelia. BioEssays 30:260–266, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This article uses critical discourse analysis to examine how the higher COVID-19 infection rates among South Asians in general, and Punjabis more specifically, have been represented by conservative politicians and their representatives as a consequence of cultural and religious practices. Two counter-narratives are discussed. The first substitutes the negative image of the Sikh Punjabi Canadian community with a celebratory and positive view of Sikh humanitarianism and community service. The second attributes the high numbers to class attributes such as precarious jobs, (...) poverty-level wages, employment insecurity, lack of sick days, over-crowded housing, racism and lack of access to healthcare. We argue that the conservative explanation as well as the first counter-narrative reveal continuities in culturalist understandings of South Asian immigrants, albeit in slightly different ways. The second counter-narrative represents a discursive resistance by advancing a structural analysis of health and disease in immigrant communities. (shrink)

Considerations of justice and concern for well-being support conducting mental health research and addressing ethical concerns specific to mental health research are critical. We discuss these concerns, provide recommendations to enable the ethical conduct of mental health research, and argue that participants’ interests should be given primary weight in resolving apparent dilemmas. We also comment on provisions of two legislative actions in India relevant to mental health research: Rights of Persons with Disability Act 2016 and the Mental Health Care Act (...) 2017. Both conform to the 2006 United Nations Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities of which India is a signatory. Both provide protections and enumerate rights relevant to people with mental health conditions but with differing focus. The commonalities and differences between the three are discussed in the background of international literature on research in mental health conditions. Studies involving deception and future directions for ethical requirements regarding genetic research are discussed. (shrink)