Rapid advances and exponential growth in computer and telecommunications technology have taken individual records and papers revealing the most intimate details of one’s life, habits, and genetic predisposition from the private sector into the public arena in derogation of privacy considerations. Although computerized medical information offers a means of streamlining and improving the health care delivery system through speed and enormous storage capacity, it also presents new challenges as it affects the right of privacy and expectation of confidentiality, creating serious (...) ethical and legal issues. Other considerations include constitutional matters such as loss of liberty when one is compelled to remain in an undesirable or unsuitable job so that insurance will not be canceled or the inability to secure another more suitable position due to genetic predisposition and denial of equal protection of the laws if one is stigmatized because one belongs to a certain ethnic or racial group that exhibits a particular genetic propensity. Collateral questions concern the propriety of disclosure of confidential health care information, including genetic data. This article also considers the proposed federal guidelines for a health information privacy law. (shrink)

Technology has provided state and federal governments with huge collections of DNA samples and identifying profiles stored in databanks. That information can be used to solve crimes by matching samples from convicted felons to unsolved crimes, and has aided law enforcement in investigating and convicting suspects, and exonerating innocent felons, even after lengthy incarceration. Rights surrounding the provision of DNA samples, however, remain unclear in light of the constitutional guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures and privacy concerns. The courts have (...) just begun to consider this issue, and have provided little guidance. It is unclear whether the laws governing protected health information are applicable to the instant situation, and if so, the degree to which they apply. DNA databanks are not uniformly regulated, and it is possible that DNA samples contained in them may be used for purposes unintended by donors of the samples. As people live their lives, they leave bits of their DNA behind. They cannot be assured that these tiny specimens will not be taken or used against their will or without their knowledge for activities such as profiling to measure tendencies such as thrill-seeking, aggressiveness, or crimes with threatening behavior. Existing racial or ethnic discrimination and profiling may also encompass genetic discrimination and profiling, creating societal class distinctions. This article will explore the constitutionality of collecting genetic materials, the ethics of such activities, and balance the social good in solving crime and deterrence against the individual's security, liberty, and privacy. (shrink)

This collection of essays by Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars underscores the significance of sustained and serious ethical, interreligious and interdisciplinary reflection on children. Essays in the first half of the volume discuss fundamental beliefs and practices within the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam regarding children, adult obligations to them, and a child's own obligations to others. The second half of the volume focuses on selected contemporary challenges regarding children and faithful responses to them. Marcia J. Bunge (...) brings together scholars from various disciplines and diverse strands within these three religious traditions, representing several views on essential questions about the nature and status of children and adult-child relationships and responsibilities. The volume not only contributes to intellectual inquiry regarding children in the specific areas of ethics, religious studies, children's rights and childhood studies, but also provides resources for child advocates, religious leaders and those engaged in interreligious dialogue. (shrink)

We show that if there is a nonconstructible real, then every perfect set has a nonconstructible element, answering a question of K. Prikry. This is a specific instance of a more general theorem giving a sufficient condition on a pair $M\subset N$ of models of set theory implying that every perfect set in N has an element in N which is not in M.

The Sacks Density Theorem [7] states that the Turing degrees of the recursively enumerable sets are dense. We show that the Density Theorem holds in every model of P - + BΣ 2 . The proof has two components: a lemma that in any model of P - + BΣ 2 , if B is recursively enumerable and incomplete then IΣ 1 holds relative to B and an adaptation of Shore's [9] blocking technique in α-recursion theory to models of arithmetic.

Classes of forcings which add a real by forcing with branching conditions are examined, and conditions are found which guarantee that the generic real is of minimal degree over the ground model. An application is made to almost-disjoint coding via a real of minimal degree.

We answer several questions posed by Hamkins and Leahy concerning the implicitly constructible universe Imp, which they introduced in [5]. Specifically, we show that it is relatively consistent with ZFC that $$Imp = \neg {\rm{CH}}$$, that $Imp \ne {\rm{HOD}}$, and that $$Imp \models V \ne Imp$$, or in other words, that $\left^{Imp} \ne Imp$.

Theorem. There is a non-empty Π10 class of reals, each of which computes a real of minimal degree. Corollary. WKL “there is a minimal Turing degree”. This answers a question of H. Friedman and S. Simpson.

Grigorieff showed that forcing to add a subset of ω using partial functions with suitably chosen domains can add a generic real of minimal degree. We show that forcing with partial functions to add a subset of an uncountable κ without adding a real never adds a generic of minimal degree. This is in contrast to forcing using branching conditions, as shown by Brown and Groszek.

Madole & Harden argue that the Mendelian reshuffling of genes and genomes is analogous to randomised controlled trials. We are not convinced by their arguments. First, their recipe for meeting the demands on randomised experiments is inherently inconsistent. Second, disequilibrium across chromosomes conflicts with their assumption of statistical independence. Third, the genome-wide association study (GWAS) method has many pitfalls, including low repeatability.

Uncountable superperfect forcing is tree forcing on regular uncountable cardinals κ with κ<κ=κ, using trees in which the heights of nodes that split along any branch in the tree form a club set, and such that any node in the tree with more than one immediate extension has measure-one-many extensions, where the measure is relative to some κ-complete, nonprincipal normal filter F. This forcing adds a generic of minimal degree if and only if F is κ-saturated.

We show, relative to the base theory RCA₀: A nontrivial tree satisfies Ramsey's Theorem only if it is biembeddable with the complete binary tree. There is a class of partial orderings for which Ramsey's Theorem for pairs is equivalent to ACA₀. Ramsey's Theorem for singletons for the complete binary tree is stronger than $B\sum_{2}^{0}$ , hence stronger than Ramsey's Theorem for singletons for ω. These results lead to extensions of results, or answers to questions, of Chubb, Hirst, and McNicholl [3].

Over the last decade, empirical research on compassion has burgeoned in the biomedical, clinical, translational, and foundational sciences. Increasingly sophisticated understandings and measures of compassion continue to emerge from the abundance of multi- and cross-disciplinary studies. Naturally, the diversity of research methods and theoretical frameworks employed presents a significant challenge to consensus and synthesis of this knowledge. To bring the empirical findings of separate and sometimes siloed disciplines into conversation with one another requires an examination of their disparate assumptions about (...) what compassion is and how it can be known. Here, we present an integrated theoretical review of methodologies used in the empirical study of compassion. Our goal is to highlight the distinguishing features of each of these ways of knowing compassion, as well as the strengths and limitations of applying them to specific research questions. We hope this will provide useful tools for selecting methods that are tailored to explicit objectives (methods matching), taking advantage of methodological complementarity across disciplines (methods-mixing), and incorporating the empirical study of compassion into fields in which it may be missing. (shrink)

Over the last decade, numerous interventions and techniques that aim to engender, strengthen, and expand compassion have been created, proliferating an evidence base for the benefits of compassion meditation training. However, to date, little research has been conducted to examine individual variation in the learning, beliefs, practices, and subjective experiences of compassion meditation. This mixed-method study examines changes in novice meditators’ knowledge and contemplative experiences before, during, and after taking an intensive course in CBCT®, a contemplative intervention that is increasingly (...) used for both inter- and intrapersonal flourishing. The participants in this study were Christian healthcare chaplains completing a 1-year residency in Clinical Pastoral Education who learned CBCT as part of their professional chaplaincy training curriculum. Prior to and upon completion of training, we surveyed participants to assess their beliefs about the malleability of compassion, types of engagement in compassion meditation, and perceptions of the impact of taking CBCT. We also conducted in-depth interviews with a subset of participants to gain a qualitative understanding of their subjective experiences of learning and practicing compassion meditation, a key component of CBCT. We found that participants reported increases in the extent to which they believed compassion to be malleable after studying CBCT. We also found high levels of variability of individual ways of practicing and considered the implications of this for the study of contemplative learning processes. This multi-methodological approach yielded novel insights into how compassion practice and compassion-related outcomes interrelate, insights that can inform the basic scientific understanding of the experience of learning and enacting compassion meditation as a means of strengthening compassion itself. (shrink)

Individuals often describe objects in their world in terms of perceptual dimensions that span a variety of modalities; the visual (e.g., brightness: dark–bright), the auditory (e.g., loudness: quiet–loud), the gustatory (e.g., taste: sour–sweet), the tactile (e.g., hardness: soft vs. hard) and the kinaesthetic (e.g., speed: slow–fast). We ask whether individuals use perceptual dimensions to differentiate emotions from one another. Participants in two studies (one where respondents reported on abstract emotion concepts and a second where they reported on specific emotion episodes) (...) rated the extent to which features anchoring 29 perceptual dimensions (e.g., temperature, texture and taste) are associated with 8 emotions (anger, fear, sadness, guilt, contentment, gratitude, pride and excitement). Results revealed that in both studies perceptual dimensions differentiate positive from negative emotions and high arousal from low arousal emotions. They also differentiate among emotions that are similar in arousal and valence (e.g., high arousal negative emotions such as anger and fear). Specific features that anchor particular perceptual dimensions (e.g., hot vs. cold) are also differentially associated with emotions. (shrink)

Considering a growing nurse shortage and the need for qualified nurses to handle increasingly complex patient care situations, how ethical beliefs are influenced and the consequences that can occur when moral conflicts of right and wrong arise need to be explored. The aim of this study was to explore influencers identified by nurses as having the most impact on the development of their ethical beliefs and whether these influencers might impact levels of moral distress and the potential for conscientious objection. (...) Nurses whose ethical beliefs were most influenced by their religious beliefs scored higher in levels of moral distress and demonstrated greater differences in areas of conscientious objection than did nurses who developed their ethical beliefs from influencers such as family values, life and work experience, political views or the professional code of ethics. (shrink)

‘Smart’ devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. While these sophisticated machines are useful for various purposes, they sometimes evoke feelings of eeriness or discomfort that constitute uncanniness, a much-discussed phenomenon in robotics research. Adult participants (N = 115) rated the uncanniness of a hypothetical future smart speaker that was described as possessing the mental capacities for experience, agency, neither, or both. The novel condition prompting participants to attribute both agency and experience to the speaker filled an important theoretical gap in the (...) literature. Consistent with the mind perception hypothesis of uncanniness (MPH; Gray & Wegner, 2012), participants in the with-experience condition rated the device significantly higher in uncanniness than those in the control condition and the with-agency condition. Participants in the with-both (experience and agency) condition also rated the device higher in uncanniness than those in the control condition and the with-agency condition, although this latter difference only approached statistical significance. (shrink)

Vaesen asks whether goal maintenance and planning ahead are critical for innovative tool use. We suggest that these aptitudes may have an evolutionary foundation in motor planning abilities that span all primate species. Anticipatory effects evidenced in the reaching behaviors of lemurs, tamarins, and rhesus monkeys similarly bear on the evolutionary origins of foresight as it pertains to tool use.

The papers published here were given at the second biennial conference of the Hegel Society of America, held at the University of Notre Dame, November 9-11, 1972. They appear in an order which reflects roughly two headings: (1) Hegel's conception of the history of philosophy in general, and (2) his relation to individual thinkers both before and after him. Given the importance of the history of philosophy for Hegel, and the far-reaching impact of his thought upon subsequent philosophy, it becomes (...) immediately apparent that we have here only a beginning. At the conference, cries went up "Why not Hegel and Aristotle, Aquinas, HusserI and Hart mann?" Indeed, why not? The answer, of course, might be given by Hegel himself : if we wish to accomplish anything, we have to limit ourselves. We trust that future conferences and scholarship will bring to light these relationships and the many more which testify to Hegel's profound presence in the mainstream of past and present thought. It is furthermore no accident that the renaissance of Hegelian studies has brought with it a rebirth of the history of philosophy as something relevant to our own problems. For Hegel, the object of philosophy is alone the truth, the history of philosophy is philosophy itself, and this truth which it gives us cannot be what has passed away. (shrink)