Background: Genomic analysis may reveal both primary and secondary findings with direct relevance to the health of probands’ biological relatives. Researchers question their obligations to return findings not only to participants but also to family members. Given the social value of privacy protection, should researchers offer a proband’s results to family members, including after the proband’s death? Methods: Preferences were elicited using interviews and a survey. Respondents included probands from two pancreatic cancer research resources, plus biological and nonbiological family members. (...) Hypothetical scenarios based on actual research findings from the two cancer research resources were presented; participants were asked return of results preferences and justifications. Interview transcripts were coded and analyzed; survey data were analyzed descriptively. Results: Fifty-one individuals (17 probands, 21 biological relatives, 13 spouses/partners) were interviewed. Subsequently, a mailed survey was returned by 464 probands, 1,040 biological family members, and 399 spouses/partners. This analysis highlights the interviews, augmented by survey findings. Probands and family members attribute great predictive power and lifesaving potential to genomic information. A majority hold that a proband’s genomic results relevant to family members’ health ought to be offered. While informants endorse each individual’s choice whether to learn results, most express a strong moral responsibility to know and to share, particularly with the younger generation. Most have few concerns about sharing genetic information within the family; rather, their concerns focus on the health consequences of not sharing. Conclusions: Although additional studies in diverse populations are needed, policies governing return of genomic results should consider how families understand genomic data, how they value confidentiality within the family, and whether they endorse an ethics of sharing. A focus on respect for individual privacy—without attention to how the broad social and cultural context shapes preferences within families—cannot be the sole foundation of policy. (shrink)

Data are lacking with regard to participants' perspectives on return of genetic research results to relatives, including after the participant's death. This paper reports descriptive results from 3,630 survey respondents: 464 participants in a pancreatic cancer biobank, 1,439 family registry participants, and 1,727 healthy individuals. Our findings indicate that most participants would feel obligated to share their results with blood relatives while alive and would want results to be shared with relatives after their death.

An in-depth examination of the work of this important medieval woman mystic.

This article will review reasons why it is argued that the law on abortion on the grounds of disability is discriminatory, as well as recent unsuccessful attempts to address this discrimination in the law. These attempts include ones which would have moderately restricted access to abortion in certain limited cases, and another that might have opened to door to a number of different possibilities, including both to options that could have restricted access to abortion, and to other options that might (...) have increased access. Finally, this article will also examine reasons why some of the most important challenges surrounding disability equality cannot be sufficiently addressed through legal change alone. While there are strong reasons to support some form of change in the law, a more foundational change in values is necessary if we want to live in a more ethical society that is truly capable of welcoming disabled children. (shrink)

Introduction -- The ethics of care and global politics -- Rethinking human security -- 'Women's work' : the global care and sex economies -- Humanitarian intervention and global security governance -- Peacebuilding and paternalism : reading care through postcolonialism -- Health and human security : gender, care and HIV/AIDS -- Gender, care, and the ethics of environmental security -- Conclusion. Security through care.

It is traditionally believed that cerebral activation (the presence of low voltage fast electrical activity in the neocortex and rhythmical slow activity in the hippocampus) is correlated with arousal, while deactivation (the presence of large amplitude irregular slow waves or spindles in both the neocortex and the hippocampus) is correlated with sleep or coma. However, since there are many exceptions, these generalizations have only limited validity. Activated patterns occur in normal sleep (active or paradoxical sleep) and during states of anesthesia (...) and coma. Deactivated patterns occur, at times, during normal waking, or during behavior in awake animals treated with atropinic drugs. Also, the fact that patterns characteristic of sleep, arousal, and waking behavior continue in decorticate animals indicates that reticulo-cortical mechanisms are not essential for these aspects of behavior. (shrink)

This entry concerns dualism in the philosophy of mind. The term ‘dualism’ has a variety of uses in the history of thought. In general, the idea is that, for some particular domain, there are two fundamental kinds or categories of things or principles. In theology, for example a ‘dualist’ is someone who believes that Good and Evil — or God and the Devil — are independent and more or less equal forces in the world. Dualism contrasts with monism, which is (...) the theory that there is only one fundamental kind, category of thing or principle; and, rather less commonly, with pluralism, which is the view that there are many kinds or categories. In the philosophy of mind, dualism is the theory that the mental and the physical — or mind and body or mind and brain — are, in some sense, radically different kinds of thing. Because common sense tells us that there are physical bodies, and because there is intellectual pressure towards producing a unified view of the world, one could say that materialist monism is the ‘default option’. Discussion about dualism, therefore, tends to start from the assumption of the reality of the physical world, and then to consider arguments for why the mind cannot be treated as simply part of that world. (shrink)

Recent financial fraud legislation such as the Dodd–Frank Act and the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (U.S. House of Representatives, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, [H.R. 4173], 2010 ; U.S. House of Representatives, The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, Public Law 107-204 [H.R. 3763], 2002 ) relies heavily on whistleblowers for enforcement, and offers protection and incentives for whistleblowers. However, little is known about many aspects of the whistleblowing decision, especially the effects of contextual and wrongdoing attributes on organizational (...) members’ willingness to report fraud. We extend the ethics literature by experimentally investigating how the nature of the wrongdoing and the awareness of those surrounding the whistleblower can influence whistleblowing. As predicted, we find that employees are less likely to report: (1) financial statement fraud than theft; (2) immaterial than material financial statement fraud; (3) when the wrongdoer is aware that the potential whistleblower has knowledge of the fraud; and (4) when others in addition to the wrongdoer are not aware of the fraud. Our findings extend whistleblowing research in several ways. For instance, prior research provides little evidence concerning the effects of fraud type, wrongdoer awareness, and others’ awareness on whistleblowing intentions. We also provide evidence that whistleblowing settings represent an exception to the well-accepted theory of diffusion of responsibility. Our participants are professionals who represent the likely pool of potential whistleblowers in organizations. (shrink)

Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events. Behavior is caused by muscles that contract upon receiving neural impulses, and neural impulses are generated by input from other neurons or from sense organs. On the epiphenomenalist view, mental events play no causal role in this process. Huxley (1874), who held the view, compared mental events to a steam whistle that contributes nothing to the work of (...) a locomotive. James (1879), who rejected the view, characterized epiphenomenalists' mental events as not affecting the brain activity that produces them "any more than a shadow reacts upon the steps of the traveller whom it accompanies". (shrink)

Silent thinking is often accompanied by subvocal sayings to ourselves, imagery, emotional feelings, and non-sensory experiences such as familiarity, rightness, and confidence that we can go on in certain ways. Phenomenological materials of these kinds, along with our dispositions to give explanations or draw inferences, provide resources that are sufficient to account for our knowledge of what we think, desire, and so on. We do not need to suppose that there is a distinctive, non-imagistic 'what it is like' to think (...) that p, and a different non-imagistic 'what it is like' to think that q. Nor need we suppose that there is a proprietary 'what it is like' to have one propositional attitude type rather than another. (shrink)

Physicalism has, over the past twenty years, become almost an orthodoxy, especially in the philosophy of mind. Many philosophers, however, feel uneasy about this development, and this volume is intended as a collective response to it. Together these papers, written by philosophers from Britain, the United States, and Australasia, show that physicalism faces enormous problems in every area in which it is discussed. The contributors not only investigate the well-known difficulties that physicalism has in accommodating sensory consciousness, but also bring (...) out its inadequacies in dealing with thought, intentionality, abstract objects, , and principles of both theoretical and practical reason; even its ability to cope with the physical world itself is called into question. Both strong "reductionist" versions and weaker "supervenience" theories are discussed and found to face different but equally formidable obstacles. Contributors include George Bealer, Peter Forrest, John Foster, Grant Gillett, Bob Hale, Michael Lockwood, George Myro, Nicholas Nathan, David Smith, Steven Wagner, Ralph Walker, and Richard Warner. (shrink)

This paper explores a variety of kinds of apparent disagreement of which it may be held that they involve failure to disagree in that, at least in some broad sense, the disputants use the same words to express different meanings or concepts. It is argued that it is hard to rebut the claim that some apparent disagreements about personal identity fall into a particular sub-category of this broad type. I conclude both that a "constrained" relativism which I call "quasi-relativism" is (...) appropriate in regard to some central personal-identity debates, and also that, in order to avoid the lamentable conclusion that there is no real disagreement at all in these debates, we should embrace the idea that there is a non-cognitive element in personal identity claims, in virtue of the tight conceptual relations between personal identity claims and value claims of various kinds. (shrink)

This volume contains papers by a group of leading experts on Aristotle and the later Aristotelian tradition of Neoplatonism. The discussion ranges from Aristotle's treatment of Parmenides, the most important pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, to Neoplatonic and medieval use of Aristotle, for which Aristotle himself set guidelines in his discussions of his predecessors. Traces of these guidelines can be seen in the work of Plotinus, and that of the later Greek commentators on Aristotle. The study of these commentators, and the recognition (...) of the philosophical interest and importance of the ideas which they expressed in their commentaries, is an exciting new development in ancient philosophy to which this book makes a unique and distinguished contribution. (shrink)

Popper proposes a technical concept of 'verisimilitude' as a test of the progressiveness of scientific theories. The paper attempts to show its uselessness and inapplicability on mathematical and practical grounds, As well as raising doubts about the value of any such attempt to give a mechanical test of scientific progress.

Since 1980 effective field theories (EFT's) have been the focus of much research by quantum field theorists but their philosophical implications have gone mostly unnoticed. Some authors claim EFT's are approximations to some fundamental theory. Others claim EFT's are ends in themselves, not approximations to some fundamental theory, and that we can use them to bypass the problem of renormalization. In the present work I argue that the EFT programme can bypass the problem if ontological commitments only come from theoretical (...) predictions. Since the history of QFT suggests some form of entity realism, the EFT programme does not allow us to bypass the problem of renormalization. (shrink)

Problem gambling is a growing public health issue in the UK. In this paper, we argue that football plays a problematic role in the promotion and normalisation of gambling. Given that sport broadcas...

Moral obligations rest on circumstances. But what are these obligating reasons and in virtue of what are they such reasons? Nomological conceptions define such reasons in terms of moral laws. I argue that one such conception cannot be correct and that others do not support the familiar and plausible view that obligating reasons are pro tanto reasons, either because they entail that this view is false or else because they cannot explain—or even help to explain—how it could be true. I (...) also argue that a particular dispositional conception of obligating reasons does support this view of obligating reasons by enabling an explanation of how it could be true. Moreover, my arguments show that the dispositional moral metaphysic on which this conception is predicated can do something that nomological alternatives cannot: explain why obligating reasons and moral obligations are pro tanto reasons and obligations. (shrink)

After sketching some aspects of truthmaker doctrines and "truthmaker projects", and canvassing some prima facie objections to the latter, I turn to an issue which might seem to involve confusion about the nature of character of truthmakers if such there be, viz for statements of identity and (specially) distinctness. The real issue here is versions of the Identity of Indiscernibles. I discuss ways of discriminating versions, which are almost certainly true but trivial, which almost certainly substantive but false, and explore (...) an interesting intermediate possibility which might if developed yield a plausibly true yet not-entirely-trivial version of the doctrine: it is equivalent to what I call "the Denial of Bare Distinctness". (shrink)

. An attempt is made to identify a concept of ‘downward causation’ that will fit the claims of some recent writers and apply to interesting cases in biology and cognitive theory, but not to trivial cases. After noting some difficulties in achieving this task, it is proposed that in interesting cases commonly used to illustrate ‘downward causation’, (a) regularities hold between multiply realizable properties and (b) the explanation of the parallel regularity at the level of the realizing properties is non-trivial. (...) It is argued that the relation between a realizable property and the property that realizes its effect in a particular case is not usefully regarded as a species of causation and that use of the concept of downward causation deflects our attention from our central explanatory tasks. (shrink)

I critically discuss both the particular doctrinal and general meta-philosophical or methodological tenets of Mark Johnston's paper "Human Beings", attending to several weaknesses in his argument. One of the most important amongst them is an apparent reliance on a substitution of identicals within an intensional context as he argues that continuity of functioning brain is essential to the persistence of "Human Beings" as allegedly singled out by his methodology; another equally important is a simple lacuna in place of an argument (...) that candidate entities for re-identification by means we take for granted in the case of persons cannot be what I call "mentalistically" individuated. (shrink)

Many of the concepts analysed by philosophers have their origin in ordinary – or at least extra-philosophical – language. Perception, knowledge, causation, and mind are examples. But the concept of substance is a philosophical term of art. Its uses in ordinary language tend to derive, often in a rather distorted way, from the philosophical senses. There is an ordinary concept in play when philosophers discuss “substance”, and this, as we shall see, is the concept of object, or thing when this (...) is contrasted with properties or events. But such “individual substances” are never termed “substances” outside philosophy. -/- There exist two rather different ways of characterising the philosophical concept of substance. The first is the more generic. The philosophical term “substance” comes from an early Latin translation of the Greek ousia. Ousia is a noun derived from the verb “einai” (to be) and is naturally translated “being”. According to the generic sense, substances are those things that best merit the title “beings”. This is usually interpreted to mean those things that are the foundational or fundamental entities of a given philosophical system. Thus, for an atomist, atoms are the substances, for they are the basic things from which everything is constructed. In David Hume’s system, impressions and ideas are the substances, for the same reason. In a slightly different way, Forms are Plato’s substances, for everything derives its existence from Forms. -/- The second use of the concept is more specific. According to this usage, substances are a particular kind of entity, and some philosophical theories acknowledge them and others do not. This conception of substance derives from the intuitive notion of individual thing or object, which contrasts mainly with properties and events. According to this usage, it is a live issue whether the fundamental entities are substances or something else, such as events, or properties located at space-times. The issue is how we are to understand the notion of an object, and whether, in the light of the correct understanding, it remains a basic notion, or one that must be characterised in more fundamental terms. Whether, for example, an object can be thought of as nothing more than a bundle of properties, or a series of events. -/- The reason “substance” has acquired these two usages is that the work that introduced the term to philosophy, Aristotle’s Categories, claims that the things that most merit the title “beings” (substances in the generic sense) are individual objects as opposed to properties or events (substances in the specific sense). (shrink)

The liking of a sensation, e.g., a taste, is a conscious occurrent but does not consist in having the liked sensation accompanied by a "pleasure sensation" - for there is no such sensation. Several alternative accounts of liking, including Aydede's "feeling episode" theory and Schroeder's representationalist theory are considered. The proposal that liking a sensation is having the non-sensory experience of liking directed upon it is explained and defended. The pleasure provided by thoughts, conversations, walks, etc., is analyzed and brought (...) into relation to the account of liking one's sensations. (shrink)

How should we design AI systems that make moral decisions that affect us? When there is disagreement about which moral decisions should be made and which methods would produce them, we should avoid arbitrary design choices. However, I show that this leads to a regress problem similar to the one metanormativists face involving higher orders of uncertainty. I argue that existing strategies for handling this parallel problem give verdicts about where to stop in the regress that are either too arbitrary (...) or too difficult to implement. I propose a new strategy for AI designers that is better than these alternatives. (shrink)

Contemporary empiricism has attempted to ground its analysis of science in a falsificationism based in selection theory. This paper links these evolutionary epistemologies with commitments to certain epistemological and ontological assumptions found in the later work of K. Popper, D. Campbell, and D. Hull, I argue that their assumptions about the character of contemporary empiricism are part of a shared paradigm of epistemological explanation which results in unresolved tensions within their own projects. I argue further that their claim to be (...) doing a science of science is not defensible. Hull's selectionism is analyzed to show how this epistemological agenda has played itself out in late empiricism. I suggest some directions that Hull might take toward an historical epistemology. (shrink)

Thomas hobbes's papers at chatsworth prove that he had considerable knowledge of legal concepts. apparently he used the chatsworth copy of christopher saint german's "doctor" and "student" in developing his concept of contractual obligation. realizing this is useful for a careful analysis of hobbes's theory of why contracts oblige. the crucial problem is hobbes attempt to explain why we should perform a disadvantageous contract. he suggests different motives in all three of his major political works. in "leviathan" he finally settles (...) on the argument that it is always to our long-term advantage to fail to keep contracts. this argument is not very satisfactory, but it is the best that he can come up with given his account of human nature. (shrink)

The author considers two arguments concerning the nature of space which occur in Berkeley and which he thinks are not sufficiently discussed. The first one concerns the phenomenology of space, the second the physics of space. The first one is the “mite” argument, while the second draws from Newton’s two thought experiments concerning absolute space: the “bucket” experiment and the “balls” experiment. The author’s aim is to support the idealist approach to space.

The provision of aid in war zones can be fraught with political difficulties and may itself foster inequalities, as it is rare to be allowed access to civilians on both sides of a conflict. Over the past decade, a United Nations brokered agreement has allowed Operation Lifeline Sudan , a UN “umbrella” organisation, to provide the diplomatic cover and operational support to allow long term humanitarian and emergency food aid to both the government and the rebel sides in the long-running (...) south Sudanese civil war. Over the years, the destruction of infrastructure in the country has meant that the provision of basic health care has been seriously hampered. Operation Lifeline Sudan has coordinated the work of most of the non-governmental organisations , working in this part of Africa. Each NGO has had responsibility for a particular area of the country and has worked closely with the local Sudanese authorities on either side of the conflict, conforming to strict codes of conduct or “ground rules”, based on neutrality. Operation Lifeline Sudan has provided an air-bridge for emergency relief supplies in regions where road access is impossible, either because of landmines, or simply because the roads do not exist. The war continues, however, and the underlying causes of war—economic exploitation, marginalisation of communities, lack of political representation, and systematic violence and abuse remain unsolved. The warring factions have brought some OLS operations in south Sudan to a standstill recently, for certain political reasons that could have compromised the neutrality of the OLS-coordinated humanitarian aid schemes. It would appear that the only resolution to the country's problems are external political pressure to get the respective combatants to negotiate and, less probably, an undertaking by countries of the developed world not to continue to supply arms. Nevertheless, OLS may serve as a model for how medical aid can be delivered in an even-handed way to the populations of countries where there is civil war, irrespective of where they may live. (shrink)