Educational institutions, like the society in which they exist, may operate with racial, gender, and class biases that marginalize students whose cultural traits and characteristics differ from mainstream norms and practices. However, as bell hooks urges, education can provide the means to "transgress" conventional limitations and biases.

Although informed consent models for prescribing hormone replacement therapy are becoming increasingly prevalent, many physicians continue to require an assessment and referral letter from a mental health professional prior to prescription. Drawing on personal and communal experience, the author argues that assessment and referral requirements are dehumanising and unethical, foregrounding the ways in which these requirements evidence a mistrust of trans people, suppress the diversity of their experiences and sustain an unjustified double standard in contrast to other forms of clinical (...) care. Physicians should abandon this unethical requirement in favour of an informed consent approach to transgender care. (shrink)

Introduction Les femmes n'ont eu véritablement accès au pastorat dans les Églises protestantes françaises qu'en l966. Certes, une femme avait été consacrée en 1948, mais à condition de rester célibataire et sans enfants. Celles qui dans les années suivantes exercèrent exceptionnellement la fonction pastorale ne furent pas consacrées. L'accès des femmes au ministère féminin vient couronner de succès les efforts de plusieurs générations de partisans de l'égalité des sexes au sein du pro..

As global warming continues to attract growing levels of attention, various stakeholders have put climate change on corporate agendas and expect firms to disclose relevant greenhouse gas information. In this paper, we investigate the consistency of the GHG information voluntarily disclosed by French listed firms through two different communication channels: corporate reports and the Carbon Disclosure Project. More precisely, we contrast the amounts of GHG emissions reported and the methodological explanations provided in each channel. Consistent with a stakeholder theory perspective, (...) we find that GHG amounts are significantly lower in the CR than in the CDP. We also find that firms increase the CR figures’ traceability when there is a discrepancy between disclosures in the two channels. We suggest that the aim of this greater traceability is to enhance information credibility across the different channels used. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 6, June 2019, Page W3-W4.

In a previous article, I argued that assessment requirements for transgender hormone replacement therapy are unethical and dehumanising. A recent response published by the Journal of Medical Ethics criticises this proposal. In this reply, I advance that their response misunderstood core parts of my argument and fails to provide independent support for assessment requirements. Though transition-related care may have similarities with cosmetic surgeries, this does not suffice to establish a need for assessments, and nor do the high rates of depression (...) and anxiety justify assessments, especially given the protective role HRT plays towards mental well-being. (shrink)

Of the many ethical corporate marketing practices, many firms use corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication to enhance their corporate image. Yet, consumers, overwhelmed by these more or less well-founded CSR claims, often have trouble identifying truly responsible firms. This confusion encourages ‘greenwashing’ and may make CSR initiatives less effective. On the basis of attribution theory, this study investigates the role of independent sustainability ratings on consumers’ responses to companies’ CSR communication. Experimental results indicate the negative effect of a poor sustainability (...) rating for corporate brand evaluations in the case of CSR communication, because consumers infer less intrinsic motives by the brand. Sustainability ratings thus could act to deter ‘greenwashing’ and encourage virtuous firms to persevere in their CSR practices. (shrink)

Conflicts of interest held by researchers remain a focus of attention in clinical research. Biases related to these relationships have the potential to directly impact the quality of healthcare by influencing decision-making, yet conflicts of interest remain underreported, inconsistently described, and difficult to access. Initiatives aimed at improving the disclosure of researcher conflicts of interest are still in their infancy but represent a vital reform that must be addressed before potential biases associated with conflicts of interest can be mitigated and (...) trust in the impartiality of clinical evidence restored. In this review, we examine the prevalence of conflicts of interest, evidence of the effects that disclosed and undisclosed conflicts of interest have had on the reporting of clinical evidence, and the emerging approaches for improving the completeness and consistency of disclosures. Through this review of emerging technologies, we recognize a growing interest in publicly accessible registries for researcher conflicts of interest and propose five desiderata aimed at maximizing the value of such registries: mandates for ensuring that researchers keep their records up to date; transparent records that are made available to the public; interoperability to allow researchers, bibliographic databases, and institutions to interact with the registry; a consistent taxonomy for describing different classes of conflicts of interest; and the ability to automatically generate conflicts of interest statements for use in published articles. (shrink)

Although critiques of humanism are not new, the currency of posthumanist discourse on the nonhuman – the animal, the environment, or the object – suggests rising concerns about humanity’s place in the ecological order. This article interrogates Cary Wolfe's posthumanist framework as he approaches the questions of activism and agency in the context of animal ethics and disability politics. By drawing attention to the contradictions in his own commitments to rethinking human exceptionalism, I examine how Wolfe's appeal for a more (...) compassionate account of ethics vis-à-vis the notion of ‘trans-species empathy’ can be more gainfully addressed through the work of feminist and quantum physicist Karen Barad. This essay contends that by preserving the difference between the human and the nonhuman as something that is given rather than interrogated, the assumption of ‘the human’ as a self-contained identity is left unchanged and unchallenged. (shrink)

The question of the imperatives induced by the Gandhian concept of non-violence towards animals is an issue that has been neglected by specialists on the thinking of the Mahatma. The aim of this article is to highlight the systematic – and significant – character of this particular aspect of his views on non-violence. The first part introduces the theoretical foundations of the duty of non-violence towards animals in general. Gandhi's critical interpretation of cow-protection, advocated by Hinduism, leads to a general (...) reflection on the duty of non-violence towards animals, the cow being transformed into the representative of all dumb creation. The approach adopted by Gandhi to solving the problem of cow-protection focuses on its practical dimensions and is based primarily on reforming animal husbandry. What limits should be imposed on the exploitation of farm animals within the framework of non-violence? Gandhi devoted nearly 30 years to elaborating an animal husbandry system that would be both economically viable and in conformity with the universal ethical principles he drew from religions (especially Hinduism). The interdiction to kill is absolute, since Gandhi not only rejects the breeding of farm animals for the purposes of butchery but also the slaughtering of animals that are no longer capable of providing the services required of them. He therefore concentrated his efforts on drawing up a scheme to reorganize this activity on a national scale while taking into consideration these constraints, which are less contradictory than they may seem to be at first sight. Reviewing the age-old activity of animal husbandry in the light of non-violence is clearly based on the specific nature of Hindu traditions. However, it goes far beyond cultural or religious relativism, since it is also founded on universal ethical principles. (shrink)

The capacity to self-generate mental content that is unrelated to the current environment is a fundamental characteristic of the mind, and the current experiment explored how this experience is related to the decisions that people make in daily life. We examined how task-unrelated thought varies with the length of time participants are willing to wait for an economic reward, as measured using an inter-temporal discounting task. When participants performed a task requiring minimal attention, the greater the amount of time spent (...) engaged in TUT the longer the individual was prepared to wait for an economic reward. These data indicate that self-generated thought engages processes associated with the successful management of long-term goals. Although immersion in the here and now is undeniably advantageous, under appropriate conditions the capacity to let go of the present and consider more pertinent personal goals may have its own rewards. (shrink)

This paper analyzes resource utilization of the Sundarbans in terms of the contradictory issues and pressures generated by foreign assistance and commercial interests in Bangladesh. In the paper, the historical legacy of resource definition and use that shaped the development of forest policy under the British is considered. In addition, the critical role of the state and the interests and pressures on the Government are explored as these shape the larger context in which current natural resource policy is generated and (...) maintained. Three areas of potential conflict between current devlopment policy and resource management control are noted. They are 1) the privatization of production and resource exploitation in contrast to common property resource use, 2) the need to meet foreign exchange requirements versus local user interests, and 3) commercial versus local user interests.The paper argues that national and international fiscal and economic constraints operate to favor commercial interests and natural resource exports at the cost of policies that emphasize an active approach to the generation and preservation of renewable resources such as the Sundarbans. (shrink)

Control over food supply was advanced in the kingdom of France in the Eighteenth century by Physiocrat economists under the seemingly advantageous label of 'freedom of grain trade'. In 1764 these reforms brought about a rise in grain prices and generated an artificial dearth that ruined the poor, some of whom died from malnutrition. The King halted the reform and re-established the old regime of regulated prices; in order to maintain the delicate balance between prices and wages, the monarchy tried (...) to limit speculation in subsistence goods and achieved some success in regulating the provisioning of public markets. Le Mercier de la Riviere concluded that executing these reforms required more effective political control. After 1774 the new king gave the Physiocratic reforms a second chance, reforming property rights and establishing an aristocracy of the landed rich. Again, this led to price hikes and as a result so-called 'popular emotions' erupted. Turgot ordered military intervention to dispel the protesters, marking a first rupture between the monarchy and the people over speculation on subsistence. Turgot's experiment failed and he was dismissed, but the Physiocracy had discovered that the market in subsistence offered new opportunities for economic power under the misleading legitimacy of 'economic laws'. Turgot's followers, Dupont de Nemours and Condorcet, continued to develop this 'theory' that was later translated into a 'scientific language' that ultimately asserted the autonomy of the economic sphere and its alleged independence from ethics and politics. The paper examines the continuity of events through the six great jacqueries and the French Revolution, including the all- important agrarian reform that ensued after 1792. Robespierre's concept of 'popular political economy' is analysed and compared with the notion of unfettered private property rights that lies at the heart of neoliberalism. (shrink)

This essay is a literature review journey of ancient Chinese texts, including Confucius' Analects, Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historians of China, Pan Ku's The History of the Former Han Dynasty, and official historical texts of subsequent dynasties. Confucius is not against the accumulation of wealth as long as it is acquired through moral means. Sima Qian, the greatest Chinese historian, appreciates the contribution of successful private enterprises towards the betterment of economy by its efficient usage of resources and (...) his opinion is strikingly similar to modern economic theories such as F. A. Hakey's ideas on free market economy. Their standpoints are, however, rejected by all later official view which emphasizes "All land and resources belong to the King." Starting from Pan Ku' proposal on the classification of social hierarchy, businessmen belong to the bottom stratum of the social ladder. The money-making businessmen of the common people is portrayed as "immoral" or even "illegal," but when the profit goes to the King or when the business is state-owned, it is taken as reasonable and highly acceptable. The Chinese King is the controller of most profitable and important businesses in major industries and mining as well as the distributor of most valuable resources. All official view emphasizes the stability of the state, for then the control of the country can be ensured and the power of the King can be consolidated. (shrink)

Cet article montre que le Livre du Chevalier errant de Thomas iii de Saluces est un miroir familial visant, à travers la combinaison du souvenir historique et de la fiction légendaire, à sublimer le souvenir des aïeux. Dans cette stratégie d’exaltation généalogique, le rôle des femmes est loin d’être négligeable. Deux cas remarquables d’héroïsme féminin sont analysés, ceux de Richarde de Saluces, la guerrière, et de Grisilidis, l’épouse vertueuse.

Neuroplasticity research marks a considerable shift in focus from localization theories of the brain to more holistic, or systemsoriented, theories of the body-brain-environment interrelation. In What Should We Do with Our Brain?, philosopher Catherine Malabou calls attention to the political significance of neuroplasticity for engaging questions of agency and accountability. This paper addressesMalabou's ethical concerns by way of anthropologist Gregory Bateson's ecological view of human agency. By redefining the individual mind as an ecological 'tangle', Bateson's perspectives offer an important provocation, (...) namely, a re-examination of the conventional parameters that bound the mind or the brain as a localized entity or that bound the mind or the brain as a property of an individual entity. This paper brings together Malabou and Bateson's views on agency and consciousness. (shrink)

There is a very small, yet important minority within the community of European Union kosher consumers. There is a great deal of research regarding objective aspects of the kosher religious as well as civil laws and their implementation, but comparatively little research about the subjective attitudes, opinions, and concerns of those who actually purchase and consume kosher food. Such information can be important for a variety of interested parties including suppliers, distributors, regulatory agencies, legislators, and certifying agencies as well as (...) religious authorities. We collected relevant data by organizing hour-long Focus Groups in five European cities and a suburb of Tel Aviv. The FG addressed consumer attitudes related to shopping practices, commitment, trust, and certification as well as their knowledge and opinions regarding nonhuman animal welfare as it relates to shechita and knowledge of the issue of stunning animals at the time of killing. One of the significant findings was a high level of secularization among Jews that translates to a low level of commitment to eating kosher. But this was accompanied by assertions that eating kosher was an important religious obligation and complaints of low availability and high cost. There was a strong feeling, even among those less committed to eating kosher, that shechita was the preferred method of slaughtering an animal and a strong suspicion of anti-Semitism as a motivation for any attempt to impose a stunning obligation. (shrink)

This paper describes the author’s experience of infusing an introductory database course with privacy content, and the on-going project entitled Integrating Ethics Into the Database Curriculum, that evolved from that experience. The project, which has received funding from the National Science Foundation, involves the creation of a set of privacy modules that can be implemented systematically by database educators throughout the database design thread of an undergraduate course.

"An impressively reasoned and startlingly unorthodox treatise on religion." - Belles Lettres Florence Nightingale (1820-1920) is famous as the heroine of the Crimean War and later as a campaigner for health care founded on a clean environment and good nursing. Though best known for her pioneering demonstration that disease rather than wounds killed most soldiers, she was also heavily allied to social reform movements and to feminist protest against the enforced idleness of middle-class women. This original edition provides bold (...) new insights into Nightingale's beliefs and a new picture of the relationship between feminism and religion. Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth Among the Artisans of England (1860), which contains the novel Cassandra , is a central text in 19th-century history of feminist thought and is published here for the first time. Nightingale argues that work was the means by which every individual sought self-fulfillment and served God. She wrote influentially about the group most Victorians declared to be above work: unmarried, middle-class women. (shrink)

During the last two decades there has been an enormous development in treatment possibilities in the field of neonatology, particularly for (extremely) premature infants. Although there are cross-cultural differences in treatment strategy, an overview of the literature suggests that every country is confronted with moral dilemmas in this area. These concern decisions to initiate or withhold treatment directly at birth and, later on, decisions to withdraw treatment with the possible consequence that the child will die. Given that the neonate cannot (...) express his or her own will, who will decide? And on the basis of what information, values and norms? We explored some of these issues in daily practice by interviewing a small sample of health care practitioners in a Dutch university Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). It turned out that experiencing moral dilemmas is part of their daily functioning. Nurses underline the suffering of the newborn, whereas physicians stress uncertainty in treatment outcome. To make the best of it, nurses focus on their caring task, whereas physicians hope that future follow-up research will lead to more predictable outcomes. As for their own offspring, part of these professionals would hesitate to bring their own extremely premature newborn to a NICU. For the most oppressing dilemma reported – terminating an already initiated treatment – we propose the concept of ‘evidence shift’ to clarify the ambiguous position of uncertainty in decision making. (shrink)

Negative attitudes toward invertebrates are a deep-seated, visceral response among Western peoples. These internalized aversions toward insects and other terrestrial arthropods, both in general and specifically as a food source, subtly and systemically contribute to unsustainable global foodways. Insect cuisine is, for Westerners, emblematic of the alien, a threat to our psychological and cultural identity. Yet failure to embrace entomophagy prevents us from seeing the full humanity of those of other classes, races, and cultures, and leads to agricultural and food (...) policy decisions that fail in their objectives to improve nourishment for all people. Key to enabling the world’s peoples to live sustainably with the land are: awareness of the psychological and cultural barriers to a more insect-positive perspective embracing insects as a desirable food resource, understanding the processes by which those barriers are constructed, their negative consequences, and identifying strategies for transforming our attitudes. (shrink)

Florence Tamagne présente dans ce livre dense, mais qui aurait parfois gagné à être plus ramassé, l'essentiel d'une thèse soutenue en 1998. Il faut se réjouir de cette publication, les travaux sur l'histoire de la sexualité étant fort rares. L'histoire de l'homosexualité présente de surcroît des difficultés propres. Elle souffre plus encore que l'histoire de l'hétérosexualité du silence des acteurs. L'auteur a donc fait feu de tout bois, combiné iconographie et littérature, discours sc..

Florence Larocque et Anne-Marie Reynaud.

This article characterizes Florence Nightingale's nursing reform as the cleaning of the Victorian home which she found unheimlich. She laid strong emphasis on an improvement in the hygiene of the house as a significant part of nursing, and, by establishing the nurse as a new occupation, gave the surplus of unmarried women a decent means of escape from the stifling domesticity in which they had been helplessly trapped. Her nursing at once reformed and reinforced the traditional role of woman (...) as a domestic figure, for she created the nurse as a mother figure in charge of the home space. In the Crimean War, Nightingale successfully nursed the idea of England as Home by attending to the dying soldiers at the front. Her crusade to nurse the unhomely space into a home, however, dismissed one uncanny place inside the imperial Home that needed urgent nursing, that is, Ireland, which had been suffering from the Great Famine and its aftermath. Nightingale confronted Irish Sisters of Mercy, who came to the Crimea to save the lives and souls of the Irish soldiers. These Irish nuns not only embodied the memories of the Famine which they had recently relieved, but also threatened Nightingale's single female authority by representing Ireland as a nation through their equally motherly presence. The service of the Irish nuns in the Crimean War was erased from the myth of the Lady with the Lamp. Nightingale could establish herself as an authoritative female subject and assumed the voice of England only by suppressing another female voice which challenged England's competence in Home management. (shrink)

They envisioned a brave new world, and what they got was fascism. As vibrant as its counterparts in Paris, Munich, and Milan, the avant-garde of Florence rose on a wave of artistic, political, and social idealism that swept the world with the arrival of the twentieth century. How the movement flourished in its first heady years, only to flounder in the bloody wake of World War I, is a fascinating story, told here for the first time. It is the (...) history of a whole generation's extraordinary promise--and equally extraordinary failure. The "decadentism" of D'Annunzio, the philosophical ideals of Croce and Gentile, the politics of Italian socialism: all these strains flowed together to buoy the emerging avant-garde in Florence. Walter Adamson shows us the young artists and writers caught up in the intellectual ferment of their time, among them the poet Giovanni Papini, the painter Ardengo Soffici, and the cultural critic Giuseppe Prezzolini. He depicts a generation rejecting provincialism, seeking spiritual freedom in Paris, and ultimately blending the modernist style found there with their own sense of toscanità or "being Tuscan." In their journals--Leonardo, La Voce, Lacerba, and l'Italia futurista--and in their cafe life at the Giubbe Rosse, we see the avant-garde of Florence as citizens of an intellectual world peopled by the likes of Picasso, Bergson, Sorel, Unamuno, Pareto, Weininger, and William James. We witness their mounting commitment to the ideals of regenerative violence and watch their existence become increasingly frenzied as war approaches. Finally, Adamson shows us the ultimate betrayal of the movement's aspirations as its cultural politics help catapult Italy into war and prepare the way for Mussolini's rise to power. (shrink)