In anticipation of extraterritorial application of antiabortion laws, many states have enacted laws that attempt to shield abortion providers, helpers, and patients from civil, professional, or criminal liability associated with legal abortion care. This essay analyzes and compares the statutory schemes of the seven early adopting shield states: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. After describing what the laws do and how they operate, we offer reflections on coming disputes, areas of legal uncertainty, and ways to (...) improve future shield laws. (shrink)

Soon after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic outbreak, it became clear that vaccination will be the most useful tool to combat the disease. Despite the apparent safety and efficacy of the developed anti‐COVID‐19 vaccines, relatively high percentages of the population worldwide refused to get vaccinated, including many health workers and health students. The present cross‐sectional study examined the motives, attitudes, and personal characteristics of those who did not get vaccinated against COVID‐19 or vaccinated without complete willingness among nursing students (...) and nursing faculty members in Israel (n = 472). Results show that the vast majority of the study participants (97%) received at least one dose of the anti‐COVID‐19 vaccine. Nearly 37% of the participants indicated that they received the vaccine without complete willingness. As compared to faculty members, nursing students reported lower trust in the efficacy of the vaccine, perceived the COVID‐19 pandemic as a health threat to a lesser extent, exhibited lower institutional and personal trust, and had higher levels of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms. Non‐Jewish participants were at risk of vaccinating without complete willingness. These findings underscore the need for developing evidence‐based strategies to promote the safety and efficacy of the anti‐COVID‐19 vaccines in nursing schools. (shrink)

When ethics committees are consulted about patients who have or need court-appointed guardians, they lack empirical evidence about several common issues, including the relationship between guardianship and prolonged, potentially medically unnecessary hospitalizations for patients. To provide information about this issue, we conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses using a retrospective cohort from Veterans Healthcare Administration. To examine the relationship between guardianship appointment and hospital length of stay, we first compared 116 persons hospitalized prior to guardianship appointment to a comparison group (n (...) = 348) 3:1 matched for age, diagnosis, date of admission, and comorbidity. We then compared 91 persons hospitalized in the year following guardianship appointment to a second matched comparison group (n = 273). Mean length of stay was 30.75 days (SD = 46.70) amongst those admitted prior to guardianship, which was higher than the comparison group (M = 7.74, SD = 9.71, F = 20.75, p. (shrink)

There has been growing global interest in livestock animal welfare. Previous research into attitudes towards animal welfare has focused on Europe and the United States, with comparatively little focus on Australia, which is an important location due to the prominent position of agriculture economically and culturally. In this article, we present results from qualitative research on how Australian meat consumers conceptualise sheep and beef cattle welfare. The study was conducted in two capital cities (Melbourne, Victoria and Adelaide, South Australia) and (...) a much smaller rural centre (Toowoomba, Queensland) using focus groups (involving 40.9% of participants) and mall-intercept interviews (59.1% of participants), totalling 66 participants. Qualitative analysis highlights that participants had clear ideas of what it means for an animal to live a ‘good life’ and experience a ‘good death,’ with their beliefs strongly tied to their expectations and cultural understandings of what Australian agriculture ‘should be.’ In response to open-ended questions, participants expressed attitudes that relied on romanticised visions of the ‘rural idyll’ as seen in frequent discussions about what is ‘normal’ for sheep meat and beef production, and relatedly, what count as ‘natural behaviours.’ Many participants rejected anything associated with the ‘other,’ classifying it as not ‘normal’: we argue that which is not considered normal, including intensive production, foreign ownership, and halal slaughter practices, appear to place participants’ conceptualizations of an animal’s ‘good death,’ and in turn the potential for a ‘good life,’ at risk. (shrink)

The lottery paradox plays an important role in arguments for various norms of assertion. Why is it that, prior to information on the results of a draw, assertions such as, “My ticket lost,” seem inappropriate? This paper is composed of two projects. First, I articulate a number of problems arising from Timothy Williamson’s analysis of the lottery paradox. Second, I propose a relevant alternatives theory, which I call the Non-Destabilizing Alternatives Theory , that better explains the pathology of asserting lottery (...) propositions, while permitting assertions of what I call fallible propositions such as, “My car is in the driveway.” Le paradoxe de la loterie joue un rôle important dans l’argumentation visant à défendre diverses normes de l’assertion. Comment se fait-il que, avant que les résultats d’un tirage soient connus, des assertions comme «Mon billet a perdu» semblent inappropriées? Cet article se compose de deux projets. Premièrement, je relève certains problèmes issus de l’analyse du paradoxe de la loterie par Timothy Williamson. Deuxièmement, je propose une théorie des alternatives pertinentes que j’appelle la «théorie des alternatives non-déstabilisantes» , et qui explique d’une meilleure façon la pathologie de l’assertion de propositions concernant la loterie, tout en permettant des assertions faillibles, telles que «Ma voiture est dans l’entrée». (shrink)

Within the political economy of informational capitalism, commercial surveillance practices are tools for resource extraction. That process requires an enabling legal construct, which this essay identifies and explores. Contemporary practices of personal information processing constitute a new type of public domain—a repository of raw materials that are there for the taking and that are framed as inputs to particular types of productive activity. As a legal construct, the biopolitical public domain shapes practices of appropriation and use of personal information in (...) two complementary and interrelated ways. First, it constitutes personal information as available and potentially valuable: as a pool of materials that may be freely appropriated as inputs to economic production. That framing supports the reorganization of sociotechnical activity in ways directed toward extraction and appropriation. Second, the biopolitical public domain constitutes the personal information harvested within networked information environments as raw. That framing creates the backdrop for culturally situated techniques of knowledge production and for the logic that designates those techniques as sites of legal privilege. (shrink)

A major goal of this work is to specify some steps of the process by which participants maintain coherency in their conversations.The underlying element of the analysis is a construct called a “context space.” Roughly, a group of utterances that refers to a single issue or episode forms the basis for a context space. Superficially, a conversation is a sequence of utterances; at a deeper level it is a structured entity whose utterances can be parsed into hierarchically related context spaces.As (...) a conversation proceeds, each conversant builds a discourse model that includes the conversation's context space structure, a notion of the present discourse topic, and a list of items being focused upon. Conversational coherency depends upon a lack of conflict between the respective models of the participants. Conflicts are prevented by speakers following high level syntactic and semantic relational rules that enable listeners to identify their discourse models. These rules, given in the study, are highly integrated with the view of conversation presented here—a hierarchy of related context spaces. (shrink)

:This essay responds to Patricia Werhane’s 1994 Ruffin Lecture address, “Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision-making in Management,” using institutional theory as an analytical framework to explore conditions that either inhibit or promote moral imagination in organizational problem-solving. Implications of the analysis for managing organizational change and for business ethics theory development are proposed.

Bioethics has entered a new era: as many commentators have noted, the familiar mantra of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice has proven to be an overly simplistic framework for understanding problems that arise in modern medicine, particularly at the intersection of public policy and individual preferences. A tradition of liberal pluralism grounds respect for individual preferences and affirmation of competing conceptions of the good. But we struggle to maintain (or at times explicitly reject) this tradition in the face of individual (...) preferences that we find distasteful, suspect, or even repugnant, especially where the broader social good or respect for equality is at stake. Directed donation presents us with such a dilemma: can we uphold the right of self-determination through respect of individual preferences regarding disposition of transplantable organs while at the same time maintaining an allocation system that reflects values of equity and justice claimed to underlie the socially negotiated practice of transplantation? Or are some preferences simply to be deemed unethical and not respected, even if that leads to a reduction in the number of transplantable organs available and to an apparent disregard for the autonomous decisions of the recently deceased? (shrink)

This special issue is the result of concerns about the marginalized status of gender within the sociology of religion. The collection of exciting new research in this special issue advocates for the importance of a gender lens on questions of religion in order to highlight issues, practices, peoples, and theories that would otherwise not be central to the discipline. We encourage sociologists who study religion to engage more in interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarship, acknowledge developments in the global South, and develop (...) more compelling theoretical frameworks that analyze religion from a gendered perspective. Our aim is to bring religion to the attention of gender and feminist scholars and to encourage religion scholars to consider gender not just as a variable but as a social structure. We hope that both groups of scholars will consider gender and religion as mutually constitutive social categories. (shrink)

In this paper I propose and defend an account of color that I call color functionalism. I argue that functionalism is a non-traditional species of primary quality theory, and that it accommodates our intuitions about color and the facts of color science better than more widely discussed alternatives.

Abstract:This essay responds to Patricia Werhane’s 1994 Ruffin Lecture address, “Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision-making in Management,” using institutional theory as an analytical framework to explore conditions that either inhibit or promote moral imagination in organizational problem-solving. Implications of the analysis for managing organizational change and for business ethics theory development are proposed.

Background Delusions are a significant feature of mental illnesses and can occur in many clinical conditions (Maher, 2001) yet the standard clinical definition (American Psychiatric Association. DSM-5 Task Force, 2013) is highly contentious. Much of the literature holds elements such as bizarreness of content and incorrigibility of belief as defining factors of delusion. However, on closer inspection, delusions are not so easy to pin down. The difficulty in defining delusion is not a new one as “…we are all capable of (...) having convictions and it is a universal human characteristic to hold on to our own mistaken judgements.” (Jaspers, 1963, p.63). Objective I intend to highlight some of the difficulties associated with the definition of delusion and perhaps clarify the phenomenology. Methodology I examine some of the philosophical, psychological and psychiatric literature with regard to the definition of delusion. I also consider my experience of my own mental activity and experiences from my therapeutic work. Results/Conclusion I identify that delusions are a heterogeneous group and that there may be more than one ‘class’ of delusion. I also show that delusions are multi-dimensional with characteristics on a continuum with normal beliefs and that further research is needed to clarify the phenomenology. (shrink)

We take a fresh look at emotion recognition in autistic children, by testing their recognition of three different emotions (happy, sad, and surprise). The interest in selecting these is that whereas the first two are typical “simple” emotions (caused by situations), the third is typically a “cognitive” emotion (caused by beliefs). Because subjects with autism have clear difficulties in understanding beliefs, we predicted they would show more difficulty in recognising surprise. In contrast, as they have no difficulty in understanding situations (...) as causes of emotion, we predicted they would not show deficits in recognising happy and sad. These predictions were borne out, in a comparison with a group of normal children and in a group of subjects with mental handicap. This result shows the importance of fine-grain analysis in emotion-recognition tasks, and is discussed in relation to affective and theory of mind models of autism. (shrink)

This paper suggests that a basic distinction between philosophical counselling and psychotherapy is to be found in the conception of ‘the person’that is inherent in each of the fields. Understanding this distinction allows not only for a more profound recognition of what is unique to philosophical counselling but also for a better view of possibilities of interchange between the fields. [1].

This article describes a new prenatal genetic test that is painless, early, and increasingly available. State legislatures have reacted by prohibiting abortion for reason of fetal sex or of fetal diagnosis and managing genetic counseling. This article explores these legislative responses and considers how physicians and genetic counselors currently communicate post-testing options. The article then examines the challenges ahead for genetic counseling, particularly in light of the troubling grip of abortion politics on conversations about prenatal diagnosis.

The question of responsibility to future generations is a distinctively modern ethical problem, which exposes the limits of many modern ethical frameworks. I argue for the theological importance of this ‘limit’, and of the question of responsibility to future generations, drawing on the ultimate/penultimate conceptuality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. Responsibility to future generations calls for detailed attention to a given situation, in the light of its openness to a future not within our control; and action for the sake of future (...) generations requires a suspension of one’s own judgement on that action. Christian ethics can take responsibility to future generations seriously while (and indeed through) maintaining a critique of attempts to orient action towards an innerworldly future utopia. (shrink)

In ordinary conversation, speakers disagree not only about worldly facts, but also about how to use language to describe the world. For example, disagreement about whether Buffalo is in the American Midwest, whether Pluto is a planet, or whether someone has been canceled, can persist even with agreement about all the relevant facts. The speakers may still engage in “metalinguistic negotiation”—disputing what to mean by “Midwest”, “planet”, or “cancel”. I first motivate an approach to metalinguistic negotiation that generalizes a Stalnakerian (...) theory of communication by including linguistic commitments in the conversational common ground. Then, I turn to cases where the very status of a disagreement as metalinguistic or factual is unclear or contested. For example, after the publication of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, some responses claimed to identify factual errors, while others took those same “errors” to be matters of interpretation. I’ll consider how to extend our theorizing about metalinguistic negotiation to this type of (even more) “meta” disagreement, using the discussion following the 1619 Project as a case study. On my view, in most such cases, there will be a metalinguistic negotiation going on. Still, I explain several ways in which, despite a dispute being metalinguistic, the factualist side can sometimes receive important vindication. I also discuss why it can make sense for speakers to contest the status of a dispute. (shrink)

This paper surveys recent trends in the history of science, using quotations from works published in the last decade. It suggests that philosophers of science have not yet come to terms with those changes, indicates which might or might not lead to productive interchange, and concludes that history and philosophy of science are now further apart than at any time since the early 1960's.

Cultural forces such as film create and reinforce rigidly-defined images of a doctor's identity for both the public and for medical students. The authoritarian and hierarchical institution of medical school also encourages students to adopt rigidly-defined professional identities. This restrictive identity helps to perpetuate the power of the patriarchy, limits uniqueness, squelches inquisitiveness, and damages one's self-confidence. This paper explores the construction of a physician's identity using cultural theorists' psychoanalytic analyses of gender and race as a framework of analysis. Cultural (...) theorists' politically-motivated work provides an excellent point of departure for destabilizing parts of the authoritarian medical hierarchy that can damage a student's professional development. Drawing on such discourse, this paper examines the processes by which a doctor's identity becomes rigidly defined and fixed by daily training. It finally proposes a way for a medical student to extrapolate himself from the current definitions of this identity and create a broader, more malleable concept of professional identity by defining himself from outside of, rather than through, difference. (shrink)