We recently synthesized and reinterpreted published studies to advance an epigenetic model for the development of homosexuality (HS). The model is based on epigenetic marks laid down in response to the XX vs. XY karyotype in embryonic stem cells. These marks boost sensitivity to testosterone in XY fetuses and lower it in XX fetuses, thereby canalizing sexual development. Our model predicts that a subset of these canalizing epigenetic marks stochastically carry over across generations and lead to mosaicism for sexual development (...) in opposite‐sex offspring – the homosexual phenotype being one such outcome. Here, we begin by outlining why HS has been under‐appreciated as a commonplace phenomenon in nature, and how this trend is currently being reversed in the field of neurobiology. We next briefly describe our epigenetic model of HS, develop a set of predictions, and describe how epigenetic profiles of human stem cells can provide for a strong test of the model. (shrink)

Two classic theories maintain that aging evolves either because of alleles whose deleterious effects are confined to late life or because of alleles with broad pleiotropic effects that increase early‐life fitness at the expense of late‐life fitness. However, empirical studies often reveal positive pleiotropy for fitness across age classes, and recent evidence suggests that selection on early‐life fitness can decelerate aging and increase lifespan, thereby casting doubt on the current consensus. Here, we briefly review these data and promote the simple (...) argument that aging can evolve under positive pleiotropy between early‐ and late‐life fitness when the deleterious effect of mutations increases with age. We argue that this hypothesis makes testable predictions and is supported by existing evidence. (shrink)

This book questions how abortion laws can be regulated in a time when abortion rights are still subject to intense debate. It addresses objections to basing abortion law on considerations of moral risk, presents two anti-abortion arguments - the deprivation argument and the substance view - to demonstrate the risk of permitting abortion, and discusses the moral risk of restricting access to abortion when it may unjustifiably harm women. The author also shows how welfare states can address the negative effects (...) of restrictive abortion laws by preventive, mitigative and compensatory measures. This is a thought-provoking and challenging book that will be of great interest to those considering abortion laws across the fields of medical ethics, bioethics, moral philosophy, law and politics. (shrink)

In this paper we use the concept of the person to examine person‐centred dialogue and show how person‐centred dialogue is different from and significantly more than transfer of information, which is the dominant notion in health care. A further motivation for the study is that although person‐centredness as an idea has a strong heritage in nursing and the broader healthcare discourse, person‐centred conversation is usually discussed as a distinct and unitary approach to communication, primarily related to the philosophy of dialogue—the (...) philosophy of Martin Buber. In this paper we start with the concept of person to critically reflect on theoretical perspectives on communication to understand person‐centred conversations in the context of nursing and health. We position the concept of the person through the use of Paul Ricoeur's philosophy and follow by distinguishing four theoretical perspectives on communication before reflecting on the relevance of each of these for person‐centred communication. These perspectives are: a linear view of communication as transfer of information, communication as a relation in the sense of philosophy of dialogue, practice‐based communication on constructionist grounds, and communication as a practice to create social community. In relation to the concept of the person, we do not find transfer of information relevant as a theoretical underpinning for person‐centred conversations. From the other three perspectives that are relevant we distinguish five types of person‐centred conversations pertinent to nursing and health: problem identifying conversations, instructive conversations, guiding and supportive conversations, caring and existential conversations, and therapeutic conversations. Through this analysis it is argued that person‐centred communication and conversations are substantially different to transfer of information. We also discuss the significance of communication adjusted to specific situations, including emphasis on how we speak in relation to the aim or topic of a conversation. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Die Forschungs- und Regulierungsebene bei datenintensiver Forschung in der Medizin liegen auseinander. Ein heterogenes Feld aus regulierenden Institutionen mit regional ungleichen Regelungen, sowohl hinsichtlich der Dichte als auch der Restriktivität von Regelungen, steht einer globalen Entwicklung der Technologien entgegen. Trotz oder gerade wegen mangelnder global-gültiger Regulierungen können auch unverbindliche oder nur bedingt verbindliche normative Vorgaben der Orientierung dienen. Doch wie soll eine solche normative Regulierung angesichts datenintensiver Forschung in der Medizin ausgestaltet werden und woran soll sie sich orientieren? Die (...) Frage, wie konkret und detailliert man eine solche Forschung regulieren sollte, lässt sich nur im Einzelfall für bestimmte Situationen und Institutionen beantworten. Ob dabei neue Normen oder Gewichtungen von Normen vorgenommen werden sollen, oder ob die Normen und deren Gewichtung weiterhin bestehen bleiben sollen, lässt sich nur mit Verweis auf starke normative Argumente beantworten. An zwingenden Argumenten für neue Normen angesichts der datenintensiven medizinischen Forschung mangelt es bisher. Dennoch ist eine Umsetzungsarbeit von Normen, egal ob neue oder alte, und deren Anwendung auf eine neue Methode oder Technologie allemal zu erbringen. Es bedarf daher – wie schon bisher – beider: sowohl etablierter und transparent kommunizierter Normen als auch des unabhängigen Urteils zur Anwendung dieser Normen. Angesichts der besonderen Eignung für diese Aufgabe sollten auch weiterhin Ethik-Kommissionen als prozedurale Instanz bei der Bewilligung von datenintensiver Forschung in der Medizin gefordert und befähigt werden, die als unabhängige Institution ein Urteil im Einzelfall anhand vorgegebener Normen fällen. Nichtsdestotrotz können sich die veränderten Praktiken datenintensiver Forschungsprojekte auch in neuen Anforderungen an Ethik-Kommissionen niederschlagen, denen mit Reformen der Arbeitsweise begegnet werden sollte. (shrink)

This methodological article explores issues related to having the ontological ground for phenomenological empirical research present throughout the research process. We discuss how ontology needs to be taken into consideration regarding the phenomena to be studied and how ontological aspects of phenomena need to be highlighted during various data collection and analysis procedures. Here, we discuss how philosophical works can be used in the context of specific research projects. In illustrating our statements, we present four empirical examples connected to the (...) themes of life changes and learning processes with the purpose of exemplifying and discussing how general lifeworld ontology can be integrated as an active resource in empirical phenomenological research. (shrink)

In a recent article, William Simkulet has argued against the anti-abortion view by invoking the fact that many human fetuses die from spontaneous abortion. He argues that this fact poses a dilemma for proponents of the anti-abortion view: either they must abandon their anti-abortion view or they must engage in preventing spontaneous abortion significantly more than at present—either to the extent that they try to prevent induced abortion or at least significantly more than they do today. In this reply, I (...) acknowledge that, if the latter would follow, the anti-abortionist view would imply implausibly strong obligations. My aim with this reply is to demonstrate that anti-abortionists can hold on to their view without having implausibly strong obligations to prevent spontaneous abortion. My conclusion is that Simkulet clearly overstates his position by not sufficiently considering the differences between the act of killing versus death by natural causes and between positive and negative rights. (shrink)

In his article, The Substance View: a critique, Rob Lovering argues that the substance view – according to which the human embryo is a person entitled to human rights – leads to such implausible implications that this view should be abandoned. In this article I respond to his criticism by arguing that either his arguments fail because the proponents of the substance view are not obligated to hold positions which may be considered absurd, or because the positions which they are (...) assumed to be obligated to hold, are not absurd at all. (shrink)

This volume presents the theory of culture of the Russian‑born German Jewish social philosopher David Koigen (1879-1933). Heir to Hermann Cohen's neo‑Kantian interpretation of Judaism, he transforms the religion of reason into an ethical Intimitätsreligion. He draws upon a great variety of intellectual currents, among them, Max Scheler's philosophy of values, the historical sociology of Max Weber, the sociology of religion of Émile Durkheim, Ernst Troeltsch and Georg Simmel and American pragmatism. Influenced by his personal experience of marginality in German (...) academia yet the same time unconstrained by the dictates of the German Jewish discourse, Koigen shapes these theoretical strands into an original argument which unfolds along two trajectories: theodicy of culture and ethos. Distinguished from ethics, ethos identifies the non-formal factors that foster a group's sense of collective identity as it adapts to continuous change. From a Jewish perspective, ethos is grounded in the biblical covenant as the paradigm of a social contract and corporate liability. Although the normative content of the covenantal ethos is subject to gradual secularization, its metaphysical and existential assumptions, Koigen argues, continue to inform Jewish self-understanding. The concept of ethos identifies the dialectic of tradition as it shapes Jewish religious consciousness, and, in turn, is shaped by the evolving cultural and axiological sensibilities. In consonance, Jewish identity cannot be reduced to ethnicity or a purely secular culture. Urban develops these fragmentary and inchoate theories into a sociology of religious knowledge and suggests to read Koigen not just as a Jewish sociologist but as the first sociologist of Judaism who proposes to overcome the dogmatic anti-metaphysical stance of European sociology. (shrink)

According to the two-tragedies argument proponents of pro-life can justifiably prioritize efforts to prevent abortion rather than miscarriages due to the fact that abortions in contrast to miscarriages involves usually the act of killing. William Simkulet has recently argued against this argument claiming that it fails as it is in conflict with the common sense pro-life view on abortion and leads to an overestimation of the moral value of preventing the ‘second tragedy’, namely the act of killing, compared with the (...) value of preventing the death of an individual. In this article, I argue against to his charges against the two tragedies argument by demonstrating that this argument is not only compatible but also in line with the common sense pro-life view and that the argument does not overestimate moral significance of the act of killing. (shrink)

How can we assess the epistemic quality of democratic decision-making? Sceptics doubt such assessments are possible, as they must rely on controversial substantive standards of truth and rightness. Challenging that scepticism, this paper suggests a procedure-independent standard for assessing the epistemic quality of democratic decision-making by evaluating whether it is adequately supported by reasons. Adequate support for conclusion is a necessary aspect of epistemic quality for any epistemic justification of democracy, though particularly relevant to theories that emphasize public deliberation. Finding (...) existing methods for measuring the quality of public discourse to fall short, we draw on an epistemological theory of argumentation to provide a more sophisticated approach to evaluating the epistemic quality of democratic decision-making, illustrate how the approach can be used, and demonstrate its relevance for the epistemic turn in democratic theory. (shrink)

While most theorists agree with the claim that human beings have high and equal moral standing, there are strong disagreements about how to justify this claim. These disagreements arise because there are different ways of managing the difficulty of finding a basis for this claim, which is sufficiently substantial to do this justifying work, but not vary in degree in order to not give rise to inequality of moral considerability. The aim of this paper is to review previous attempts to (...) address this difficulty and to demonstrate why they fail and then to defend another way of dealing with this challenge by applying two views: the substance view on the human person and the natural-law account of morality. My claim is that this approach has comparative advantages because it provides a binary and a normatively significant basis of justification for equality without being implausibly inclusive. (shrink)

In his article ‘The substance view: A critique’, Rob Lovering argues that the substance view –according to which a human person comes into existence at the moment of conception – leads to such implausible implications that this view should be abandoned. I responded to his reductio arguments in ‘A critique of Rob Lovering's criticism of the substance view’ and concluded that his arguments did not justify a rejection of the substance view. Now Lowering and William Simkulet have both responded to (...) my criticism, claiming that my criticism of Lovering's article did not refute his original arguments. In this article I respond to their criticism and conclude that, while the substance view has some less plausible implications, none of them justify a complete refutation of this view. (shrink)

This volume contains papers presented at the Poznań Reasoning Week multi-conference held in Poznań in September 11-15, 2018. PRW aims at bringing together experts whose research offers a broad range of perspectives on systematic analyses of reasoning processes and their formal modelling. The 2018 edition consisted of three conferences, which addressed the following topics: (i) games in reasoning research, (ii) the interplay of logic and cognition, and (iii) refutation systems. The papers collected in this volume address all these topics.

This full-scaled monograph, rich in factographic material, concerns Nārāyaṇa Guru, a founder of a powerful socio-religious movement in Kerala. He wrote in three languages, drawing on three different literary conventions. The world of this complex philosophic-religious literature is brought closer to the reader with rare deft and dexterity by the Author who not only retrieves for us the original circumstances, language and poetic metre of each work but also supplies histories of their reception. Thanks to numerous glosses, comments and elucidations (...) supplied by the Author, we can much better understand how Nārāyaṇa's mystical universe creatively relates to the Tamil OEaiva Siddhānta and to Kerala's variety of Vedānta tradition. Prof. Cezary Galewicz. (shrink)

This study aimed to explore the conditions for nurses' daily patient education work by focusing on managers' way of speaking about the patient education provided by nurses in hospital care. An explorative, qualitative design with a social constructionist perspective was used. Data were collected from three focus group interviews and analysed by means of critical discourse analysis. Discursive practice can be explained by the ideology of hegemony. Due to a heavy workload and lack of time, managers could ‘see’ neither their (...) role as a supporter of the patient education provided by nurses, nor their role in the development of nurses' pedagogical competence. They used organisational, financial, medical and legal reasons for explaining their failure to support nurses' provision of patient education. The organisational discourse was an umbrella term for ‘things’ such as cost‐effectiveness, which were prioritised over patient education. There is a need to remove managerial barriers to the professional development of nurses' patient education. Managers should be responsible for ensuring and overseeing that nurses have the prerequisites necessary for providing patient education as well as for enabling continuous reflective dialogue and opportunities for learning in practice. (shrink)

Abortion critics have argued that one should err on the side of life and prohibit abortion since the status of the fetus is uncertain. David Boonin has criticized this precautionary argument, but his criticism has been ignored. The aim is to elaborate on the precautionary argument by responding to Boonin’s criticism. Boonin considers three versions of the precautionary argument—the disaster avoidance argument, the maximin argument, and the expected utility argument; yet all three are judged unsuccessful for the same reasons: they (...) lead to unacceptable implications, they lead to conclusions that are too weak, and they undermine the integrity of moral reasoning. I respond to this criticism by arguing that one can avoid unacceptable implications by considering a criterion of realism, that the weaker conclusions are rather an advantage, and that the application of the precautionary principle makes room for considerations which maintain the integrity of moral reasoning. I also consider some criticism beyond Boonin’s objections. (shrink)

The two tragedies argument has been raised as a response to the argument against abortion from spontaneous abortion. According to this argument against the antiabortion position, miscarriages should be of great concern for proponents of this position since they result in a greater amount of deaths of human beings than induced abortions do. According to critics of AAP, this fact undermines its plausibility, since proponents of the AAP either must try to prevent miscarriages to the same extent as they try (...) to prevent abortions or abandon their opposition to at least some abortions—which are not acceptable options for proponents of APP. The claim of 2TA is that one can differentiate between induced abortion and miscarriages due to the fact that the former involves the act of killing of another human being. This fact adds a tragedy to the tragedy that both abortions and miscarriages result in – the death of a human being – and contributes to justifying the choice of proponents of AAP to prioritise the prevention of abortions rather than miscarriages. In this response, I defend 2TA against criticism that claims that this argument is: inconsistent with the AAP and trivialises the death of the fetus. My claim is that the first line of criticism rests on a misunderstanding of the premises of 2TA while the second line of criticism rests on a disanalogous thought experiment. I therefore conclude that these objections fail. (shrink)

Liberalism and naturalism are the reigning orthodoxies of most faculties today, while dualism is overwhelmingly rejected. The overarching claim defended in this paper is that liberals should consider dualism more seriously than what currently seems to be the case. This claim will be defended in two stages. First, I will argue that dualism provides better resources with which to defend foundational liberal commitments to human equality and human agency than those naturalism offers. Secondly, I will argue that dualism is plausible (...) enough to be seriously considered by liberals granted that this view is friendlier to liberal commitments than naturalism is. (shrink)

Patient education materials have the potential to strengthen the health literacy of patients. Previous studies indicate that readability and suitability may be improved. The aim of this study was to explore and analyze discourses inherent in patient education materials since analysis of discourses could illuminate values and norms inherent in them. Clinics in Sweden that provided colorectal cancer surgery allowed access to written information and ‘welcome letters’ sent to patients. The material was analysed by means of discourse analysis, embedded in (...) Derrida's approach of deconstruction. The analysis revealed a biomedical discourse and a hospitality discourse. In the biomedical discourse, the subject position of the personnel was interpreted as the messenger of medical information while that of the patients as the carrier of diagnoses and recipients of biomedical information. In the hospitality discourse, the subject position of the personnel was interpreted as hosts who invite and welcome the patients as guests. The study highlights the need to eliminate paternalism and fosters a critical reflective stance among professionals regarding power and paternalism inherent in health care communication. (shrink)

Although the abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome has become commonplace, infanticide is still widely rejected. Generally, there are three ways of justifying the differentiation between abortion and infanticide: by referring to the differences between the moral status of the fetus versus the infant, by referring to the differences of the moral status of the act of abortion versus the act of infanticide, or by separating the way the permissibility of abortion is justified from the way the impermissibility of infanticide (...) is justified. My argument is that none of these ways justifies the abortion of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome while simultaneously rejecting infanticide. Either the justification for abortion is consistent with infanticide, or it is implausible to justify abortion while rejecting infanticide. I conclude the article by making some preliminary remarks about how one might manage the situation posed by my argument. (shrink)

Der Band versammelt grundlegende Studien zur Klassik- und Psychoanalyse-Rezeption Edith Steins. Texte, Kommentare und Dokumente erläutern die Denkarbeit der Karmelitin, aber auch ihren Literaturbrief von 1932. Ohne die hier aufgezeigten Fundamente ist weder der Karmel- noch der Wissenschaftsweg Edith Steins angemessen verständlich.

Most of what is told in this paper has been told before by the same author, in a number of publications of various kinds, but this is the first time that all this material has been brought together and treated in a uniform way. Smaller errors in the earlier publications are corrected here without comment. It has been known since the 1920s that quadratic equations played a prominent role in Babylonian mathematics. See, most recently, Høyrup (Hist Sci 34:1–32, 1996, and (...) Lengths, widths, surfaces: a portrait of old Babylonian algebra and its kin. Springer, New York, 2002). What has not been known, however, is how quadratic equations came to play that role, since it is difficult to think of any practical use for quadratic equations in the life and work of a Babylonian scribe. One goal of the present paper is to show how the need to find solutions to quadratic equations actually arose in Mesopotamia not later than in the second half of the third millennium BC, and probably before that in connection with certain geometric division of property problems. This issue was brought up for the first time in Friberg (Cuneiform Digit Lib J 2009:3, 2009). In this connection, it is argued that the tool used for the first exact solution of a quadratic equation was either a clever use of the “conjugate rule” or a “completion of the square,” but that both methods ultimately depend on a certain division of a square, the same in both cases. Another, closely related goal of the paper is to discuss briefly certain of the most impressive achievements of anonymous Babylonian mathematicians in the first half of the second millennium BC, namely recursive geometric algorithms for the solution of various problems related to division of figures, more specifically trapezoidal fields. For an earlier, comprehensive (but less accessible) treatment of these issues, see Friberg (Amazing traces of a Babylonian origin in Greek mathematics. WorldScientific, Singapore 2007b, Ch. 11 and App. 1). (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines the temporal rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future to discuss how the new generation of climate movement organizations offers ideas of an open future that can be acted upon. Research has shown how climate organizations create economic and social disruptions. However, as the article shows, they also create temporal disruptions. Taking theoretical inspiration from critical utopian studies, the article states that the climate activists should be understood as utilizing a disruptive utopian method that aims (...) to disrupt the present and thereby open the future. The method relies on utopias that are relational and open, not static or absolute. Hence, the utopianism employed by these groups is not about closure and perfection, but rather about openness and offering alternatives. (shrink)

Um das Ansehen von medizinischen Forschern ist es in der westlichen Welt nicht überall gut bestellt. In den 1990er-Jahren gelangte das Thema »Medizinischer Forschungsbetrug« erstmals in den USA in das öffentliche Bewusstsein. Eine Debatte um begünstigende Strukturen und denkbare Kontrollinstrumente zur Eindämmung von Missbrauch entbrannte – in Deutschland blieb ein solcher Diskurs bis zur Jahrhundertwende zunächst aus. Der Band nimmt wissenschaftlich arbeitende Ärzte, die ethischen Anforderungen, denen sie sich ausgesetzt sehen, und das System, in dem sie arbeiten, in den Fokus. (...) Stella Elaine Urbans Analyse von Betrugsfällen deckt wissenschaftsimmanente und individuelle Fallstricke auf, die unredliche Forschung begünstigen. Es zeigt sich, dass die wissenschaftliche Integrität unterstützt und geschützt werden muss, um das Vertrauen in die Medizin wiederherzustellen. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it aims to delineate the flow of resources and the claims on those resources within the humanitarian aid system by locating task structures and functional units across the aid chain. Second, it draws on this account to highlight tensions in the system. Different stations in the organisational process are conditioned by the tasks assigned to them, how those tasks are anchored in a moral economy, and their historical interrelations. Third, it explores how (...) aid organisations are perceived by experts in different parts of the aid chain. Four key agents were invited to recount their work experiences. We then consider how the outlook of the interviewees was shaped by their place in the aid chain. The interviews are an inventory of experiences, a preliminary corroboration of the organisational analysis that preceded them, and a source of future hypotheses. (shrink)

How should the state justify its coercive rules? Public reason liberalism endorses a public justification requirement: Justifications offered for authoritative regulations must be acceptable to all members of the relevant public. However, as a criterion of legitimacy, the public justification requirement is epistemically unreliable: It prioritizes neither the exclusion of false beliefs nor the inclusion of true beliefs in justifications of political rules. This article presents an epistemic alternative to the public justification requirement. Employing epistemological theories of argumentation, we demonstrate (...) how this approach enables assessing the epistemic quality of justifications of political rules, even when the truth is difficult to establish. (shrink)

Abstract It has become almost commonplace to regard the concepts of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and Just War as not only compatible but rather closely connected. Contrary to this position I argue here that some Just War criteria are in significant tension with R2P. This tension results from the fact that Just War only makes war permitted while R2P prescribes an obligation. But R2P and Just War not only are in significant tension, but also suffer from inverted weaknesses: R2P is (...) too demanding while Just War is not demanding enough. Granting that R2P implies a duty to protect, I argue that such a duty is too demanding since it conflicts with the principle of ?ought implies can?, whereas Just War is arguably not far-reaching enough as ?duties-talk? does not fit into its structure. I finish by proposing an interpretation of R2P and Just War which not only eliminates the tension but also compensates for these weaknesses. (shrink)

One element of the liberal ideal of secularity is the principle that the state should treat religions neutrally: This is the religious neutrality requirement. Applied to religious belief systems, the principle stipulates that the state should not take a position on whether or not a certain religion is true. I challenge this ideal and argue that teachers in public schools sometimes need to take a position on religious truth claims in order to avoid the risk of promoting false beliefs. I (...) then argue that not acting to avert these implications is sufficiently costly to justify the abandonment of this requirement. (shrink)

Volume 26, Issue 3, September 2020, Page 273-274.

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 2, Page 153-154, February 2022.