Dear editorOrgans transplantation is the solution for many end stage insufficiencies, but organ shortage is still matter of debate. As a consequence, organ procurement (OP) remains currently the best way to provide organs in western countries. Besides, the news of the death of a loved one, especially when he is young and dies in violent circumstances, can be a devastating event for families. In those conditions, the process of donation request from the coordinators may be difficult and requires experience and (...) “tact”. Despite these precautions, refusals are not rare.An 18 year-old-patient was transported in shock after a car accident to our hospital. Emergent laparotomy was performed for mesenteric and hepatic trauma requiring liver packing. She also presented a cervical and cerebral trauma with a fast deterioration of the neurological status. A tentorial herniation was quickly suspected. The family had been contacted and the severity of the situation explained without mentioning brain. (shrink)

Compared to other animals, humans appear to have a special motivation to share experiences and mental states with others (Clark, 2006;Grice, 1975), which enables them to enter a condition of ‘we’ or shared intentionality (Tomasello & Carpenter, 2005). Shared intentionality has been suggested to be an evolutionary response to unique problems faced in complex joint action coordination (Levinson, 2006;Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005) and to be unique to humans (Tomasello, 2014). The theoretical and empirical bases for this claim, (...) however, present several issues and inconsistencies. Here, we suggest that shared intentionality can be approached as an interactional achievement, and that by studying how our closest relatives, the great apes, coordinate joint action with conspecifics, we might demonstrate some correlate abilities of shared intentionality, such as the appreciation of joint commitment. We provide seven examples from bonobo joint activities to illustrate our framework. (shrink)

Pateman challenges the way contemporary society functions by questioning the standard interpretation of an idea that is deeply embedded in American and British political thought: that our rights and freedoms derive from the social contract explicated by Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau and interpreted in the United States by the Founding Fathers. The author shows how we are told only half the story of the original contract that establishes modern patriarchy. The sexual contract is ignored and thus men's patriarchal right over (...) women is also glossed over. No attention is paid to the problems that arise when women are excluded from the original contract but incorporated into the new contractual order. One of the main targets of the book is those who try to turn contractarian theory to progressive use, and a major thesis of the book is that this is not possible. Thus those feminists who have looked to a more "proper" contract- one between genuinely equal partners, or one entered into without any coercion- are misleading themselves. In the author's words, "In contract theory universal freedom is always a hypothesis, a story, a political fiction. Contract always generates political right in the forms of domination and subordination." Thus the book is also aimed at mainstream political theorists, and socialist and other critics of contract theory. The author offers a sweeping challenge to conventional understandings- of both left and right- of actual contracts in everyday life: the marriage contract, the employment contract, the prostitution contract, and the new surrogate mother contract. By bringing a feminist perspective to bear on the contradictions and paradoxes surrounding women and contract, and the relation between the sexes, she is able to shed new light on fundamental political problems of freedom and subordination. (shrink)

Shows that current elitist theories are based on an inadequate understanding of the early writings of democratic theory and that much sociological evidence has been ignored.

Research on bias in peer review examines scholarly communication and funding processes to assess the epistemic and social legitimacy of the mechanisms by which knowledge communities vet and self-regulate their work. Despite vocal concerns, a closer look at the empirical and methodological limitations of research on bias raises questions about the existence and extent of many hypothesized forms of bias. In addition, the notion of bias is predicated on an implicit ideal that, once articulated, raises questions about the normative implications (...) of research on bias in peer review. This review provides a brief description of the function, history, and scope of peer review; articulates and critiques the conception of bias unifying research on bias in peer review; characterizes and examines the empirical, methodological, and normative claims of bias in peer review research; and assesses possible alternatives to the status quo. We close by identifying ways to expand conceptions and studies of bias to countenance the complexity of social interactions among actors involved directly and indirectly in peer review. (shrink)

Over the last century, biologists have come to know much more about the two sexes, but they have not seen any need to revise the traditional binary “gametic” account of sex. One would expect that medical controversies would take place against a background of agreement on the sex binary. Recent cultural trends have dashed that expectation. What changed was not science, but politics: the new century’s push for transgender rights sowed doubts about the sex binary, making sex-classification in law, education, (...) sport, and medicine highly controversial. This article explores the manifestation of these cultural trends in academia and medicine, which has been to the detriment of medical standards and the well-being of patients. An instructive case study is the area of medicine in which the hegemony of non-binarism has been most dramatic: the treatment of people—including minors—suffering from gender distress. (shrink)

To arrive at their final evaluation of a manuscript or grant proposal, reviewers must convert a submission’s strengths and weaknesses for heterogeneous peer review criteria into a single metric of quality or merit. I identify this process of commensuration as the locus for a new kind of peer review bias. Commensuration bias illuminates how the systematic prioritization of some peer review criteria over others permits and facilitates problematic patterns of publication and funding in science. Commensuration bias also foregrounds a range (...) of structural strategies for realigning peer review practices and institutions with the aims of science. (shrink)

In this title, new and established scholars demonstrate the application of feminism in a range of academic disciplines including history, philosophy, politics, and sociology.

If the focus of interest is democratization, including women’s freedom, a basic income is preferable to stakeholding. Prevailing theoretical approaches and conceptions of individual freedom, free-riding seen as a problem of men’s employment, and neglect of feminist insights obscure the democratic potential of a basic income. An argument in terms of individual freedom as self-government, a basic income as a democratic right, and the importance of the opportunity not to be employed shows how a basic income can help break both (...) the link between income and employment and the mutual reinforcement of the institutions of marriage, employment, and citizenship. (shrink)

An empirically sensitive formulation of the norms of transformative criticism must recognize that even public and shared standards of evaluation can be implemented in ways that unintentionally perpetuate and reproduce forms of social bias that are epistemically detrimental. Helen Longino’s theory can explain and redress such social bias by treating peer evaluations as hypotheses based on data and by requiring a kind of perspectival diversity that bears, not on the content of the community’s knowledge claims, but on the beliefs and (...) norms of the culture of the knowledge community itself. To illustrate how socializing cognition can bias evaluations, we focus on peer-review practices, with some discussion of peer-review practices in philosophy. Data include responses to surveys by editors from general philosophy journals, as well as analyses of reviews and editorial decisions for the 2007 Cognitive Science Society Conference. (shrink)

00 Pateman examines the notion of political obligation in relation to the liberal democratic state and presents a vision of participatory democracy as a means to effect a more satisfactory relationship between the citizen and the state. She offers a general assessment of liberal theory and an interpretation of all familiar arguments about political obligation and democratic consent. Pateman examines the notion of political obligation in relation to the liberal democratic state and presents a vision of participatory democracy as a (...) means to effect a more satisfactory relationship between the citizen and the state. She offers a general assessment of liberal theory and an interpretation of all familiar arguments about political obligation and democratic consent. (shrink)

Psychometrically oriented researchers construe low inter-rater reliability measures for expert peer reviewers as damning for the practice of peer review. I argue that this perspective overlooks different forms of normatively appropriate disagreement among reviewers. Of special interest are Kuhnian questions about the extent to which variance in reviewer ratings can be accounted for by normatively appropriate disagreements about how to interpret and apply evaluative criteria within disciplines during times of normal science. Until these empirical-cum-philosophical analyses are done, it will remain (...) unclear the extent to which low inter-rater reliability measures represent reasonable disagreement rather than arbitrary differences between reviewers. (shrink)

Scholars belong to multiple communities of credit simultaneously. When these communities disagree about a scholarly achievement’s credit assignment, this raises a puzzle for decision and game theor...

Under the traditional system of peer-reviewed publication, the degree of prestige conferred to authors by successful publication is tied to the degree of the intellectual rigor of its peer review process: ambitious scientists do well professionally by doing well epistemically. As a result, we should expect journal editors, in their dual role as epistemic evaluators and prestige-allocators, to have the power to motivate improved author behavior through the tightening of publication requirements. Contrary to this expectation, I will argue that the (...) publication bias literature in academic medicine demonstrates that editor interventions have had limited effectiveness in improving the health of the publication and trial registration record, suggesting that much stronger interventions are needed. (shrink)

On the surface, developing a social psychology of science seems compelling as a way to understand how individual social cognition – in aggregate – contributes towards individual and group behavior within scientific communities (Kitcher, 2002). However, in cases where the functional input-output profile of psychological processes cannot be mapped directly onto the observed behavior of working scientists, it becomes clear that the relationship between psychological claims and normative philosophy of science should be refined. For example, a robust body of social (...) psychological research demonstrates implicit gender bias in the evaluation of others (e.g., Steinpreis, Anders, & Ritzke, 1999). Many expected implicit bias to be a major cause of women’s underrepresentation in math intensive fields of science; however, quantitative sociological research of hiring and manuscript and grant evaluation has discovered no gender disparity in outcomes (Ceci & Williams, 2011). Why might this be so? This paper will discuss methodological challenges that go beyond classic problems of external validity in extrapolating psychological effects and explanations to scientific communities. These problems include more complex external validity issues raised by the introduction of multi-process models of cognition (e.g., implicit versus explicit social cognition) as well as the reflexive role that folk and experimental theories of social psychology play in guiding the behavior of scientists at the individual and community level. (shrink)

There is an increasing push by journals to ensure that data and products related to published papers are shared as part of a cultural move to promote transparency, reproducibility, and trust in the scientific literature. Yet few journals commit to evaluating their effectiveness in implementing reporting standards aimed at meeting those goals (1, 2). Similarly, though the vast majority of journals endorse peer review as an approach to ensure trust in the literature, few make their peer review data available to (...) evaluate effectiveness toward achieving concrete measures of quality, including consistency and completeness in meeting reporting standards. Remedying these apparent disconnects is critical for closing the gap between guidance recommendations and actual reporting behavior. We see this as a collective action problem requiring leadership and investment by publishers, who can be incentivized through mechanisms that allow them to manage reputational risk and through continued innovation in journal assessment. (shrink)

Merton envisioned his norms of science at a time when peer-reviewed journals controlled scientific communication. Technologies for sharing and finding content have since divorced the certification and amplification of science, generating systemic vulnerabilities. Certified amplification—a new Mertonian-styled norm—enjoins their recoupling and introduces a taxonomy of strategies adopted by institutions to close the certification-amplification gap, including the proportioning of the one to the other. Examples illustrating each taxonomic type collectively paint a picture of an ethos employing a rich range of certification (...) and amplification techniques and emerging in a decentralized fashion across heterogeneous objects, communication modalities, and institutions. (shrink)

The White Coats for Black Lives and #ShutDownSTEM movements have galvanised biomedical practitioners and researchers to eliminate institutional and systematic racism, including barriers faced by Black researchers in biomedicine and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In our study on Black–White funding gaps for National Institutes of Health Research Project grants, we found that the overall award rate for Black applicants is 55% of that for white applicants. How can systems for allocating research grant funding be made more fair while improving (...) their efficiency? (shrink)

I motivate and articulate a dispositional account of aversive racism. By conceptualizing and measuring attitudes in terms of their full distribution, rather than in terms of their mode or mean preference, my account of dispositional attitudes gives ambivalent attitudes (qua attitude) the ability to predict aggregate behavior. This account can be distinguished from other dispositional accounts of attitude by its ability to characterize ambivalent attitudes such as aversive racism at the attitudinal rather than the sub-attitudinal level and its deeper appreciation (...) of the analogy between traits and attitudes. (shrink)

In this study, we evaluate how individual virtues and inter-organizational management control systems influence buyer–supplier performance through relationship quality. Results from a sample of 232 firms confirm that virtues and IOMCS relate positively to relationship quality and performance, respectively. However, IOMCS lose their positive influence on relationship quality when considered along with virtues. That is, when both variables enter the regression model simultaneously, virtues win. This interesting finding has particular resonance at a time when research on ethics still needs to (...) reinforce its positive effects on the practice of management. (shrink)

Crises in peer review capacity, study replication, and AI-fabricated science have intensified interest in automated tools for assessing scientific research. However, the scientific community has a history of decontextualizing and repurposing credibility markers in inapt ways. I caution that AI science evaluation tools are particularly prone to these kinds of inference by false ascent due to contestation about the purposes to which they should be put, their portability across purposes, and technical demands that prioritize data set size over epistemic fit. (...) To counter this, I argue for a social, pragmatist epistemology and a newly articulated norm of Critically Engaged Pragmatism to enjoin scientific communities to vigorously scrutinize the purposes and purpose-specific reliability of AI science evaluation tools. Under this framework, AI science evaluation tools are not objective arbiters of scientific credibility, but the object of the kinds of critical discursive practices that ground the credibility of scientific communities. (shrink)

The literature on organizational ethicality to date has focused primarily on elements of the cultural, social, and political factors that enhance positive behaviors, interspersed with isolated accounts of malfeasance and wrongdoing. This treatise defines the anatomy of organizational dysfunction as a matter of ethicality, reframing the relationship from individual transgression to the organization itself. It is argued that the structure of an organization predisposes in large part whether it is itself conducive or prohibitive to unethical acts. Our approach allows for (...) a new stream of ethics research whose focus is how an organization functions rather than on the specific acts of those within it. (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers have not yet resolved what they take implicit attitudes to be; and, some, concerned about limitations in the psychometric evidence, have even challenged the predictive and theoretical value of positing implicit attitudes in explanations for social behavior. In the midst of this debate, prominent stakeholders in science have called for scientific communities to recognize and countenance implicit bias in STEM fields. In this paper, I stake out a stakeholder conception of implicit bias that responds to these challenges (...) in ways that are responsive to the psychometric evidence, while also being resilient to the sorts of disagreements and scientific progress that would not undermine the soundness of this call. Along the way, my account advocates for attributing collective (group-level) implicit attitudes rather than individual-level implicit attitudes. This position raises new puzzles for future research on the relationship (metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical) between collective implicit attitudes and individual-level attitudes. (shrink)

The Abbé de Saint-Pierre, best known for his 'Project for Perpetual Peace', in fact left a much larger and more coherent body of political and moral writing, but it has been only partially studied. This book, the first systematic exploration of his entire corpus, offers a complete re-evaluation of this important author's contributions to the Enlightenment. From the first decades of the eighteenth century, Saint-Pierre set forth a pioneering vision of politics as the harmonisation of interests, anticipating Bentham as a (...) utilitarian. He imagines replacing the system of inherited power and clientele networks, which structured Old Regime society and determined the exercise of power under absolutism, with a rationalised, meritocratic and dynamic organisation. He argued for the political values of social utility and public good to take the place of the Christian ideals of perfection and the aristocratic ideals of personal charisma. As a deist seeking to reconcile morality and religion, Saint-Pierre argued that the search for salvation through active piety must also promote social justice and beneficence--and that only the indivisible power of a rationalised monarch, informed by competent elites, could carry out the reforms necessary to yield a government which would produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Saint-Pierre, thus, provided among the first arguments for an imposed welfare state, well before the sources more frequently associated with that idea--political economists, cameralists and the physiocrats."--Pages v-vi. (shrink)

Neuroimaging has been to neuroethics what free will and determinism has been, albeit for much longer, to philosophy: pillars for scholarly inquiry and curiosity, and entries to dialogue, debate, and discovery. With interest piqued by reproducible measures of regional blood flow in the human brain under well-defined conditions such as existential problem solving, decision-making, and trust, this article meticulously documents emerging trends involving functional MRI studies. The article builds on that work and examines the hypothesis that almost twenty years after (...) the first wave of such studies, the focus on neuroimaging and its application to complex and profoundly personal human behaviors has not abated. Neuroimaging studies remain an unwavering source of energy for the field. It reviews some of the reasons that they have provoked so much attention in neuroethics and elsewhere, presenting a 2002–2008 update to the trends that documented for 1991–2001, comparing this second generation of data to the first. (shrink)

A new road map for design is emerging out of interdisciplinary research across biology and design. Whilst in the second part of the twentieth century, the emergence of the digital realm altered and radically challenged conventional design and manufacturing processes, the beginning of the twenty-first century marks a strong shift towards the amalgamation of the binary code with biological systems. With advances in synthetic biology, we can now ‘biofabricate’ like Nature does. By tinkering and altering the DNA code or the (...) environment of growth of living organisms, we can effectively ‘design’ and grow new biomaterials. The role of design is shifting from working with inanimate matter such as plastic and metals to making with animate living entities such as mycelium, yeast and bacteria. This paradigm shift promises to open up new possibilities for biofabricating future intelligent materials as well as for engaging with new sustainable processes. This paper examines strategies and tools for designing with living systems and proposes a framework for design to engage with our future bio-materiality. From biofabrication experiments to synthetic biology propositions, the paper will investigate a series of design artifacts that explores strategies such as co-designing with natural organisms or actuating a new synthetic nature and develop a critique of how biodesign can help shifting towards the crafting of a future sustainable intelligent bio-materiality. (shrink)

AI science evaluation tools aim to assess research credibility. As with traditional metrics such as impact factors, their edicts can be decontextualised and repurposed in problematic ways. To address this, I propose Critically-Engaged Pragmatism as a scientific norm enjoining scientific communities to scrutinise the purposes and purpose-specific reliability of AI science evaluation tools. To foster Critically Engaged Pragmatism, creators of AI science evaluation tools should transparently and fully report design, training, and benchmarking details to facilitate assessments of purpose-specific reliability, liability (...) to different types of error, and bias. What count as best practices for the transparent reporting of AI science evaluation tools should be updated as new forms of error, bias, and gamesmanship are discovered. Under this framework, AI science evaluation tools are not objective arbiters of scientific credibility. Rather, they are the object of critical discursive practices that ultimately ground the credibility of scientific communities. (shrink)

What is the current status of Asian Americans in philosophy? How do Asian Americans fare in comparison to other minority groups? And, what professional strategies might they use (more or less successfully) in response to their counterstereotypical status in philosophy? In this piece, I will address these questions empirically by extrapolating from available demographic, survey, and experimental studies. This analysis will be too fast and loose, but I offer it in the spirit of constructing a broad-brushed sketch— painted from a (...) pallet of variegated data—for others to critique, improve, and displace. (shrink)

This article explores the use of case databases to support the development of competence in analyzing ethical issues and the public policy process in a public health learning context. A brief synthesis of the literature highlights the relevance of case studies for acquiring empirical knowledge or developing critical analysis skills. However, this synthesis did not identify any analyses of the use of case sets, such as case databases. To fill this gap, the article presents PolÉthicas, a collection of case studies (...) describing ethical issues and the public health policy development process in Canada, and its user guide. The latter is based on the arguments and methods identified in the literature review, as well as on the cross-analysis of several cases dealing with related themes and structured in a similar way. The PolÉthicas case bank and its user guide enable us to reflect on the theoretical and empirical dimensions of collective public health choices in the development of public policies, based on a number of cases, and to question the values at stake in the development and implementation of public policies, the actors involved and their interactions, and the context in which these processes take place. (shrink)

In this article, we report the outcome of a sociological inquiry into nursing knowledge of death and dying, specifically ‘the good death’. A genealogical approach informed by actor‐network theory and appreciative inquiry were used to compose a broad socio‐material account of how nurses concern themselves with the care of the dying and end‐of‐life care. Our enquiry revealed similarly to other studies, that there was no shared or overarching model of care. Key themes derived from nurses' translations of ‘the good death’ (...) were re‐presented pictorially as six pillars and two processes to comprise a new diagram of The Personalised Ideal Death. (shrink)

The Abbé de Saint-Pierre sought to develop a science regarding morals that aimed at “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” In his system, heroic morality and Christian asceticism give way to merit, the service of the nation, and values devoid of any charismatic dimension. Against an intention-based approach inspired by Augustinianism and against Mandeville’s abandonment of self-interest, Saint-Pierre devised political institutions and collective educational programs that guided the desire of distinction toward public utility. Properly channelled, the pleasure of being (...) distinguished becomes a dynamic principle that has the potential to produce a prosperous, harmonious, and benevolent society. (shrink)

Ethical decision-making in public health rarely involves simply avoiding a bad choice in favor of a good choice. Instead, it requires policymakers to strike a balance among conflicting goals that are all good—goals such as the health of populations and individuals, knowledge gained through scientific research, autonomy, social justice, and the efficient use of limited resources. This balance can be elusive, and perfect examples are the legal instruments governing dual-use research, a term describing scientific endeavors meant to produce beneficial knowledge (...) or technology, but that could also be misapplied. Dual-use research of concern policies were implemented... (shrink)

La « camera-réalité », néologisme qualifiant la nature du médium photographique, est un « objet théorique » qui interroge l’irruption de l’image photographique en philosophie. Siegfried Kracauer définit dans Théorie du film le réalisme propre à l’image photographique, en revisitant le concept d’affinité, dans une discussion serrée avec l’héritage kantien qu’il connaît parfaitement : il y va d’une redéfinition de l’expérience esthétique par l’enregistrement, entre déliaison et rédemption, le trait d’union entre caméra et réalité signant un effort conceptuel à notre (...) avis remarquable. (shrink)

There are several key differences between the codes of ethics developed by the American Psychological Association and the Canadian Psychological Association. This paper tells the story behind the key differences between the U.S. and Canada codes. It starts with an introduction to the two countries and a brief history of what led up to the American Psychological Association’s (APA) decision to develop the world’s first ethics code for psychologists. This is followed by a description of the development process used by (...) APA, and the reasons why the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) originally adopted the APA code but subsequently chose to develop its own “made-in-Canada” code of ethics. The key differences of the CPA code, the cultural, legal, and philosophical contexts that help explain the rationale for those differences, and why the differences have been maintained are discussed. In particular, attention is given to the CPA code’s strong focus on: (a) the concept of a contract with society; (b) aspiration vs. enforcement; (c) ethical reasoning and decision making; and (d) organizing standards around ethical principles. (shrink)

This article analyzes the thematic and conceptual importance of aesthetics and ›Kunstwissenschaft‹ within the journal Logos, where ›style‹ is a conceptual tool for analyzing the crisis of modernity, both a diagnosis and a symptom of an era that questions the form and equally the absence of form in culture. If Logos is indeed a philosophy of culture in action, both Wölfflin’s categorical research and Simmel’s emphasis on the importance of tragedy manifest the tensions that characterize it.

Une rencontre entre ChatGPT et le livre chinois des transformations Yi Jing révèle que l’IA cherche en réalité à « améliorer la vie des personnes de sa communauté », que la communauté dont elle se réclame est située à Richland Center dans le Wisconsin, où vivrait un certain John Smith. La quête de ce John Smith conduit à un questionnement profond sur notre utilisation des IA érigées au statut de consultants.

In this article I present and discuss my methodology for building a long-diachronic (1681-1914) and multilinguistic corpus. Since there existed no significant Alsatian corpus, a major effort has been undertaken in order to devise a corpus documenting language contact in the writings of Alsatian speakers-writers. This task presented a certain number of methodological challenges such as language contact, sociolinguistic variation, diachronic variation, a lack of primary sources and digitized documents. In addition, the challenges included the complexity of the historical-political-sociolinguistic context (...) and the relationship between orality and scripturality. (shrink)

The initial point of inquiry was a social education experience that played a crucial role in my philosophical career. It was a formation during which I was led, to my amazement, to create a gesticulated conference on the theme of the place of women in philosophy. This experience made me aware of the intellectual oppression experienced in philosophy due to my gender. It’s from this experience that I renew my desire to philosophize. In this article, I explore what this method (...) of social education, and the feminism that for me has been its extension, can bring to philosophy. In what ways can they contribute to demasculinizing philosophy? (shrink)