Definition of the problem: Even after the new German legislation about organ donors and transplantation (“information solution”), the question of criteria for distributing the organs is still not solved. The various alternatives to solve this problem face different social acceptance and economic efficiency.Arguments: Medical criteria (e.g. HLA compatibility) and non-medical criteria (e.g. willingness to pay of the patients) are valued on the basis of generally accepted objectives (e.g. equal access to health services or low costs). As an innovative form of (...) organ distribution systems the club solution is introduced. It allows the donor to realise preferences regarding use of the organs.Conclusion: Scoring systems may help to increase the transparency of organ allocation. From an economic point of view medical criteria have to be weighted more than non-medical criteria. (shrink)

Background Little is known about how financial influences affect medical decision-making and may challenge the primacy principle of patient welfare. First qualitative results in cancer medicine identified specific decision-making situations that can be influenced by financial considerations and characterized by the type of their financial influence. These qualitative findings provide evidence that these influences are largely shaped by reimbursement strategies. Nevertheless, questions on how reimbursement strategies affect medical decision-making, and what their normative dimension is regarding the primacy principle, remain unclear. (...) Methods To address the research questions, we conducted an empirical qualitative content analysis according to Kuckartz and an ethical analysis using Ives’ framework of reflexive balancing following the “standards of practice in empirical bioethics research” and the “framework for empirical bioethics research projects”. Results The empirical analysis identified six financially incentivized actions: to refrain, to reduce, to deflect, to privilege, to prioritize, and to withhold. These were linked to pre-existing definitions from the normative context: rationing, prioritization, deprioritization, and selection. The ethical analysis showed that a lack of transparency about whether reimbursement strategies implement normative priorities or merely regulate costs makes it difficult to assess their compatibility with the primacy of patient welfare. Conclusions The empirical and ethical analyses demonstrate that financial influences, as embedded in reimbursement strategies, can challenge the primacy principle by shaping which options appear feasible or appropriate in practice. Greater transparency and clearer justification of the goals embedded in reimbursement systems are required to determine when such influences are ethically acceptable and how they should be governed. Trial registration Not applicable, as the empirical part of this study is based on qualitative interview data and does not constitute as a clinical trial. (shrink)

Wenn Maschinen entscheiden, steht unsere Demokratie auf dem Spiel. In diesem Sammelband diskutieren führende Denker: innen, Wissenschaftler: innen und Praktiker: innen, wie Künstliche Intelligenz unsere freiheitliche Gesellschaft herausfordert und warum wir die Zukunft proaktiv gestalten müssen. Klar und fesselnd zeigen die Beiträge, welche Risiken und Chancen die allgegenwärtigen Algorithmen für Gerechtigkeit, Transparenz und Teilhabe bergen. Von den globalen Machtgefügen um die führenden Tech-Konzerne bis zu den gefährdeten Grundrechten jedes und jeder Einzelnen - dieses Buch beleuchtet, wie wichtig es ist, im (...) Zeitalter der KI unsere demokratischen Werte zu verteidigen. Eine provokante und fundierte Bestandsaufnahme, die dazu motiviert, über die Zukunft der Demokratie neu nachzudenken. Aus dem Inhalt Grundlagen der KI - jenseits des Hypes KI und Gerechtigkeit in der Zivilgesellschaft Der AI Act und wie er funktioniert Transparenz und Nicht-Erklärbarkeit von KI KI aus feministischer Perspektive Liebe und Freundschaft mit KI KI und Demokratie in der Arbeitswelt Der KI-Coup und die Politische Ökonomie der Abhängigkeiten KI-Effizienzversprechen vs. Demokratie Agentische KI und die Zukunft der Demokratie Ein Argument für die Demokratisierung von KI Die Herausgeber: innen Dr. Ramona Casasola-Greiner studierte Philosophie, Kunstgeschichte und Literatur. Seit 2017 arbeitet sie als Data & AI Consultant bei FELD M in München. Sie ist Speakerin, Dozentin, Coach und Autorin mehrerer Fach- und Sachbücher sowie Co-Leiterin der AG Künstliche Intelligenz des Think Tanks D64 - Zentrum für Digitalen Fortschritt. Dr. Korbinian Rüger ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in praktischer Philosophie und Ethik an der LMU München. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen in der normativen und angewandten Ethik. Er leitet aktuell ein vom Bayerischen Institut für digitale Transformation gefördertes Projekt zu KI und Verteilungsgerechtigkeit. (shrink)

Why the DNA‐containing organelles, chloroplasts, and mitochondria, are inherited maternally is a long standing and unsolved question. However, recent years have seen a paradigm shift, in that the absoluteness of uniparental inheritance is increasingly questioned. Here, we review the field and propose a unifying model for organelle inheritance. We argue that the predominance of the maternal mode is a result of higher mutational load in the paternal gamete. Uniparental inheritance evolved from relaxed organelle inheritance patterns because it avoids the spread (...) of selfish cytoplasmic elements. However, on evolutionary timescales, uniparentally inherited organelles are susceptible to mutational meltdown (Muller's ratchet). To prevent this, fall‐back to relaxed inheritance patterns occurs, allowing low levels of sexual organelle recombination. Since sexual organelle recombination is insufficient to mitigate the effects of selfish cytoplasmic elements, various mechanisms for uniparental inheritance then evolve again independently. Organelle inheritance must therefore be seen as an evolutionary unstable trait, with a strong general bias to the uniparental, maternal, mode. (shrink)

Plastids and mitochondria arose through endosymbiotic acquisition of formerly free-living bacteria. During more than a billion years of subsequent concerted evolution, the three genomes of plant cells have undergone dramatic structural changes to optimize the expression of the compartmentalized genetic material and to fine-tune the communication between the nucleus and the organelles. The chimeric composition of many multiprotein complexes in plastids and mitochondria (one part of the subunits being nuclear encoded and another one being encoded in the organellar genome) provides (...) a paradigm for co-evolution at the cellular level. In this paper, we discuss the co-evolution of nuclear and organellar genomes in the context of environmental adaptation in species and populations. We highlight emerging genetic model systems and new experimental approaches that are particularly suitable to elucidate the molecular basis of co-adaptation processes and describe how nuclear-cytoplasmic co-evolution can cause genetic incompatibilities that contribute to the establishment of hybridization barriers, ultimately leading to the formation of new species. (shrink)

Sensory augmentation challenges current societal norms and views of what is conceived as a “normal” human being. Beginning with self reflections of a bodyhacker, the author proposes an extended view onto the human or respectively cyborg body. Based on cognitive theories, it is argumented that we are already mental cyborgs. Our brains plastically restructure themselves in order to meet new requirements of the technological extended human.

A first-person account of some victims of the virus, the author puts faces and circumstances to the tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic. Told from a chaplain’s point of view, these narratives will take the reader beyond the numbers and ask questions like: What is the cost of keeping families separated at the end of life, and, if patient/family centered care is so central to healthcare these days, why was it immediately discarded? Is potentially saving human lives worth the risk of (...) damaging them beyond repair? (shrink)

This introduction situates liberal ideas of Europe in the interwar period within the context of recent historiographical debates and reassesses their political significance beyond teleological narratives of European integration. It argues that Europe remained a central, albeit contested, frame of reference between the two world wars, particularly in liberal political, economic, and intellectual discourses. Building on longer traditions of liberal internationalism and European thinking that predated 1914, interwar liberal Europe emerged at the intersection of crisis, reform, and political pragmatism. Rather (...) than functioning primarily as a blueprint for supranational integration, liberal Europe often operated as a situational and practice-oriented concept, embedded in concrete political projects and reform agendas. By examining emblematic constellations such as the Locarno treaties, Aristide Briand’s proposal for a European federation, and the Paneuropa movement, the introduction highlights the ambivalences inherent in liberal Europeanism, oscillating between normative aspiration and political constraint. The final sections present the contributions to this special issue and argue that, although interwar liberal European projects ultimately failed, they constituted a ‘lost Europe’ whose ideas, concepts, and actors proved highly transferable after 1945. (shrink)

In this case, an adolescent with a life-threatening immune disease experiences increased social complexity, child welfare involvement, and placement into foster care, which could disrupt a medical...

The accessibility of art in Germany underwent a fundamental change over the course of the 18th century. Aristocratic collectors opened their doors to the general public, and new museums were dedicated exclusively to art. This development parallels the concurrent development of aesthetics in philosophy and the conception of the autonomy of art. Its theoretical foundation was provided by Kant in his third critique with such completeness that the standards of beauty he worked out emerge as constitutive elements of the art (...) museum. The Romantic movement reinforced the trend in what proved to be an ambivalent way. The general accessibility of art was well suited to its transgression of boundaries, but it necessitated a new, less contingent mode of demarcation between the work of art and the observer. That became an occasion for »Romanticization« of both the artwork and its audience, demonstrated here by August Wilhelm Schlegel’s conversation on art Die Gemählde. It is further elucidated by Friedrich Schlegel’s Nachricht von den Gemählden in Paris and its echo in two texts published by Kleist: The novella Die Heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik and the essay on Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Mönch am Meer that was drafted by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim and radically modified by Kleist. (shrink)

The article undertakes a rereading of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy with a focus on its two central achievements – reviving the Dionysus myth and making the origin of tragedy evident – whose mutual interrelatedness has attracted only sparse critical attention to date. Working more as a myth-maker than a theorist, Nietzsche advances a groundbreaking portrayal of the story of Dionysus that allows him to lay bare the origins of tragedy. Simultaneously, his identification of tragedy’s ultimate source suggests a configuration that (...) lends the Dionysus myth new currency. In so doing, Nietzsche conceives the manifest presence of this myth – as well as that of the origins of tragedy – as a specific recombination of the Dionysian and the Apollonian: not as an Apollonian taming or sublimation of the Dionysian, nor yet as dialectical mediation, but rather as the Apollonian’s seizure by the Dionysian, which teeters on the threshold between lurching toward and postponing a new, more comprehensively Dionysian loss of boundaries. In this way, Nietzsche suggests, there is generated a »Schauen und Sehnen über das Schauen hinaus,« a mode of viewing amplified by longing, through which the specific form of the Dionysus myth from the perspective of tragedy and conversely of tragedy from the perspective of myth becomes apparent. The fulfillment of Nietzsche’s vision in dramatic art is here exemplified by Hofmannsthal’s Elektra. (shrink)

(2007). A Rview Of “Asian Americans in Class: Charting the Achievement Gap Among Korean American Youth”. Educational Studies: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 68-71.

In reference to the paradoxical classification of art in Kafka’s Josefine story, religious aspects of the artist’s performances and their effect on the audience are scrutinized. The leading question is to what extent it evokes an allusion to the primal scene of divine revelation, following Stéphane Mosès’ commentary in his readings of the Bible. Josefine’s singing with a “nothing of a voice”, reduced to “the slightest of nullities”, the zero-point of signification, nevertheless affects an experience of presence and community that (...) touches the listeners’ entire being. From the perspective of the artist, her song recitals are manifestations of supreme art of which she claims a soteriological significance in respect of her audience who belongs in Kafka’s portrayal obviously to the Jewish people. Around such a tension between maximal restraint of an utterance (the voice onset of the aleph of the word anokhi/i) and all-encompassing meaning (the name of God and all Commandments whose acceptance is constitutive for the Jewish people) circle the theological exegeses of the Sinai-scene (esp. Ex. 20,1) in the tradition of Rashi and Maimonides, in modernity e.g. of Gershom Scholem in dispute with Walter Benjamin on Kafka. It will be shown that the depicted paradoxes of Josefine’s art performances unfold the mentioned tension as an original literary reflection on revelation and language under the conditions of modernity. (shrink)

The gap between a firm's "talk" and its "walk" has received significant research attention in the CSR literature: does the firm’s behavior represent “aspirational talk” or just “greenwashing?” We drew on the formative view of communication to explore the question of whether executives’ environmental talk triggers firms to take environmental action. The method we applied was to study executive presentations in less constrained environments where the executives have more discretion. Using 1456 transcripts of executive presentations made by publicly traded firms (...) in polluting industries at broker-hosted conferences, we found that executive utterances on environmental topics in the events were marginally associated with an increase in a firm’s environmental action. In addition, this study appears to show that a presentation style characterized by numeric concreteness moderates that impact, while a presentation style that instead emphasizes narrative concreteness does not. (shrink)

Among the options of government for reducing negative environmental externalities from agriculture is the institution of a polluter statutory liability. An environmental duty of care imposes a statutory liability on agents who interact with the environment to avoid causing environmental harm. This paper documents environmental duty of care provisions governing landholders in Queensland, Australia, with specific reference to the 2007 Queensland State Rural Leasehold Land Strategy. The paper reports on a positive response by a group of leaseholders within the Northern (...) Gulf Region in Queensland who developed a prototype environmental code of practice for grazing—a land use not previously covered by such an institution in Australia. The paper concludes that (1) a statutory environmental duty of care and specific forms of leasehold tenure are elements of an effective strategy for implementing an agricultural environmental ethics in north Australia’s rangelands and (2) a grazing industry code of practice is a practical and important tool for the grazing industry to safeguard its social licence to operate. (shrink)

We introduce a smooth mapping of some discrete space-time symmetries into quasi-continuous ones. Such transformations are related with q-deformations of the dilations of the Euclidean space and with the noncommutative space. We work out two examples of Hamiltonian invariance under such symmetries. The Schrödinger equation for a free particle is investigated in such a noncommutative plane and a connection with anyonic statistics is found.

In its constructive and speculative nature, design has the critical potential to reshape prevalent socio-material realities. At the same time, design is inevitably normative, if not often violent, as it stabilises the past, normalises the present, and precludes just and sustainable futures. The contributions rethink concepts of critique that influence the field of design, question inherent blind spots of the discipline, and expand understandings of what critical design practices could be. With contributions from design theory, practice and education, art theory, (...) philosophy, and informatics, »Critical by Design?« aims to question and unpack the ambivalent tensions between design and critique. (shrink)

Health equity can be defined as the absence of disadvantage to individuals and communities in health outcomes, access to health care, and quality of health care regardless of one’s race, gender, nationality, age, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status. Health equity concerns those disparities in public health that can be traced to unequal, systemic economic, and social conditions. Despite significant improvements in the health of the overall population, health inequities in America persist. Racial and ethnic minorities continue to experience higher rates (...) of morbidity and mortality than non-minorities across a range of health issues. For example, African-American children with asthma have a seven times greater mortality rate than Non-Hispanic white children with the illness. While cancer is the second leading cause of death among all populations in the U.S., ethnic minorities are especially burdened with the disease. (shrink)

Der hier erstmals ver]ffentlichte Briefwechsel zwischen dem Psychiater C.G. Jung und dem Nobelpreistr{ger der Physik Wolfgang Pauli ist ein geistesgeschichtliches Dokument ersten Ranges. Ein privates Schicksal hat sie zusammengef}hrt, und daraus ist ein vorwissenschaftlicher Dialog erwachsen, in dem versucht wird, naturwissenschaftliches und psychologischesDenken zu vereinheitlichen. Die Briefe verdeutlichen, da~ es weder f}r den Psychologen zul{ssig ist, die methodischen Einsichten der Physik, noch f}r den Physiker, die Erfahrungen im Umgang mit dem Psychischenzu vernachl{ssigen.