The comorbidity of chronic pain and opioid addiction is a serious problem that has been growing with the practice of prescribing opioids for chronic pain. Neuroimaging research has shown that chronic pain and opioid dependence both affect brain structure and function, but this is the first study to evaluate the neurophysiological alterations in patients with comorbid chronic pain and addiction. Eighteen participants with chronic low back pain and opioid addiction were compared with eighteen age- and sex-matched healthy individuals in a (...) pain-induction fMRI task. Unified structural equation modeling (SEM) with Lagrange multiplier (LM) testing yielded a network model of pain processing for patient and control groups based on 19 a priori defined regions. Tests of differences between groups on specific regression parameters were determined on a path-by-path basis using z-tests corrected for the number of comparisons. Patients with the chronic pain and addiction comorbidity had increased connection strengths; many of these connections were interhemispheric and spanned regions involved in sensory, affective, and cognitive processes. The affected regions included those that are commonly altered in chronic pain or addiction alone, indicating that this comorbidity manifests with neurological symptoms of both disorders. Understanding the neural mechanisms involved in the comorbidity is crucial to finding a comprehensive treatment, rather than treating the symptoms individually. (shrink)

BackgroundJunior medical doctors have a key role in discussions and decisions about treatment and end-of-life care for people with dementia in hospital. Little is known about junior doctors’ decision-making processes when treating people with dementia who have advance care directives, or the factors that influence their decisions. To describe among junior doctors in relation to two hypothetical vignettes involving patients with dementia: their legal compliance and decision-making process related to treatment decisions; the factors influencing their clinical decision-making; and the factors (...) associated with accurate responses to one hypothetical vignette. MethodA cross-sectional survey of junior doctors, including trainees, interns, registrars and residents, on clinical rotation in five public hospitals located in one Australian state. The anonymous, investigator-developed survey was conducted between August 2018 and June 2019. Two hypothetical vignettes describing patients with dementia presenting to hospital with an ACD and either: bacterial pneumonia; or suspected stroke were presented in the survey. Participants were asked to indicate whether they would commence treatment, given the ACD instructions described in each vignette.ResultsOverall, 116 junior doctors responded. In Vignette 1, 58% of respondents selected the legally compliant option. Participants who chose the legally compliant option perceived ‘following patient wishes’ and ‘legal requirements to follow ACDs’ as equally important reasons for complying with the ACD. The most common reason for not selecting the legally compliant option in Vignette 1 was the ‘ACD is relevant in my decision-making process, but other factors are more relevant’. In Vignette 2, 72% of respondents indicated they would commence treatment and 18% selected they would not commence treatment.. Similar reasons influenced participant decision-making in Vignette 2, a less legally certain scenario.ConclusionsThere are critical gaps in junior doctors’ compliance with the law as it relates to the implementation of ACDs. Despite there being differences in relation to the legal answer and its certainty, clinical and ethical factors guided decision-making over and above the law in both vignettes. More education and training to guide junior doctors’ clinical decision-making and ensure compliance with the law is required. (shrink)

BackgroundStructured, systematic methods to formulate consensus recommendations, such as the Delphi process or nominal group technique, among others, provide the opportunity to harness the knowledge of experts to support clinical decision making in areas of uncertainty. They are widely used in biomedical research, in particular where disease characteristics or resource limitations mean that high-quality evidence generation is difficult. However, poor reporting of methods used to reach a consensus – for example, not clearly explaining the definition of consensus, or not stating (...) how consensus group panellists were selected – can potentially undermine confidence in this type of research and hinder reproducibility. Our objective is therefore to systematically develop a reporting guideline to help the biomedical research and clinical practice community describe the methods or techniques used to reach consensus in a complete, transparent, and consistent manner.MethodsThe ACCORD project will take place in five stages and follow the EQUATOR Network guidance for the development of reporting guidelines. In Stage 1, a multidisciplinary Steering Committee has been established to lead and coordinate the guideline development process. In Stage 2, a systematic literature review will identify evidence on the quality of the reporting of consensus methodology, to obtain potential items for a reporting checklist. In Stage 3, Delphi methodology will be used to reach consensus regarding the checklist items, first among the Steering Committee, and then among a broader Delphi panel comprising participants with a range of expertise, including patient representatives. In Stage 4, the reporting guideline will be finalised in a consensus meeting, along with the production of an Explanation and Elaboration document. In Stage 5, we plan to publish the reporting guideline and E&E document in open-access journals, supported by presentations at appropriate events. Dissemination of the reporting guideline, including a website linked to social media channels, is crucial for the document to be implemented in practice.DiscussionThe ACCORD reporting guideline will provide a set of minimum items that should be reported about methods used to achieve consensus, including approaches ranging from simple unstructured opinion gatherings to highly structured processes. (shrink)

The Real Food Challenge is a national student movement in the United States that aims to shift $1 billion—roughly 20%—of college and university food budgets across the country towards local, ecologically sound, fair, and humane food sources—what they call “real” food—by 2020. The University of Vermont was the fifth university in the U.S. to sign the Real Food Campus Commitment, pledging to shift at least 20% of its own food budget towards “real” food by 2020. In order to examine student (...) preference for “real” food on the UVM campus, we analyzed a survey of 904 undergraduate students that used contingent valuation to evaluate students’ willingness-to-pay for the “real” attribute. We found that a majority of students are willing to pay a positive premium for “real” food. Furthermore, we found that student characteristics and attitudes significantly influence WTP. Specifically, gender, residency, college, and attitudes about price and origin of food are significant predictors of WTP. (shrink)

A substantial portion of biomedical R&D is publicly funded. But resulting medicines are typically covered by patents held by private firms, and priced without regard to the public’s investment. The Bayh-Dole Act provides a possible remedy, but its scope is limited.

An incisive examination of bioethics and American healthcare, and their profound affects on American culture over the last sixty years, from two eminent scholars. An eye-opening look at the inevitable moral choices that come along with tremendous medical progress, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die is a primer for all Americans to talk more honestly about health care. Beginning in the 1950s when doctors still paid house calls but regularly withheld the truth from their patients, (...) Amy Gutmann and Jonathan D. Moreno explore an unprecedented revolution in health care and explain the problem with America’s wanting everything that medical science has to offer without debating its merits and its limits. The result: Americans today pay far more for health care while having among the lowest life expectancies and highest infant mortality of any affluent nation. Gutmann and Moreno—“incisive, influential, and pragmatic thinkers” (Arthur Caplan)—demonstrate that the stakes have never been higher for prolonging and improving life. From health care reform and death-with-dignity to child vaccinations and gene editing, they explain how bioethics came to dominate the national spotlight, leading and responding to a revolution in doctor-patient relations, a burgeoning world of organ transplants, and new reproductive technologies that benefit millions but create a host of legal and ethical challenges. With striking examples, the authors show how breakthroughs in cancer research, infectious disease, and drug development provide Americans with exciting new alternatives, yet often painful choices. They address head-on the most fundamental challenges in American health care: Why do we pay so much for health care while still lacking universal coverage? How can medical studies adequately protect individuals who volunteer for them? What’s fair when it comes to allocating organs for transplants in truly life-and-death situations? A lucid and provocative blend of history and public policy, this urgent work exposes the American paradox of wanting to have it all without paying the price. (shrink)

Stakeholders in traditional dairy-producing states in the upper Midwest and Northeast hope that the boom in the organic milk market will offer family-scale dairy farms a means to escape the cost-price squeeze of the conventional food system. However, recent trends in organic dairy raise questions about whether organic dairy is conventionalizing, which is to say it is coming to resemble the conventional sector as shown in disparities of power in the value chain that pressure all participants to adopt more (...) industrial practices. This paper reports the results of an exploratory qualitative study of whether and how the organic milk value chain in upstate New York is conventionalizing. Findings lend some support to the conventionalization hypothesis in that organic milk from the beginning has been produced, processed, and marketed as a commodity, and the federal regulations governing organic dairy have facilitated the replication of this commodity-based system. However, there is also evidence that some producers are responding to these pressures not by intensifying, but by going deeper into the alternative organic model, forging more direct and local relationships along the value chain and embracing principles of the organic movement. (shrink)

This special edition ofJLMEcenters on a novel proposal for a national PrEP access program with the potential to break through a failed status quo.

Purpose Cybercrime is a prevalent and serious threat to publicly traded companies. Defending company information systems from cybercrime is one of the most important aspects of technology management. Cybercrime often not only results in stolen assets and lost business but also damages a company’s reputation, which in turn may affect the company’s stock market value. This is a serious concern to company managers, financial analysts, investors and creditors. This paper aims to examine the impact of cybercrime on stock prices of (...) a sample of publicly traded companies. Design/methodology/approach Financial data were gathered on companies that were reported in news stories as victims of cybercrime. The market price of the company’s stock was recorded for several days before the news report and several days after. The percentage change in the stock price was compared to the change in the Dow Jones Industrial average to determine whether the stock price increased or decreased along with the rest of the market. Findings Stock prices were negatively affected in all time periods examined, significantly so in one period. Practical implications This paper describes cases concerning cybercrime, thereby bringing attention to the value of cybersecurity in protecting computers, identity and transactions. Cyber security is necessary to avoid becoming a victim of cybercrime. Specific security improvements and preventive measures are provided within the paper. Preventive measures are generally less costly than repairs after a cybercrime. Originality/value This is an original manuscript that adds to the literature regarding cybercrime and preventive measures. (shrink)

In recent months, pharmaceutical manufacturers have brought legal challenges to a provision of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) empowering the federal government to negotiate the prices Medicare pays for certain prescription medications. One key argument made in these filings is that price negotiation is a “taking” of property and violates the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. Through original case law and health policy analysis, we show that government price negotiation and even price regulation of goods (...) and services, including patented goods, are constitutional under the Takings Clause. Finding that the IRA violates the Takings Clause would radically upend settled constitutional law and jeopardize the US’s most important state and federal health care programs. (shrink)

To reduce CO2 emissions requires greater reliance on renewable sources of energy for generating electricity, especially adoption of large-scale wind generation. This study investigates possible approaches and/or policies that increase efficient use of renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a cost effective manner. We develop a constrained optimization model of two electricity systems to identify the impact of increasing wind generating capacity and examine how carbon prices (taxes, allowances) impact the penetration of wind power into the electricity grids. (...) Rather than employ engineering cost functions, marginal cost functions are estimated using hourly offer data from the Alberta Electric System Operator. We determine optimal removal of coal generating facilities as greater levels of wind capacity are installed in an integrated Alberta-BC electricity system; and examine the economic costs and institutional incentives that affect the ability to store intermittent wind-generated power in BC’s hydro reservoirs during low demand. The marginal shadow price of storage is zero, whichindicates that there is more than enough water behind the dams given Alberta’s relatively small demand for storage and limited intertie transmission capacity. (shrink)

The challenge of handling fictional discourse is to find the best way to resolve the apparent inconsistencies in our ways of speaking about fiction. A promising approach is to take at least some such discourse to involve pretense, but does all fictional discourse involve pretense? I will argue that a better, less revisionary, solution is to take internal and fictionalizing discourse to involve pretense, while allowing that in external critical discourse, fictional names are used seriously to refer to fictional characters. (...) I then address two objections to such realist theories of fiction: One, that they can’t adequately account for the truth of singular nonexistence claims involving fictional names, and two, that accepting that there are fictional characters to which we refer is implausible or ontologically profligate. (shrink)

While Roman Ingarden is well known for his work in aesthetics and studies in ontology, one of his most important and lasting contributions has been largely overlooked: his approach to a general ontology of social and cultural objects. Ingarden himself discusses cultural objects other than works of art directly in the first section of “The Architectural Work”1, where he develops a particularly penetrating view of the ontology of buildings, flags, and churches. This text provides the core insight into how his (...) more lengthy studies of the ontology of works of art in The Literary Work of Art and the rest of The Ontology of the Work of Art, combined with the ontological distinctions of Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, may be used to understand social and cultural objects. The view that results, I will argue, is based in foreseeing problems with the reductivist and projectivist views that remain popular, and is capable of resolving central problems still thought to plague those who would offer a theory of cultural objects. (shrink)

Bailey (2021) offers a clever argument for the compatibility of determinism and moral responsibility based on the nature of intrinsic intentions. The argument is mistaken on two counts. First, it is invalid. Second, even setting that first point aside, the argument proves too much: we would be blameworthy in paradigm cases of non-blameworthiness. I conclude that we cannot reason from intentions to responsibility solely from the “inside out”—our possessing a blameworthy intention cannot tell us whether this intention is also blameworthy (...) in deterministic worlds. (shrink)

SALMON A, BROWNE AJ, and PEDERSON A. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 336–345 ‘Now we call it research’: participatory health research involving marginalized women who use drugsIn this paper, we discuss and analyse the strategies employed and challenges encountered when conducting a recent feminist participatory action research study with highly marginalized women who were illicit drug users in an inner city area of Vancouver, Canada. Through an analysis of the political economy of participatory praxis within current neoliberal contexts, we focus on (...) three main areas: (i) reconceptualizing the pragmatics of participation; (ii) the microeconomic implications of participatory research, including ethical issues in payment for research participation; and (iii) the value and limits of using research as a tool for activism and empowerment. We conclude with a brief discussion of what we see to be some of the most salient social justice implications arising from feminist and participatory approaches to health research within neoliberal political spaces. (shrink)

Imagination is celebrated as our vehicle for escape from the mundane here and now. It transports us to distant lands of magic and make-believe, and provides us with diversions during boring meetings or long bus rides. Yet the focus on imagination as a means of escape from the real world minimizes the fact that imagination seems also to furnish us with knowledge about it. Imagination seems an essential component in our endeavor to learn about the world in which we live--whether (...) we're planning for the future, aiming to understand other people, or figuring out whether two puzzle pieces fit together. But how can the same mental power that allows us to escape the world as it currently is also inform us about the world as it currently is? Ten original essays grapple with this neglected question; in doing so, they present a diverse array of positions ranging from cautious optimism to deep-seated pessimism. Blending perspectives from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, Knowledge Through Imagination sheds new light on the epistemic role of imagination. (shrink)

Arguments that ordinary inanimate objects such as tables and chairs, sticks and stones, simply do not exist have become increasingly common and increasingly prominent. Some are based on demands for parsimony or for a non-arbitrary answer to the special composition question; others arise from prohibitions against causal redundancy, ontological vagueness, or co-location; and others still come from worries that a common sense ontology would be a rival to a scientific one. Until now, little has been done to address these arguments (...) in a unified and systematic way. Ordinary Objects is designed to fill this gap, demonstrating that the mistakes behind all of these superficially diverse eliminativist arguments may be traced to a common source. It aims to develop an ontology of ordinary objects subject to no such problems, providing perhaps the first sustained defense of a common sense ontology in two generations. The work done along the way addresses a number of major issues in philosophy of language and metaphysics, contributing to debates about analyticity, identity conditions, co-location and the grounding problem, vagueness, overdetermination, parsimony, and ontological commitment. In the end, the most important result of addressing these eliminativist arguments is not merely avoiding their conclusions; examining their failings also gives us reason to suspect that many apparent disputes in ontology are pseudo-debates. For it brings into question widely-held assumptions about which uses of metaphysical principles are appropriate, which metaphysical demands are answerable, and how we should go about addressing such fundamental questions as "What exists?". As a result, the work of Ordinary Objects promises to provide not only the route to a reflective understanding of our unreflective common-sense view, but also a better understanding of the proper methods and limits of metaphysics. (shrink)

This article is currently available as a free download on ingentaconnect.

In recent analytic metaphysics, the view that ‘ordinary inanimate objects such as sticks and stones, tables and chairs, simply do not exist’ has been defended by some noteworthy writers. Thomasson opposes such revisionary ontology in favour of an ontology that is conservative with respect to common sense. The book is written in a straightforward, methodical and down-to-earth style. It is also relatively non-specialized, enabling the author and her readers to approach problems that are often dealt with in isolation in a (...) more unified way.Thomasson's arguments are mainly counter-attacks on six ‘eliminativist’ arguments against ordinary objects. A causal redundancy argument espoused by Trenton Merricks holds that to suppose that there are ordinary objects is to suppose that these objects have distinctive causal powers. However, the casual efficacy of a baseball, for example, is exhausted by that of some suitably arranged …. (shrink)

Creations of the Mind: Essays on Artifacts and their Representation, ed. Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

The need for increased civility has been a recurring theme in conversations about lawyer professionalism in the United States and Canada over the last several decades. In addition to having many advocates, however, the civility movement has also been subject to criticism. In large part, the critiques made to date have focused on the problems or risks created when civility rules or guidelines are enforced against lawyers. This article takes a different focus to provide a complementary, yet distinct critique. The (...) object of analysis is the discourse of the civility movement. More specifically, the assumptions and concepts of lawyer professionalism embedded in our conversations about civility are explored. Upon review, the discourse of the civility movement reveals a dominant narrative framed in terms of competing masculinities: the aggressive, testosterone fuelled Rambo-lawyer is cast as the anti-hero to be vanquished against renewed calls for the return of the gentlemanly Atticus Finch. I argue that this 'Rambo-Finch narrative' is hostile to inclusive understandings of lawyer professionalism in three inter-related ways: (1) it renders women and other 'outsider' lawyers largely invisible; (2) it romanticizes past discriminatory concepts of lawyer professionalism; and (3) it reflects anxieties about the destabilization of traditional, exclusionary claims or modes of authority in the legal profession. The exclusionary understandings of lawyer professionalism contained in the Rambo-Finch narrative should be of concern to those interested with improving gender equity and diversity in the legal profession as there is good reason to believe that this discourse translates into 'real world' consequences in how 'outsider' lawyers are viewed and treated within the legal profession. (shrink)

The most widely debated conception of democracy in recent years is deliberative democracy--the idea that citizens or their representatives owe each other mutually acceptable reasons for the laws they enact. Two prominent voices in the ongoing discussion are Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. In Why Deliberative Democracy?, they move the debate forward beyond their influential book, Democracy and Disagreement.What exactly is deliberative democracy? Why is it more defensible than its rivals? By offering clear answers to these timely questions, Gutmann and (...) Thompson illuminate the theory and practice of justifying public policies in contemporary democracies. They not only develop their theory of deliberative democracy in new directions but also apply it to new practical problems. They discuss bioethics, health care, truth commissions, educational policy, and decisions to declare war. In "What Deliberative Democracy Means," which opens this collection of essays, they provide the most accessible exposition of deliberative democracy to date. They show how deliberative democracy should play an important role even in the debates about military intervention abroad.Why Deliberative Democracy? contributes to our understanding of how democratic citizens and their representatives can make justifiable decisions for their society in the face of the fundamental disagreements that are inevitable in diverse societies. Gutmann and Thompson provide a balanced and fair-minded approach that will benefit anyone intent on giving reason and reciprocity a more prominent place in politics than power and special interests. (shrink)

This challenging study places fiction squarely at the centre of the discussion of metaphysics. Philosophers have traditionally treated fiction as involving a set of narrow problems in logic or the philosophy of language. By contrast Amie Thomasson argues that fiction has far-reaching implications for central problems of metaphysics. The book develops an 'artifactual' theory of fiction, whereby fictional characters are abstract artifacts as ordinary as laws or symphonies or works of literature. By understanding fictional characters we come to understand how (...) other cultural and social objects are established on the basis of the independent physical world and the mental states of human beings. (shrink)

Examines the relationship between making objects and knowing nature in Europe from the mid-15th to mid-19th centuries.

Liz Jackson is Professor of Education and Head of Department of International Education at the Education University of Hong Kong. Liz served as the President of the Philosophy of Education Society...

The authors offer ways to encourage and educate Americans to participate in the public deliberations that make democracy work and lay out the principles of..

The novel COVID-19 pandemic has placed medical triage decision-making in the spotlight. As life-saving ventilators become scarce, clinicians are being forced to allocate scarce resources in even the wealthiest countries. The pervasiveness of air travel and high rate of transmission has caused this pandemic to spread swiftly throughout the world. Ethical triage decisions are commonly based on the utilitarian approach of maximising total benefits and life expectancy. We present triage guidelines from Italy, USA and the UK as well as the (...) Jewish ethical prospective on medical triage. The Jewish tradition also recognises the utilitarian approach but there is disagreement between the rabbis whether human discretion has any role in the allocation of scarce resources and triage decision-making. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical exploration of disorientation and its significance for action. Disorientations are human experiences of losing one's bearings, such that life is disrupted and it is not clear how to go on. In the face of life experiences like trauma, grief, illness, migration, education, queer identification, and consciousness raising, individuals can be deeply disoriented. These and other disorientations are not rare. Although disorientations can be common and powerful parts of individuals' lives, they remain uncharacterized by Western philosophers, (...) and overlooked by ethicists.Disorientations can paralyze, overwhelm, embitter, and misdirect moral agents, and moral philosophy and motivational psychology have important insights to offer into why this is. More perplexing are the ways disorientations may prompt improved moral action.Ami Harbin draws on first person accounts, philosophical texts, and qualitative and quantitative research to show that in some cases of disorientation, individuals gain new forms of awareness of political complexity and social norms, and new habits of relating to others and an unpredictable moral landscape. She then argues for the moral and political promise of these gains. A major contention of the book is that disorientations have 'non-resolutionary effects': they can help us act without first helping us resolve what to do. In exploring these possibilities, Disorientation and Moral Life contributes to philosophy of emotions, moral philosophy, and political thought from a distinctly feminist perspective. It makes the case for seeing disorientations as having the power to motivate profound and long-term shifts in moral and political action. A feminist re-envisioning of moral psychology provides the framework for understanding how they do so. (shrink)

A vision of a living code of ethics is proposed to counter the emphasis on negative phenomena in the study of organizational ethics. The living code results from the harmonious interaction of authentic leadership, five key organizational processes (attraction–selection–attrition, socialization, reward systems, decision-making and organizational learning), and an ethical organizational culture (characterized by heightened levels of ethical awareness and a positive climate regarding ethics). The living code is the cognitive, affective, and behavioral manifestation of an ethical organizational identity. We draw (...) on business ethics literature, positive organizational scholarship, and management literature to outline the elements of positive ethical organizations as those exemplary organizations consistently practicing the highest levels of organizational ethics. In a positive ethical organization, the right thing to do is the only thing to do. (shrink)

An introduction to comparative philosophy relates European and Oriental philosophies and brings to light such aspects of Eastern philosophy as intellectuality, reasoning, and logical analysis usually associated with Western thought.

The adventure I am now undertaking is an appraisal of my profession, philosophy, of my fellow professionals, the philosophers, and, finally of myself at least ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a host of ethical challenges, but key among these has been the possibility that health care systems might need to ration scarce critical care resources. Rationing p...

Empathy has for a long time, at least since the eighteenth century, been seen as centrally important in relation to our capacity to gain a grasp of the content of other people's minds, and predict and explain what they will think, feel, and do; and in relation to our capacity to respond to others ethically. In addition, empathy is seen as having a central role in aesthetics, in the understanding of our engagement with works of art and with fictional characters. (...) A fuller understanding of empathy is now offered by the interaction of research in science and the humanities. This volume draws together nineteen original chapters by leading researchers across several disciplines, together with an extensive Introduction by the editors. The individual chapters reveal how important it is, in a wide range of fields of enquiry, to bring to bear an understanding of the role of empathy in its various guises. It offers the ideal starting-point for the exploration of this intriguing aspect of human life. (shrink)

While the clinical promise of much stem cell research remains largely theoretical, patients are nonetheless pursuing unproven stem cell therapies in jurisdictions around the world—a phenomenon referred to as “stem cell tourism.” These treatments are generally advertised on a direct-to-consumer basis via the Internet. Research shows portrayals of stem cell medicine on such websites are overly optimistic and the claims made are unsubstantiated by published evidence. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that parents are pursing these “treatments” for their children, despite potential (...) physical and financial risk. Physicians are in a unique position as they can be expected to be involved in, or privy to, such decisions. In this paper, we consider what duties physicians may have toward minor patients whose parents/guardians wish to engage in stem cell tourism on their behalf. We use the Canadian perspective to address the broadly relevant issues raised by this trend. (shrink)

Opponents of abortion sometimes hold that it is impermissible because fetuses are persons from the moment of conception. But miscarriage, which ends up to 89 % of pregnancies, is much deadlier than abortion. That means that if opponents of abortion are right, then miscarriage is the biggest public-health crisis of our time. Yet they pay hardly any attention to miscarriage, especially very early miscarriage. Attempts to resolve this inconsistency by adverting to the distinction between killing and letting die or to (...) the difficulty of preventing miscarriage fail, leaving a dilemma. Opponents of abortion should either advocate a substantial shift in our political and medical priorities or else give up the view that fetuses are persons from the moment of conception. (shrink)

Human languages vary in many ways but also show striking cross-linguistic universals. Why do these universals exist? Recent theoretical results demonstrate that Bayesian learners transmitting language to each other through iterated learning will converge on a distribution of languages that depends only on their prior biases about language and the quantity of data transmitted at each point; the structure of the world being communicated about plays no role (Griffiths & Kalish, , ). We revisit these findings and show that when (...) certain assumptions about the relationship between language and the world are abandoned, learners will converge to languages that depend on the structure of the world as well as their prior biases. These theoretical results are supported with a series of experiments showing that when human learners acquire language through iterated learning, the ultimate structure of those languages is shaped by the structure of the meanings to be communicated. (shrink)