Drugs used to provide improvement of cognitive functioning have been shown to be effective in healthy individuals. It is sometimes assumed that the use of these drugs constitutes cheating in an academic context. We examine whether this assumption is ethically sound. Beyond providing the most up-to-date discussion of modafinil use in an academic context, this contribution includes an overview of the safety of modafinil use in greater depth than previous studies addressing the issue of cheating. Secondly, we emphasize two crucial, (...) but hitherto nearly overlooked, nuances to the issues: the potential for modafinil to decrease inequality and disadvantage in academic settings, and the fact that how modafinil is used dramatically impacts its effects on health, coercion, fairness, authenticity and effort. Finally, we explicitly defend the position that there are no qualitatively morally relevant differences between modafinil use and other enhancement modalities; any such differences are in degree,... (shrink)

Hymenoplasty is a surgical procedure requested by women who are expected to remain virgins until marriage. In this article, I assess the ethical and legal challenges raised by this request, both for the individual physician and for the health care system. I argue that performing hymenoplasty is not always an unethical practice and that, under certain conditions, it should be provided by the health care system.

One of the most controversial aspects in uncontrolled donation of organs after circulatory death is the initiation of preservation measures before death. I argue that in so-called opting-out systems only under very stringent conditions we might presume consent to the instauration of those measures. Given its current legal framework, I claim that this is not the case of Spain, a well-known country in which consent is presumed—albeit only formally—and where uDCD is currently practiced.

Hymenoplasty is a minor surgical procedure requested by women who, for cultural or religious reasons, need to remain a virgin until marriage. In this article I assess whether the public healthcare system of a liberal state should provide it as part of a policy of multicultural accommodation. I conclude that, in order to remain loyal to certain ethical ideals linked to the rule of law, liberal states should give access to hymenoplasty only to women for whom premarital virginity is a (...) precondition for their flourishing within their community and who say they are victims of sexual assault. (shrink)

The so-called uncontrolled donation after circulatory determination of death (uDCDD) have been implemented in several countries, including Spain and France, to increase the availability of organs for transplantation. These protocols allow obtaining kidneys, livers and lungs of patients who do not survive cardio-pulmonary resuscitation performed in out-of-hospital settings. Simultaneously with the development and recent proliferation of these protocols, some emergency teams have begun to employ unconventional methods of CPR, with still uncertain but promising results. The coexistence of these two possibilities (...) raises some questions: At what point should attempts to save a patient with circulatory arrest be abandoned so that this individual can begin to be considered as a potential organ donor? How to manage potential conflicts of loyalties that may arise within emergency and procurement teams? How should the information to the families of those patients and potential organ donors be managed? This article gathers the conclusions of a workshop in which an interdisciplinary working group addressed these and other questions related to DCDD and non-conventional CPR. (shrink)

In this paper we defend that elective ventilation, even if conceived as the instrument to maximise the chances of organ recovery, is mainly the means to provide the patient who is dying with a dignified death in several ways, one of them being the possibility of becoming an organ donor. Because EV does not harm the patient and permits the medical team a better assessment of the patient's clinical trajectory and a better management of the dying process by the family, (...) EV does not violate the principle of non-beneficence nor the principle of autonomy if we restrict the initiation of EV to those cases in which it is not known what the previous wishes of the patient were as regards to his or her care at the end of life. (shrink)

In this essay, we focus on the moral justification of a highly controversial measure to redress medical brain drain: the duty to stay. We argue that the moral justification for this duty lies primarily in the fact that medical students impose high risks on their fellow citizens while receiving their medical training, which in turn gives them a reciprocity-based reason to temporarily prioritize the medical needs of their fellow citizens.

In this paper we defend that elective ventilation (EV), even if conceived as the instrument to maximise the chances of organ recovery, is mainly the means to provide the patient who is dying with a dignified death in several ways, one of them being the possibility of becoming an organ donor. Because EV does not harm the patient and permits the medical team a better assessment of the patient's clinical trajectory and a better management of the dying process by the (...) family, EV does not violate the principle of non-beneficence nor the principle of autonomy if we restrict the initiation of EV to those cases in which it is not known what the previous wishes of the patient were as regards to his or her care at the end of life. (shrink)

Resumen: El artículo establece paralelos entre el Concilio Vaticano II (1962-1965) y la Conferencia General del Episcopado Latinoamericano (Medellín, 1968), bajo la perspectiva común de la historicidade del “mistério de la Iglesia”. Un paralelismo fundamental: la creación del CELAM (1955) anticipa en la práctica la doctrina de la colegialidad episcopal, promulgada por el Concilio ( Lumem Gentium 22). Bajo el foco de la colegialidade eclesial, toda la intensa actividad de preparación de la Conferencia de Medellín, así como su realización y (...) su documento final, se construye “a la luz del Concilio”. Desde la autocomprensión de la Iglesia inserida en la historia –expresada y compartida en los dos acontecimentos- se formulan los grandes temas y compromisos de la Iglesia latino-americana: la opción evangélica por los pobres; la nueva manera de ser Iglesia que se concreta en las comunidades eclesiales de base; y la dimensión teológica de las aspiraciones y exigências de liberación, formulada posteriormente por la teologia de la liberación. Leídos en clave teológica, el Concilio y Medellín fueron un signo de los tiempos, un kairós en el caminar histórico de la Iglesia hacia el Reino. La reflexiópn se refiere también a un actual “tiempo de exilio” de la Iglesia, que se caracteriza por la distancia de las grandes y exigentes convocaciones del Concilio y de Medellín. En el exilio, voces proféticas conclaman a superar el olvido de la historia. Palabras-clave : Iglesia. Concilio Vaticano II. CELAM. Conferencia de MedellíThis article draws parallels between the Second Vatican Council (1962 – 1965) and the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops (Medellín, 1968), under the common view of the historicity of the “mystery of the Church”. A basic parallel arises: the creation of CELAM (1955) anticipates the doctrine of episcopal collegiality, promulgated by the Council (Lumen Gentium 22). Under the focus of the ecclesial collegiate, all the intensive activity of preparation for the Conference of Medellin, its realization and its final document, were made through the Council inspiration. By comprehending the Church as inserted in history the major themes and commitments of the Latin American Church are formulated: the evangelical option for the poor, the new way of being church founded in ecclesial communities, the theological dimensions of the aspirations and demands for liberation later formulated in Liberation Theology. Seen with theological eyes, the Council and the Conference of Medellín were a sign of the times, a historical movement of the Church towards the Kingdom of God. This discussion also refers to the current time of the Church as a “time in exile”. The present time is characterized by its detachment from the demands of the Council and of Medellín. In exile, prophetic voices call on to overcome the forgetting of history. Keywords: Church. Vatican Council II. CELAM. Conference of Medellín. - DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2011v9n24p1233. (shrink)

Offering the most comprehensive book-length study to-date of reparation programs, this handbook contains an innovative blend of case-study analysis, thematic papers, and national legislation documents from leading scholars and practitioners. This landmark work will make a genuine contribution to the theory and practice of reparations.

Le MAS a remporté les élections présidentielles boliviennes d’octobre 2020 dès le premier tour, avec 55,1 % des voix. Pablo Solón, ancien ministre d’Evo Morales, énumère dans cet article les raisons de ce triomphe et trace les défis qui s’imposent au nouveau gouvernement du président élu, Luis Arce. De fait, c’est une phase post Evo Morales qui s’ouvre, dans un pays profondément marqué par la pandémie, l’écocide, la corruption, les atteintes à l’état de droit, ainsi que par grave crise (...) économique. La clé pour relancer un « processus de changement » repose dans la capacité d’autogestion et d’autonomie des organisations sociales. (shrink)

Determinar el estatuto del embrión humano no es una tarea fácil y menos cuando existen realidades y propuestas diversas en torno al mismo. Si bien tratar de describir qué es una persona, resulta ya complejo por las dimensiones sociales, biológicas, psicológicas y espirituales que se involucran; cuando a ello le agregamos el valor antropológico,legal, ontológico y biológico del desarrollo de la persona, se complica todavía más. No obstante, cuando entendemos que no es adecuado generar conflicto entre disciplinas, sino, por el (...) contrario, que nuestra labor es la de dialogar y comprender que todos estamos trabajando con una misma realidad, podemos entonces vincular al ser humano en todas sus dimensiones, ver su integralidad y rescatar el valor originario del ser humano desde su concepción hasta su muerte. En especial, en el presente ensayo nos enfocaremos a dicho análisis para establecer una propuesta de cómo entender el estatuto del embrión humano desde los ámbitos biológico, legal, antropológico y ontológico. (shrink)

Este estudio pretende demostrar el origen metodológico común del concepto de soberanía popular de Rousseau y Carl Schmitt, entendido como aquella autoridad política cuya legitimidad descansa en un principio democrático verdaderamente sustantivo. En primer lugar, se intentará probar cómo ambas obras serían la expresión de una común reacción al formalismo de una dogmática liberal que identifica metodológicamente la legalidad formal con la legitimidad política. Así, Rousseau critica un enunciado de la ley natural procedente de Locke que legitima la desigualdad social (...) y política y justifica el gobierno burgués de los propietarios y Schmitt cuestiona un positivismo jurídico cuyo normativismo habría ocultado el auténtico valor sociológico del poder y la soberanía. En segundo lugar, una vez avanzada una crítica de las representaciones políticas que niegan el carácter sustantivo del pueblo soberano, se estudia el modo en que ambos formulan una propuesta metodológica alternativa. Aquí se prestará especial atención al modo en que la elaboración schmittiana incorpora, en un contexto de crisis de las formas liberales, una reelaboración de la crítica de Rousseau. (shrink)

Conditional independence tests have received special attention lately in machine learning and computational intelligence related literature as an important indicator of the relationship among the variables used by their models. In the field of probabilistic graphical models, which includes Bayesian network models, conditional independence tests are especially important for the task of learning the probabilistic graphical model structure from data. In this paper, we propose the full Bayesian significance test for tests of conditional independence for discrete datasets. The full Bayesian (...) significance test is a powerful Bayesian test for precise hypothesis, as an alternative to the frequentist’s significance tests (characterized by the calculation of the p-value). (shrink)

To manage conflicts between temptation and commitment, people use self-control. The process model of self-control outlines different strategies for managing the onset and experience of temptation. However, little is known about the decision-making factors underlying strategy selection. Across three experiments (N = 317), we tested whether the moral valence of a commitment predicts how people advise attentional self-control strategies. In Experiments 1 and 2, people rated attentional focus strategies as significantly more effective for people tempted to break moral relative to (...) immoral commitments, even when controlling for perceived temptation and trait self-control. Experiment 3 showed that as people perceived commitments to have more positive moral valence, they judged attentional focus strategies to be significantly more effective relative to attentional distraction strategies. Moreover, this effect was partly mediated by perceived differences in motivation. These results indicate that moralization informs decision-making processes related to self-control strategy selection. (shrink)

Se presentan los resultados de un estudio cuyo objetivo general fue identificar y caracterizar el patron estructural de las prácticas pedagógicas recurrentes en los departamentos de educación de espacios patrimoniales musealizados de la Región Metropolitana de Chile, ejemplo de país con perfil identitario pluricultural. La muestra parte de los 87 museos y organizaciones del Registro Nacional de Museos del gobierno (RMC). Se utilizó un diseño exploratorio secuencial (cuan – CUAL) que incorpora análisis estadísticos descriptivos, fases, criterios e instrumentos del método (...) OEPE. Permitió acotar la muestra a 16 y trasladar sus líneas a la base de datos OEPE. Seguido a esto (fase CUAL), la muestra se sometió a los indicadores de la escala validada Q-Edutage. Finalmente, se realizaron análisis descriptivos para los 5 departamentos educativos cuartil 1. La óptica se sitúa en la correlación de ámbitos y agentes educativos como fenómeno. Los nodos estructurales fueron metodología, tipologías de diseño, estrategias pedagógicas, recursos y cauces de participación e interacción comunicativa en entornos virtuales. De la estructura se infieren los cuatro principios del fenómeno, los cuales se ocupan de (1) la capacitación profesional, (2) los artefactos facilitadores, (3) la tecnología aplicada y (4) los mecanismos favorecedores de la interacción. (shrink)

Essays exploring the prospects for transnational democracy in a world of increasing globalization.

El artículo analiza el tratamiento hegeliano del concepto de voluntad general de Rousseau en la Fenomenología del espíritu. Se teje una trama conceptual que enfatiza en: (i) la necesariedad del concepto de voluntad general de Rousseau en el entramado conceptual hegeliano; (ii) las implicancias de este concepto en la estructura política y social, en términos de una ausencia de instituciones de representación política en una sociedad ética; (iii) las consecuencias violentas y nihilistas de la extrapolación práctica de la voluntad general (...) como axioma teórico. (shrink)

This paper seeks to articulate a conception of justice in reparations for victims of human rights violations when the aim is to repair a large number of cases, as opposed to individual, isolated cases. It starts with an effort to establish some semantic clarity by trying to distinguish between two different contexts for the use of the term “reparations”. It discusses some of the problems with merely transplanting the ideal of compensation in proportion to harm from its natural home in (...) the resolution of individual judicial cases, and using it as a standard of justice for massive reparations programs. Instead, it argues in favor of thinking about justice in the context of massive cases in terms of the achievement of three goals, namely, recognition, civic trust, and social solidarity — three goals that are intimately related to justice. Finally, it tries to shed light on the basic trade-offs that accompany some of the choices that have to be made in the process of constructing a comprehensive and coherent reparations program. (shrink)

La lectio divina es un ejercicio ascético y espiritual usado por la comunicad cristiana en las asambleas litúrgicas. Desde los Padres del Desierto su práctica nunca se ha extinguido como ejercicio espiritual. Ahora parece haber vuelto con fuerza como ejercicio de lectura de la Palabra de Dios. La primera parte del artículo recrea los datos históricos fundamentales, la segunda explica su validez para los cristianos y las comunidades de nuestro tiempo.

One of the dominating themes in the first part is the negative treatment that Marx’s concept of labor has received by late critical theorists, particularly Habermas. While supportive of the rejection of Marx’s economic functionalism entailed by Habermas’s adoption of communicative action as the basic category of critical theory, Honneth worries about the indifference towards the normative potential of labor that he sees in most twentieth-century social theory. Honneth agrees with critics of reductionism that labor is neither the only form (...) of social reproduction, nor a primary source of emancipatory consciousness, as the fragmentation and depolitization of a working class that has suffered the effects of Taylorism clearly manifests. But Honneth is still convinced that the experience of recognition is to a large extent associated with work, and that Habermas tends to understand interaction in terms of instrumental action, making the concept of interaction inadequate to capture the sort of normative claims expressed by workers who do not see themselves sufficiently recognized in the labor they do. Although Honneth acknowledges that he has not settled how to navigate between these competing interests, the clarity of the call for a more complex concept of labor justifies the inclusion of these papers in the volume. (shrink)

After drawing a distinction between a cosmopolitan attitude and institutional cosmopolitanism, this paper reconstructs Habermas’s account of the relationship between morality and law in order to argue that this account can be the basis of a cosmopolitan attitude which, although insufficient, on its own, to ground cosmopolitan institutions, can, nonetheless, motivate interest in institutional cosmopolitanism. The paper then examines Habermas’s proposal for institutionalizing a system of cosmopolitan governance. It distinguishes and explores the reach and limitations of three arguments in favor (...) of institutional cosmopolitanism not always adequately differentiated in Habermas’s work: (a) an argument from the weakness of the nation state, (b) an argument from the democratic deficit of nationalism, and (c) an argument from the state’s incapacity to guarantee human rights. (shrink)

El objetivo de esta contribución es detallar el proceso para realizar un estudio sobre la población de un municipio que permita la elaboración de un diagnóstico sociológico. Para ello, se identificarán variables demográficas, económicas, sociales y de participación pública. El proceso permite alcanzar la información mínima y necesaria para el desarrollo de la primera fase de un proyecto enfocado hacia la planificación de políticas públicas: la fase de diagnóstico sociológico. El estudio de dichos elementos estructurales permite obtener resultados detallados de (...) la población y confeccionar las tesis fundamentales sobre las necesidades y problemáticas sociales que se presentan. (shrink)

This article describes and proposes the “environmental subsidiarity principle” as a guiding ethical value in forestry governance. Different trends in environmental management such as local participation, decentralization or global governance have emerged in the last two decades at the global, national and local level. This article suggests that the conscious or unconscious application of subsidiarity has been the ruling principle that has allocated the level at which tasks have been assigned to different agents. Based on this hypothesis this paper describes (...) the principle of subsidiarity and its application to environmental policies within forest governance and proposes the “environmental subsidiarity” principle as a critical conceptual tool for sustainable resource management. The paper explains as an example how “environmental subsidiarity” is the key principle that can link payment for ecosystem services (PES) with environmental public policies and applies this principle with all its political consequences to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and enhancing forest carbon stocks in developing countries (REDD+) architecture. It concludes by showing how the adoption of “environmental subsidiarity” as a ethical principle could help to maximize benefits to all stakeholders involved in PES schemes such as REDD+. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Most theorem provers for Classical Logic transform the input formula into a particular normal form. This tranformation is done before the execution of the algorithm or it is integrated into the deductive algorithm. This situation is no different for Non-Classical Logics and, particularly, for Temporal Logics. However, unlike classical logic, temporal logic does not provide an extension of the notion of non negative normal form. In this work, we define a temporal negative normal form for the future fragment of (...) the linear time propositional temporal logic, named FNext. The definition saves as much information as possible about implicants and implicates of the input formula and its subformulas. This property is the novelty of this normal form; for example, in [Fis97] the normal form is guided by the separation property and in [Ven86] the normal form provided prepares the input formula to be treated by a resolution method. Moreover, we also introduce an algorithm having linear cost, which transforms the input formula into a temporal negative normal form. Furthermore, in this work we present a new structure and a set of operators over it that allows us to efficiently manage the information about unitary implicants and implicates contained in the subformulae. (shrink)

The main aim of the study is to ascertain contrastively, in English and Spanish, how directive speech acts are represented in film discourse. For the purpose of the investigation, the directive speech acts of 24 films, 12 in English and 12 in Spanish, were extracted and analysed. A classification taxonomy, inspired by previous research, was created in order to categorize the different types of directive speech acts and determine their level of (in)directness. The results show that indirectness is more widely (...) represented in the English than in the Spanish film scripts, thus confirming the assertion that being indirect is a distinctive feature of English native speakers (Grundy, 2008). This research makes a valuable contribution to the exploration of speech acts in filmspeak and informs the existing local grammar descriptions of the linguistic patterns of directive speech acts. (shrink)

Muchas de las teorías educativas actuales son de corte constructivista. En este artículo, reflexionamos sobre diversas cuestiones antropológico-filosóficas que justifican los postulados del constructivismo aplicados a la didáctica expuestos por Giovanni Marcello Iafrancesco. Cuando nos adentramos en el constructivismo epistemológico encontramos diferentes orientaciones teóricas. Algunas de ellas se relacionan con la epistemología evolucionista y la idea de selección natural. Por ello, tras la introducción, se realiza una crítica a la idea de selección natural en el campo antropológico, después de la (...) cual aparecen expuestas las ideas necesarias para que los postulados del constructivismo, aplicados a la didáctica, resulten evidentes. (shrink)

The following analysis consider one of the most recognized movies in the history of Cinema, “A Clockwork Orange”, identifying and examining the elements of the narration, which characterize it as a satire. However, this assertion lead to ask, which type of satire represent the Film. To structure these characterizations will be allude the Satire Theory of Friedrich Schiller, which works to delimitate not only the satirical elements of the story, but the mode the movie takes to become a critic to (...) the society. This will show how the Movie operate as a moralizing reflection, whose originality lies in the employment of the Satire to carry out this reflection. (shrink)