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Humanist celebrant The British Humanist Association has in the past described officiants as follows:Officiants are generally at least 35 years old, have experience of public speaking, and have probably had paid or voluntary experience in a caring/supporting profession – such as nursing, teaching, police or social work, for example. They must be able to cope with the emotional burden of regularly meeting and working with bereaved people - often in relation to particularly difficult or unexpected deaths, such as the death of a child in a road accident. Funeral directors are able to make arrangements with trained officiants in their local area. Humanist funerals have reportedly been held in recent years for Claire Rayner, Keith Floyd, Linda Smith, Ronnie Barker, Lynsey de Paul, and Terry Jones, Victoria Wood, Doris Lessing, John Noakes, David Nobbs, Cynthia Payne, Dale Winton, and Bob Monkhouse, among others. The humanist funeral for former First Minister of Wales Rhodri Morgan in 2017 was the first national funeral in the United Kingdom to be led by a humanist celebrant, former AM Lorraine Barrett, as well as the first national funeral held in Wales. Celebrants also undertake humanist baby namings as a non-religious alternative to ceremonies such as christenings. The purpose is to recognise and celebrate the arrival of a child, and welcome him or her in the family and circle of friends. In Ireland, the Humanist Association of Ireland manages its own network of humanist ceremonies | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8198900 | Humanist celebrant |
Humanist celebrant Since 2012, these have been legally recognised, as in Scotland. In 2015, humanist marriages accounted for 6% of all marriages in Ireland, making them six times more popular than the Church of Ireland's weddings. Laws in each state of the United States vary about who has the right to perform wedding services, but humanist celebrants are usually categorized as "clergy" and have the same rights and responsibilities as ordained clergy. Humanist celebrants will perform both opposite-sex and same-sex marriage ceremonies. The Humanist Society, an adjunct of the American Humanist Association, maintains a list of humanist celebrants. Humanists conduct wedding ceremonies across Canada. These typically happen under the auspices of the national Humanist Canada group or through one of the province-level groups such as the British Columbia Humanist Association. Humanist weddings, funerals, and naming ceremonies are popular throughout Scandinavia, where humanist groups tend to be well-established. Humanist coming of age ceremonies are also popular in these countries, and in particular Norway, where humanists also conduct legally binding weddings. In Norway, coming of age ceremonies are a cultural norm dating back to when it was a legal requirement for young people to have a church-led confirmation ceremony. In an increasingly secular population, many Norwegians turn to the Norwegian Humanist Association (NHA) instead for a 'confirmation' that reflects their values | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8198900 | Humanist celebrant |
Humanist celebrant In 2017, 11,000 Norwegian young people registered for their ceremony with the NHA, representing nearly one in five young Norwegians. Humanist groups providing ceremonies as part of Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands are well-established across Germany and are particularly prominent in many of Germany's cities, where majorities of residents are non-religious. As in Scandinavia, humanist coming-of-age ceremonies are very popular, due to secularisation and a pre-existing tradition of religious confirmation. "Jugendweihe" ceremonies have been on offer since at least 1852, although these days they are more likely to be referred to as "Jugendfeier" (youth celebration, as opposed to youth ordination). 8,500 young Germans took part in these ceremonies in 2015. Humanist weddings are not legally recognized in Italy but, by law, civil weddings can be officiated by the mayor, or anyone delegated by the mayor, as long as they have active and passive suffrage. With the mayor’s permission, then, the couple can choose an independent celebrant who can marry them legally within a humanist ceremony. Even though they are not legally recognized in their own right, humanist or symbolic weddings have been celebrated in Italy for years, usually as an add-on to the registrar marriage. The first was celebrated in 2002 at Burio Castle in Asti, by Vera Pegna, deputy secretary of the Italian organization UAAR (Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics) | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8198900 | Humanist celebrant |
Humanist celebrant This organization was also the first to promote training courses for humanist celebrants in Italy, and has recently increased the number of courses it offers and fully subsidizes. Other bodies and individuals are now beginning to charge trainee celebrants for their courses. As far as funerals are concerned, there is no official civil ceremonies in Italy, which means that humanist or independent celebrants can be called upon to officiate a funeral with no legal impediments. The main problem is that only some larger towns and cities provide an appropriate, officially recognized, well-equipped venue where a secular funeral can be held. Where this is lacking, non-religious ceremonies must be held outdoors, at the burial or scattering site, or in cramped, unbefitting environments. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8198900 | Humanist celebrant |
Mid-twentieth century baby boom The middle of the 20th century was marked by a significant and persistent increase in fertility rates in many countries of the world, especially in the West, helping create the baby boomer generation. Although the baby boom is traditionally considered to be the post-war phenomenon started immediately after World War II, some demographers place it earlier, at the increase of births during the war or the late 1930s. The boom coincided with the marriage boom, a significant increase in nuptiality. The increase in fertility was driven primarily by decrease in childlessness and increase in parity progression to a second child. In most of the Western countries, progression to a third child and beyond declined which, coupled with aforementioned increase in transition to first and second child, resulted in higher homogeneity in family sizes. The baby boom was most prominent among educated and economically active women. The baby boom ended with the significant decline in fertility in the 1960s and 1970s which was later called by demographers the baby-bust. Economist and demographer Richard Easterlin in his "Twentieth Century American Population Growth" (2000), explains the growth pattern of the American population in the 20th century by examining the fertility rate fluctuations and the decreasing mortality rate. Easterlin attempts to prove the cause of the baby boom and baby bust by the "relative income" theory, despite the various other theories that these events have been attributed to | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8210419 | Mid-twentieth century baby boom |
Mid-twentieth century baby boom The "relative income" theory suggests that couples choose to have children based on a couple's ratio of potential earning power and the desire to obtain material objects. This ratio depends on the economic stability of the country and how people are raised to value material objects. The "relative income" theory explains the baby boom by suggesting that the late 1940s and the 1950s brought low desires to have material objects, because of the Great Depression and World War II, as well as plentiful job opportunities (being a post-war period). These two factors gave rise to a high relative income, which encouraged high fertility. Following this period, the next generation had a greater desire for material objects, however, an economic slowdown in the United States made jobs harder to acquire. This resulted in lower fertility rates causing the Baby Bust. Jan Van Bavel and David S. Reher proposed that the increase in nuptiality (marriage boom) coupled with low efficiency of contraception was the main cause of the baby boom. They doubted the explanations (including the Easterlin hypothesis) which considered the post-war economic prosperity that followed deprivation of the Great Depression as main cause of the baby boom, stressing that GDP-birth rate association was not consistent (positive before 1945 and negative after) with GDP growth accounting for a mere 5 percent of the variance in the crude birth rate over the period studied by the authors | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8210419 | Mid-twentieth century baby boom |
Mid-twentieth century baby boom Data shows that only in few countries there was significant and persistent increase in the marital fertility index during the baby boom, which suggests that most of the increase in fertility was driven by the increase in marriage rates. Jona Schellekens claims that the rise in male earnings that started in the late 1930s accounts for most of the rise in marriage rates and that Richard Easterlin's hypothesis according to which a relatively small birth cohort entering the labor market caused the marriage boom is not consistent with data from the United States. Matthias Doepke, Moshe Hazan, and Yishay Maoz all argued that the baby boom was mainly caused by the alleged crowding out from the labor force of females who reached adulthood during the 1950s by females who started to work during the Second World War and did not quit their jobs after the economy recovered. Andriana Bellou and Emanuela Cardia promote a similar argument, but they claim women who entered the labor force during the Great Depression crowded out women who participated in the baby boom. Glenn Sandström disagrees with both variants of this interpretation based on the data from Sweden showing that an increase in nuptiality (which was one of the main causes of an increase in fertility) was limited to economically active women. He pointed out that in 1939 a law prohibiting the firing of a woman when she got married was passed in the country | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8210419 | Mid-twentieth century baby boom |
Mid-twentieth century baby boom Greenwood, Seshadri, and Vandenbroucke ascribe the baby boom to the diffusion of new household appliances that led to reduction of costs of childbearing. However Martha J. Bailey and William J. Collins criticize their explanation on the basis that improvement of household technology began before baby boom, differences and changes in ownership of appliances and electrification in U.S. counties are negatively correlated with birth rates during baby boom, that the correlation between cohort fertility of the relevant women and access to electrical service in early adulthood is negative, and that Amish also experienced the baby boom. Judith Blake and Prithwis Das Gupta point out the increase in ideal family size in the times of baby boom. Peter Lindert partially attribute the baby boom to the extension of income tax coverage on most of the US population in the early 1940s. The latter actualize already existed and newly created tax exemptions for children and married couples creating the new incentive for earlier marriage and higher fertility. It is proposed that because of the fact that the taxation was progressive the baby boom was more pronounced among the richer population. In the United States and Canada the baby boom was among the highest in the world. In 1946, live births in the U.S. surged from 222,721 in January to 339,499 in October. By the end of the 1940s, about 32 million babies had been born, compared with 24 million in the 1930s | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8210419 | Mid-twentieth century baby boom |
Mid-twentieth century baby boom In 1954, annual births first topped four million and did not drop below that figure until 1965, when four out of ten Americans were under the age of 20. As a result of the marriage boom getting married immediately after high school was becoming commonplace and women were increasingly under tremendous pressure to marry by the age of 20. The stereotype developed that women were going to college to earn their M.R.S. (Mrs.) degree. The baby boom was stronger among American Catholics than among Protestants. The exact beginning and end of the baby boom is debated. The U.S. Census Bureau defines "baby boomers" as those born between mid-1946 and mid-1964, although the U.S. birth rate began to shoot up in 1941 and to decline after 1957. Deborah Carr considers baby boomers to be those born between 1944 and 1959, while Strauss and Howe place the beginning of the baby boom in 1943. In Canada, the baby boom is usually defined as occurring from 1947 to 1966. Canadian soldiers were repatriated later than American servicemen, and Canada's birthrate did not start to rise until 1947. Most Canadian demographers prefer to use the later date of 1966 as the boom's end year in that country. The later end than the US is ascribed to a later adoption of birth control pills. In the United States more babies were born during the seven years after 1948 than in the previous 30, causing a shortage of teenage babysitters | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8210419 | Mid-twentieth century baby boom |
Mid-twentieth century baby boom Madison, New Jersey, for example, only had 50 high-school girls to babysit for a town of 8,000, and any sitter could have had two sitting jobs at once if desired. $5 of the $7 that a California couple spent to go to the movies in 1950 went to the babysitter. The volume of baby boom was the largest in the world in New Zealand and second-largest in Australia. Like the US, the New Zealand baby boom was stronger among Catholics than Protestants. The author and columnist Bernard Salt places the Australian baby boom between 1946 and 1961. In the United Kingdom the baby boom occurred in two waves. After a short first wave of the baby boom during the war and immediately after, peaking in 1946, the United Kingdom experienced a second wave during the 1960s, with a peak in births in 1964. The baby boom in Ireland began during the state of emergency which existed in the country during the Second World War. Laws on contraception were restrictive in Ireland and the baby boom was more prolonged in this country. Secular decline of fertility began only in the 1970s and particularly after the legalization of contraception in 1979. The marriage boom was even more prolonged and did not recede until the 1980s. France and Austria experienced the strongest baby booms in Europe. In contrast to most other countries, the French and Austrian baby booms were driven primarily by an increase in marital fertility. In the French case, pronatalist policies were an important factor in this increase | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8210419 | Mid-twentieth century baby boom |
Mid-twentieth century baby boom Weaker baby booms occurred in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands. Baby boom was absent or very strong in Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain. There were however regional variations in Spain with a considerable baby boom occurring in such regions as Catalonia. There was a strong baby boom in Czechoslovakia, but it was weak or absent in Poland, Bulgaria, Russia, Estonia and Lithuania. The baby boom was very strong in Norway and Iceland, significant in Finland, moderate in Sweden and relatively weak in Denmark. Along with the developed countries of the West, many developing countries (among them Morocco, China and Turkey) also witnessed the baby boom. The baby boom in Mongolia, one of such developing countries, is probably explained by improvement in health and living standards related to the establishment of a socialist society. The baby boom also occurred in most Latin American countries (with the exception of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay). An increase in fertility was driven by a decrease in childlessness and, in most nations, by an increase in parity progression to second, third and fourth births. Its magnitude was largest in Costa Rica and Panama. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8210419 | Mid-twentieth century baby boom |
Source protection Source protection, sometimes also referred to as source confidentiality or in the U.S. as the reporter's privilege, is a right accorded to journalists under the laws of many countries, as well as under international law. It prohibits authorities, including the courts, from compelling a journalist to reveal the identity of an anonymous source for a story. The right is based on a recognition that without a strong guarantee of anonymity, many would be deterred from coming forward and sharing information of public interests with journalists. Regardless of whether the right to source confidentiality is protected by law, the process of communicating between journalists and sources can jeopardize the privacy and safety of sources, as third parties can hack electronic communications or otherwise spy on interactions between journalists and sources. News media and their sources have expressed concern over government covertly accessing their private communications. To mitigate these risks, journalists and sources often rely on encrypted messaging. Due to the centrality of communication between journalists and sources to the daily business of journalism, the question of whether or not sources can expect to have their identity protected has significant effects on the ability of media to operate and investigate cases. If a potential source can expect to face legal retaliation or other personal harm as a result of talking to a journalist, they may be less willing to talk to the media | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8216055 | Source protection |
Source protection In Africa, the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights has adopted a "Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression in Africa" which includes a right to protection of sources under Principle XV. In Europe, the European Court of Human Rights stated in the 1996 case of "Goodwin v. United Kingdom" that "[p]rotection of journalistic sources is one of the basic conditions for press freedom ... Without such protection, sources may be deterred from assisting the press in informing the public on matters of public interest. As a result the vital public-watchdog role of the press may be undermined and the ability of the press to provide accurate and reliable information may be adversely affected." The Court concluded that absent "an overriding requirement in the public interest", an order to disclose sources would violate the guarantee of free expression in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In the wake of "Goodwin", the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers issued a Recommendation to its member states on how to implement the protection of sources in their domestic legislation. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has also called on states to respect the right. In Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania unauthorized access to information by government entities were identified in several cases. In those political regions, policies such as mandatory registration of pre-paid SIM mobile phone cards and government access to CCTV make hacking tools and surveillance a lot easier | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8216055 | Source protection |
Source protection In the Netherlands, a 2006 case ruled that in cases of minimal national security interest do not supersede source confidentiality. Bart Mos and Joost de Haas, of the Dutch daily "De Telegraaf". In an article in January 2006, the two journalists alleged the existence of a leak in the Dutch secret services and quoted from what they claimed was an official dossier on Mink Kok, a notorious criminal. They further alleged that the dossier in question had fallen into the hands of Kok himself. A subsequent police investigation led to the prosecution of Paul H., an agent accused of selling the file in question. Upon motions by the prosecution and the defence, the investigative judge in the case ordered the disclosure of the source for the news story, on the grounds that it was necessary to safeguard national security and ensure a fair trial for H. The two journalists were subsequently detained for refusing to comply with the disclosure order, but were released on appeal after three days, on November 30. The Hague district court considered that the national security interest served by the order was minor and should not prevail over the protection of sources. In the Americas, protection of sources has been recognized in the "Inter-American Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression", which states in Principle 8 that "every social communicator has the right to keep his/her source of information, notes, personal and professional archives confidential | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8216055 | Source protection |
Source protection " In the United States, unlike doctor-patient or lawyer-client confidentiality, reporters are not afforded a similar legal shield. Communications between reporters and sources have been used by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies as an avenue to information about specific individuals or groups related to pending criminal investigations. In the 1971 case of "Branzburg v. Hayes" the court ruled that reporter's privilege was not guaranteed by the First Amendment, but the publicity surrounding the case helped introduce the concept of reporter's privilege into public discussion. As a result of the case, Branzburg"," a Kentucky reporter, was forced to testify about his sources and story to a grand jury. A University of Montana student, Linda Tracy, was issued a subpoena for video she took of a violent encounter between police officers and a group of residents. The case, which was ultimately dismissed, involved attaining unedited footage of the encounter which part of was used in a documentary Linda Tracy made as for an undergraduate journalism class. Although she won the case, her status as a real journalist was called into question. Even with the victory, the court did not specifically address if protections and privacy extended to student journalists, but because of the nature of her intent and the project she could not be coerced to releasing the footage. The case helped help further battles in student journalism and press freedoms at an educational level | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8216055 | Source protection |
Source protection The Electronic Communications Privacy Act passed in 1986 and protects bank transactions, telephone digits, and other information. The act also encompasses what organizations must provide to law enforcement with a subpoena, such as name, address, durations of services used, type of device used, and source of payment. This is known as “required disclosure” policies. It later included provisions to prohibit access to stored electronic devices. Former CIA employee Edward Snowden further impacted the relationship between journalism, sources, and privacy. Snowden's actions as a whistleblower at the National Security Agency drew attention to the extent of US government surveillance operations. Surveillance by network administrators may include being able to view how many times a journalist or source visits a website per day, the information they are reading or viewing, and online applications they utilize. In Mexico, it is reported that the government there has spent $300 million during one year to surveil and gather information from the population with specific interest in journalists to get access to their texts, phone calls, and emails. Newsrooms rely on end-to-end encryption technologies to protect the confidentiality of their communications. However, even these methods are not completely effective. More schools of journalism are also beginning to include data and source protection and privacy into their curriculum | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8216055 | Source protection |
Source protection Technologies used to protect source privacy include SecureDrop , GlobaLeaks , Off-the-Record Messaging, the Tails operating system, and Tor. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8216055 | Source protection |
Homophobic propaganda (or anti-gay propaganda) is propaganda based on homonegativity and homophobia towards homosexual and sometimes other non-heterosexual people. Such propaganda supports anti-gay prejudices and stereotypes, and promotes social stigmatization or discrimination. The term "homophobic propaganda" was used by the historian Stefan Micheler in his work "Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of Same-Sex-Desiring Men under National Socialism", as well as other works treating the topic. In some countries, some forms of homophobic propaganda are considered hate speech and are prohibited by law. Political attitudes towards homosexuals in Nazi Germany were based on the assumption that homosexuals were destroying the German nation as "sexual degenerates". Historian Erwin J. Haeberle dates the first appearance of this political attitude to 14 May 1928. Categorized as a ‘biocracy’ by Maastricht University professor Harry Oosterheis, the Nazi regime was primarily concerned with the fact that homosexual men could not bear offspring—and therefore could not ultimately contribute to the spread of the Aryan race. Though homosexuals in Nazi Germany were not persecuted systematically, researchers estimate that around 50,000 homosexual men were convicted for ‘unnatural vice’, and between 10 and 30% of this proportion were ultimately sent to concentration camps. In Russia, it is illegal to commit crimes against someone based on their social group, and LGBT people are considered a separate social group by law | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8216996 | Homophobic propaganda |
Homophobic propaganda Responsibility for it is established item 136 and item 282 of the criminal code of the Russian Federation. However, on June 30, 2013, President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill banning the "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations" among minors, and prohibits the equation of same-sex and straight marital relationships. "Vice News" claims that many LGBT rights groups have been transformed "from being a stigmatized fringe group to full-blown enemies of the state" in Russia following the introduction of this law, and that openly homophobic and neo-Nazi groups such as Occupy Paedophilia have been described by Russian authorities as "civil movements fighting the sins of society". In 1981, Norway became the first country to establish a criminal penalty (a fine or imprisonment for up to two years) for public threats, defamations, expressions of hate, or agitation for discrimination towards the LGBT community. On July 1, 1987 in the Netherlands joined the Dutch Penal code, which established punishment for public defamations on the basis of sexual orientation as fees or imprisonment for up to two years. In 1989 in Ireland a resolution against anti-gay hate speech came into effect. It establishes penalty in the form of fees or imprisonment for up to two years for publication or distribution of materials which contain defamations, threats, hate speech or offenses for LGBT people. The law is occasionally taken into effect | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8216996 | Homophobic propaganda |
Homophobic propaganda On 2 March 1993 in New South Wales, Australia, an amendment to the antidiscrimination law came into effect which prohibits public hate speech, despisement or ridiculing of homosexuals. A legal exclusion is any information which is distributed for educational, religious, scientific or social purposes. On 10 December 1999 an analogous amendment was accepted by Tasmanian parliament, which permits no exclusion. In February 2000 the South African Parliament enacted the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act, which prohibits hate speech based on any of the constitutionally prohibited grounds, including sexual orientation. The definition of hate speech includes speech which is intended to "promote or propagate hatred". Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 added section 2A to the Local Government Act 1986, which forbade local authorities from being allowed to "promote homosexuality", or "promote the teaching in any maintained school the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship". It was repealed on 21 June 2000 in Scotland as one of the first pieces of legislation enacted by the new Scottish Parliament, and on 18 November 2003 in the rest of the United Kingdom by section 122 of the Local Government Act 2003. Spain's antidiscrimination laws ban hate speech in regards to sexual orientation and gender identity since 1995. Discrimination, hate, or violence on the premise of either of the aforementioned factors is punishable by up to three years in prison | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8216996 | Homophobic propaganda |
Homophobic propaganda Other countries which ban anti-LGBT discrimination include Albania, Andora, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Kosovo, Malta, Northern Cyprus, Portugal, Serbia, Belgium, France, Guernsey, Ireland, Isle of Man, Jersey, Luxembourg, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Norfolk Island, New Zealand, Fiji, New Caledonia, Micronesia, Easter Island, French Polynesia, Pitcairn Islands, and Wallis and Futuna. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8216996 | Homophobic propaganda |
Heteronomy refers to action that is influenced by a force outside the individual, in other words the state or condition of being ruled, governed, or under the sway of another, as in a military occupation. Immanuel Kant, drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, considered such an action nonmoral. It is the counter/opposite of autonomy. Philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis contrasted heteronomy with autonomy by noting that while all societies create their own institutions (laws, traditions and behaviors), autonomous societies are those in which their members are aware of this fact, and explicitly self-institute (αυτο-νομούνται). In contrast, the members of heteronomous societies (hetero = others) attribute their imaginaries to some extra-social authority (e.g., God, the state, ancestors, historical necessity, etc.). | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8218816 | Heteronomy |
Gloria Origgi (born 1967) is an Italian philosopher at the CNRS in Paris (Institut Jean Nicod) who works on the theory of mind, epistemology and social sciences applied to new technology. She is the founder (in 2002) and director of the innovative project, a portal where many international virtual conferences in the social and cognitive sciences are being organized. She is the author of the book 'Reputation', published by Princeton University Press in 2017. has previously published a book on the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, "Introduzione a Quine", Laterza, 2000. She has edited the collection of essays "Text-e. Text in the age of the Internet", Palgrave, 2006, based on a web conference that she co-organized with Noga Arikha and the research team of the library of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (contributors include Umberto Eco, Jason Epstein, Dan Sperber and Theodore Zeldin). She has published numerous articles on social epistemology and cultural issues in English, French and Italian. Among her books: "Qu'est-ce que la confiance?" VRIN, 2008; "La réputation", PUF 2015 (translated into Italian and into English) Her first work in Italian, "La Figlia della Gallina Nera" was published in Italy by "Nottetempo" (2008). She also writes for various newspapers and cultural magazines such as Il Fatto Quotidiano, MicroMega, Il Sole 24 Ore. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8234546 | Gloria Origgi |
Erazim Kohák (21 May 1933 – 8 February 2020) was Czech philosopher and writer. His early education was in Prague. After communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, his family escaped to the United States. He died in February 2020 at the age of 86. Kohák was born in Prague in May 1933. He studied at Colgate University, earning a B.A. in 1954, and then studied philosophy, theology and religious studies at Yale University (M.A. in 1957, PhD in 1958). He also worked at Gustavus Adolphus College and Boston University (Professor in 1977). After the Velvet revolution in 1989, he returned to Czechoslovakia to become a professor at Charles University in Prague. Since 2006, he has been a senior research fellow in the Centre of Global Studies in the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. He supported several non-governmental ecological organizations and was a member of the honorary board of Děti Země (Children of the Earth) and Společnost pro trvale udržitelný život (Society for Sustainable Living). Kohak has said in 2007 for BBC: "We have nothing to fear from a Russia in the ascendant." | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8240687 | Erazim Kohák |
Al-Isra, 26 Quran 17:26 (also notated Al-Isra, 26) is the twenty-sixth verse of "Al-Isra", the seventeenth chapter of the Quran, which relates to the controversies of the land of Fadak in modern-day Saudi Arabia. The verse is also known as the Verse of Dhul Qurba. writes: This hadith is also included by: writes regarding this verse: Refer to the commentary of "Anfal": 41 and "Nahl": 90. Ibn Jarir reports that once Imam Ali bin Husayn al Zayn al Abidin said to a Syrian: "We are the near of kin referred to in this verse." Abd ibn Salih, a courtier, had reported that Mamun al Rashid wrote a letter to Abdullah ibn Musa to know his opinion about the issue of Fadak. Ibn Musa quoted the above noted tradition. Then Mamun returned the land of Fadak to the children of Fatimah. The land the Jews left without an heir was distributed by the Muhammad, as commanded by God (see Anfal: 1), with the consent of the "ansar" , among the "muhajirin" ( who had abandoned their properties in Mecca. Many gardens and tracts of land, Fatimah inherited from her mother, Khadijah, were in and around Mecca. Through this verse God directed Muhammad to give Fatimah her due rights. So he gave her the garden of Fadak in fulfilment of her share as a "muhajir" and also included his own share in it. During the lifetime of Muhammad, the land of Fadak was in the active possession of Fatimah, but after Muhammad's death, the first caliph, Abu Bakr, seized the land | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8241075 | Al-Isra, 26 |
Al-Isra, 26 The evidence of Ali, his sons Hasan and Husayn and Fatimah was rejected, notwithstanding their truthfulness according to the Quran (Al Imran Verse 61), (Al-Aḥzāb Verse 33). Her claim as the inheritor of Muhammad was also rejected. Sahih Muslim and Sahih Bukhari inform us that the caliph Umar used to point out Ali and Abbas as those who branded him and his predecessor as usurpers and liars in connection with the property of Fadak, and neither Ali nor Abbas ever denied it. Fatimah, after this incident, never spoke to Abu Bakr and Umar, and asked Ali not to allow them to attend her funeral prayers and burial. The confiscated property of Fadak was never used for the well-being of the people nor for the maintenance of the Muslim army. Every Umayyid ruler treated the garden of Fadak as his personal property, except Umar II, who, after making a thorough examination of the case, returned it to the "ahl al-bayt" (, i.e. Muhammad's family). The Abbasid rulers again took it away from the "ahl al-bayt" and used it as their property, till Mamun al Rashid again conducted a thorough inquiry by a special court of jurists before which a follower of the "ahl al-bayt" advocated their case and the state attorney opposed his arguments. At the end Mamun wrote the judgement in the form of a royal edict, awarding the land to the "ahl al-bayt", a summary of which has been recorded by al-Baladhuri in his book, "Fath al-Buldan" | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8241075 | Al-Isra, 26 |
Al-Isra, 26 Ibn Abi al-Hadid has also given a brief account of the arguments, for and against, in his commentary of the art of eloquence. Fatimah herself gave the strongest arguments in her favour in her address to the then-ruling party. "Biography of Bibi Fatimah Zahra", published by Peermahomed Ebrahim Trust. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8241075 | Al-Isra, 26 |
Personal alarm A personal alarm is a small hand-held electronic device with the functionality to emit a loud siren-like alarming sound. It is activated either by a button, or a tag that, when pulled, sets the siren off. It is used to attract attention in order to scare off an assailant. The sound emitted can also have the effect of distracting, disorienting, or surprising the assailant. The volume varies from model to model, with some models having 130 decibels. Some personal alarms are also outfitted with an LED light for normal lighting purposes or to help deter an assailant. Due attention must be given to the fact that these devices can give a 'false sense of security' and therefore place the individual in danger. Some personal safety apps emit a loud intermittent "shrill whistle", in the manner of a personal alarm. According to the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, the best way to use a personal alarm is to activate it, to drop it on the floor near the assailant, and then to immediately run away. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8242443 | Personal alarm |
Ezekiel Emanuel Ezekiel Jonathan "Zeke" Emanuel (born September 6, 1957) is an American oncologist and bioethicist and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He is the current Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy. Previously, Emanuel served as the Diane and Robert Levy University Professor at Penn. He holds a joint appointment at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Wharton School and was formerly an associate professor at the Harvard Medical School until 1998 when he joined the National Institutes of Health. Emanuel is the son of Benjamin M. Emanuel and Marsha (Smulevitz) Emanuel. His father, Benjamin M. Emanuel, is a Jerusalem-born pediatrician who was once a member of the Irgun, a Jewish paramilitary organization that operated in Mandate Palestine. He provided free care to poor immigrants and led efforts to get rid of lead paint due to its negative consequences for children and as of 2010 lived in a suburb of Chicago. Emanuel’s mother, Marsha, a nurse and psychiatric social worker who was raised in the North Lawndale community on Chicago's West Side, was active in civil rights, including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). She attended marches and demonstrations with her children. In a 2009 interview Emanuel recalled that in his childhood "worrying about ethical questions was very much part and parcel of our daily routine | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel " His two younger brothers are former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Hollywood-based talent agent Ari Emanuel. He has an adopted sister, Shoshana Emanuel, who has cerebral palsy. His father’s brother, Emanuel, was killed in the 1936 Arab Riots in the British Mandate of Palestine, after which the family changed its name from Auerbach to Emanuel in his honor. As children, the three Emanuel brothers shared a bedroom and spent summers together in Israel. All three brothers took ballet lessons in their childhood, which Emanuel says "hardened us and taught us that if you do something unusual, people will take potshots at you." Emanuel and his brother Rahm frequently argue about healthcare policy. Emanuel mimics his brother's end of the conversation: "You want to change the whole healthcare system, and I can’t even get SCHIP [State Children’s Health Insurance Program] passed with dedicated funding? What kind of idiot are you?" Emanuel graduated from Amherst College in 1979 and subsequently received his M.Sc. from Exeter College, Oxford in Biochemistry. He simultaneously studied for an M.D. and a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Harvard University, receiving the degrees in 1988 and 1989, respectively. He was a member of the first cohort of Faculty Fellows at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard from 1987–88. Emanuel completed an internship and residency at Beth Israel Hospital in internal medicine | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel Subsequently, he undertook fellowships in medicine and medical oncology at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, and is a breast oncologist. Emanuel received dozens of honors and awards, including the Toppan Dissertation Prize, the Harvard award for best political science dissertation of 1988 and the Dan David Prize for his contribution to the field of bioethics in 2018. Emanuel is a divorced father of three daughters. His daughter Gabrielle, a 2010 graduate of Dartmouth College, won a Rhodes scholarship in November 2010. His daughter Rebekah, a graduate of Yale University won a George J. Mitchell Scholarship in 2008. Another daughter Natalia, a 2013 graduate of Yale University, won a Marshall scholarship in November 2013, and is currently a Ph.D. student at Harvard University. After completing his post-doctoral training, Emanuel pursued a career in academic medicine, rising to the level of associate professor at Harvard Medical School in 1997. He soon moved into the public sector, and held the position of Chief of the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Emanuel served as Special Advisor for Health Policy to Peter Orszag, the former Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration. Emanuel entered the administration with different views from President Barack Obama on how to reform health care, but was said by colleagues to be working for the White House goals | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel Since September 2011, Emanuel has headed the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves as a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, under the official title Diane S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor. In articles and in his book "Healthcare, Guaranteed", Emanuel said that universal health care could be guaranteed by replacing employer paid health care insurance, Medicaid and Medicare with health care vouchers funded by a value-added tax. His plan would allow patients to keep the same doctor even if they change jobs or insurance plans. He would reduce co-payments for preventive care and tax or ban junk food from schools. He criticized the idea of requiring individuals to buy health insurance. However, he supports Obama's plans for health care reform, even though they differ from his own. In the article "Why Tie Health Insurance to a Job?", Emanuel said that employer based health insurance should be replaced by state or regional insurance exchanges that pool individuals and small groups to pay the same lower prices charged to larger employers. Emanuel said that this would allow portable health insurance even to people that lose their jobs or change jobs, while at the same time preserving the security of employer based health benefits by giving consumers the bargaining power of a large group of patients | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel According to Emanuel, this would end discrimination by health insurance companies in the form of denial of health insurance based on age or preexisting conditions. In "Solved!", Emanuel said that Universal Healthcare Vouchers would solve the problem of rapidly increasing health care costs, which, rising at three times the rate of inflation, would result in higher copayments, fewer benefits, stagnant wages and fewer employers willing to pay for health care benefits. In an article co-written by and Victor Fuchs, Emanuel co-wrote that employer-based health insurance has "inefficiencies and inequities", that Medicaid is "second-class" and that insuring more people without replacing those systems would be to build on a "broken system". He said, "in the short run they require ever more money to cover the uninsured, and in the long run the unabated rise in health costs will quickly revive the problem of the uninsured." He suggested that a federal agency be created to test the effectiveness of new health care technology. As Emanuel co-wrote, At $2 trillion per year, the U.S. health-care system suffers much more from inefficiency than lack of funds. The system wastes money on administration, unnecessary tests and marginal medicines that cost a lot for little health benefit. It also provides strong financial incentives to preserve such inefficiency. By building on the existing health-care system, these reform proposals entrench the perverse incentives | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel Moreover, even plans that reduce the number of uninsured today may find that those gains will disappear in a few years if costs continue to grow much faster than gross domestic product. As costs rise, many companies will drop insurance and pay the modest taxes or fees that have been proposed. States will find that costs exceed revenue and that cuts will have to be made. Emanuel said that replacing employer-based health insurance and programs like Medicaid would "improve efficiency and provide cost control for the health-care system." Emanuel and Fuchs reject a single-payer system, because it goes against American values of individualism. "The biggest problem with single-payer is its failure to cohere with core American values. Single-payer puts everyone into the same system with the same coverage and makes it virtually impossible to add amenities and services through the private market." In his book "The Ends of Human Life" Emanuel used the AIDS patient "Andrew" as an example of moral medical dilemmas. Andrew talked to a local support group and signed a living will asking that life sustaining procedures be withdrawn if there is no reasonable expectation of recovery. The will was not given to anyone but kept in his wallet, and no one was given power of attorney. There were questions about his competence since he had AIDS dementia when he signed the will. Still, Andrew's lover said that he had talked about such situations, and asked that Andrew be allowed to die | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel Andrew's family strongly disagreed that Andrew wanted to die. Dr. Wolf previously saved Andrew's life, but promised to help him avoid a "miserable death". The ICU wanted guidance from Dr. Wolf as to how aggressively they should try to keep Andrew alive, as his chances of surviving a cardiac arrest were about zero. Two other critical patients were recently refused admission because of a bed shortage. There was a question as to whether Andrew's lover was representing Andrew's wishes or his own. There was also a question as to whether Andrew’s parents knew Andrew better than others, or whether they were motivated by guilt from rejecting Andrew's identification as a gay male. The cost of aggressive treatment was $2,000 per day. This dilemma illustrates the ethical challenges faced by even the most conscientious physicians, in addition to patient confidentiality, the meaning of informed consent, and the ethics of experimental treatments, transplanting genes or brain tissue. Also, while many agree that every citizen should be given adequate health care, few agree on how to define what adequate health care is. Many of these issues have become almost insoluble moral dilemmas. Babies that would be born with serious birth defects pose a serious moral dilemma, and medical technology makes it sometimes difficult to define what death is in the case of permanently brain damaged patients on respirators. There are also ethical questions on how to allocate scarce resources | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel However, the Hippocratic Oath is proof that medical technology is not the cause of medical questions about ethics. Emanuel said the Hippocratic Oath and the codes of modern medical societies require doctors to maintain client patient confidentiality, refrain from lying to a patient, keep patients informed and obtain their consent, in order to protect the patient from manipulation and discrimination. Emanuel said that a doctor’s oath would never allow him to administer a lethal injection for capital punishment as a doctor, although the issue would be different if he were asked to serve on a firing squad not as a doctor but rather as a citizen. He said that in the case of mercy killing there are rare cases where the medical obligation to relieve suffering would be in tension with the obligation to save a life, and that a different argument (an argument that intentional killing "should not be used to achieve the legitimate ends of medicine") would be required instead. Emanuel believes that "liberal communitarianism" could be the answer. Citizens, according to this view, should be given rights needed to participate in democratic deliberations based on a "common conception of the good life". For example, vouchers could be granted through thousands of Community Health Programs (CHPs), each of which would agree on its own definition of the public good. Each CHP would decide which services would be covered as basic, and which services would not be covered | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel Emanuel said that legalizing euthanasia, as was done in the Netherlands, might be counterproductive, in that it would decrease support for pain management and mental health care. However, Emanuel does support the use of Medical Directives to allow patients to express their wishes when they can no longer communicate. Ezekiel, and his former wife Linda Emanuel, an M.D. Ph.D. bioethicist and geriatrician, created the Medical Directive, which is described as more specific and extensive than previous living wills and is a third generation Advance Directive. He claims the Hippocratic Oath debunks the theory that opposition to euthanasia is modern. Emanuel said that for the vast majority of dying patients, "legalizing euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide would be of no benefit. To the contrary, it would be a way of avoiding the complex and arduous efforts required of doctors and other health-care providers to ensure that dying patients receive humane, dignified care." Emanuel said that a historical review of opinions on euthanasia from ancient Greece to now "suggests an association between interest in legalizing euthanasia and moments when Social Darwinism and raw individualism, free markets and wealth accumulation, and limited government are celebrated." Emanuel said that it is a myth that most patients who want to die choose euthanasia because they are in extreme pain. He said that in his own experience, "those with pain are more likely than others to oppose physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel " He said that patients were more likely to want euthanasia because of "depression and general psychological distress ... a loss of control or of dignity, of being a burden, and of being dependent." He also said that the kind of legalized euthanasia practiced in the Netherlands would lead to an ethical "slippery slope" which would make it easier for doctors to rationalize euthanasia when it would save them the trouble of cleaning bedpans and otherwise caring for patients who want to live. He said that legalized euthanasia in the Netherlands did not adhere to all the legal guidelines, and that some newborns were euthanised even though they could not possibly have given the legally required consent. As Emanuel said, "The Netherlands studies fail to demonstrate that permitting physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia will not lead to the nonvoluntary euthanasia of children, the demented, the mentally ill, the old, and others. Indeed, the persistence of abuse and the violation of safeguards, despite publicity and condemnation, suggest that the feared consequences of legalization are exactly its inherent consequences." Emanuel also expressed the concern that budgetary pressures might be used to justify euthanasia if it were legal. As Emanuel said, Emanuel said that claims of cost saving from assisted suicide are a distortion, and that such costs are relatively small, including only 0.1 percent of total medical spending | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel In 2016, Emanuel wrote in the article "Attitudes and Practices of Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide in the United States"", Canada, and Europe" that existing data on physician-assisted suicide does not indicate widespread abuse. This article also noted that physician-assisted suicide has been increasingly legalized while remaining relatively rare and largely confined to oncology patients. The controversy surrounding Emanuel is due to claims by Betsy McCaughey and Sarah Palin accusing Emanuel of supporting euthanasia. Emanuel has opposed euthanasia. These claims have been used by Republicans opposing health care reform. Betsy McCaughey described as a "Deadly Doctor" in a "New York Post" opinion article. The article, which accused Emanuel of advocating healthcare rationing by age and disability, was quoted from on the floor of the House of Representatives by Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. Sarah Palin cited the Bachmann speech and said that Emanuel's philosophy was "Orwellian" and "downright evil", and tied it to a health care reform end of life counseling provision she claimed would create a "death panel". Emanuel said that Palin's death panel statement was "Orwellian". Palin later said that her death panel remark had been "vindicated" and that the policies of Emanuel are "particularly disturbing" and "shocking" | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel On former Senator Fred Thompson's radio program, McCaughey warned that "the healthcare reform bill would make it mandatory—absolutely require—that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner." She said those sessions would help the elderly learn how to "decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go in to hospice care ... all to do what's in society's best interest or in your family's best interest and cut your life short." As "The New York Times" mentioned, conservative pundits were comparing Nazi Germany's T4 euthanasia program to Obama’s policies as far back as November 2008, calling them "America's T4 program—trivialization of abortion, acceptance of euthanasia, and the normalization of physician assisted suicide." PolitiFact described McCaughey's claim as a "ridiculous falsehood." FactCheck.org said, "We agree that Emanuel’s meaning is being twisted. In one article, he was talking about a philosophical trend, and in another, he was writing about how to make the most ethical choices when forced to choose which patients get organ transplants or vaccines when supplies are limited." An article on Time.com said that Emanuel "was only addressing extreme cases like organ donation, where there is an absolute scarcity of resources ... 'My quotes were just being taken out of context.'" A decade ago, when many doctors wanted to legalize euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, Emanuel opposed it | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel Emanuel said the "death panel" idea is "an outright lie, a complete fabrication. And the paradox, the hypocrisy, the contradiction is that many of the people who are attacking me now supported living wills and consultations with doctors about end-of-life care, before they became against it for political reasons." "I worked pretty hard and against the odds to improve end-of-life care. And so to have that record and that work completely perverted—it's pretty shocking." Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., who sponsored the end-of-life provision in , said the measure would block funds for counseling that presents suicide or assisted suicide as an option, and called references to death panels or euthanasia "mind-numbing". Blumenauer said that as recently as April 2008 then-governor Palin supported end-of-life counseling as part of Health Care Decisions Day. Palin's office called this comparison "hysterically funny" and "desperate". Republican Senator Johnny Isakson, who co-sponsored a 2007 end-of-life counseling provision, called the euthanasia claim "nuts". Analysts who examined the end-of-life provision Palin cited agreed that it merely authorized Medicare reimbursement for physicians who provide voluntary counseling for advance health care directives (including living wills). According to Emanuel, the most important life-saving cancer drugs are rationed not by "death panels" but by The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, signed by President George W. Bush | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel The act limits Medicare payments for generic cancer drugs, which cuts profits from producing them and results in shortages. Emanuel's previous statements on rationing were about the "allocation of very scarce medical interventions such as organs and vaccines" such as who should get a "liver for transplantation". Ezekiel said that McCaughey's euthanasia claims were a "willful distortion of my record". Jim Rutennberg said that Emanuel's critics oversimplified complex issues, such as who should get a kidney. Such rationing was said to be unavoidable because of scarcity, and because a scarce resource such as a liver is "indivisible". Emanuel said that McCaughey took words out of context, omitting qualifiers such as "Without overstating it (and without fully defending it) ... Clearly, more needs to be done ..." Emanuel once compared the word "rationing" to George Carlin’s seven words you can't say on television. In 1994 Emanuel said in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, "Just because we are spending a lot of money on patients who die does not mean that we can save a lot of money on end of life care." Emanuel wrote "Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet" (1996) for the Hastings Center Report. In this article Emanuel questioned whether a defect in our medical ethics causes the failure of the US to enact universal health care coverage | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel The macro level of the issue is the proportion of total gross national product allotted to health care, the micro level is which individual patient will receive specific forms of health care, e.g., "whether Mrs. White should receive this available liver for transplantation." In between are the basic or essential health care services that should be provided to each citizen. The end-stage renal disease program is an example of a service that increases the total cost of health care, and reduces the amount that can be spent on basic or essential health care. Emanuel distinguished between basic services that should be guaranteed to everybody from discretionary medical services that are not guaranteed. The result would be a two tiered system, where those with more money could afford more discretionary services. He saw a failure to define basic services as the reason attempts at universal health care coverage have failed. As a result, the belief that universal health care would require unlimited costs makes any attempt at providing universal health care seem likely to end in national bankruptcy. Instead of universal coverage of basic health care, those who are well insured have coverage for many discretionary forms of health care and no coverage for some basic forms of health care. Emanuel said that while drawing a line separating basic and universal health care from discretionary health care is difficult, the attempt should be made | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel Emaniel mentioned the philosophies of Amy Gutmann, Norman Daniels and Daniel Callahan when arguing that there is an overlap between liberalism and communitarianism where civic republicanism and deliberative democracy meet. According to The Atlantic, Emanuel is describing the philosophy of John Rawls in arguing that society is choosing one value (equality) over another (a healthy society), and this substitution may be responsible for limited choices in health care. PolitiFact says that Emanuel was describing the fact that doctors often have to make difficult choices, such as who should get a liver transplant. PolitiFact also said, "Academics often write theoretically about ideas that are being kicked around. And they repeat and explore those ideas, without necessarily endorsing them." When asked if those who are not "participating citizens" should be denied health care, Emanuel said "No" and "The rest of the text around that quote made it made it pretty clear I was trying to analyze it and understand it, not endorse it." In 2009, Govind Persad, Alan Wertheimer and co-wrote another article on a similar topic in the journal The Lancet. Ezekiel was one of three authors who co-wrote "Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions", which examines eight theoretical approaches for dealing with "allocation of very scarce medical interventions such as organs and vaccines." All eight approaches were judged to be less than perfect, and the Complete Lives system combines most of them | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel Treating people equally could be accomplished by lottery or first come first served. A lottery system is simple and difficult to corrupt, but blind in that it would treat saving forty years of life the same as saving four months. A first come first served system seems fair at first, but favors the well off, those who are informed, can travel easily and who push to the front of a line. Favoring the worst off could be accomplished by favoring the sickest first or by favoring the youngest first. Favoring the sickest appeals to the rule of rescue, but organ transplants don’t always work well with the sickest patients. Also, a different patient could become equally sick in the future. Favoring the youngest saves the most years of life, but a twenty-year-old has a more developed personality than an infant. Maximizing total benefits or utilitarianism can be accomplished by saving the most lives or by prognosis (life years). While saving the most lives is best if all else is equal, all else is seldom equal. Going by prognosis alone might unfairly favor improving the health of a person who is healthy to begin with. Promoting and rewarding social usefulness can be accomplished through instrumental value or by reciprocity. Social usefulness is difficult to define, in that going by conventional values or favoring church goers might be unfair. Instrumental value, such as giving priority to workers producing a vaccine, cannot be separated from other values, like saving the most lives | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel Reciprocity (favoring previous organ donors or veterans) might seem like justice, but is backward looking and could lead to demeaning and intrusive inquiries into lifestyle. When resources (organs, vaccines and so forth) are scarce, the Complete Lives systems blends five different approaches (excluding first come first served, sickest first and reciprocity) but is weighted in favor of saving the most years of life. However, it also emphasizes the importance of saving the large investment of nurture and education spent on an adolescent. It would not favor the young when the prognosis is poor and the number of years of life saved would not be great, when dealing with scarcity. Emanuel said the Complete Lives system was not meant to apply to health care in general, but only to a situation where "we don’t have enough organs for everybody who needs a transplant. You have one liver, you have three people who need the liver - who gets it? The solution isn’t ‘We get more livers.’ You can’t. It’s a tragic choice." Of the 1996 Hastings Center Report, Emanuel said, "I was examining two different, abstract philosophical positions to see what they might offer in the context of redoing the health-care system and trying to reduce resource consumption in health care. It's as abstractly philosophical as you can get on a practical question. I qualified it in 27 different ways, saying it wasn't my view | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel " He also said, "As far as rationing goes, it's nothing I've ever advocated for the health system as a whole, and I've talked about rationing only in the context of situations where you have limited items, like limited livers or limited vaccine, and not for overall health care." Emanuel said that his words were selectively quoted, and misrepresent his views. He said, "I find it a little dispiriting, after a whole career's worth of work dedicated to improving care for people at the end of life, that now I'm 'advocating euthanasia panels.'" Emanuel spent his career opposing euthanasia and received multiple awards for his efforts to improve end of life care. Emanuel said, "It is incredible how much one's reputation can be besmirched and taken out of context" and "No one who has read what I have done for 25 years would come to the conclusions that have been put out there." Although Emanuel opposes legalized euthanasia, he believes that after age 75 life is not worth living, and the pursuit of longevity, not a worthwhile goal for U.S. health care policy. This is refuted by neurosurgeon and medical ethicist Miguel Faria, who in two articles in "Surgical Neurology International" claims that healthy lifestyles and brain plasticity can lead to the postponement of senescence and lead to happiness even as we age. In the 2008 "Journal of the American Medical Association" article "The Perfect Storm of Overutilization" Emanuel said, "Overall, US health care expenditures are 2 | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel 4 times the average of those of all developed countries ($2759 per person), yet health outcomes for US patients, whether measured by life expectancy, disease-specific mortality rates, or other variables, are unimpressive." He said that expensive drugs and treatments that provide only marginal benefits are the largest problems. Fee-for-service payments, physician directed pharmaceutical marketing, and medical malpractice laws and the resultant defensive medicine encourage overutilization. Direct-to-consumer marketing by pharmaceutical companies also drives up costs. According to "Time", Betsy McCaughey said that Emanuel "has criticized medical culture for trying to do everything for a patient, 'regardless of the cost or effects on others,' without making clear that he was not speaking of lifesaving care but of treatments with little demonstrated value." Emanuel made a related comment during a "Washington Post" interview, when he said that improving the quality and efficiency of healthcare to avoid unnecessary and even harmful care would be a way to avoid the need for rationing. One reason the high cost of health care yields disappointing results is because only 0.05 percent of health care dollars are spent on assessing how well new health care technology works. This is largely because health care lobbyists oppose such research | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel For example, when the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research found that there was little evidence to support common back operations, orthopedic and neurosurgeons lobbied to cut funding for such research. Emanuel said that fee-for-service reimbursements encourage spending on ineffective health care. However, more should be spent on fraud detection, coordinating health services for patients with multiple doctors, and evaluating the effectiveness of new medical technologies such as genetic fingerprints for cancer and better ways of managing intravenous lines. In a "Washington Post" article Emanuel co-wrote with Shannon Brownlee, they described the health care system as "truly dysfunctional, often chaotic", "spectacularly wasteful" and "expensive". In a 2007 slideshow "Conflicts of Interest", Emanuel said that there were conflicts of interest between a physician's primary responsibilities (providing optimal care for patients, promoting patient safety and public health) and a physician's secondary interests (publishing, educating, obtaining research funding, obtaining a good income and political activism). Emanuel said that while it is difficult to know when conflicts of interest exist, the fact that they do is "the truth". When there is no doubt of a conflict, the issue is not a mere conflict of interest, but fraud | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel In a 2007 article "Conflict of Interest in Industry-sponsored Drug Development" Emanuel said that there is a conflict between the primary interests of drug researchers (conducting and publishing good test results and protecting the patient) and secondary concerns (obligations to family and medical societies and money from industries). However, industry sponsored tests are more likely to use double-blind protocols and randomization, and more likely to preset study endpoints and mention adverse effects. Also, there is no evidence that patients are harmed by such studies. However, there is evidence that money influences how test results are interpreted. Emanuel mentioned the Selfox study on the use of calcium channel blockers in treating hypertension, in which authors with a financial interest in the results reported much better results than the rest. Worse yet, test results sponsored by industry are likely to be widely published only if the results are positive. For example, in a Whittington study for data on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, negative results were much less likely to be published than positive results. However, in "The Obligation to Participate in Biomedical Research" the authors Schaefer, Emanuel and Wertheimer said that people should be encouraged to view participation in biomedical research as a civic obligation, because of the public good that could result | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
Ezekiel Emanuel In a 2017 article "Conflict of Interest for Patient-Advocacy Organizations" Emanuel found that financial support of patient-advocacy organizations from drug, device, and biotechnology organizations was widespread (83% of reviewed organizations). Later that year, he argued in another article "Why There are No "Potential" Conflicts of Interest" that conflicts of interest exist whether or not bias or harm has actually occurred. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243661 | Ezekiel Emanuel |
William Wallace (philosopher) William Wallace (11 May 184418 February 1897) was a Scottish philosopher and academic who became fellow of Merton College and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University. He was best known for his studies of German philosophers, most notably Hegel, some of whose works he translated into highly regarded English editions. While reputedly forbidding in manner, he was known as an able and effective teacher and writer who succeeded in greatly improving the understanding of German philosophy in the English-speaking world. He died at the age of 52 after a bicycle accident near Oxford. Wallace was born at Railway Place in Cupar, Fife, the son of master-builder James Wallace and Jane Kelloch. He was the elder of two brothers and was educated at Madras Academy (now Bell Baxter High School) in Cupar before going on to St Andrews University to study arts. He developed a strong interest in the natural world, which led him to spend much time on walks in the countryside, cycling, botany and mountaineering. Although his parents had encouraged him to take up the study of theology as a precursor to a career in the clergy, Wallace realised that this would not best suit him and chose instead to study the Classics. He was awarded an exhibition at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied from 1864. In 1867 he became a fellow of Merton College. He gained his Bachelor of Arts the following year, gaining a first class in Moderations and in Literae Humaniores | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8247041 | William Wallace (philosopher) |
William Wallace (philosopher) He was also awarded the Gaisford Prize in 1867 for his work on Greek prose, becoming a tutor at Merton in the same year, and was elected as a Craven Scholar in 1869. His Master of Arts followed in 1871 and he was appointed as Merton's librarian. Wallace married Janet Barclay, a childhood friend from Cupar, on 4 April 1872. The couple had three children, a daughter and two sons. His younger brother Edwin Wallace studied at Oxford's Lincoln College and later served as vice-provost of Worcester College between 1881 and his death in 1884. In 1882, Wallace became the successor to Thomas Hill Green as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, a position which he held along with the Merton tutorship until his death fifteen years later. His "brusque and sarcastic" manner earned him the nickname "the Dorian", a nickname he acquired at Balliol, though this was said to conceal a "generous and affectionate" nature. He was described as a man of "much genuine nobleness and a staunch uprightness of thought and speech" whose "acquaintances were numerous and friendly, but his intimates few and attached." Wallace's work focused primarily on the study and diffusion of the ideas of the German philosophers Kant, Fichte, Herder, and Hegel, of whom it was said that his knowledge was exceptional. He was highly regarded as a teacher and lecturer, usually speaking without notes in a style described as "humorous, elegant, and yet earnest" that "produced a unique impression of insight and sincerity upon his students | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8247041 | William Wallace (philosopher) |
William Wallace (philosopher) " He sought to encourage his students to think critically and aimed to explain the sometimes arcane and technical nature of philosophical constructs in a way that was both readily understandable and expressed imaginatively, for instance commenting in one of his works that "the Absolute Idea [of Hegel] may be compared to the old man who utters the same creed as a child, but for whom it is pregnant with the significance of a lifetime". His writings included "The Logic and Prolegomena of Hegel" (1873), a translation of Hegel's "Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences". It was still regarded as "the most masterly and influential of all English translations of Hegel" when it was republished in 1975. The translation was accomplished in a free and creative style accompanied by extensive explanatory notes on the text, drawing parallels between the philosophy of Hegel and classical figures such as Plato and Aristotle. He published "Epicurean Philosophy" in 1880, tracing the origins of Epicureanism and highlighting the links between the life of Epicurus and the philosophy that he espoused. Wallace's "Kant" (1882), part of Blackwood's Philosophical Classics series, portrayed the German philosopher as engaged in a dialogue with John Locke and David Hume, two of the most influential British Empiricists. He published "The Life of Arthur Schopenhauer" in 1890 in which his biographical account was accompanied by a critique of the philosopher's rejection of empiricism and materialism | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8247041 | William Wallace (philosopher) |
William Wallace (philosopher) He attacked Schopenhauer's "unconquerable vanity" but praised his insight into the power of art and his belief that "the best life is one predicated on the underlying unity of all experience". He travelled extensively to research both works, touring Germany to learn about the cultural and geographical environment in which the German philosophers had lived and worked. A second edition of "The Logic of Hegel" followed in 1892 and a third edition was published in 1893 with a lengthy analytical introduction. Wallace's work on Hegel focused on the themes that most resonated with a British audience, such as unity and community, while giving relatively less attention to more alien ideas such as the dialectic. In 1894 he published a translation of the last part of Hegel's "Encyclopaedia" under the title of "The Philosophy of Mind", accompanied by five essays commenting on questions such as the method of psychology and how it related to ethics and theology. His final work, published posthumously by Edward Caird, was his "Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics" which he had delivered in 1892 at the University of Glasgow as part of the Gifford Lectures on the history of natural theology. Wallace died on 19 February 1897 as a result of a bicycle accident. While descending a steep hill at Enslow Bridge at Bletchington near Oxford, he lost control of his bicycle and hit a parapet wall, fracturing his skull | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8247041 | William Wallace (philosopher) |
William Wallace (philosopher) He was found unconscious under his bicycle and was carried on a hurdle to The Rock of Gibraltar Inn, where he died early the next day without regaining consciousness. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, with his wife and one of his sons. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8247041 | William Wallace (philosopher) |
Taboo on rulers Taboos regarding rulers includes both taboos on people coming into contact with a ruler and the taboos regarding the ruler themselves. Freud attributes the existence of such taboos to an unconscious current of hostility toward the king/ruler. In the following example the hostility toward the ruler is more obviously shown: But even in such glaring instances, however, the hostility is not admitted as such, but masquerades as a ceremonial. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8259064 | Taboo on rulers |
ReliefWeb is the largest humanitarian information portal in the world. Founded in 1996, the portal now hosts more than 720,000 humanitarian situation reports, press releases, evaluations, guidelines, assessments, maps and infographics. The portal is an independent vehicle of information, designed specifically to assist the international humanitarian community in effective delivery of emergency assistance. It provides information as humanitarian crises unfold, while emphasizing the coverage of "forgotten emergencies" at the same time. Its vision and strategy aim to make a “one-stop shop for the global humanitarian community." was launched in October 1996 and is administered by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The project began as the brainchild of the US Department of State, Bureau of International Organization Affairs, which had noticed during the Rwanda crisis how poorly critical operational information was shared between NGOs, UN Agencies and Governments. In 1995, the Department's Senior Policy Adviser on Disaster Management led a series of discussions at UN HQ in Geneva and New York City, as well as a conference on the project at the US Department of State in which both as a product and the internet in general were touted as fresh tools for the humanitarian community. Its official launch was also the launch of the UN's first disaster website | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8262468 | ReliefWeb |
ReliefWeb Recognizing how critical the availability of reliable and timely information in time of humanitarian emergencies is, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the creation of and encouraged humanitarian information exchange through by all governments, relief agencies and non-governmental organizations in Resolution 51/194 on 10 February 1997. The General Assembly reiterated the importance of information sharing in emergencies and of taking advantage of OCHA's emergency information services such as in Resolution 57/153 on 3 March 2003. maintains offices in three different time zones to update the website around the clock: Bangkok (Thailand), Nairobi (Kenya) and New York City (United States). Prior to 2011, the three offices were located in Geneva (Switzerland), Kobe (Japan), and New York (USA). The closing of the Geneva and Kobe offices were due to the higher costs associated with these locations. has seen steady growth in usage. In 2017, 6,8 million people visited ReliefWeb. In the same year, the website published more than 57,000 reports and maps, 39,500 jobs in the humanitarian sector, and 2,600 training opportunities. A first major re-design effort was started in 2002 and completed in 2005, which focused on implementing a more user-centric information architecture. In April 2011, launched a new web platform based on open-source technology to offer a powerful search/filter engine and delivery system | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8262468 | ReliefWeb |
ReliefWeb In 2012, began to expand its focus to become the one-stop shop for critical information on global crises and disasters. In November 2012, revamped the home page, the "About Us" section and the Blog and introduced "Labs", a place to explore new and emerging opportunities and tools to improve information delivery to humanitarian workers. disseminates humanitarian information by updating its website around the clock. In addition, reaches more than 168,500 subscribers through its e-mail subscription services, allowing those who have low bandwidth Internet connections to receive information reliably. posts maps and documents daily from over 5,000 sources from the UN system, Governments, Inter-governmental organizations, NGOs, academia and the media. In addition, a team of cartographers creates original maps focusing on humanitarian emergencies. All documents posted on the site are classified and archived, allowing advanced searching of documents from past emergency responses. The database contains more than 720,000 maps and documents dating back to 1981. is also a major repository of humanitarian job postings and training announcements. In 2017, 1,605 organizations posted 39,336 job announcements on ReliefWeb. The job and training sources include Academic and Research Institutions, NGOs, International Organizations, Governments, Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement and the Media | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8262468 | ReliefWeb |
ReliefWeb also provides apps and tools for humanitarians, which enable more targeted personalised information search, with the aim to speed up the delivery of important information. The apps include functions to search content, curate and access humanitarian data, and manage humanitarian personnel. has won the following awards: | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8262468 | ReliefWeb |
James Rest was an American psychologist specializing in moral psychology and development. Together with his Minnesota Group of colleagues, including Darcia Narvaez, Muriel Bebeau, and Stephen Thoma, Rest extended Kohlberg's approach to researching moral reasoning. was a professor at the University of Minnesota from 1970 until his formal retirement in 1994 and was a 1993 recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award at the University. Rest continued mentoring, researching, and writing until his death in 1999. Rest's and the Neo-Kohlbergians' work included the Defining Issues Test (DIT), which attempts to provide an objective measure of moral development, and the Four Component Model of moral development, which attempts to provide a theoretical perspective on the subject. Rest and the Minnesota Group were unusually open to other approaches, new research, criticisms, and integrating their Neo-Kohlbergian approach with others. There have been extensive criticisms of Rest's work in general and the DIT in particular. Testing by independent sources has tended to uphold the strength and validity of the test. The 4 component model of involves 4 psychological processes: 1.Moral sensitivity - the individual must be able to interpret a particular situation in terms of possible courses of action, determine who could be affected by the action, and understand how the affected party would regard the effect 2 | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8266721 | James Rest |
James Rest Moral judgement - the individual must be able to judge which action is right and ought to decide what to do in a particular situation. 3.Moral motivation - the individual must be able to choose moral values over personal values 4.Moral character - the individual must have sufficient ego, strength and implementation skills to follow his or her intentions. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8266721 | James Rest |
Defining Issues Test The is a component model of moral development devised by James Rest in 1974. The University of Minnesota formally established the Center for the Study of Ethical Development as a vehicle for research around this test in 1982. The is a proprietary self-report measure which uses a Likert-type scale to give quantitative ratings and rankings to issues surrounding five different moral dilemmas, or stories. Specifically, respondents rate 12 issues in terms of their importance to the corresponding dilemma and then rank the four most important issues. The issue statements that respondents respond to are not fully developed stances which fall on one side or another of the presented dilemma. Rather, they are conceptualized as fragments of reasoning, to which respondents must project meaning. Meaning is projected by means of moral reasoning schemas (each of which is explained below). A schema is a mental representation of stimuli that has previously been encountered, which allows one to make sense of newly experienced, but related, stimuli. So, when a respondent reads an issue statement that both makes sense to them, as well as triggers a preferred schema, that statement is given a high rating and ranking. Conversely, when a respondent reads an issue statement that is either construed as nonsensical or overly simplistic, the item receives a low rating | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8266740 | Defining Issues Test |
Defining Issues Test Patterns of ratings and rankings reveal information about three specific schemas of moral reasoning: the Personal Interests Schema, the Maintaining Norms Schema and the Postconventional Schema. The personal interests schema are regarded as the least developmentally advanced level of moral reasoning. In operating primarily at the Personal Interests level, the respondent takes into consideration what the protagonist of the story, or those close to the protagonist, has to gain or lose. The Maintaining Norms Schema is considered more advanced than the Personal Interests Schema, as it emphasizes more than the individual. At the maintaining norms reasoning level, law and authority are important, as each of these helps to uphold social order, which is paramount to this schema. So, a respondent who is predominantly using this schema will take into consideration what needs to be done in order to be compliant with the social order of society. Finally, the Postconventional Schema is regarded as the most developmentally advanced. At the postconventional reasoning level, laws are not simply blindly accepted (as with the maintaining norms schema), but are scrutinized in order to ensure society-wide benefit. So, a respondent who is primarily using this schema will focus on what is best for society as a whole. For example, the civil rights movement was a product of postconventional reasoning, as followers were most concerned with the society-wide effects of inequality | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8266740 | Defining Issues Test |
Defining Issues Test Though an individual may rely more heavily on one of the aforementioned schemas, moral reasoning is typically informed, to varying degrees, by each of the schemas. One of the Defining Issues Test's original purposes was to assess the transition of moral development from adolescence to adulthood. In 1999 the test was revised in the DIT-2 for brevity, clarity and more powerful validity criteria. The has been dubbed "Neo-Kohlbergian" by its constituents as it emphasizes cognition, personal construction, development and postconventional moral thinking - reflective of the work by Lawrence Kohlberg and his stages of moral development. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8266740 | Defining Issues Test |
Taboo on the dead The taboo on the dead includes the taboo against touching of the dead, those surrounding them and anything associated with the dead. A taboo against naming the dead is a kind of word taboo whereby the name of a recently deceased person, and any other words similar to it in sound, may not be uttered. It is observed by peoples from all over the world, including Australia, Siberia, Southern India, the Sahara, and the Americas. After a Yolngu man named Bitjingu died, the word "bithiwul" "no; nothing" was avoided. In its place, a synonym or a loanword from another language would be used for a certain period, after which the original word could be used again; but in some cases the replacement word would continue to be used. In some Australian Aboriginal cultural practices, the dead are not referred to by their name directly as a mark of respect. In Pitjantjatjara, for instance, it is common to refer to a recently deceased person as 'kunmanara', which means "what's his name". Often, the person's last name can still be used. The avoidance period may last anywhere from 12 months to several years, depending on how important or famous the person was. The person can still be referred to in a roundabout way, such as "that old lady" or by generic skin type but not by first name. Other reasons may include not making mockery of that person and keeping respect with regard to them. For this reason, the names of many notable Aboriginal people were only recorded by Westerners and may have been incorrectly transliterated. R. M. W | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8274026 | Taboo on the dead |
Taboo on the dead Dixon has suggested, in reference to Australian Aboriginal languages, that the substitution of loanwords for tabooed words results in significant vocabulary replacement, hindering the application of the comparative method. Other linguists find the effects of the taboo on vocabulary replacement to be insignificant. Goddard (1979) also suggests upon finding evidence of name-taboos of the deceased in Tonkawa similar to Australian languages, the languages of the North American Southeast may have resisted classification into language families so far due in part to vocabulary replacement (in addition to their already sparse documentation). Sigmund Freud explains that the fundamental reason for the existence of such taboos is the fear of the presence or of the return of the dead person's ghost. It is exactly this fear that leads to a great number of ceremonies aimed at keeping the ghost at a distance or driving him off. In many cases the taboo remains intact until the body of the dead has completely decayed, Psychologist Wilhelm Wundt associates the taboo to a fear that the dead man's soul has become a demon. Moreover, many cases show a hostility toward the dead and their representation as malevolent figures. Edward Westermarck notes that "Death is commonly regarded as the gravest of all misfortunes; hence the dead are believed to be exceedingly dissatisfied with their fate [...] such a death naturally tends to make the soul revengeful and ill-tempered | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8274026 | Taboo on the dead |
Taboo on the dead It is envious of the living and is longing for the company of its old friend." | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8274026 | Taboo on the dead |
Collective action problem A collective action problem is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action. The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was most clearly established in 1965 in Mancur Olson's "The Logic of Collective Action". The collective action problem can be observed today in many areas of study, and is particularly relevant to economic concepts such as game theory and the free-rider problem that results from the provision of public goods. Additionally, the collective problem can be applied to numerous public policy concerns that countries across the world currently face. Although he never used the words "collective action problem," Thomas Hobbes was an early philosopher on the topic of human cooperation. Hobbes believed that people act purely out of self-interest, writing in "Leviathan" in 1651 that "if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies." Hobbes believed that the state of nature consists of a perpetual war between people with conflicting interests, causing people to quarrel and seek personal power even in situations where cooperation would be mutually beneficial for both parties. Through his interpretation of humans in the state of nature as selfish and quick to engage in conflict, Hobbes's philosophy laid the foundation for what is now referred to as the collective action problem | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8276451 | Collective action problem |
Collective action problem David Hume provided another early, more well-known interpretation of what is now called the collective action problem in his 1738 book "A Treatise of Human Nature". Hume characterizes a collective action problem through his depiction of neighbors agreeing to drain a meadow:Two neighbours may agree to drain a meadow, which they possess in common; because it is easy for them to know each others mind; and each must perceive, that the immediate consequence of his failing in his part, is, the abandoning the whole project. But it is very difficult, and indeed impossible, that a thousand persons should agree in any such action; it being difficult for them to concert so complicated a design, and still more difficult for them to execute it; while each seeks a pretext to free himself of the trouble and expence, and would lay the whole burden on others.In this passage, Hume establishes the basis for the collective action problem. In a situation in which a thousand people are expected to work together to achieve a common goal, individuals will be likely to free ride, as they assume that each of the other members of the team will put in enough effort to achieve said goal. In smaller groups, the impact one individual has is much greater, so individuals will be less inclined to free ride. The most prominent modern interpretation of the collective action problem can be found in Mancur Olson's 1965 book "The Logic of Collective Action" | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8276451 | Collective action problem |
Collective action problem In it, he addressed the accepted belief at the time by sociologists and political scientists that groups were necessary to further the interests of their members. Olson argued that individual rationality does not necessarily result in group rationality, as members of a group may have conflicting interests that do not represent the best interests of the overall group. Olson further argued that in the case of a pure public good that is both nonrival and nonexcludable, one contributor tends to reduce their contribution to the public good as others contribute more. Additionally, Olson emphasized the tendency of individuals to pursue economic interests that would be beneficial to themselves and not necessarily the overall public. This contrasts with Adam Smith's theory of the "invisible hand" of the market, where individuals pursuing their own interests should theoretically result in the collective well-being of the overall market. Olson's book established the collective action problem as one of the most troubling dilemmas in social science, leaving a profound impression on present-day discussions of human behavior and its relationship with governmental policy. Public goods are goods that are nonrival and nonexcludable. A good is said to be nonrival if its consumption by one consumer does not in any way impact its consumption by another consumer. Additionally, a good is said to be nonexcludable if those who do not pay for the good cannot be kept from enjoying the benefits of the good | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8276451 | Collective action problem |
Collective action problem The nonexcludability aspect of public goods is where one facet of the collective action problem, known as the free-rider problem, comes into play. For instance, a company could put on a fireworks display and charge an admittance price of $10, but if community members could all view the fireworks display from their homes, most would choose not to pay the admittance fee. Thus, the majority of individuals would choose to free ride, discouraging the company from putting on another fireworks show in the future. Even though the fireworks display was surely beneficial to each of the individuals, they relied on those paying the admittance fee to finance the show. If everybody had assumed this position, however, the company putting on the show would not have been able to procure the funds necessary to buy the fireworks that provided enjoyment for so many individuals. This situation is indicative of a collective action problem because the individual incentive to free ride conflicts with the collective desire of the group to pay for a fireworks show for all to enjoy. Pure public goods include services such as national defense and public parks that are usually provided by governments using taxpayer funds. In return for their tax contribution, taxpayers enjoy the benefits of these public goods. In developing countries where funding for public projects is scarce, however, it often falls on communities to compete for resources and finance projects that benefit the collective group | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8276451 | Collective action problem |
Collective action problem The ability of communities to successfully contribute to public welfare depends on the size of the group, the power or influence of group members, the tastes and preferences of individuals within the group, and the distribution of benefits among group members. When a group is too large or the benefits of collective action are not tangible to individual members, the collective action problem results in a lack of cooperation that makes the provision of public goods difficult. Game theory is one of the principal components of economic theory. It addresses the way individuals allocate scarce resources and how scarcity drives human interaction. One of the most famous examples of game theory is the prisoner's dilemma. The classical prisoner's dilemma model consists of two players who are accused of a crime. If Player A decides to betray Player B, Player A will receive no prison time while Player B receives a substantial prison sentence, and vice versa. If both players choose to keep quiet about the crime, they will both receive reduced prison sentences, and if both players turn the other in, they will each receive more substantial sentences. It would appear in this situation that each player should choose to stay quiet so that both will receive reduced sentences. In actuality, however, players who are unable to communicate will both choose to betray each other, as they each have an individual incentive to do so in order to receive a commuted sentence | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8276451 | Collective action problem |
Collective action problem The prisoner's dilemma model is crucial to understanding the collective problem because it illustrates the consequences of individual interests that conflict with the interests of the group. In simple models such as this one, the problem would have been solved had the two prisoners been able to communicate. In more complex real world situations involving numerous individuals, however, the collective action problem often prevents groups from making decisions that are of collective economic interest. Scholars estimate that, even in a battleground state, there is only a one in ten million chance that one vote could sway the outcome of a United States presidential election. This statistic may discourage individuals from exercising their democratic right to vote, as they believe they could not possibly affect the results of an election. If everybody adopted this view and decided not to vote, however, democracy would collapse. This situation results in a collective action problem, as any single individual is incentivized to choose to stay home from the polls since their vote is very unlikely to make a real difference in the outcome of an election. Despite high levels of political apathy in the United States, however, this collective action problem does not decrease voter turnout as much as some political scientists might expect | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8276451 | Collective action problem |
Collective action problem It turns out that most Americans believe their political efficacy to be higher than it actually is, stopping millions of Americans from believing their vote does not matter and staying home from the polls. Thus, it appears collective action problems can be resolved not just by tangible benefits to individuals participating in group action, but by a mere belief that collective action will also lead to individual benefits. Environmental problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and waste accumulation can be described as collective action problems. Since these issues are connected to the everyday actions of vast numbers of people, vast numbers of people are also required to mitigate the effects of these environmental problems. Without governmental regulation, however, individual people or businesses are unlikely to take the actions necessary to reduce carbon emissions or cut back on usage of non-renewable resources, as these people and businesses are incentivized to choose the easier and cheaper option, which often differs from the environmentally-friendly option that would benefit the health of the planet. Individual self interest has led to over half of Americans believing that government regulation of businesses does more harm than good. Yet, when the same Americans are asked about specific regulations such as standards for food and water quality, most are satisfied with the laws currently in place or favor even more stringent regulations | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8276451 | Collective action problem |
Collective action problem This illustrates the way the collective problem hinders group action on environmental issues: when an individual is directly affected by an issue such as food and water quality, they will favor regulations, but when an individual cannot see a great impact from their personal carbon emissions or waste accumulation, they will generally tend to disagree with laws that encourage them to cut back on environmentally-harmful activities. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8276451 | Collective action problem |
Freedom and Culture is a book by John Dewey. Published in 1939, the book is an analytical defense of democracy written in a time when democratic regimes had recently been replaced by non-democratic ones, and at a time when Marxism was considered a powerful political force. According to Dewey, human nature is the result of many forces, many of which are culturally determined. Attempts have been made to explain human behavior as being primarily motivated by love of freedom, or by pursuit of self-interest, or by the pursuit of power, or being primarily determined by economic conditions. All of these are products of their times and their inevitable falsification results in a backlash, de-emphasizing the formerly over-emphasized factor. According to Dewey, freedom had been associated with individuality by some people and with rationality, or law, by others. It has also been associated with the farming class by some people and with capitalists by others. Individualism (or liberty) and social control (or law) have been proposed as two extremes between which freedom has to navigate. In reality, the individual and the social forces interact in various ways, rather than being two distinct extremes. Therefore, for individuals to be free, appropriate social conditions must exist. Democratic conditions do not automatically maintain themselves and they cannot be mechanically prescribed in a constitution | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8294130 | Freedom and Culture |
Freedom and Culture Dictatorships exist not only through coercion but also by appealing to certain idealistic elements in people, such as solidarity or the appeal of sharing in the creation of a new system. Public education and press free from government control can be as much a tool for totalitarianism as they are a tool for democracy. They surround the citizens, who in a modern state do not have direct contact with the events that affect them, with "ready made intellectual goods", making them susceptible to propaganda. According to Dewey, the leaders of the American rebellion against the British were motivated by restrictions placed on industry and trade and by high taxation. This was rationalized into the idea that all government not self-imposed is foreign to human nature and human rights. This simple theory of democracy was a product of the simple conditions under which it was formulated: There is a widespread desire in human nature for personal freedom - release from dominion over personal beliefs and conduct. The main threat to freedom is the tendency of government officials to extend their power. Therefore, guarantees against abuse of government power are enough to guarantee freedom. This idea is very influential in the U.S. A view that economic development is having an anti-democratic effect and should be controlled by government is more modern and its existence is an indication that conditions have changed dramatically | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8294130 | Freedom and Culture |
Freedom and Culture Conditions have become more complex, and impersonal forces have been set in motion on unprecedented scale, resulting in loss of personal control over the personal situation. Modern conditions have rendered the assumed harmony between liberty and equality invalid. Also, the tendency toward organization by both labor and capital, that is inherent in economic development, was seen in the original democratic theory as an anti-democratic force. The loss of control motivates both the working class and the capitalists to embrace totalitarian means in the hope of improving security, and distrust of organized labor and capital pushes the public to give more power, as a counterbalance, to a would-be dictator. Can existing institutions be used to cope with modern problems? Socialists who favor non-revolutionary means suggest regulation of industry or ownership of industry by government. Theory and practice, however, do not show that the resulting situation is essentially different from that of capitalism, leaving the question of how to reconcile modern conditions with democracy open. This chapter is a critique of monistic Marxist theory in vogue at the time the book was written. Marxism asserts that social activities and relations are determined solely by economic conditions, rejecting other factors, associated with human behavior, as having any influence. Original Marxist qualification to this position, allowing that existing social structures can have influence on subsequent events, is removed | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8294130 | Freedom and Culture |
Freedom and Culture Beyond economic determinism, Marxism states that all social change is the result of class warfare, which moves the workers toward liberation from past subjugation, and finally creates a classless society. This law is an economic paraphrase of the Hegelian dialectic idealism, in which conflict between ideas results in synthesis and harmony. Marxist theory was a creature of its time, a time when intellectual thought was dealing with social development (or "evolution"), causal necessity, Hegelian philosophy, economically based ideologies and the search for social theories. Marxism is dated by its search for unifying causality, since while the idea of unifying causality was typical of mid 19th century science, it was abandoned in later scientific thought, to be replaced by the idea of invariance, which describes how different phenomena relate to each other, rather than ascribe a single cause for all phenomena. "The inherent theoretical weakness of Marxism is that it supposed a generalization that was made at a particular date and place (and made even then only by bringing observed facts under a premise drawn from a metaphysical source) can for continued resort to observation, and to continual revision of generalizations in their office of working hypotheses." Acceptance of Marxism was supported by its discussion of contemporary social phenomena - the struggle between capitalists and factory workers, and economic cycles and concentration | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8294130 | Freedom and Culture |
Freedom and Culture In both its structure and in its attraction based on addressing pressing social issues, Marxism is similar to a religious ideology. In the USSR, monistic Marxist theory has been accompanied by the anti-scientific devices of one party control of all communications and persecution of dissenters. Power has been given to a small group to apply the theory in specific cases, giving that group absolute coercive power derived from the absolute principle. This occurrence demonstrates that popular representation, multiple parties and constant criticism of government encourage freedom. Despite the influence of economic factors in politics, these formal devices allow interplay of various tendencies whose result is greatly better than that of a monistic idea. "We cannot continue the idea that human nature when left to itself, when freed from external arbitrary restrictions, will tend to the production of democratic institutions that work successfully... We have to see that democracy means the belief that humanistic culture "should" prevail; we should be frank and open in our recognition that the proposition is a moral one- like any idea that concerns what "should" be." "Science through its physical and technological consequences is now determining the relations between human beings. If it is incapable of developing moral techniques which will also determine these relations, the split in modern culture goes so deep that not only democracy but all civilized values are doomed | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8294130 | Freedom and Culture |
Freedom and Culture A culture that permits science to destroy traditional values but which distrusts its power to create new ones is a culture which is destroying itself." | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8294130 | Freedom and Culture |
Frenemy "Frenemy" (also spelled "frienemy") is an oxymoron and a portmanteau of "friend" and "enemy" that refers to "a person with whom one is friendly, despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry" or "a person who combines the characteristics of a friend and an enemy". The term is used to describe personal, geopolitical and commercial relationships both among individuals and groups or institutions. This term also describes a competitive friendship. The word originates from the aristocratic Mitford sisters, of literary and social fame. The American-based author and activist Jessica Mitford who circulated it, stated it was: "an incredibly useful word…coined by one of my sisters when she was a small child to describe a rather dull little girl who lived near us. My sister and the frenemy played together constantly…all the time disliking each other heartily." "Frenemy" has appeared in print as early as 1953 in an article titled "Howz about calling the Russians our Frienemies?" by the American gossip columnist Walter Winchel in the "Nevada State Journal" From the mid-1990s it underwent a massive hike in usage. A "Businessweek" article stated that frenemies in the workplace are common, even in business to business partnerships. Due to increasingly informal environments and the "abundance of very close, intertwined relationships that bridge people's professional and personal lives .. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8301203 | Frenemy |
Frenemy [while] it certainly wasn't unheard of for people to socialize with colleagues in the past, the sheer amount of time that people spend at work now has left a lot of people with less time and inclination to develop friendships outside of the office." Professional relationships are successful when two or more business partners come together and benefit from one another, but personal relationships require more common interests outside of business. Relationships in the workplace, in a sports club, or any place that involves performance comparing, form because of the commonalities between persons. Due to the intense environment, competitiveness can evolve into envy and strain a relationship. type relationships become routine and common because of the shared interest of business dealings or competition. Sigmund Freud said of himself that “an intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable to my emotional life…not infrequently…friend and enemy have coincided in the same person”. Frenemies can be divided into different categories based on their behaviors: needs help or a favor, then they can be considered as a one-sided frenemy to the latter person. This person doesn't care about the life of the other person and doesn't have any interest in what is going on with the other. Also, they do not show up in time of the other's need. So, it is a one-sided relationship. friend, makes fun of them, cracks sarcastic jokes about them so frequently that it gets hard for them to tolerate | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8301203 | Frenemy |
Frenemy They discloses their secrets in public. So, that person will eventually start to hate this frenemy. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8301203 | Frenemy |
Right to petition The right to petition government for redress of grievances is the right to make a complaint to, or seek the assistance of, one's government, without fear of punishment or reprisals. In Europe, Article 44 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union ensures the right to petition to the European Parliament. Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany guarantees the right of petition to "competent authorities and to the legislature". The right to petition in the United States is granted by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (1791). The prohibition of abridgment of the "right to petition" originally referred only to the Congress and the U.S. federal courts. The incorporation doctrine later expanded the protection of the right to its current scope, over all state and federal courts and legislatures, and the executive branches of the state and federal governments. The right to petition includes, under its umbrella, the petition. For example, in January 2006, the U.S. Senate considered S. 2180, an omnibus "ethics reform" bill. This bill contained a provision (Section 204) There are ongoing conflicts between organizations that wish to impose greater restrictions on citizen's attempts to influence or "lobby" policymakers. and the right of individuals, groups, and corporations (via corporate personhood), to lobby the government. Another controversial bill, the Executive Branch Reform Act, H.R | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8313678 | Right to petition |
Right to petition 984, would require over 8,000 Executive Branch officials to report into a public database nearly any "significant contact" from any "private party", a term that the bill defines to include almost all persons other than government officials. The bill defines "significant contact" to be any "oral or written communication (including electronic communication) . . . in which the private party seeks to influence official action by any officer or employee of the executive branch of the United States." This covers all forms of communication, one way or two ways, including letters, faxes, e-mails, phone messages, and petitions. The bill is supported by some organizations as an expansion of "government in the sunshine", but other groups oppose it as an infringing on the right to petition by making it impossible for citizens to communicate their views on controversial issues to government officials without those communications becoming a matter of public record. Ancient and Imperial Chinese dynasties recognised the right to petition for all subjects. Commoners could petition the Emperor to remove local officials. The Huabiao, a ceremonial column common in traditional Chinese architecture, is believed to have originated from signboards set up by ancient rulers to offer an avenue for the public to write petitions. In modern China the use of local petitioning bureaus remains common, however, those who remain dissatisfied still travel to the capital as a last resort to appeal to the central government | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8313678 | Right to petition |
Right to petition The National Public Complaints and Proposals Administration () and local bureaus of letters and calls receive suggestions and grievances. The officers then channel the issues to respective departments and monitor the progress of settlement, which they feedback to the filing parties. If unsatisfied, they can move up the hierarchy to bring complaints to the next higher level. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8313678 | Right to petition |
Declaration of Tokyo The is a set of international guidelines for physicians concerning torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in relation to detention and imprisonment, which was adopted in October 1975 during the 29th General assembly of the World Medical Association, and later editorially updated by the WMA in France, May 2005 and 2006. It declares torture to be "contrary to the laws of humanity", and antithetical to the "higher purpose" of the physician, which is to "alleviate the distress of his or her fellow human being." The policy states that doctors should refuse to participate in, condone, or give permission for torture, degradation, or cruel treatment of prisoners or detainees. According to the policy, a prisoner who refuses to eat should not be fed artificially against his will, provided that he or she is judged to be rational. It is the privilege of the physician to practise medicine in the service of humanity, to preserve and restore bodily and mental health without distinction as to persons, to comfort and to ease the suffering of his or her patients. The utmost respect for human life is to be maintained even under threat, and no use made of any medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8356507 | Declaration of Tokyo |
Declaration of Tokyo For the purpose of this Declaration, torture is defined as the deliberate, systematic or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons acting alone or on the orders of any authority, to force another person to yield information, to make a confession, or for any other reason. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8356507 | Declaration of Tokyo |
Duality of structure is one of Anthony Giddens' coined phrases and main propositions in his explanation of structuration theory. The basis of the duality lies in the relationship the Agency has with the Structure. In the duality, the Agency has much more influence on its lived environment than past structuralist theory had granted. The key to Giddens' explanation is his focus on the knowledgeability of the agent and the fact that the agency cannot exist or be analyzed separately from its structure. They can only exist as a duality. The structural properties which he calls modalities help illustrate the dimensions of the duality. "By the duality of structure I mean that the structural properties of social systems are both the medium and the outcome of the practices that constitute those systems." The Structure has both rules and resources or constraints and enabling qualities. Language is often used to exemplify these modalities. The system of interaction includes in itself "rules" of the language such as syntax but also leaves room for interpretations or the creation of completely new words. The system of interaction is responsible for maintaining a certain standard of consistency in order for the language to make sense to both the speaker and the interpreter. At the same time, the completeness of the language can always be manipulated and changed through interaction by the agent. The phrase is used in Chomsky by John Lyons to illustrate the differences between human and animal communication | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8369046 | Duality of structure |
Duality of structure It is described there as "two levels of grammatical structure." The first being syntactic and the second being phonemes. | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8369046 | Duality of structure |
Social dominance theory (SDT) is a theory of intergroup relations that focuses on the maintenance and stability of group-based social hierarchies. According to the theory, group-based inequalities are maintained through three primary intergroup behaviors: institutional discrimination, aggregated individual discrimination, and behavioral asymmetry. The theory proposes that widely shared cultural ideologies (i.e., legitimizing myths) provide the moral and intellectual justification for these intergroup behaviors. was first formulated in 1999 by psychology professors and researchers, Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto. The theory begins with the observation that human social groups tend to be organized according to group-based social hierarchies in societies that produce economic surplus. These hierarchies have a trimorphic (3-form) structure. This means that these hierarchies are based on (1) age (i.e., adults have more power and higher status than children), (2) sex (i.e., men have more power and higher status than women), and (3) arbitrary-set, which are group-based hierarchies that are culturally defined and do not necessarily exist in all societies. Arbitrary-set hierarchies can be based on ethnicity (e.g., Whites over Blacks in the U.S.), religion, nationality, and so on. Human social hierarchies consist of a hegemonic group at the top and negative reference groups at the bottom. More powerful social roles are increasingly likely to be occupied by a hegemonic group member (for example, an older white male) | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8377605 | Social dominance theory |
Social dominance theory Males are more dominant than females, and they possess more political power (the iron law of andrarchy). Most high-status positions are held by males. is a consideration of group conflict which describes human society as consisting of oppressive group-based hierarchy structures. The key principles of social dominance theory are: The reason that social hierarchies exist in human societies is that they were necessary for survival of inter-group competition during conflict over resources. Essentially, groups organised in hierarchies were more efficient at combat than groups who were organised in other ways, giving a competitive advantage to groups disposed towards social hierarchies. explains the mechanisms of group hierarchy oppression using three basic mechanisms: These processes are driven by legitimizing myths, which are beliefs that justify social dominance: is a multi-level theory of how societies maintain group-based dominance. Proposed initially by Sidanius and Pratto (1999), the theory assumes that societies are based on social structures in which dominant groups have higher social status, political authority, power and wealth. Thus, a group-based hierarchy in which dominant groups secure a disproportionate share of the good things in life whiles subordinate groups receives a disproportionate share of the bad stuff | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8377605 | Social dominance theory |
Social dominance theory Over time, such structures incorporate into a legitimized myth that serves to perpetuate and maintain this form of group-based hierarchy and creates an ideology that strengthens social dominance, creates intergroup oppression, discrimination and supports prejudice (Pratto & Stewart, 2012). Notably, social hierarchy is a universal feature that marks humanity. However, the nature of these hierarchical differences and inequality differs across cultures and societies. The theory identifies two aspects of myth legitimization. Hierarchy enhancing legitimizing myth perpetuates inequality and maintains intergroup inequality, whereas hierarchy attenuating legitimizing myth decreases group-based inequalities and ensures equity. Myth legitimation has implications for human rights and social justice. For instance, hierarchy attenuating myths argue for a reduction of the disparities that exist between social groups in their access to resources, power, and legitimacy. Whiles hierarchy enhancing legitimizing myths suggest that some rights and privileges are reserved only for certain groups, serving to increase group-based inequality and social hierarchy. Scales measuring social dominance orientation correlate robustly across countries with a variety of kinds of group prejudices (including sexism, sexual orientation prejudice, racism, nationalism) and with hierarchy - enhancing policies (Pratto & Stewart, 2012) | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8377605 | Social dominance theory |
Social dominance theory Social dominance orientation correlates negatively with tolerance, egalitarianism, universalism, humanitarianism, and support for hierarchy - attenuating policies such as human rights (e.g. Pratto, Sidanius, & Levin, 2006 ). Researcher at University of Auckland, John Duckitt, accepts the concept of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and attempts to pair it to a related set of beliefs, Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). A scale was produced to measure RWA, and it was focused on conventionalism, authoritarian aggression and authoritarian submission. These three core authoritarian characteristics were identified in the sociology book, "The Authoritarian Personality". Duckitt proposes a model in which RWA and SDO are produced by socialization in childhood, by personality, and by worldview beliefs. Punitive socialisation is hypothesised as a cause of social conformity. This conformity is predicted to lead to a view of the world as a dangerous, dog-eat-dog place. These correspond to high–RWA beliefs, and in turn influence ingroup and outgroup attitudes. Unaffectionate socialisation is hypothesised to cause tough-minded attitudes. This promotes a view of the world as competitive, similar to the jungle of the evolutionary past. The need to compete is aligned with high SDO, and, again, influences ingroup and outgroup attitudes. These two streams of causation may co-occur. Parenting styles may be both punitive and unaffectionate, and a competitive-jungle worldview is compatible with world–as–a-dangerous-place | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8377605 | Social dominance theory |
Social dominance theory Once established, high–RWA beliefs are hypothesised to promote high–SDO beliefs and vice versa. This predicts high correlations between the two, with environmental origins. On top of this, outgroup and ingroup attitudes may reinforce each other. Duckitt further examines the complexities of the interaction between RWA, SDO and a variety of specific ideological/prejudicial beliefs and behaviour. For instance: Duckitt concludes that RWA and SDO have been well studied, and points out that this way of examining belief-paradigms and motivation-schemas could also be useful for examining anti-authoritarian-libertarian and egalitarian-altruistic ideologies. SDT is influenced by Marxist and socio-biological ideas. Marx described the oppressive hierarchy of hegemonic group(s) dominating negative reference groups, in his examples the bourgeoisie (owning class) dominate the proletariat (working class) by controlling capital (the means of production), not paying workers enough, and so on. However Marx thought that the working class would eventually grasp the solution to this oppression and destroy the bourgeoisie in a revolution. Legitimizing myths theory is about ideologies that explain and justify social systems. The term "myth" is meant to imply that everyone in society perceives these ideologies as explanations for how the world works, not whether or not they are true or false (indeed Sidanius and Pratto make no claims as to the truthfulness, morality or fairness of these ideologies) | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8377605 | Social dominance theory |
Social dominance theory There are two functional types of legitimizing myths: (1) hierarchy-enhancing and (2) hierarchy-attenuating legitimizing myths. Hierarchy-enhancing ideologies (e.g., racism or meritocracy) contribute to greater levels of group-based inequality. Hierarchy-attenuating ideologies (e.g., anarchism and feminism) contribute to greater levels of group-based equality. People endorse these different forms of ideologies based in part on their psychological orientation toward dominance and their desire for unequal group relations (i.e., their social dominance orientation; SDO). People who are higher on SDO tend to endorse hierarchy-enhancing ideologies, and people who are lower on SDO tend to endorse hierarchy-attenuating ideologies. SDT finally proposes that the relative counterbalancing of hierarchy-enhancing and -attenuating social forces stabilizes group-based inequality. Various processes of hierarchical discrimination are driven by "legitimizing myths" (Sidanius, 1992), which are beliefs justifying social dominance, such as paternalistic myths (hegemony serves society, looks after incapable minorities), reciprocal myths (suggestions that hegemonic groups and outgroups are actually equal), and sacred myths (the divine right of kings, as a religion-approved mandate for hegemony to govern). Pratto et al. (1994) suggest the Western idea of meritocracy and individual achievement as an example of a legitimizing myth, and argues that meritocracy produces only an illusion of fairness | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8377605 | Social dominance theory |
Social dominance theory SDT draws on social identity theory, suggesting that social-comparison processes drive individual discrimination (ingroup favouritism). Discriminatory acts (such as insulting remarks about minorities) are performed because they increase the actors' self-esteem. Consistent with the observation that, in patriarchal societies, males tend to be more dominant than females, SDT predicts that males will tend to have a higher social dominance orientation (SDO). As such males will tend to function as hierarchy enforcers, that is, they will carry out acts of discrimination such as the systematic terror by police officers (Sidanius, 1992) and the extreme example of death squads and concentration camps. This is supported by evidence such as police officers possessing measurably higher levels of SDO. SDT also predicts that males that carry out violent acts have been predisposed out of a conditioning called prepared learning. This learned fear readily enables males to commit acts to groups they fear. John C. Turner and Katherine J. Reynolds (2003) from the Australian National University published in the British Journal of Social Psychology a commentary on SDT titled "Why social dominance theory has been falsified" which outlined six fundamental criticisms based on internal inconsistencies: 1. That the supposed evolutionary basis of the social dominance drive is largely fantasy; 2. That the social and psychological substance of the theory does not follow from and indeed is at odds with the so-called ‘ubiquitous drive’; 3 | Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8377605 | Social dominance theory |