Human Rights and Human Dignity

Why should all human beings have certain rights simply by virtue of being human? One justification is an appeal to religious authority. However, in increasingly secular societies this approach has its limits. An alternative answer is that human rights are justified through human dignity. This paper argues that human rights and human dignity are better separated for three reasons. First, the justification paradox: the concept of human dignity does not solve the justification problem for human rights but rather aggravates it in secular societies. Second, the Kantian cul-de-sac: if human rights were based on Kant’s concept of dignity rather than theist grounds, such rights would lose their universal validity. Third, hazard by association: human dignity is nowadays more controversial than the concept of human rights, especially given unresolved tensions between aspirational dignity and inviolable dignity. In conclusion, proponents of universal human rights will fare better with alternative frameworks to justify human rights rather than relying on the concept of dignity.     

人类进化与人类的新进化评析

对于人类进化出现的新图景,不同领域的研究者提出了不同的“人类新进化”概念.在论述人类进化的基础上,对几种不同的“人类的新进化”观点加以陈述和评析,试图提出一种统一的“人类的新进化”概念.即“人类的新进化”既不是单纯的生物进化,也不是单纯的社会文化进化,而是指人类生物进化与社会文化进化的协同进化.     

Human understanding

Contemporary thinkers either hold that meanings cannot be mental states, or that they are patterns of brain functions. But patterns of social, or brain, interactions cannot be that which we understand. Wittgenstein had another answer (not the one attributed to him by writers who ignore his work in psychology): understanding, he said, is seeing an item as embodying a type Q, thus constraining what items will be seen as the same. Those who cannot see things under an aspect are meaning-blind.That idea is expanded in this article. Its ontology consists of types only: entities that recur in space, time, and possible worlds. Types (Socrates, Man, Red, On, etc.) overlap; Socrates = Bald at some index and not in another. The logic used is thus that of contingent identity. Now some possible worlds are mentally represented; the entities that occur in them are meanings. But such entities may also recur in the real world. Thus the entities we experience, the phenomena, which serve as our meanings, may be identical in the real world with real things. A correspondence theory of truth is thus developed: a sentence is true iff its meaning constitutes, in a specified way, a real situation.     

Human software

Just as the hardware of a large computer system requires a large program, often called software or an operating system (OS), to supervise and control its performance, so too do human beings require a mind to control the brain. Our OS, however, is hardwired in neuronal circuitry and also involves the endocrine system. Much evidence attests to the built-in nature and existence of our OS. Examples are our abilities (1) to conceive ideas, (2) to process them internally and symbolically, (3) to express them in any of several modes (e.g., as verbal strings, as visual images, in sign language, in body language), (4) to dream. Some of the probable anatomical components of the human OS are identified and some indications of its systematic effects on consciousness are discussed. Some research relating psychopathology to the OS is cited.     

Human Bonds

ABSTRACT There are three kinds of bonds between human beings: biological and natural; legal and artificial; social and voluntary. Marriage can be seen as an artificial and legal means of shifting the loose bonding of the third category of relationship into the deep and inescapable bonding of the first. The desire to create bonds of this type is widespread, but non-bonding, too, has been recommended either as good in itself—a way of achieving peace of mind or personal emancipation through wider relationships—or as necessary self-denial for some higher cause. In the latter case, the bonds of family are seen as a positive good, a view shared, though for different reasons, by religious and political conservatives and by revisionist feminists.
In contrast to this, three philosophical conceptions which would favour unbonding, or detachment from emotional ties, are categorised here as (a) the Stoic, (b) the Existentialist and (c) the Feminist. Within the Feminist ideal, it is radical, rather than liberal or socialist feminism that has most in common with Stoic or Existentialist ideals. These ideals are considered, together with various alternatives to marriage, and are judged not to override the need for deep personal bonds between human beings. These personal bonds of love and commitment are compared with the alternative bonds of religion and politics and it is concluded that, whatever forms they take, personal bonds have fundamental moral priority in the lives of human beings.     

基因与人性:影响人性的若干基因

人类行为既受到遗传因素的影响,同时也受到环境(文化)因素的影响。近年来逐渐引起众多学科领域关注的行为遗传学研究从行为的基因关联出发,系统研究了行为的遗传因素及其基因基础,取得了令人瞩目的成绩。该文系统总结了八种人类重要行为的基因基础及其与环境因素的关系,并从基因与人性的关系角度进行了讨论。     

Human classical conditioning

Recent reports of failure to obtain blocking in human galvanic skin response (GSR) conditioning, together with our own equivocal results with eyelid conditioning, have motivated us to re-examine the status of the conditioned stimulus (CS) in human conditioning studies. The issues raised by compound stimuli, by contextual cues and occasion setting stimuli, and by cross-modal transfer are considered in the light of data from our laboratories. These data include observations on the interchangeability of stimulus modalities during acquisition, the use of varying information loads embedded in occasion setting displays, the comparison of alternative blocking designs and the analysis of response topography in relation to stimulus variability. They suggested that an adequate account of the CS in human conditioning studies must recognize that it is dynamically processed and reprocessed both during and after acquisition.     

Grounding Human Dignity

Abstract: What is the future of human dignity? Is there a limit on what can be done to human organisms? To approach such questions this article reviews some traditional understandings of human dignity and then offers a shift in perspective. Traditional areas in which human dignity has been grounded include the doctrine of the image of God, the notion of humanity as a reconciliation of opposites, the chronological place of humans in the process of creation, God's free grace, and the human capacity for union with the divine. Maintaining that dignity is reserved for the later stages of human development, the author suggests we shift our thinking from notions of dignity to those of value. A fertilized egg as a living organism is to be valued for its uniqueness and nature, but it does not acquire dignity until it individualizes within the larger process of embryogenesis.     

Human sensory dominance

Human Ss matched an auditory and a visual stimulus for subjective magnitude. Then each stimulus was used as a cue in a reaction time task. On occasions when both stimuli were presented simultaneously, Ss’ responding was seen to be dominated by the visual stimulus. Of further interest was the finding that on some occasions of simultaneous light-tone presentation Ss were unaware that the tone had been presented. This apparent prepotency of the visual over the auditory stimulus was seen to persist across a variety of experimental conditions, which included giving Ss verbal instructions to respond to the tone when both stimuli were presented simultaneously.     

人类基因组计划——《中国医学伦理学辞典》条目选载之一

人类基因组计划（HGP）主要包括：遗传图谱的建立;物理图谱的建立;DNA顺序测定;基因的识别;人类基因组多样性计划;模式生物体基因组比较研究及相关的社会、法律和伦理问题的研究等。人类基因组研究的伦理问题有：基因研究和人类的尊严、遗传信息的陷私权及获知权、组图谱的信息使用与人的社会权利、基因组信息对个人的影响、资源的专利与资源争夺、基因决定论还是非决定论、基因组研究成果应用的不可预测性等,这些问题若处理不当有可能会导致严重的后果。