Technology and morality: Influences on public attitudes toward biotechnology

This study uses national survey data to test effects on individuals’ objections to biotechnology applied to plants and animals. We find that females and individuals who believe in the biblical story of creation have greater intrinsic moral objections to biotechnology than males and those who do not believe the creation story. We also find that the perception of personal benefit from biotechnology significantly decreases the likelihood of moral objection to both plant and animal biotechnology, and that perception of environmental risk from biotechnology significantly increases the likelihood of moral objection to both types of biotechnology. Policy issues are discussed. He has studied biotechnology, development, social change, work and industry. He currently works in the Survey Research Division at Research Triangle Institute in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. He engages is applied studies of new technologies and public policies affecting consumers, industry, natural resources and society. He has researched moral attitude and religious affects in biotechnology acceptance, environmentalism, and in relation to numerous controversial social concerns and issues.     

Within- and between-culture variation: individual differences and the cultural logics of honor, face, and dignity cultures

The CuPS (Culture × Person × Situation) approach attempts to jointly consider culture and individual differences, without treating either as noise and without reducing one to the other. Culture is important because it helps define psychological situations and create meaningful clusters of behavior according to particular logics. Individual differences are important because individuals vary in the extent to which they endorse or reject a culture's ideals. Further, because different cultures are organized by different logics, individual differences mean something different in each. Central to these studies are concepts of honor-related violence and individual worth as being inalienable versus socially conferred. We illustrate our argument with 2 experiments involving participants from honor, face, and dignity cultures. The studies showed that the same "type" of person who was most helpful, honest, and likely to behave with integrity in one culture was the "type" of person least likely to do so in another culture. We discuss how CuPS can provide a rudimentary but integrated approach to understanding both within- and between-culture variation.     

The saving power of biotechnology: on public perceptions of a field of technology

Biotechnology emerges in the nexus of academic, political and economic interests. With its strong reliance on a human individual capable of changing matter or organisms in accordance with anticipated goals, biotechnology is closely linked with a modern notion of human agency. In this article, it is argued that in contemporary European societies, biotechnology is perceived in three distinct ways, namely as an agent, as pluripotent, and as salvific. Similar to other forms of technologies, it provides a foil for human activity and projection, but it supersedes them in a quasi religious fashion. The great fascination with the biotechnological enterprise might, thus, express a more fundamental longing for narratives providing coherence and meaning.     

Seeds of discontent: Expert opinion, mass media messages, and the public image of agricultural biotechnology

Survey data are presented on opinions about agricultural biotechnology and its applications held by agricultural science faculty at highly ranked programs in the United States with and without personal involvement in biotechnology-oriented research. Respondents believed biotech holds much promise, but policy positions vary. These results underscore the relationship between opinion and stakeholder interests in this research, even among scientific experts. Media accounts are often seen as causes, rather than artifacts, of the existence of public controversy; European and now U.S. opposition to food biotechnology is often explained away in terms of such a relationship. The authors argue that where even experts are divided, public opposition cannot reasonably be attributed to poor public understanding or sensationalistic media accounts. Ethical implications for communicating science are explored.     

Immigrant skill utilization in the Canadian labour market: Implications of human capital research

The quantitative significance of the underutilization of immigrant skills may be assessed, albeit imprecisely, in human-capital earnings analysis. Earnings deficits of immigrants may arise from: (a) lower immigrant skill quality, (b) underutilization of immigrant skills, and (c) pay inequities for immigrants doing the same work as native-born Canadians. Consistent with numerous studies, data from the 1996 census micro-data show that underutilization of immigrant skills is significant, though less so than unequal pay within occupations. In 1996 dollars, the total annual immigrant earnings deficit from all three sources was 15.0 billion, of which15.0 billion, of which 2.4 billion was related to skill underutilization, and 12.6 billion was related to pay inequity. Discussion considers adjustments to these estimates, taking account of difficulties measuring the skill levels of occupations and immigrant skill quality. < /div > < div class=Äbstract» < a name=Äbs2» < /a > La signification quantitative de la sous-utilisation des qualifications immigrées peut être évaluée, quoique sans précision, dans l￠analyse humain-capitale de revenus. Les déficits de revenus des immigrés peuvent surgir de: (a) la qualité immigrée inférieure de compétence, (b) sous-utilisation des qualifications immigrées, et (c) injustices de salaire pour des immigrés faisant la même chose fonctionnent les Canadiens indigènesoutenus. Conformé aux nombreuses études, données des micro-données 1996 de recensement prouvent que la sous-utilisation des qualifications immigrées est significative, cependant moins ainsi que le salaire 


 112.6 billion was related to pay inequity. Discussion considers adjustments to these estimates, taking account of difficulties measuring the skill levels of occupations and immigrant skill quality.     

The effect of the belief in free market ideology on redressing corporate injustice

Many people in the major Western economies (e.g., United States, UK, and Germany) subscribe to free market ideology (FMI), which claims that institutional oversight of the market is unnecessary for public reaction can force corporations to regulate their own behavior. The question then becomes how people's belief in FMI affects their reactions to corporate transgressions. Given its ingroup‐centered values, we hypothesized that FMI beliefs would bias reactions to corporate transgressions. We report results of a pilot study showing that FMI beliefs are predicted by selfishness, tradition, conformity, and lack of universalism. We then report three experiments, which showed that stronger FMI beliefs predict weaker demands to redress corporate injustices committed by ingroup (but not outgroup) corporations (Studies 1–3), especially when victims of corporate wrongdoings belong to an outgroup (rather than the ingroup; Study 3). The findings inform our conceptual understanding of FMI and give insights about its implications for market justice.     

Decidable and enumerable predicate logics of provability

Predicate modal formulas are considered as schemata of arithmetical formulas, where is interpreted as the standard formula of provability in a fixed sufficiently rich theory T in the language of arithmetic. QL _T(T) and QL _T are the sets of schemata of T-provable and true formulas, correspondingly. Solovay's well-known result — construction an arithmetical counterinterpretation by Kripke countermodel — is generalized on the predicate modal language; axiomatizations of the restrictions of QL _T(T) and QL _T by formulas, which contain no variables different from x, are given by means of decidable prepositional bimodal systems; under the assumption that T is ₁-complete, there is established the enumerability of the restrictions of QL _T(T) and QL _T by: 1) formulas in which the domains of different occurrences of don't intersect and 2) formulas of the form ⁿ A.     

Scientific objectivity and the logics of science

This paper develops an account of scientific objectivity for a relativist theory of evidence. It briefly reviews the character and shortcomings of empiricist and wholist treatments of theory acceptance and objectivity and argues that the relativist account of evidence developed by the author in an earlier essay offers a more satisfactory framework within which to approach questions of justification and intertheoretic comparison. The difficulty with relativism is that it seems to eliminate objectivity from scientific method. Reconceiving objectivity as a function of the social character of science, rather than of individually practiced methods, allows us to claim that science is objective even if relativism is true, and provides a more realistic account of scientific objectivity than is possible on either the empiricist or the wholist accounts.     

Normal bimodal logics of ability and action

The basic bimodal systemK/K can be interpreted as an analysis of the logic of ability developed in [1]. Where in [1] we would express the claimI can bring it about that P using the formula, with its non-normal operator, we will now use the formula. Here is a normal alethic possibilitation operator.is a normal necessitation operator, but it is independent of, and not subject to an alethic interpretation. Rather, is interpreted to meanI bring it about that P. The result is a simplification and clarification of a combined logic of ability and action like that in [2], but employing only normal operators.A number of extensions of the basic systemK/K are constructed, first by strengthening the two normal sublogics independently and then by linking the two sublogics via axiom schemata involving both operators. The result is a series of increasingly strong systems which more and more adequately fulfill our expectations for a satisfactory logic of action and ability.I am grateful to Valentin Goranko, David K. Lewis, Marion Sarkis Mircheva, and Solomon Passy for helpful discussions and correspondence on these topics.     

Intellectual property and biotechnology: the European debate

The European patent system allows for the introduction of moral issues into decisions about the granting of patents. This feature has greatly impacted European debates about the patenting of biotechnology. This essay explores the European experience, in both the European Union and the European Patent Organization. It argues that there has been great confusion surrounding these issues primarily because the Europeans have not developed a general theory about when exclusion from patentability is the best social mechanism for dealing with morally offensive technologies.     

Projective and inductive generation of abstract logics

An abstract logic A, C consists of a finitary algebraA and a closure systemC onA. C induces two other closure systems onA, C _P andC _I, by projective and inductive generation respectively. The various relations amongC, C _P andC _I are determined. The special case thatC is the standard equational closure system on monadic terms is studied in detail. The behavior of Boolean logics with respect to projective and inductive generation is determined.Allatum est die 17 Junii 1975     

Religious cultures and gender cultures: tracing gender differences across religious cultures

This special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Religion focuses on varying empirical connections and theoretical relations between ‘religion’ and ‘gender’. The introduction to this special issue suggests a theoretical approach which is sensitive to culture by drawing on a phenomenological understanding of culture that is based on knowledge and meaning production and sense making. At first sight, this may not sound convincing because ‘culture’ is a category that is most notably used in combination with religion and gender in culturalist ways. In the migration societies of contemporary Europe, religion has become a metaphor for cultural difference and symbolic boundary-making. The core element of this approach is the conceptualisation of culture as a social web consisting of symbolic forms based on signs of meaning that shape social action, orientation, and experience in the world, including the religious sphere. This entails an understanding of religion as a distinct province of meaning that is structured by processes of social symbolisation just like any other sphere of life. This approach reveals that culturalist conceptions of both religion and gender have specific social meanings as meaningful signs in the symbolic order of secular modernity.     

Temporal logics for concurrent recursive programs: Satisfiability and model checking

We develop a general framework for the design of temporal logics for concurrent recursive programs. A program execution is modeled as a partial order with multiple nesting relations. To specify properties of executions, we consider any temporal logic whose modalities are definable in monadic second-order logic and which, in addition, allows PDL-like path expressions. This captures, in a unifying framework, a wide range of logics defined for ranked and unranked trees, nested words, and Mazurkiewicz traces that have been studied separately. We show that satisfiability and model checking are decidable in EXPTIME and 2EXPTIME, depending on the precise path modalities.