Positive Loss and Tragic Memory: On the Preservation of Community

Theologies of disaster have to recognize exceptional disasters in the framework of a general human exposure to vulnerability, while engaging in the formation of human and religious resilience. Resilience is about “bouncing back and forward” in and through precautionary and self‐adaptive responses to disasters. Drawing up a distinction between personal tragedies and socially shared disasters, the basic argument is that the reconnection of disrupted communities lies at the center of both tragedy and disaster. This article describes a post‐secular theology of tragedy and disaster that mainly stays in a vernacular language, referring to basic assumptions of the gospel while refraining from using the heavier repertoires of Christian doctrine.     

Reasonable Partiality in Professional Ethics: The Moral Division of Labour

Attention is given to a background idea that is often invoked in discussions about reasonable partiality: the idea of a moral division of labour. It is not only a right, but also a duty for professionals to attend (almost) exclusively to the interests of their own clients, because their partial activities are part of an impartial scheme providing for an allocation of professional help to all clients. To clarify that idea, a difference is made between two kinds of division of labour, a technical one and a social one. In order to assess the applicability of the idea of a moral division of labour to professional ethics, journalism is contrasted with other professions.     

C-reactive protein polymorphisms are associated with the cortisol awakening response in basal conditions in human subjects

Cortisol affects the acute-phase response, but it is unknown whether C-reactive protein (CRP), an acute-phase reactant, also affects hypothalamus?pituitary?adrenal axis activity. In the present study, associations were explored between CRP haplotypes with plasma CRP concentrations and basal salivary cortisol level. We included 266 physically healthy Caucasian subjects (103 females and 163 males) aged between 18 and 65 years of whom 94 had a psychiatric disorder in a genetic association study. Six tag single-nucleotide polymorphisms capturing the common genetic variation of the CRP gene were genotyped (i.e. rs2808628, rs2808630, rs1205, rs1800947, rs1417938, and rs3091244) to yield common CRP haplotypes. Plasma CRP concentrations, the salivary cortisol awakening response (CAR) (0, 30, 45, and 60?min after awakening), and the diurnal cortisol decline (11:00, 15:00, 19:00, and 23:00 h) were assessed for 2 days. rs2808628, rs1205, rs1417938, and rs3091244 showed expected associations not only with CRP concentrations, but also with salivary cortisol levels during the CAR. Five well-characterized CRP haplotypes were arranged in ascending order according to increasing CRP levels. There was an inverse linear association between CRP haplotypes and cortisol levels during the CAR, but no association with the diurnal cortisol decline. Hence, genetic variants in the CRP gene that are associated with lifetime plasma CRP levels were also associated with salivary cortisol levels after awakening, in basal, non-inflammatory conditions.     

Eudaimonist Virtue Ethics and Right Action: A Reassessment

My question in this paper concerns what eudaimonist virtue ethics (EVE) might have to say about what makes right actions right. This is obviously an important question if we want to know what (if anything) distinguishes EVE from various forms of consequentialism and deontology in ethical theorizing. The answer most commonly given is that according to EVE, an action is right if and only if it is what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances. However, understood as a claim about what makes particular actions right, this is not especially plausible. What makes a virtuous person??s actions right must reasonably be a matter of the feature, or features, which she, via her practical wisdom, appreciates as ethically relevant in the circumstances, and not the fact that someone such as herself would perform those actions. I argue that EVE instead should be understood as a more radical alternative in ethical philosophy, an alternative that relies on the background assumption that no general account or criterion for what makes right actions right is available to us: right action is simply too complex to be captured in a ??finite and manageable set of??moral principles?? (McKeever and Ridge, Principled ethics, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 139). This does not rule out the possibility that there might be some generalizations about how we should act which hold true without exception. Perhaps there are some things which we must never do, as well as some features of the world which always carry normative weight (even though their exact weight may vary from one context to another). Still, these things are arguably few and far between, and what we must do to ensure that we reliably recognize what is right in particular situations is to acquire practical wisdom. Nothing short of that could do the job.     

Effects of Happiness on All-Cause Mortality During 15 Years of Follow-Up: The Arnhem Elderly Study

Positive psychological characteristics may be beneficial for physical health. However, prospective data on the effects of happiness on survival is scarce. In a population-based cohort study, the Arnhem Elderly Study, happiness was measured by two items, being: “I have many moments of happiness” and “I often laugh happily”. In Cox proportional hazard models, happiness was analyzed as a predictor of 15 year all-cause mortality for 861 (85%) of 1,012 elderly subjects aged 65–85 years. Results showed that happiness was inversely associated with mortality (age- and sex-adjusted hazard ratio of 0.78 for happy subjects versus unhappy subjects; 95% confidence interval 0.64–0.95, P = 0.01 for trend), but that this relationship was no longer statistically significant after adjustment for physical activity and prevalent morbidity. Thus, happiness predicts for lower mortality, which may partly be mediated by more physical activity and lower morbidity.     

Strategic Maneuvering: A Synthetic Recapitulation

As an introduction to the special issue on Perspectives on Strategic Maneuvering, this article provides a synthetic recapitulation of the various steps that were taken in developing the pragma-dialectical theory of strategic maneuvering. First, the concept of strategic maneuvering is described as a means to reconcile the simultaneous pursuit of dialectical and rhetorical aims. Second, strategic maneuvering is related to the various kinds of argumentative activity types in which it takes place. Third, the concept of dialectical profiles is discussed and the parameters that are pertinent to distinguishing between different types of strategic maneuvering. Fourth, the fallacies are viewed as derailment of strategic maneuvering. Fifth, as a case in point, strategic maneuvering with inconsistency is examined. This contribution brings together insights that earlier were put forward in a number of separate publications.     

No representation without awareness in the lateral occipital cortex

Recent research has shown that four small dots presented in the vicinity of, but not adjacent to, a target stimulus can banish that stimulus from conscious awareness. It is thought that the mental representation of the masked stimulus is "erased" by the trailing quartet of dots. Using functional magnetic resonance adaptation, we show that there is no persisting neural representation of the successfully masked stimulus in lateral occipital cortex, a region that has been implicated in the processing of object structure. This finding rules out the alternative interpretation that a lingering neural representation is merely rendered inaccessible to consciousness, as is the fate, for example, of monocular information under conditions of binocular rivalry.