Overlapping Consensus Thin and Thick: John Rawls and Simone Weil

John Rawls and Simone Weil presented two distinct conceptions of political justice, aimed at articulating a common ethos in an inherently heterogeneous society. The terms of the former, chiefly concerned with the distribution of primary goods, underwrite much of today's Western democracies political liberalism. The terms of the latter, chiefly concerned with the way interaction is organised in social activities in view of the body and soul's balancing pairs of needs, are less well known. We explain the sense in which the overlapping consensus in Weil's notion of political justice is “thicker”, and may thus deserve more attention – alongside that of Rawls – for substantiating a democratic ethos within political liberalism.     

Disability Rights,Prenatal Diagnosis and Eugenics: A Cross-Cultural View

This paper considers the disability rights critique of genetic testing in the context of different communities and the issue of nondirectiveness. Despite the wide usage of genetic diagnosis in Israel, no public debate has emerged there concerning disability rights and prenatal testing. The common attitude that emerged from interviews with Israeli representatives of organizations “of’’ and “for’’ people with genetic diseases and congenital disabilities can be described as a two-fold view of disability: support of genetic testing during pregnancy, and support of the disabled person after birth. This two-fold view is explained as a secular construction situated in legal, economic and cultural contexts. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the “two-fold view’’ of disability for the profession of genetic counseling. It is argued that awareness of the existence of conflicting views among clients—such as the view of the ‘disability critique’ as well as of the “two-fold view of disability’’—should strengthen the significance of nondirectiveness.     

Nondirectiveness and Its Lay Interpretations: The Effect of Counseling Style, Ethnicity and Culture on Attitudes Towards Genetic Counseling Among Jewish and Bedouin Respondents in Israel

To evaluate the effects of ethnicity, culture, and counseling style on the interpretation of nondirectiveness in genetic counseling, a questionnaire containing premarital and prenatal case vignettes in two versions (pessimistic/optimistic) was administered to 281 Jewish and 133 Bedouin respondents. The first study population was comprised of Jewish students enrolled in a university and a community college in the Negev (southern part of Israel). The second study population was comprised of Muslim-Bedouin college students from the same area. The majority of Jewish respondents interpreted the nondirective message as intended by counselors, while the majority of Bedouin respondents did not. Counseling style was found to have a statistically significant effect on the interpretation of the general role of counseling. Gender and susceptibility were not found to have a significant effect on interpretation. Group differences are analyzed through a cultural lens in which different interpretive norms can generate expectations for either nondirectiveness or directiveness.     

An Approach for Determining the Mix between Human and Automated Service Providers

With the growing popularity of self‐service technologies (SST), businesses have to determine how to combine traditional human service with SST technologies. These mix problems have not received adequate attention in the research literature. This paper offers a decision model for solving mix problems between human service channels and SSTs. The decision problem cannot be determined as a traditional max or min problem and it is fuzzy. In fuzzy problems, the decision maker (DM) is considered as the focal point with the relevant knowledge and preferences and therefore, the objective is to maximize the DM's preferences. This paper develops a decision support system for eliciting a DM's value function when the service channels are considered to be substitutes, but when the rate of substitution may change and then uses a linear‐fractional model to fit the DM's data and optimize the DM's preferences. A service mix problem for a grocery store with human service providers and SSTs is used to demonstrate how the decision model can be employed to analyze and solve service mix decision making problems. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Saving or Subordinating Life? Popular Views in Israel and Germany of Donor Siblings Created through PGD

To explore how cultural beliefs are reflected in different popular views of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis for human leukocyte antigen match (popularly known as “savior siblings”), we compare the reception and interpretations, in Germany and Israel, of the novel/film My Sister’s Keeper. Qualitative analysis of reviews, commentaries and posts is used to classify and compare normative assessments of PGD for HLA and how they reproduce, negotiate or oppose the national policy and its underlying cultural and ethical premises. Four major themes emanated from the comparison: loss of self-determination and autonomy; loss of dignity through instrumentalization; eugenics and euthanasia; and saving life. In both countries, most commentaries represented a dominant position, with a few negotiated positions. We also highlight the decoding of a relatively less explored bioethical aspect of My Sister’s Keeper’s narrative, namely the meaning of euthanasia. We conclude by discussing how the findings relate to attempts of providing cultural explanations for the regulation of HLA-PGD.     

Iterative and fixed point common belief

We define infinitary extensions to classical epistemic logic systems, and add also a common belief modality, axiomatized in a finitary, fixed-point manner. In the infinitary K system, common belief turns to be provably equivalent to the conjunction of all the finite levels of mutual belief. In contrast, in the infinitary monotonic system, common belief implies every transfinite level of mutual belief but is never implied by it. We conclude that the fixed- point notion of common belief is more powerful than the iterative notion of common belief.     

Bifurcated loyalty and religious actors’ behaviour in democratic politics: the case of post-1967 religious Zionism in Israel

This paper deals with the political behaviour of religious groups in a democratic setting. In particular, it suggests an explanation as to why the same religious group might adopt very different modes of engagement with the state, over the same issues, at different times. The proposed framework combines two components: (1) a communitarian understanding of civil society; and (2) the concept of bifurcated loyalty which grasps the unique tension experienced by religious groups in democratic regimes, and its effect on their political behaviour. I go on to apply this framework in the case of religious Zionism in Israel. This case, which explores important events and trends in the history of the religious Zionist group in Israel, with special emphasis on the post-1967 era, nicely demonstrates the shifting strategies of engagement of this group with the state. The behaviour of this group ranged from constructive collaboration through participation in government to outright violent clashes with the state. Such dramatic changes expose the link between changing levels of bifurcated loyalty and political behaviour in response to changes in state policies towards religious actors and contents. The paper concludes with a brief discussion about the general applicability of such an approach to the study of religious groups in democratic politics and civil society.     

Dissociable effects of irrelevant context on 2D and 3D grasping

Grasping movements directed toward real objects are typically unaffected by irrelevant aspects of the object and its surroundings, indicating that such interactions are based on analytic processing of object shape and size. However, recent findings show that grasping directed toward two-dimensional (2D) objects is subjected to perceptually mediated effects of relative shape and size. It is unclear however, whether context-dependent processing—a hallmark of visual perception—affects 2D grasping in the same fashion. Here, we explored this possibility by comparing the influence of a newly discovered contextual effect on 2D and on 3D grasping. According to the range of standard effect (RSE), the perceptual resolution for a stimulus depends on the range of the other stimuli presented within the same session, with higher resolution obtained under narrow compared to wide context range. In two experiments, participants were asked to grasp 3D and 2D objects embedded in a wide or a narrow range. The results showed that, unlike 3D grasping, which was immune to contextual information, the resolution during 2D grasping was significantly modulated by the range of the irrelevant context. The findings suggest that visuomotor control directed to 2D objects is intruded by irrelevant perceptual information, making it context-dependent     

Can Population-Based Carrier Screening Be Left to the Community?

As more genes and mutations are identified in diseases for which particular populations are at increased risk, it is becoming more important to address the social interface between communities and carrier screening. While disproportionately targeted in genetic research, the Orthodox Jewish community often shies away, due to social and religious constraints, from genetic testing and counseling offered by the public health system. The solution is provided by Dor Yeshorim—a program which has become for many a prototype for the successful merging of modern reprogenetic screening and traditional communities. My commentary focuses on the gaps between the rationale and practice of Dor Yeshorim, and the implications of these gaps regarding the trade-off involved in leaving carrier screening to the community. I conclude with a set of questions raised by the implications of the unintended consequences of community genetics.