Wrath of God: religious primes and punishment

Recent evidence indicates that priming participants with religious concepts promotes prosocial sharing behaviour. In the present study, we investigated whether religious priming also promotes the costly punishment of unfair behaviour. A total of 304 participants played a punishment game. Before the punishment stage began, participants were subliminally primed with religion primes, secular punishment primes or control primes. We found that religious primes strongly increased the costly punishment of unfair behaviours for a subset of our participants--those who had previously donated to a religious organization. We discuss two proximate mechanisms potentially underpinning this effect. The first is a 'supernatural watcher' mechanism, whereby religious participants punish unfair behaviours when primed because they sense that not doing so will enrage or disappoint an observing supernatural agent. The second is a 'behavioural priming' mechanism, whereby religious primes activate cultural norms pertaining to fairness and its enforcement and occasion behaviour consistent with those norms. We conclude that our results are consistent with dual inheritance proposals about religion and cooperation, whereby religions harness the byproducts of genetically inherited cognitive mechanisms in ways that enhance the survival prospects of their adherents.     

Paternalism and fairness in clinical research

In this paper, we defend the ethics of clinical research against the charge of paternalism. We do so not by denying that the ethics of clinical research is paternalistic, but rather by defending the legitimacy of paternalism in this context. Our aim is not to defend any particular set of paternalistic restrictions, but rather to make a general case for the permissibility of paternalistic restrictions in this context. Specifically, we argue that there is no basic liberty-right to participate in clinical research and that considerations of distributive fairness justify some paternalistic protections of research subjects.     

Group bias in cooperative norm enforcement

A hallmark of human social cognition is the tendency for both adults and children to favour members of their own groups. Critically, this in-group bias exerts a strong influence on cooperative decision-making: people (i) tend to share more with members of their in-group and (ii) differentially enforce fairness norms depending on the group membership of their interaction partners. But why do people show these group biases in cooperation? One possibility is that the enforcement of cooperative norm violations is an evolved mechanism supporting within-group cooperation (Norms-Focused Hypothesis). Alternatively, group bias in cooperation could be a by-product of more general affective preferences for in-group members (Mere Preferences Hypothesis). Here, we appraise evidence from studies of both adults and children with the goal of understanding whether one of these two accounts is better supported by existing data. While the pattern of evidence is complex, much of it is broadly consistent with the Mere Preferences Hypothesis and little is uniquely supportive of the Norms-Focused Hypothesis. We highlight possible reasons for this complexity and suggest ways that future work can continue to help us understand the important relationship between group bias and cooperation.     

Survival lotteries reconsidered

In 1975 John Harris envisaged a survival lottery to redistribute organs from one to a greater number in order to reduce number of deaths as a consequence of organ failure. In this paper I reach a conclusion about when running a survival lottery is permissible by looking at the reason prospective participants have for allowing the procedure from a contractual perspective. I identify three versions of the survival lottery. In a National Lottery, everyone within a jurisdiction is a candidate for being a donor for everyone else, disregarding all differences between individuals' eventual possibility of needing an organ. In a Group Specific Lottery, it is a question of running a lottery among members of a specific group who share the same probability of getting organ failure. In a Local Lottery one randomises among individuals who are already in need of a new organ but who happen to be compatible and in need of different organs. While the first is vulnerable to considerations of fairness, it is difficult to perceive a feasible way to implement the second option that does not come with a host of unwelcome consequences. I argue, however, that it is permissible to run Local Lotteries.     

不同林分密度杉木林生态系统碳密度及其垂直空间分配特征

以不同林分密度(1800、3000、4500株/hm~2)杉木林为研究对象,通过野外调查、样品采集和室内分析,研究不同林分密度杉木林生态系统碳密度及其分配特征。结果表明:1)三种林分密度杉木林生态系统碳密度分别为131.54、161.42、172.69 t/hm~2,随林分密度增大而升高,且具有显著差异(P<0.05)。杉木林碳密度表现为土壤层>乔木层>林下地被物层。土壤有机碳储量占总碳储量的比例最大(53.11%—67.37%),其次是树干、树根、树皮(25.89%—35.74%),高密度杉木林分有利于树干、树皮、树根碳密度分配比例的增加。2)乔木层,树干、树皮、宿留枯枝及宿留枯叶碳密度随林分密度增大而升高,鲜枝及鲜叶碳密度随林分密度增大先升高后降低,且均具显著差异(P<0.05);树干、树皮碳密度随树体高度的升高而降低,鲜枝鲜叶碳密度集中于树体中上部(8 m≤h≤10 m),宿留枯枝枯叶碳密度集中分布于树体中部(4 m≤h≤8 m)。3)随着林分密度的增大,不同径级根碳密度呈上升趋势,且不同径级根碳密度随林分密度变化差异达显著水平(P<0.05);不同...     

Improving the justice-based argument for conducting human gene editing research to cure sickle cell disease

In a recent article, Marilyn Baffoe-Bonnie offers three arguments that conducting CRISPR/Cas9 biotechnology research to cure sickle cell disease (SCD) would help address historical and current injustices in SCD research and care. I will grant that the first argument is sound, but show that the second and third arguments suffer from roughly the same defect, which is that they really argue for something else rather than for conducting CRISPR/Cas9 research to cure SCD. I conclude that a better justice-based argument would use only Baffoe-Bonnie’s first argument.     

Rawlsian Justice and Palliative Care

Palliative care serves both as an integrated part of treatment and as a last effort to care for those we cannot cure. The extent to which palliative care should be provided and our reasons for doing so have been curiously overlooked in the debate about distributive justice in health and healthcare. We argue that one prominent approach, the Rawlsian approach developed by Norman Daniels, is unable to provide such reasons and such care. This is because of a central feature in Daniels' account, namely that care should be provided to restore people's opportunities. Daniels' view is both unable to provide pain relief to those who need it as a supplement to treatment and, without justice‐based reasons to provide palliative care to those whose opportunities cannot be restored. We conclude that this makes Daniels' framework much less attractive.     

Responding to inequities: gorillas try to maintain their competitive advantage during play fights

Humans respond to unfair situations in various ways. Experimental research has revealed that non-human species also respond to unequal situations in the form of inequity aversions when they have the disadvantage. The current study focused on play fights in gorillas to explore for the first time, to our knowledge, if/how non-human species respond to inequities in natural social settings. Hitting causes a naturally occurring inequity among individuals and here it was specifically assessed how the hitters and their partners engaged in play chases that followed the hitting. The results of this work showed that the hitters significantly more often moved first to run away immediately after the encounter than their partners. These findings provide evidence that non-human species respond to inequities by trying to maintain their competitive advantages. We conclude that non-human primates, like humans, may show different responses to inequities and that they may modify them depending on if they have the advantage or the disadvantage.     

HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE REQUIREMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL AID

Every year approximately 18 million people die prematurely from treatable medical conditions including infectious diseases and nutritional deficiencies. The deaths occur primarily amongst the poorest citizens of poor developing nations. Various groups and individuals have advanced plans for major international medical aid to avert many of these unnecessary deaths. For example, the World Health Organization's Commission on Macroeconomics and Health estimated that eight million premature deaths could be prevented annually by interventions costing roughly US$57 bn per year.
This essay advances an argument that human rights require high-income nations to provide such aid. The essay briefly examines John Rawls' obligations of justice and the reasons that their applicability to cases of international medical aid remains controversial. Regardless, the essay argues that purely humanitarian obligations bind the governments and citizens of high-income liberal democracies at a minimum to provide major medical aid to avert premature deaths in poor nations. In refusing to undertake such medical relief efforts, developed nations fail to adequately protect a fundamental human right to life.