A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across ( k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for the emergence of textualism: in a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (total n = 5,794) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers, and judges.

In this paper I present an argument in favour of a parental duty to use preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD).The article presents an argument supporting the claim that preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) would be chosen as the method of selection by rational agents under some circumstances. The argumentation suggests that performing PGD is demanded from the perspective of embryos in the situations when not all of the created embryos can be implanted and there is a significant risk of passing on a serious condition. Therefore it is obligatory for couples because of a principle similar to the one concerning respect for patient autonomy. The argument can be accepted by advocates of various moral doctrines as it does not refer to any of them, but it is based on criteria of rational decisions in situations of risk or uncertainty and the principle of respect for patient autonomy. It also has an important advantage over standard arguments in support of PGD: it circumvents the non-1 An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 27th European Conference on Philosophy of Medicine and Health Care in Basel.

Topic modeling-a text-mining technique often used to uncover thematic structures in large collections of texts-has been increasingly frequently used in the context of the analysis of scholarly output. In this study, we construct a corpus of 19,488 texts published since 1971 in seven leading journals in the field of bioethics and philosophy of medicine, and we use a machine learning algorithm to identify almost 100 topics representing distinct themes of interest in the field. On the basis of intertopic correlations, we group the content-based topics into eight clusters, thus providing a novel, fine-grained intellectual map of bioethics and philosophy of medicine. Moreover, we conduct a number of diachronic analyses, examining how the "prominence" of different topics has changed across time. In this way, we are able to observe the distinct patterns in which bioethics and philosophy of medicine have evolved and changed their focus over the past half a century.

No abstract

No abstract