Empathy, Asymmetrical Reciprocity, and the Ethics of Mental Health Care

I discuss Young’s “asymmetrical reciprocity” and apply it to an ethics of mental health care. Due to its emphasis on engaging with others through respectful dialogue in an inclusive manner, asymmetrical reciprocity serves as an appropriate framework for guiding caregivers to interact with their patients and to understand them in a morally responsible and appropriate manner. In Section 1, I define empathy and explain its benefits in the context of mental health care. In Section 2, I discuss two potential problems surrounding empathy: the difficulty of perspectivetaking and “compassion fatigue.” In Section 3, I argue that these issues can be resolved if examined through the lens of an ethics of care. Reciprocal relationships between patients and caregivers are an important element in the development of an ethics of care. In Section 4, I introduce two models of reciprocity that can be applied to a health care context: Benhabib’s symmetrical reciprocity and Young’s asymmetrical reciprocity. In Section 5, I demonstrate how asymmetrical reciprocity cultivates empathy and, in Section 6 and Section 7, I show how it overcomes the objections of empathy and improves therapeutic relationships

The Political and Economic Context of European defence R&D

Along with all other defence-related issues, defence research is a controversial area for EU action. Until recently, defence issues have not figured prominently among EU policy discussions and defence research has played little, if any, role in European technology policy. Although the Framework Programme is funding research projects that could have potential military applications in addition to their explicit civilian goals, there is no strategy on how to address such "dual-use" research activities. Yet, this paper argues that the interaction between technologies developed for civilian and for military use has led to a situation in which it is increasingly difficult to refer to distinct military and civilian technology bases. From the point of view of policy formulation a strict separation between defence and civilian technologies is increasingly appearing as anachronistic. The extent to which "dual-use" research will be explicitly considered in the development of the 6th Framework Programme will again emerge as a matter of debate. The paper presents and discusses different avenues through which dual-use and defence-related research could be given formal consideration in the development and implementation of the 6th Framework Programme.EU research policy, defence, "dual-use" research

Hierarchical Generalized Linear Models: The R Package HGLMMM

The R package HGLMMM has been developed to fit generalized linear models with random effects using the h-likelihood approach. The response variable is allowed to follow a binomial, Poisson, Gaussian or gamma distribution. The distribution of random effects can be specified as Gaussian, gamma, inverse-gamma or beta. Complex structures as multi-membership design or multilevel designs can be handled. Further, dispersion parameters of random components and the residual dispersion (overdispersion) can be modeled as a function of covariates. Overdispersion parameter can be fixed or estimated. Fixed effects in the mean structure can be estimated using extended likelihood or a first order Laplace approximation to the marginal likelihood. Dispersion parameters are estimated using first order adjusted profile likelihood.