Publications by authors named "Michael Klenk"

Moral disagreement is often thought to be of great metaethical significance for moral realists. I explore what remains of that significance when we look at moral disagreement through the lens of a combination of two influential and independently plausible hypotheses about moral language. The Morality-As-Cooperation (MAC) hypothesis says that our capacity for and use of moral language is an adaptation to increase mutualistic cooperation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

According to some philosophers of technology, technology embodies moral values in virtue of its functional properties and the intentions of its designers. But this paper shows that such an account makes the values supposedly embedded in technology epistemically opaque and that it does not allow for values to change. Therefore, to overcome these shortcomings, the paper introduces the novel Affordance Account of Value Embedding as a superior alternative.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We propose a fundamental challenge to the feasibility of moral progress: most extant theories of progress, we will argue, assume an unrealistic level of cognitive control people must have over their moral judgments for moral progress to occur. Moral progress depends at least in part on the possibility of individual people improving their moral cognition to eliminate the pernicious influence of various epistemically defective biases and other distorting factors. Since the degree of control people can exert over their moral cognition tends to be significantly overestimated, the prospects of moral progress face a formidable problem, the force of which has thus far been underappreciated.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Pandemics like COVID-19 confront us with decisions about life and death that come with great uncertainty, factual as well as moral. How should policy makers deal with such uncertainty? We suggest that rather than to deliberate until they have found the right course of action, they better do moral experiments that generate relevant experiences to enable more reliable moral evaluations and rational decisions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Digital tracing technologies are heralded as an effective way of containing SARS-CoV-2 faster than it is spreading, thereby allowing the possibility of easing draconic measures of population-wide quarantine. But existing technological proposals risk addressing the wrong problem. The proper objective is not to maximise the ratio of people freed from quarantine but to also ensure that the composition of the freed group is fair.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Gram-positive zoonotic bacterium Streptococcus suis (S. suis) is responsible for a wide range of diseases including meningitis in pigs and humans. The blood-cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) barrier is constituted by the epithelial cells of the choroid plexus, which execute barrier function also after bacteria have entered the central nervous system (CNS).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The adherence, internalization and persistence of the human pathogen Streptococcus pyogenes (group A streptococci, GAS) to and within host cells were studied, and the induced responses of the infected epithelial cells were investigated. Next to common cellular responses on GAS infection, many responses of the infected HEp-2 epithelial cells are GAS serotype-specific. Moreover, several cellular responses do not correlate with the actual bacterial numbers adherent, internalized and persistent within the cells or the production of major cytolysins, as demonstrated for cytoskeletal pathways, cytokine release and apoptosis induction in infected cells.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The bacterial human pathogen Streptococcus pyogenes (group A streptococci, GAS) is able to adhere to, internalize into and cross-talk on multiple levels with its host cells. To gain insight into the Fas function in pathogenesis we used Affymetrix human genome DNA-arrays to measure temporal and global transcriptional responses of HEp-2 cells infected with M49 S. pyogenes wild-type bacteria and DeltafasX, an isogenic S.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Expression of neurotrophin receptors of the tyrosine kinase receptor (Trk) family is an important prognostic factor in solid tumors including neuroblastoma. High expression of TrkA (NTRK1) is associated with a favorable biology and outcome of neuroblastoma, whereas TrkB (NTRK2) is expressed on aggressive neuroblastomas with unfavorable outcome. To gain new insights into the global gene expression program resulting in these divergent biological phenotypes, we stably expressed either TrkA or TrkB in the human SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cell line.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Streptococcus pyogenes (group A streptococci, GAS) is an important and exclusively human pathogen. Adherence to and internalization into host cells significantly contributes to the pathogenesis of GAS infections. The adherence mechanism is a two-step process in which host extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins act as prime targets.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Angiogenesis is an indispensable prerequisite for the progression and metastasis of solid malignancies. Tumor angiogenesis appears to be governed by alterations of tumor suppressor or oncogenes operant in a broad range of tumors. We have addressed this issue in neuroblastoma, a malignancy characterized by the near-exclusive amplification and overexpression of the N-Myc oncogene.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: fopen(/var/lib/php/sessions/ci_sessiondrq5udaomhvem65rf2k6gk460qqjil2h): Failed to open stream: No space left on device

Filename: drivers/Session_files_driver.php

Line Number: 177

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: session_start(): Failed to read session data: user (path: /var/lib/php/sessions)

Filename: Session/Session.php

Line Number: 137

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once