Recent evidence suggests that progesterone is required for ovulation, luteinization, and the maintenance of luteal structure and function in primates. Progesterone action is mediated by intracellular progesterone receptors (PRs), and PRs are detectable by immunocytochemistry in the monkey corpus luteum. However, changes in total luteal PR and PR isoform expression have not been quantitated in the corpus luteum during its life span in the menstrual cycle. This study was initiated to identify and quantify PR isoforms in the macaque corpus luteum throughout the luteal phase of the natural cycle by means of Western blotting. Several antibodies generated against the human PR recognized two bands of consistent molecular weights in monkey tissues, and these bands comigrated with PR-A and PR-B from human T47D cells. Taken together, these data suggest that the two proteins identified were macaque PR-A and PR-B. The estimated molecular weights of monkey PR-A and PR-B were approximately 90,000 and 120,000, respectively. PRs were detected in a variety of macaque tissues, including the endometrium, whole ovary, and decidua, but not in spleen, which is PR-negative by other techniques. Whereas PR-A was the predominant isoform observed in endometrium and decidua, PR-B predominated in the ovary without a dominant follicle or corpus luteum as well as in the corpus luteum. In luteal tissue, PR-A levels decreased (p < 0.05) over the course of the luteal phase, while PR-B levels were unchanged. Hence the ratio of PR-B to PR-A (PR-B:PR-A) increased (p < 0.05) from early to very late luteal phase. Since PR-B:PR-A can alter gene expression in response to progestins and antiprogestins in vitro, the temporal changes in PR-B:PR-A in the monkey corpus luteum may contribute to functional differences in luteal responses to progesterone and other steroids in vivo.

Among business ethicists, Adam Smith is widely viewed as the defender of an amoral if not anti-moral economics in which individuals’ pursuit of their private self-interest is converted by an ‘invisible hand’ into shared economic prosperity. This is often justified by reference to a select few quotations from The Wealth of Nations. We use new empirical methods to investigate what Smith actually had to say, firstly about the relationship between free market institutions and individuals’ moral virtues, and secondly about the further relationship between virtues and societal flourishing. We show with more quantitative precision than traditional scholarship that the invisible hand reading dramatically misrepresents both the nuance and the sum of Smith’s analysis. Smith paid a great deal of attention to a flourishing society’s dependence on virtues, including the non-self-regarding virtues of justice and benevolence, and he worried also about their fragility in the face of the changed incentives and social conditions of commercial society.

Whether or not capitalism is compatible with ethics is a long standing dispute. We take up an approach to virtue ethics inspired by Adam Smith and consider how market competition influences the virtues most associated with modern commercial society. Up to a point, competition nurtures and supports such virtues as prudence, temperance, civility, industriousness and honesty. But there are also various mechanisms by which competition can have deleterious effects on the institutions and incentives necessary for sustaining even these most commercially friendly of virtues. It is often supposed that if competitive markets are good, more competition must always be better. However, in the long run competition enhancing policies that neglect the nurturing and support of the bourgeois virtues may undermine the continued flourishing of modern commercial society.

Human development is meant to be transformational in that it aims to improve people's lives by enhancing their capabilities. But who does it target: people as they are or the people they will become? This paper argues that the human development approach relies on an understanding of personal identity as dynamic rather than as static collections of preferences, and that this distinguishes human development from conventional approaches to development. Nevertheless this dynamic understanding of personal identity is presently poorly conceptualized and this has implications for development practice. We identify a danger of paternalism and propose institutionalizing two procedural principles as side constraints on development policies and projects: the principle of free prior informed consent, and the principle of democratic development.

In a democracy people are free to express their opinions and question those of others. This is an important personal freedom, and also essential to the very idea of government by discussion. But it has also been held to be instrumentally important because in open public debate true ideas will conquer false ones by their merit, and the people will see the truth for themselves. In other words, democracy has an epistemic function as a kind of truth machine. From this it follows that in a democracy there should be no dogma: no knowledge protected from public challenge and debate. Yet this whole argument is founded on embarrassing misconceptions of the nature of truth and of the working of democracy.