It is almost universally accepted that traditional provider-patient relationships should be governed, at least in part, by the ethical principles set forth by Beauchamp and Childress. These principles include autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. Recently, however, the nature of medial practice has changed. The pervasive presence of computer technology in medicine raises interesting ethical questions. In this paper we argue that some software designers should be considered health care providers and thus be subject the ethical principles incumbent upon “traditional” providers. (...) We argue that these ethical responsibilities should be applied explicitly rather than as a passive, implicit, set of guidelines. (shrink)

Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...) urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity. (shrink)

A series of papers in Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine (PEHM) have recently disputed whether non-heart beating organ donors are alive and whether non-heart beating organ donation (NHBD) contravenes the dead donor rule. Several authors who argue that NHBD involves harvesting organs from live patients appeal to.

As a patient approaches death, family members often are asked about their loved one’s preferences regarding treatment at the end of life. Advance care directives may provide information for families and surrogate decision makers; however, less than one-third of Americans have completed such documents. As the U.S. population continues to age, many surrogate decision makers likely will rely on other means to discern or interpret a loved one’s preferences. While many surrogates indicate that they have some knowledge of their loved (...) one’s preferences, how surrogates obtain such knowledge is not well understood. Additionally, although research indicates that the emotional burden of end-of-life decision making is diminished when surrogates have knowledge that a loved one’s preferences are honored, it remains unclear how surrogates come to know these preferences were carried out. The current study examined the ways that next of kin knew veterans’ end-of-life preferences, and their ways of knowing whether those preferences were honored in Veteran Affairs Medical Center inpatient settings. (shrink)

Do abusive supervisors benefit from their own harmful behaviors, or do they experience the same repercussions as their victims do? This article extends a growing stream of research that aims to understand how bad actors process their own negative actions, when they are most impacted by their adverse behaviors, and how their job performance is influenced as a result. We ground this research in a moral emotions perspective to suggest that enacted abusive supervision elicits prominent moral responses (i.e., shame or (...) guilt), which subsequently influence the supervisor’s own work conduct. Specifically, we suggest that feelings of guilt will prompt an abusive boss to compensate for their negative behaviors by increasing performance efforts, whereas supervisors with feelings of shame will withdraw and exhibit lower work performance. Multiple mediation results from Study 1 revealed that abusive supervisors predominantly experience shame and, in turn, reduced performance. In Study 2, we expand on these findings by considering the moderating role of supervisor core self-evaluations (CSE). We find that the negative relationship between enacted abuse and supervisor performance (through shame) is exacerbated when managers possess a fragile sense of self (i.e., low CSE). Overall, the current article adds to the argument that abusive supervisors do not profit from their own negative behaviors and that they, too, suffer performance setbacks. (shrink)

Allthough small business accounts for over 90% of businesses in U.K. and indeed elsewhere, they remain the largely uncharted area of ethics. There has not been any research based on the perspective of small business owners, to define what echical delemmas they face and how, if at all, they resolve them. This paper explores ethics from the perspective of small business owner, using focus groups and reports on four clearly identifiable themes of ethical delemmas; entrepreneurial activity itself, conflicts of personal (...) values with business needs, social responsibility and the impact of owners' personality on business ethics. The mechanisms for resolving ethical dilemmas is not at all clear, as there appears to be a web of filters which are used in an inter-connected way. However a common starting point for resolving an ethical delemma which involves others is based on identifying who it is (e.g., a friend or institution) and the quality of the relationship with that person. The research yielded a rich source of material on business ethics and it is clear that future researchers must focus on this sector if business ethics is to make significant advances. (shrink)

Education should be a continuous process from birth to death. It is essentially a process leading to reconciliation of the human and divine elements in the constitution of a human being. Right relationship between God and man, spirit and matter, the whole and the part, should be a prime objective of educational techniques.

In this essay, we aim to provide an overview of the political and philosophical issues pertaining to asexuality. The first section, “What Is Asexuality?,” offers an account of asexuality. The second section, “Asexuality as a Unique Sexual Orientation,” argues that asexuality should be understood as a unique sexual orientation. The third section, “Asexuality and Oppression,” discusses the various forms of oppression facing asexual persons today. The fourth section, “The Goods of Asexuality,” articulates some goods that asexuality brings to human lives, (...) and we do this with an eye toward conceiving of asexuality as something other than a mere deficit. (shrink)

This article challenges the unidimensional view of abusive supervisors and examines how employees respond to abuse when the transgressing boss also has a positive impact on others. Drawing on deonance and fairness theory, we propose competing hypotheses about the influence of prosocial impact. Specifically, we use deonance theory to suggest that prosocial impact might buffer the effects of abusive supervision. Alternatively, we incorporate fairness theory to predict that prosocial impact strengthens injustice perceptions and thereby worsens consequences of abuse. Two field (...) studies show support for fairness theory, demonstrating that employees perceive greater injustice, and show stronger retaliatory behaviors, when the abusive supervisor makes a positive difference in the workplace. A final field study replicates these results, while also testing the underlying cognitive process employees use to assess the interplay between “good” and “bad” supervisory characteristics. This article contributes insights to abusive supervision, prosocial impact, organizational justice, and behavioral ethics literatures. (shrink)

This talk was given Monday 13 May 2002 at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and previously to summer visitors at the IBM Watson Research Center in 2001. There are no section titles; the displayed material is what I wrote on the whiteboard as I spoke.

Intrinsic value is differentiated from extrinsic, And assumed to be an empirical characteristic. Then six definitional hypotheses are introduced as to what "x has intrinsic value" means. Under examination, All collapse but d5. In d5, "x has intrinsic value" means "x is or would be liked or disliked for its own sake." d5's relations to ethical hedonism are next examined. Last, Moore's objection, That what one likes intrinsically, One may believe to be bad or not good if it were to (...) exist quite alone, Is analyzed and found to lack cogency. (shrink)

Hamilton's principle and Hamilton's law are discussed. Hamilton's law is then applied to achieve direct solutions to time-dependent, nonconservative, initial value problems without the use of the theory of differential or integral equations. A major question has always plagued competent investigators who use “energy methods,” viz., “Why is it that one can derive the differential equations for a system from Hamilton's principle and then solve these equations (at least in principle) subject to applicable initial and boundary conditions; but one cannot (...) obtain a solution directly from Hamilton's principle except in very special cases?” This paper provides the answer to that question. In Hamilton's own words, “... the peculiar combination it [i.e., Hamilton's law] involves, of the principles of variations with those of partial differentials, for the determination and use of an important class of integrals, may constitute, when it shall be matured by the future labors of mathematicians, a separate branch of analysis.”. (shrink)

Background People who are at elevated risk of suicide stand to benefit from internet-based interventions; however, research in this area is likely impacted by a range of ethical and practical challenges. The aim of this study was to examine the ethical issues and practical barriers associated with clinical studies of internet-based interventions for suicide prevention. Method This was a mixed-methods study involving two phases. First, a systematic search was conducted to identify studies evaluating internet-based interventions for people at risk of (...) suicide, and information pertaining to safety protocols and exclusion criteria was extracted. Second, investigators on the included studies were invited to complete an online survey comprising open-ended and forced-choice responses. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyse the data. Results The literature search identified 18 eligible studies, of which three excluded participants based on severity of suicide risk. Half of the 15 suicide researchers who participated in the survey had experienced problems obtaining ethics approval, and none had encountered adverse events attributed to their intervention. Survey respondents noted the difficulty of managing risk in online environments and the limitations associated with implementing safety protocols, although some also reported increased confidence resulting from the ethical review process. Respondents recommended researchers pursue a collaborative relationship with their research ethics committees. Conclusion There is a balance to be achieved between the need to minimise the risk of adverse events whilst also ensuring interventions are being validated on populations who may be most likely to use and benefit from them. Further research is required to obtain the views of research ethics committees and research participants on these issues. Dialogue between researchers and ethics committees is necessary to address the need to ensure safety while also advancing the timely development of effective interventions in this critical area. (shrink)

This study examined whether the stability of highly relevant animate and inanimate information predicted encoding. Participants viewed audiovisual media and completed a change detection task of screenshots taken from the viewing session. The screenshots were either left as originally viewed or a factor was altered. The factors were all motivationally and story relevant. Half were part of an animal and half were part of other environmental information. This was crossed with whether the information was stable or fleeting in the scene. (...) Changes to animals were more recognized than inanimate information. Changes to fleeting inanimate information were better recognized than changes to stable inanimate information. These findings indicate potential for relevant change in environmental threat and opportunity is adaptively significant and likely to increase attention and encoding across animate and inanimate categories of information. (shrink)

This is a creative-commons licensed guide. Its purpose is to provide students with an understanding of some ways in which they might contribute to philosophical conversation. It is also available for free use via my website.

Alison Bailey’s The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance examines how whiteness misshapes our humanity, measuring the weight of whiteness in terms of its costs and losses to collective humanity. People of color feel the weight of whiteness daily. The resistant habits of whiteness and its attendant privileges, however, make it difficult for white people to feel the damage. White people are more comfortable thinking about white supremacy in terms of what privilege does for (...) them, rather than feeling what it does to them. The first half of the book focuses on the overexposed side of white privilege, the side that works to make the invisible and intangible structures of power more visible and tangible. Bailey discusses the importance of understanding privileges intersectionally, the ignorance-preserving habits of “white talk,” and how privilege and ignorance circulate in educational settings. The second part invites white readers to explore the underexposed side of white dominance, the weightless side that they would rather not feel. The final chapters are powerfully autobiographical. Bailey engages readers with a deeply personal account of what it means to hold space with the painful weight of whiteness in her own life. She also offers a moving account of medicinal genealogies, which helps to engage the weight she inherits from her settler colonial ancestors. The book illustrates how the gravitational pull of white ignorance and comfort are stronger than the clean pain required for collective liberation. The stakes are high: Failure to hold the weight of whiteness ensures that white people will continue to blow the weight of historical trauma through communities of color. -/- All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. -/- -/- . (shrink)

My project here is to argue for situating moral judgments about Indian surrogacy in the context of Reproductive Justice. I begin by crafting the best picture of Indian surrogacy available to me while marking some worries I have about discursive colonialism and epistemic honesty. Western feminists' responses to contract pregnancy fall loosely into two interrelated moments: post-Baby M discussions that focus on the morality of surrogacy work in Western contexts, and feminist biomedical ethnographies that focus on the lived dimensions of (...) reproductive technologies and how they are embodied and negotiated in specific cultural contexts. Both approaches have their shortcomings. Uncritically extending Western moral frameworks (for example, liberal feminist political values) to Indian surrogacy work raises the specter of discursive colonialism; with it, worries arise about how Western normative traditions can distort, erase, or misread non-Western subjects' lived experiences. Feminist biomedical ethnographic approaches correct this, but raise the specter of a weak moral absenteeism; with it, concerns arise about under-theorizing the structural harms and injustices shaping surrogacy worker's lives. I suggest that we might reduce these shortcomings by framing normative and ethnographic engagement with global surrogacy as questions of reproductive justice. (shrink)

We develop a new puzzle concerning a material being's relationship to the smallest parts of the material world. In particular, we investigate how a being could be responsible for anything if its be...

This book offers ways to overcome problems that arise when voters, politicians, and bureaucrats pursue selfish interests rather than the general interest in their political behavior. It combines previously published ideas about charging people the costs of their political actions and selling insurance against unfavorable political outcomes, with new ideas about competing legislatures and incentives for generating efficient political outcomes. The book includes new are discussed, as well as a proposed constitution and its rationale.

A sensibility is, on a rough first pass, an emotional orientation to the world. It shapes how things appear to us, evaluatively speaking. By transfiguring things’ evaluative appearances, a change in sensibility can profoundly alter one’s overall experience of the world. I argue that some forms of sensibility change entail (1) risking one’s knowledge of what experiences imbued with one’s prior sensibility were like, and (2) surrendering one’s grasp on the intelligibility of one’s prior emotional apprehensions. These costs have consequences (...) for Laurie Paul’s ‘problem of transformative experience.’ Paul has argued that when we are poised to become someone new, our inexperience generates problems for authentic choice about our own futures. By reckoning with the epistemic losses involved in sensibility change, I show that this problem must not be confined to novel transformations. Prior experience does not guarantee the knowledge or understanding necessary for choosing authentically (in Paul’s sense). If the problem Paul highlights is indeed a problem _at all,_ then, it is a still more pervasive and intractable one than it has been taken to be. (shrink)

_Utilitarianism_ is a classic work of ethical theory, arguably the most persuasive and comprehensible presentation of this widely influential position. Mill argues that it is pleasure and pain that ought to guide our decision-making&and not the pleasure and pain of any one person or group, but the summative experience of all who are affected by our actions. While he didn’t invent utilitarianism, Mill offered its clearest expression and strongest defense, and expanded the theory to account for the variety in quality (...) that we find among specific pleasures and pains. Today, Mill’s version of the “Greatest Happiness Principle” is a standard premise in many moral arguments within the academy and in practical ethical and political deliberation. The complete text of the 1871 edition of _Utilitarianism_ is presented here, with footnote annotations added to clarify unfamiliar references and terminology for the student reader. A detailed introduction by the editor is divided into brief digestible parts discussing the context of the text and offering guidelines on how to read it accurately and critically. This edition has its origin in the acclaimed _Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought_ and adheres to the anthology’s format and high standard of accuracy and accessibility. (shrink)

Alan Bailey offers a clear exposition and defence of the philosophy of Sextus Empiricus, one of the most influential of ancient thinkers, the father of philosophical scepticism.