It is perhaps most useful to approach the Doctor-Patient relationship (DPR) by admitting that it’s complicated. We review some of the strategies that have been employed to mitigate this complexity, zeroing in on one that promises to capture the main features of the DPR without eliminating some of its more important, existential components; pieces of the puzzle that must be retained if we are to avoid oversimplification and the errors that can arise by ignoring important foundational properties. We believe that (...) a useful way to look at the DPR and to capture essential features that must be balanced in the process is provided by Partnership Theory and its definition in terms of the so-called domination and partnership systems. We apply this theory to the DPR and investigate the implications of this application to health care. We see that in the absence of mitigating circumstances, adoption of the patient-as-partner model serves healthcare well and is flexible enough to accommodate circumstances that dictate modifications. (shrink)

Friendship, in its nature, purpose, and effects, has been an important concern of philosophy since antiquity. It was of particular significance in the life of Gilles Deleuze, one of the most original and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. Taking L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze -- an eight-hour video interview that was intended to be aired only after Deleuze's death -- as a key source, Charles J. Stivale examines the role of friendship as it appears in Deleuze's work and (...) life. Stivale develops a zigzag methodology practiced by Deleuze himself to explore several concepts as they relate to friendship and to discern how friendship shifts, slips, and creates movement between Deleuze and specific friends. The first section of this study discusses the elements of creativity, pedagogy, and literature that appear implicitly and explicitly in his work. The second section focuses on Deleuze's friendships with Foucault, Derrida, Claire Parnet, and Félix Guattari and reveals his conception of friendship as an ultimately impersonal form of intensity that goes beyond personal relationships. Stivale's analysis offers an intimate view into the thought of one of the greatest thinkers of our time. (shrink)

Despite its importance, the linkage between genetic and cultural evolution has until now been little explored. An understanding of this linkage is needed to extend evolutionary theory so that it can deal for the first time with the phenomena of mind and human social history. We characterize the process of gene-culture coevolution, in which culture is shaped by biological imperatives while biological traits are simultaneously altered by genetic evolution in response to cultural history. A case is made from both theory (...) and evidence that genetic and cultural evolution are inseverable, and that the human mind has tended to evolve so as to bias individuals toward certain patterns of cognition and choice rather than others. With the aid of mathematical models we trace the coevolutionary circuit: The genes prescribe structure in developmental pathways that lay down endocrine and neural systems, imposing regularities in the development of cognition and behavior; these regularities translate upward into holistic patterns of culture, which can be predicted in the form of probability density distributions ; natural selection acts within human history to favor certain epigenetic rules over others; and the selection alters the frequencies of the underlying genes. The effects of genetic and cultural changes reverberate throughout the circuit and are consequently tested with the passage of each life cycle. In addition to modeling gene-culture coevolution, we apply methods from island biogeography and information theory to examine the cultural capacity of the genes, the factors determining the magnitude of cultural diversity, and the possible reasons for the uniqueness of the human achievement. (shrink)

This article presents the rationale of a new approach to the debate between sociobiology and religion. In it, I outline a sociobiology that may generate alternative and competing hypotheses about the existence of gods as beings (theisms) and the nature of their participation in the universe. I examine the central theoretical issues of this sociobiology and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a sociobiological approach to theological issues, including problems pertinent to nontheistic theologies. A concluding case is made for an (...) enriched and revitalized agenda in the dialogue between sociobiology and religion. While consistent with current research on gene‐culture coevolution, the article's treatment expands on earlier work to begin incorporating theoretical terms that carry a more direct theological impact. (shrink)

In this essay, we defend the design of the Salk polio vaccine trial and try to put some limits on the role schemata should play in designing clinical research studies. Our presentation is structured as a response to de Freitas and Pietrobon who identified the CONSORT statement as a schema that would have, had it existed at the time, ruled out the design of the Salk polio vaccine trial of 1954 in favor of a completely randomized controlled clinical trial. We (...) argue that large-scale public health interventions often require evidence beyond simple efficacy, the limit of what an RCT can provide, and that the design actually adopted for the Salk trial represented a reasonable—albeit imperfect—compromise. This is of more than historical interest in that many contemporary studies are of the scale and scope to require a more pragmatic, rather than explanatory, approach to study design. (shrink)

Research shows that the physician’s personal attributes and social characteristics have a strong association with their end-of-life decision making. Despite efforts to increase patient, family and surrogate input into EOL decision making, research shows the physician’s input to be dominant. Our research finds that physician’s social values, independent of religiosity, have a significant association with physician’s tendency to withhold or withdraw life sustaining, EOL treatments. It is suggested that physicians employ personal social values in their EOL medical coping, because they (...) have to cope with existential dilemmas posed by the mystery of death, and left unresolved by medical decision making mechanisms such as advanced directives and hospital ethics committees. (shrink)

Heidegger understands technology as an act of revealing rather than merely a human achievement. Within the modern era, technology represents the manner in which humans stand within and make manifest the open interplay and inter-relatedness that is world. The danger of this era is the extent to which everything has become available, accessible, and disposable to human manipulation, practically without limit. However, the very totalizing extent to which this is happening, and the forgetfullness that takes it all for granted, can (...) also make us suddenly aware that everything, including world itself, is at risk; that we ourselves are at risk; that we are the danger. He calls for an attitude of releasement that handles world with a sense of receiving, and not just taking, a sense of thankfulness. Such a change could directly impact how we see ourselves and our responsibilities as we go about developing and using technologies. (shrink)

Although controversy concerning the morality of hunting is generally focused on sport hunting, sport hunting itself is not a morally distinctive kind of hunting. The understanding of hunting in general needs to be supplemented with reference to the goods which hunting seeks. Attempts to draw a moral distinction between sport and subsistence hunting are inadequate and historically suspect. Likewise, trying to establish sport hunting as morally distinctive by emphasizing its similarities to other sports also fails. Nevertheless, there are standards accepted (...) by hunters that support ethical judgments about hunting. Ethical hunting requires reentry into a community of nonhuman beings governed by ecology and evolution, not human constructs, the development of virtues such as tenacity, courage, moderation, and discipline, and the achievement of a heightened respect for the biotic community in which the hunt takes place. By means of such standards, we may yet be able to determine what good hunting is even though we are unable to determine whether sport hunting is good. (shrink)

This volume sets Berkeley's philosophy in its historical context by providing selections from: firstly, works that deeply influenced Berkeley as he formed his main doctrines; secondly, works that illuminate the philosophical climate in which those doctrines were formed; and thirdly, works that display Berkeley's subsequent philosophical influence. The first category is represented by selections from Descartes, Malebranche, Bayle, and Locke; the second category includes extracts from such thinkers as Regius, Lanion, Arnauld, Lee, and Norris; while reactions to Berkeley, both positive (...) and negative, are drawn from a wide range of thinkers - Leibniz, Baxter, Hume, Diderot, Voltaire, Reid, Kant, Herder, and Mill. (shrink)

In a society that is increasingly reliant on complex technologies, there are vital interests at stake in the ethics education of technical professionals. To promote professional behavior that will enhance the long-term well-being of all citizens and their environment, ethics education should be free of industry bias and use resources developed by independent academic and professional organizations. Recently, however, corporations have attempted to involve themselves in engineering ethics education (through the American Society of Engineering Education) as a spinoff of their (...) n-house employee ethics training. This article examines the “industry perspective” on ethics education offered by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin Corporations and reviews Lockheed-Martin’s “Ethics Challenge” game. The aerospace industry’s narrow focus on employee workplace behavior overlooks larger public-interest concerns. Engineering ethics education must include developing ethical awareness and a sense of social responsibility. (shrink)

The community college movement has been eager to embrace the accelerating changes brought about by global capital and facilitated by information technology. Leadership for the community college role in globalization has been cultivated by the American Association of Community Colleges and the League for Innovation in the Community College. As the administrators of publicly funded community colleges view themselves as managers and CEOs in a competitive market for education, the colleges look to private industry for funding. Meanwhile, the voice of (...) the community college is nearly silent with regard to environmental destruction and human rights abuses e xacerbated by globalization. This article will focuse on the role of community colleges in facilitating and cheerleading the corporate global economy while attenuating dissenting world views that would promote a more just and sustainable future. (shrink)

That dichotomization is, at least under certain circumstances, a bad idea is not news. A well-known, early example is the biblical story of King Solomon, who used the absurdity of the procedure to help adjudicate a dispute between two women who each claimed to be the mother of a contested child. Solomon reasoned that his proposal to split the child into two, giving half to each woman, would be abhorrent to the real mother, and when one of the women objected (...) while the other thought the proposal was "only fair," the choice between the women was made obvious.Things, however, are not always so clear-cut, and it is not difficult to find arguments that point to the advantages that accrue to those that simplify matters.... (shrink)

This essay seeks to identify significant theological, philosophical, cultural, political, and moral issues that are raised by the four participants of the exchange on responding to terrorism. It argues that the “just war” concept, as classically developed and refined within the mainstream of the Christian moral tradition over the last two millennia, furnishes the best—indeed, the only morally responsible—alternative to addressing and deterring the terrorist phenomenon, given the commitment to justice and neighbor-love which underpins the tradition.

Despite its importance, the linkage between genetic and cultural evolution has until now been little explored. An understanding of this linkage is needed to extend evolutionary theory so that it can deal for the first time with the phenomena of mind and human social history. We characterize the process of gene-culture coevolution, in which culture is shaped by biological imperatives while biological traits are simultaneously altered by genetic evolution in response to cultural history. A case is made from both theory (...) and evidence that genetic and cultural evolution are inseverable, and that the human mind has tended to evolve so as to bias individuals toward certain patterns of cognition and choice rather than others. With the aid of mathematical models we trace the coevolutionary circuit: The genes prescribe structure in developmental pathways that lay down endocrine and neural systems, imposing regularities in the development of cognition and behavior; these regularities translate upward into holistic patterns of culture, which can be predicted in the form of probability density distributions ; natural selection acts within human history to favor certain epigenetic rules over others; and the selection alters the frequencies of the underlying genes. The effects of genetic and cultural changes reverberate throughout the circuit and are consequently tested with the passage of each life cycle. In addition to modeling gene-culture coevolution, we apply methods from island biogeography and information theory to examine the cultural capacity of the genes, the factors determining the magnitude of cultural diversity, and the possible reasons for the uniqueness of the human achievement. (shrink)

The Standards of Ethical Conduct for Management Accountants (Statement 1C) promulgated by the National Association of Accountants on June 1, 1983, are described and critiqued in this article. Four major issues related to the issuance of the standards are discussed: (1) What are the basic requirements of any ethical system? Does Statement IC meet these requirements? (2) Should a professional be ethical? (3) If ethical behavior is desirable for management accountants, should such standards be formally expressed in writing? (4) If (...) the standards are expressed in writing, what format should be adopted for the content and how should the standards be expressed? (shrink)

Memory exhibits episodic superposition, an analog of the quantum superposition of physical states: Before a cue for a presented or unpresented item is administered on a memory test, the item has the simultaneous potential to occupy all members of a mutually exclusive set of episodic states, though it occupies only one of those states after the cue is administered. This phenomenon can be modeled with a nonadditive probability model called overdistribution (OD), which implements fuzzy-trace theory's distinction between verbatim and gist (...) representations. We show that it can also be modeled based on quantum probability theory. A quantum episodic memory (QEM) model is developed, which is derived from quantum probability theory but also implements the process conceptions of global matching memory models. OD and QEM have different strengths, and the current challenge is to identify contrasting empirical predictions that can be used to pit them against each other. (shrink)

The Belmont Report’s distinction between research and the practice of accepted therapy has led various authors to suggest that these purportedly distinct activities should be governed by different ethical principles. We consider some of the ethical consequences of attempts to separate the two and conclude that separation fails along ontological, ethical, and epistemological dimensions. Clinical practice and clinical research, as with yin and yang, can be thought of as complementary forces interacting to form a dynamic system in which the whole (...) exceeds the sum of its parts. Just as effective clinical practice cannot exist without clinical research, meaningful clinical research requires the context of clinical practice. We defend this thesis by triangulation, that is, by outlining how multiple investigators have reached this conclusion on the basis of varied theoretical and applied approaches. More confidence can be placed in a result if different methods/viewpoints have led to that result. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze is now regarded as one of the most radical philosophers of the twentieth century. His work is hugely influential across a range of subjects, from philosophy to literature, to art, architecture and cultural studies. _Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts_ provides a guide to Deleuzian thought for any reader coming to his writings for the first time. This new edition is fully revised and updated and includes three new chapters on the event, psychoanalysis and philosophy.

The first part of the paper sketches the rationale for the classical theistic thesis that, though God is not really related to the world, the world is really related to God. Part II delineates four sets of recent criticisms ofthis thesis: (a) an objection which assesses it as conflating transparent and opaque construals of intentional propositions, (b) a dilemma which regards it as undermining either free divine creativity or God’s knowledge of the contingent, (c) arguments which view its adherence to (...) an absolute divine immutability and independence as in conflict both with God’s knowledge of a changing creation and with human knowledge of God, and (d) two religiously inspired objections which contend that the thesis is contradictory to the biblical claim that God is personally related to the world. Part III develops the linguistic essence of the classical thesis through the syntactical insights of Sommers’ logic and defends it against the objections posed. (shrink)

This paper uses the intuition from the game of chickento model client-auditor financial reporting and audit effort strategies. Within an ethical context, our model is concerned with the client misreporting and its detection by the auditor. The paper uses a welfare game(similar to the game of chicken) to more formally model client-auditor strategies. The welfare game is then extended to provide additional insight into ethical and audit effort issues.Such a welfare gameprovides equilibrium in mixed strategies. This mixed strategy solution makes (...) possible four outcomes from the game: 1) Financial Statements are fairly presented by client and the auditor performs a normal audit, 2) Financial Statements are fairly presented by client and the auditor performs an extended audit (over auditing), 3) Financial State-ments are misstated by client and detected by the auditor, and 4) Financial Statements are misstated by client and not detected by the auditor (audit failure despite no intended unethical action on the part of the auditor). (shrink)

The author starts from the traditional American notion that technology might offer a way to decrease the horror and suffering of warfare. He points out that historically this assumption is flawed in that past technological advances, from gunpowder weapons to bombers, have only made warfare more--not less--bloody. With a relentless logic, Colonel Dunlap takes to task those who say that the Revolution in Military Affairs has the potential to make war less bloody. He covers the technological landscape from precision-guided munitions (...) and Information Warfare to the use of space for military operations to raise issues that could pose difficult ethical, legal and moral problems for statesmen and soldiers. Some of these conundrums are so confounding that the author could claim that in all humility his only purpose was to raise these issues to prompt debate. But Colonel Dunlap takes the next step to outline several broad thematic avenues that may help us all address the difficult problems that lie ahead. (shrink)