This article explores the process of university Ethical Review both as lived experience and as part of institutional governance at an English university. The article uses Blackburn's distinction between ethics and Ethics (Ethics?A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001) as a framework to examine the themes of ?vulnerability?, ?power? and ?relationships?. These themes are analysed closely both within the institutional and the fieldwork contexts, attempting to include the perspectives of all those involved in the research ethics process. The (...) article does not seek to draw any definitive conclusions but rather to stimulate, and add to the iterative discussion on the process of Ethical Review within institutions. Nonetheless, it does conclude by making some suggestions concerning the way in which the lived experience of ethics could better inform the practice of institutional Ethical Review. (shrink)

An introduction to the various logics of truth and modality as part of a foundation for the construction of theories of knowledge representation. The book reviews various semantic theories and employs them as the basis for the development of logics of truth and modality.

: Many bioethicists assume that morality is in a state of wide reflective equilibrium. According to this model of moral deliberation, public policymaking can build upon a core common morality that is pretheoretical and provides a basis for practical reasoning. Proponents of the common morality approach to moral deliberation make three assumptions that deserve to be viewed with skepticism. First, they commonly assume that there is a universal, transhistorical common morality that can serve as a normative baseline for judging various (...) actions and practices. Second, advocates of the common morality approach assume that the common morality is in a state of relatively stable, ordered, wide reflective equilibrium. Third, casuists, principlists, and other proponents of common morality approaches assume that the common morality can serve as a basis for the specification of particular policies and practical recommendations. These three claims fail to recognize the plural moral traditions that are found in multicultural, multiethnic, multifaith societies such as the United States and Canada. A more realistic recognition of multiple moral traditions in pluralist societies would be considerably more skeptical about the contributions that common morality approaches in bioethics can make to resolving contentious moral issues. (shrink)

Étude du matériel d'une tombe de la fin du protoattique ancien (contenant une oinochoé, une coupe, une tasse, une loutrophore, un dé et une table à jeu miniature) et de tombes de la fin du VIIe siècle avec un cratère ovoïde, des amphores, et un petit dinos à têtes d'influence corinthienne.

Examines the various explanations that have been given for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's losses in the 1982 and 1986 California gubernatorial campaigns. The authors offer important advice for all black candidates running against whites for office today.

Bioethicists disagree over methods, theories, decision-making guides, case analyses and public policies. Thirty years ago, the thinking of many scholars coalesced around a principlist approach to bioethics. That mid-level mode of moral reasoning is now one of many approaches to moral deliberation. Significant variation in contemporary approaches to the study of ethical issues related to medicine, biotechnology and health care raises the question of whether bioethics exists as widely shared method, theory, normative framework or mode of moral reasoning.

The standard issues with experts are about the nature of scientifi c expertise; problems of legitimacy and problems having to do with the limits of expertise; problems having to do with the place of experts in democratic politics and bureaucracies; as well as more general problems about the knowledge that experts possess: what the role of tacit knowledge and knowledge embodied in things and routines is, and to what extent expertise can be replaced or augmented by expert systems and technical (...) means. The chapters collected in this volume will be concerned with all of these issues, with the exception of tacit knowledge and technological “expert systems,” which will be the subject of a separate volume, Understanding the Tacit. The chapters in the present volume, however, go beyond the problem of scientifi c expertise, which will be treated as one type among many forms of expertise. (shrink)

Open any standard bioethics textbook, and therein can be found a host of subjects ranging from the abortion rights controversy to the morality of xenographic tissue transplantation. Just as there is a wide scope to the subject matter of bioethics, its practitioners come from a multitude of disciplines, including law, medicine, nursing, theology, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. And yet, despite a rich variety of investigators and methods, bioethicists overlook numerous subjects that deserve to be addressed. In particular, they neglect issues (...) of public health, preventive medicine, and social medicine. Although topics such as physician-assisted suicide, prenatal genetic testing, and the ethics of new reproductive technologies constitute the contemporary canon of bioethics and deserve sustained analysis, these subjects are not so significant that they should eclipse other issues. For example, gun control policies, the regulation of food additives. immunization programs, prenatal care, leave programs enabling employees to care for dying relatives, the provision of nutrition and medical care to the homeless, and the use of emergency rooms by the most impoverished citizens are all topics neglected by bioethicists. (shrink)

Introduction: ethical exigency -- Influence and escape -- Positioning -- Upon transcendence -- Ethical optics -- From stranger to neighbor -- This strange mission -- Waging peace -- Conclusion: the least of these.

Louis Mink wrote a classic study of R. G. Collingwood that led to his most important contribution to the philosophy of history, his account of narrative. Central to this account was the non-detachability thesis, that facts became historical facts through incorporation into narratives, and the thesis that narratives were not comparable to the facts or to one another. His book on Collingwood was critical of Collingwood's idea that there were facts in history that we get through self-knowledge but which are (...) nevertheless objective, his account of re-enactment, and his notion of absolute presuppositions. It is illuminating to compare Collingwood to Weber with respect to these puzzling arguments, for the same issues arise there in different form. Recent work in social neuroscience on mirroring allows a different approach to these puzzles: mirror system “knowledge“ of others and simulation fit, respectively, with Weber's idea of direct observational understanding and Collingwood's re-enactment account. This account allows for the detaching of historical facts about thoughts and action from narrative. (shrink)

This article first summarizes research regarding the relationship between sports that intentionally structure multiple types of brain trauma into their practice, such as rugby and boxing, and the range of negative health outcomes that flow from participation in such sports. The resultant brain injuries are described as ‘now’ and ‘later’ diseases, being those that affect the child immediately and then across their lifetime. After highlighting how these sports can permanently injure children, it examines this harm in relation to existing British (...) laws and policies concerning child abuse. The conclusion drawn is that neither children nor adults on their behalf are legally able to give informed consent for participation, and that impact sport organisations effectively groom children into sustaining and accepting brain trauma. Adults providing brain-traumatizing versions of these sports are thus described as being complicit in a form of child abuse that we term brain abuse. The contradictions in existing sports policy are highlighted, where policy describes that children are to be protected from harm, and yet the very practice of such sports creates harm by design. Implications of the argument are that children should be prohibited from partaking in impact sports. (shrink)

L. J. Henderson was a central figure in Harvard discussions of the nature of science in the interwar period and served as a bridge between the sciences and the social sciences. Two key ideas were promoted by Henderson: systems and conceptual schemes, both of which spread quickly at Harvard and then beyond. In this article the focus will be on conceptual schemes, a term which had a distinctive origin in Henderson that accounts for some of the ambiguities in its adaptations. (...) Henderson spoke as a scientist speaking to philosophers rather than doing philosophy and sharply distinguished his aims from those that followed from Immanuel Kant. Henderson’s model was the scheme of ancient Greek medicine, which had persisted for millennia and was replaced by modern medicine. This was differentiated from earlier neo-Kantian and later Kuhnian variations. Henderson’s account was distinctive in placing the origins of conceptual schemes in intuitions about patterns formed in practice by people operating on concrete phenomena. The resulting schemes, he thought, had to be accepted on faith by students, but were, as he put it, walking sticks to enable communication and understanding rather than exclusive dogmas. Henderson was an enthusiast for Vilfredo Pareto, who was vilified at Harvard during the war by Carl J. Friedrich, which led not to the disuse of his ideas but to the erasure of their origins. (shrink)

Conventional accounts of liberal democracy tend to obscure a basic fact: the phenomenon of administration. The American reception of the administrative state was self-consciously imitative of Continental models of state bureaucracy, as a remedy for the ills of democratic politics, but construed as a means of saving democracy from itself, and from lawyers and legalism, in the name of efficiency. The means was discretionary power, unaccountable to the courts and to voters. Reconciling this to democracy proved a challenge, and continues (...) to be one. (shrink)

Understanding the role of religion in early British sociology, as well as its fate in later sociology, requires a variety of perspectives: one is intellectual and concerns the various forms that the topic of religion took for British sociology. Another is organisational and ecological. British sociology as embodied in the Sociological Society was a part of a vast array of organisations that were part of a massive movement of social reform, international in scope, and motivated largely by the newly ‘social’ (...) Christianity of the late Victorian era. As a kind of public discourse, sociology was part of what Maurice Cowling called the ‘Public Doctrine’ replacing religion. As Cowling demonstrates for British intellectual life as a whole, the withdrawing roar of the sea of faith, as Matthew Arnold put it, was in the ears of generations of British academics and thinkers, and especially in those who used the term ‘sociology’ or referred to sociological thinkers, such as Comte, or their precursors. (shrink)

In this study the relationship between philosophy and literature is explored by means of an examination of ideas about language, the subject and ethics in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Musil and Oğuz Atay.

can be adapted and adopted by developing countries. IFC sees this as being an area where we may be able to benchmark and promote positive change. ● The force of global trade initiatives also influences animal welfare.

The split in our thinking between "masculine" and "feminine" is probably as old as language itself. Human beings seem to have a natural tendency to divide things into pairs: good/bad, light/dark, subject/object and so on. It is not surprising, then, that the male/female or masculine/feminine dichotomy is used to classify things other than men and women. Many languages actually classify all nouns as "masculine" or "feminine" (although not very consistently: for example, the Spanish masculine noun pollo means "hen", while the (...) feminine polla is slang for "penis"). This is perfectly natural; it is part of the way categorisation works in language. This does not, however, mean that it is right. It is probably unimportant whether a table or a chair is thought of as masculine or feminine. It may not even be very important these days whether we think of the sun as male and the moon as female (like the ancient Greeks) or vice versa (like most of the German tribes). However, when we start associating abstract concepts like Reason or Nature with men and women, we run into serious difficulties. (shrink)