Somewhat traumatized by the Galileo Affair the Church until recently showed low profile in the conflicts with science, evolutionary theory included. The talk presents a categorization of possible relationships between science and religion by distinguishing between "Galilean conflicts", which are about mutually exclusive statements about matters of fact, and Freudian conflicts where an empirical science tries to explain away religion as a phenomenon in its own right. In the light of this distinction I deal with the (...) reactions of the Church since 1859, particularly with the ambiguous position of the present Pope. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky pursues a methodology in linguistics that abstracts from substantial amounts of data about actual language use in a way that has met considerable resistance from many other linguists. This chapter argues that Chomsky's observation in fact accords with good explanatory practice elsewhere in science, but it does conflict with a traditional methodology in linguistics. It's striking that the main features of Chomsky's Galilean style are independently taken to be rather obvious features of scientific method in contemporary philosophy (...) of science. The chapter first looks in more detail at the roles that idealization plays in contemporary generative grammar. It then proceeds to explore the congruence between the Galilean style in linguistics and aspects of good scientific methodology. Finally, the chapter sets out and responds briefly to some of the arguments that have been raised against the Galilean style. (shrink)

Special relativity is based on the apparent contradiction between two postulates, namely, Galilean vs. c-invariance. We show that anomalies ensue by holding the former postulate alone. In order for Galilean invariance to be consistent, it must hold not only for bodies’ motions, but also for the signals and forces they exchange. If the latter ones do not obey the Galilean version of the Velocities Addition Law, invariance is violated. If, however, they do, causal anomalies, information loss and (...) conservation laws’ violations are bound to occur. These anomalies are largely remedied by introducing waves and fields that disobey Galilean invariance. Therefore, from these inconsistencies within classical mechanics, electromagnetism could be predicted before experiment proved its existence. Special relativity, it might be argued, would then follow naturally, either as a resolution of the resulting conflict or as an extrapolation of the path between the theories. We conclude with a review of earlier attempts to base SR on a single postulate, and point out the originality of the present work. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to consider in what sense the modal-Hamiltonian interpretation of quantum mechanics satisfies the physical constraints imposed by the Galilean group. In particular, we show that the only apparent conflict, which follows from boost-transformations, can be overcome when the definition of quantum systems and subsystems is taken into account. On this basis, we apply the interpretation to different well-known models, in order to obtain concrete examples of the previous conceptual conclusions. Finally, we consider the (...) role played by the Casimir operators of the Galilean group in the interpretation. (shrink)

Summary Exchanges of learning and controversies between engineers and mathematicians were important factors in the development of early modern science. This theme is discussed by focusing, first, on architectural and mathematical dynamism in mid 16th-century Milan. While some engineers-architects referred to Euclid and Vitruvius for improving their education and argued for an institutional reform of their profession, Girolamo Cardano and other mathematicians explained the De architectura and studied the inventions of the arts. Attention is drawn, then, to the entrance in (...) the field of hydraulics of Benedetto Castelli, a Galilean mathematician who criticised some basic engineering methods but also relied on engineering experience. This mix of criticism and appropriation of engineering notions was particularly highlighted by Domenico Guglielmini, who saw in the study of the nature of rivers the key for their control and improvement. A further facet was the growing distinction among the practitioners. In 16th-century Milan professional distinctions appeared in a grand scale cadastral survey of the whole state and in the establishment of a professional body of engineers-architects and land surveyors. It was not a peculiarly Italian trend. In the postscript some remarks are added to show that a partly similar differentiation was also taking place among E.G.R. Taylor's mathematical practitioners of Elizabethan England. (shrink)

Books reviewed:John Barton, Joel and Obadiah: A Commentary John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, Volume III: Companions and CompetitorsWilliam E. Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes: Galilean Conflicts and the Setting of QRichard A. Horsley, Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark's GospelMaurice Casey, Aramaic Sources of Mark's GospelPhilip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its WayChristopher M. Tuckett, Christology and the New Testament: Jesus and His Earliest FollowersMarkus Bockmuehl, The Cambridge Companion (...) to JesusShelly Matthews, First Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early Judaism and ChristianityStephen J. Davis, The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women's Piety in Late AntiquityJ. Nimmo Smith, A Christian's Guide to Greek Culture. The Pseudo‐Nonnus Commentaries on Sermons 4, 5, 39 and 43 by Gregory of Nazianzus: Introduction, Translation and Notes.David Thomas, Early Moslem Polemic Against Christianity: Abu Isa al‐Warraq's ‘Against the Incarnation’Thomas O'Loughlin, Celtic Theology: Humanity, World and God in Early Irish WritingsCaroline M. Baron and Jenny Stratford, The Church and Learning in Later Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of R. B. Dobson Owen Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent Benson Bobrick, The Making of the English BiblePeter Marhall and Alec Ryrie, The Beginnings of English ProtestantismRobert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England. Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540–1640Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation EnglandNicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c.1530–1700John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689William Gibson, The Church of England 1688–1832: Unity and AccordWarwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth CenturiesJames M. Byrne, God: Thoughts in an Age of Uncertainty Michael Palmer, The Question of God: An Introduction and SourcebookMichel René Barnes, The Power of God: ΔYNAMIΣ in Gregory of Nyssa's Trinitarian TheologyThomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on VirtueStanley M. Hauerwas, Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth‐Century Theology and PhilosophyDavid Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and ApocalypseJohn Sullivan, Catholic Education: Distinctive and InclusiveGeorge Dennis O'Brien, The Idea of a Catholic UniversityGunnar Skirbekk and Nils Gilje, A History of Western ThoughtEllen Wagner, Essays on Plato's PsychologyAnthony Kenny, Aquinas on BeingJame Daly, Deals and Ideals: Two Concepts of EnlightenmentManfred Kuehn, Kant: A BiographyP. Travis Kroeker and Bruce K. Ward, Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to ModernityStephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, KierkegaardDavid Braybrooke, Natural Law ModernizedMaría Pía Lara, Rethinking EvilW. W. Meisner, Freud and PsychoanalysisJennifer Jackson, Truth, Trust and MedicineJeremy Sugarman and Daniel P. Sulmasy, Methods in Medical EthicsH. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. and Mark J. Cherry, Allocating Scarce Medical Resources: Roman Catholic PerspectivesMaura A. Ryan, The Ethics and Economics of Assisted Reproduction: The Cost of LongingMichael Walsh, Dictionary of Christian Biography. (shrink)

Ptolemy´s astronomy and the Galileo case: two historical and epistemological considerations The Galileo case is the most famous example of the encounter betwen science and Faith. The debate was centered, among others, in the field of epistemology and the history of science. The paper shows that the Galilean pretentions of interpreting the heliocentric hypothesis in a realistic way did not constituted a novelty, but rather it was a continuation of the most important Ptolemaic astronomical tradition. It also argues that (...) the Copernican hypothesis did not inaugurate, because of the introduction of the Earth´s motion, a new phase of conflict between astronomy and physics. This conflict already existed, at least, since the times of Ptolemy. (shrink)

In this paper I revisit Adam Smith’s treatment of Copernicanism and Newtonianism in his essay, “The History of Astronomy” (hereafter: “Astronomy”), in light of a surprisingly ignored context: David Hume. This remark will strike most scholars of Adam Smith as unfounded—David Hume’s philosophy is often invoked as a source of Smith’s approach in the “Astronomy” or as its target. Yet, Hume’s occasional remarks on Copernicanism nor his treatment of the history of science in the History of England (1754-62, but revised (...) throughout Hume’s life) have not been carefully analyzed in light of the “Astronomy.” In the first five sections of this paper I offer a detailed analysis of all of Hume’s remarks on the Copernican system in his oeuvre. I show that David Hume believed that Copernicus achieved a “revolution” in philosophy. Moreover, I argue that Hume increasingly treats Galileo as the hero of the Copernican revolution. In doing so, Hume appears surprisingly blind to the importance of post-Galilean natural philosophy, especially the (dynamical) arguments that Huygens and Newton provided for the rotation of the Earth. In the last section of the paper, I argue that Adam Smith does show appreciation of dynamic views. I show that Smith and the mature Hume agree on the importance of Galileo, even describing his method in strikingly similar language, but that they evaluate the evidence differently in light of two conflicting commitments: i) Hume is committed to the “true philosophy”—-a certain kind of scepticism which Smith does not share; ii) Hume never seems to have assimilated the way Newton changed the evidential standards within science. (shrink)

We use a new, distinctly “geometrical” interpretation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics (NRQM) to argue for the fundamentality of the 4D blockworld ontology. We argue for a geometrical interpretation whose fundamental ontology is one of spacetime relations as opposed to constructive entities whose time-dependent behavior is governed by dynamical laws. Our view rests on two formal results: Kaiser (1981 & 1990), Bohr & Ulfbeck (1995) and Anandan, (2003) showed independently that the Heisenberg commutation relations of NRQM follow from the relativity of (...) simultaneity (RoS) per the Poincaré Lie algebra. And, Bohr, Ulfbeck & Mottelson (2004a & 2004b) showed that the density matrix for a particular NRQM experimental outcome may be obtained from the spacetime symmetry group of the experimental configuration. This shows how the blockworld view is not only consistent with NRQM, not only an implication of our geometrical interpretation of NRQM, but it is necessary in a non-trivial way for explaining quantum interference and “non-locality” from the spacetime perspective. Together the formal results imply that contrary to accepted wisdom, NRQM, the measurement problem and so-called quantum non-locality do not provide reasons to abandon the 4D blockworld implication of RoS. But rather, the deep non-commutative structure of the quantum and the deep structure of spacetime as given by the Minkowski interpretation of special relativity (STR) are deeply unified in a 4D spacetime regime that lies between Galilean spacetime (G4) and Minkowski spacetime (M4). Taken together the aforementioned formal results allow us to model NRQM phenomena such as interference without the need for realism about 3N Hilbert space, establishing that the world is really 4D and that configuration space is nothing more than a calculational device. Our new geometrical interpretation of NRQM provides a geometric account of quantum entanglement and so-called non-locality free of conflict with STR and free of interpretative mystery. In section 2 we discuss the various tensions between STR and NRQM with respect to the dimensionality of the world. Section 3 is devoted to an explication of the Kaiser et al. results and their philosophical implications. Likewise, the Bohr et al. results and their implications are the subject of section 4. In section 5, we present our geometric interpretation of quantum entanglement and “non-locality.”. (shrink)

Psychologists of my generation will recognize the implicit reference in my title immediately: to Kurt Lewin's classic paper that introduced most of us to the excitement of his ideas when we read it as the initial chapter of A Dynamic Theory of Personality . When Lewin wrote about "The Conflict Between Aristotelian and Galilean Modes of Thought in Contemporary Psychology" over a half a century ago, it was indeed a breath of fresh air. Along with a very few other (...) books and papers, it stands out saliently in my memory as having had a large part in forming my enduring perspective in psychology. It surely played a similar role for many others, by no means just Lewinians. We cannot readily recall its content since we've absorbed it, and built it into the fabric of our thought. I turn back to Lewin's essay because it represents the psysicalist tradition in psychological theory at its best, free of many faults that tainted the behavioristic expressions of positivism. All the same, the hermeneutic and contextualist critique of positivism should leave us dissatisfied with Lewin's version of a Galilean strategy for psychology. In one respect, thus, I am using this occasion for my own "me-too" endorsement of post-positivist theorizing. My second concern here is to focus attention on the need for a culturally and historically contextualized approach in personality theory. Finally, this occasion lets me talk some sense about post-positivist perspectives in psychology. As usual, the conceptual innovators have not been very reasonable. If a contextualized psychology of persons is to be advanced, we need a more plausible version of contextualism than is being argued by the leading polemicists. This is also an effort, therefore, to domesticate a contextualized approach, to accommodate it to its prospective role of defining a new mainstream of theorizing at the softer, more human end of the psychological spectrum. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Background: Clinical ethics committees have been broadly implemented in university hospitals, general hospitals and nursing homes. To ensure the quality of ethics consultations, evaluation should be mandatory. Research question/aim: The aim of this article is to evaluate the perspectives of all people involved and the process of implementation on the wards. Research design and participants: The data were collected in two steps: by means of non-participating observation of four ethics case consultations and by open-guided interviews with 28 participants. Data analysis (...) was performed according to grounded theory. Ethical considerations: The study received approval from the local Ethics Commission (registration no.: 32/11/10). Findings: ‘Communication problems’ and ‘hierarchical team conflicts’ proved to be the main aspects that led to ethics consultation, involving two factors: unresolvable differences arise in the context of team conflicts on the ward and unresolvable differences prevent a solution being found. Hierarchical asymmetries, which are common in the medical field, support this vicious circle. Based on this, minor or major disagreements regarding clinical decisions might be seen as ethical conflicts. The expectation on the clinical ethics committee is to solve this (communication) problem, but the participants experienced that hierarchy is maintained by the clinical ethics committee members. Discussion: The asymmetrical structures of the clinical ethics committee reflect the institutional hierarchical nature. They endure, despite the fact that the clinical ethics committee should be able to detect and overcome them. Disagreements among care givers are described as one of the most difficult ethically relevant situations and should be recognised by the clinical ethics committee. On the contrary, discussion of team conflicts and clinical ethical issues should not be combined, since the first is a mandate for team supervision. Conclusion: To avoid dominance by physicians and an excessively factual character of the presentation, the case or conflict could be presented by both physicians and nurses, a strategy that strengthens the interpersonal and emotional aspects and also integrates both professional perspectives. (shrink)

Background: Education can be taken as a key factor in transmission of a value tradition in healthcare. In professional and educational contexts, transmission of values appears to be a kind of guarantee for an occupational group’s professional identity, awareness and ethical integrity. Given the positives of such transmission of value traditions, one can also pay attention to conflicts between the professional tradition and individuals who are brought into that tradition. Objectives: How does mediation of value tradition in healthcare education (...) appear out of the students’ perspective based on their own narratives? Research design and participants: Students’ texts were analysed through a combination of contrastive discourse analysis and sociohistorical description and then evaluated from an ethical perspective. Data were collected from the annual electronic feedback given by students after their clinical practice at a University Hospital. Ethical considerations: Organizational approval was received. Information about the voluntary nature of participation was a part of the feedback tool. Findings: The analysis points to the fact that there is a definite theme in the students’ experiences that both the previous research has neglected and that stands in conflict with the current tradition of healthcare education in Finland. That theme can be summarized in the experience of ‘losing one’s identity’, and it is expressed in a request to experience of ‘losing one’s identity’ and it is expressed in a request to have a right to ‘use one’s own name’ also as a healthcare professional. Discussion and conclusion: Being addressed by one’s name is to make the person directly involved and responsible, realizing that that person’s perspective is of importance to the way the world is. We argue that this theme (my name) is of ethical importance and could have empowering potentiality when used in an ethically sound way. (shrink)

Powerful emotion and pursuit of self-interest have many times led people to break the law with the belief that they are doing so with sound moral reasons. This study is a comprehensive philosophical and legal analysis of the gray area in which the foundations of law and morality clash. This objective book views these oblique circumstances from two perspectives: that of the person who faces a possible conflict between the claims of morality and law and must choose whether or not (...) to obey the penal code; and that of the people who make and uphold laws and must decide whether to treat someone with a moral claim to disobey differently from ordinary lawbreakers. In examining the extent of the obligations owed by citizens to their government, Greenawalt concentrates on the possible existence of a single source of obligation that reaches all citizens and all laws. He also discusses techniques of amelioration of punishment for conscientious lawbreakers, asking how far legal systems should go to accomodate individuals who break the law for reason of conscience. Drawing from numerous examples of conflicts between law and morality, Greenawalt illustrates in detail the positions and predicaments of potential lawbreakers and lawmakers alike. (shrink)

In recent work, Callender and Cohen (2009) and Hoefer (2007) have proposed variants of the account of chance proposed by Lewis (1994). One of the ways in which these accounts diverge from Lewis’s is that they allow special sciences and the macroscopic realm to have chances that are autonomous from those of physics and the microscopic realm. A worry for these proposals is that autonomous chances may place incompatible constraints on rational belief. I examine this worry, and attempt to determine (...) (i) what kinds of conflicts would be problematic, and (ii) whether these proposals lead to problematic conflicts. After working through a pair of cases, I conclude that these proposals do give rise to problematic conflicts. (shrink)

There are at least two different aspects of our rational evaluation of agents’ doxastic attitudes. First, we evaluate these attitudes according to whether they are supported by one’s evidence (substantive rationality). Second, we evaluate these attitudes according to how well they cohere with one another (structural rationality). In previous work, I’ve argued that substantive and structural rationality really are distinct, sui generis, kinds of rationality – call this view ‘dualism’, as opposed to ‘monism’, about rationality – by arguing that the (...) requirements of substantive and structural rationality can come into conflict. In this paper, I push the dialectic on this issue forward in two main ways. First, I argue that the most promising ways of resisting the diagnosis of my cases as conflicts still end up undermining monism in different ways. Second, supposing for the sake of argument that we should understand the cases as conflicts, I address the question of what we should do when such conflicts arise. I argue that, at least in a prominent kind of conflict case, the coherence requirements take precedence over the evidential requirements. (shrink)

Clinical Ethics, Ahead of Print. It could hardly be denied that healthcare should be patient-centred. However, some of the practices commonly described as patient-centred care may have ethically problematic consequences. This article identifies and discusses twelve ethical conflicts that may arise in the application of person-centred care. The conflicts concern e.g. privacy, autonomous decision-making, safeguarding medical quality, and maintaining professional egalitarianism as well as equality in care. Awareness of these potential conflicts can be helpful in finding the (...) best way to ensure that healthcare has its focus on the needs and interests of the patients. Patient-centred care may have to take different forms, depending of the nature of the disease, the patient’s life situation, and the economic, organizational and technological resources available to the healthcare unit. (shrink)

In this paper, we raise two points. First, any rights‐based theory should provide a method by which to guide reasoning in addressing conflicts of rights. The reason, we argue, is that these theories must provide guidance on what should be done. Second, this method must contain two key recommendations: (1) We should try to find a deliberative mechanism through which none of the rights is simply eliminated from the scene; (2) these rights may be balanced against each other to (...) define which right should prevail, but without considering non‐rights‐interests as if they were rights in the process. These recommendations instantiate two crucial principles that underlie our common intuitions on rights, namely, the principle that rights deserve equal respect and the principle that rights should be taken seriously. (shrink)

According to epistemic reductionism about practical reasons, facts about practical reasons can be reduced to facts about evidence for ought-judgements. We argue that this view misconstrues practical conflicts. At least some conflicts between practical reasons put us in a position to know that an action ϕ is optional, i.e. that we neither ought to perform nor ought to refrain from performing the action. By understanding conflicts of practical reasons as conflicts of evidence about what one ought (...) to do, epistemic reductionism fails to account for this. In conflict cases in which ϕ-ing is optional, epistemic reductionism suggests that we have equally strong evidence for and against assuming that we ought to ϕ, and thus cannot be in a position to know that it is not the case that we ought to ϕ. This is a serious flaw. (shrink)

In light of the recent revival of the debate on radical democracy, this paper seeks to show how a critical reappropriation of Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic politics can explain the structure of a conflict-based understanding of democratic orders. In explicit convergence with Mouffe, I argue that a radical democratic project by no means needs to abandon—as many absolute democracy and multitude theorists claim—the modern political paradigm. I also show, diverging from her account, that Mouffe’s defence of a radical democratic (...) project based on pluralism and agonism would have been better served by a critical reception of Arendt’s thinking rather than that of Schmitt. The relevance of this alternative strategy—so I will argue—lies in the fact that it delivers an apt design for a politico-legal order which permits true and proper conflicts, on the one hand, while simultaneously allowing that they be dealt with democratically, on the other. (shrink)

The medical profession is under a state of increasing scrutiny. Recent high profile scandals regarding substantial industry payments to physicians, surgeons, and medical researchers have raised serious concerns over conflicts of interest. Amidst this background, the public, physicians, and policymakers alike appear to make the same assumption regarding conflicts of interest; that doctors who succumb to influences from industry are making a deliberate choice of self-interest over professionalism and that these doctors are corrupt. In reality, a myriad of (...) evidence from social science indicates that influence from conflicts of interest often occurs on a subconscious and unintentional level. This poses an important issue, since such conflicts can steer wellintentioned physicians away from their primary professional goal to provide the best medical advice and treatment possible. (shrink)

BackgroundHealthcare professionals use the ethics of justice and care to construct moral reasoning. These ethics are conflicting in nature; different value systems and orders of justice and care are applied to the cause of actual moral conflict. We aim to clarify the structure and factors of healthcare professionals’ moral conflicts through the lens of justice and care to obtain suggestions for conflict resolutions.MethodSemi-structured interviews about experiences of moral conflict were conducted with Japanese nurses recruited using the snowball sampling method. (...) Interviews were conducted based on the real-life moral conflict and choice interview. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, then analyzed based on the interpretive method of data analysis. Verbatim transcripts were read four times, first to get an overall sense of the conflict, then to understand the person’s thoughts and actions that explain the conflict, and third and fourth to identify perspectives of justice and care, respectively. Each moral perspective was classified into categories according to Chally’s taxonomy.ResultsAmong 31 responses, 2 that did not mention moral conflict were excluded, leaving 29 responses that were analyzed. These responses were classified into six cases with conflict between both justice and care perspectives or within one perspective, and into two cases without conflict between perspectives. The “rules” category of justice and the “welfare of others” category of care were included in many cases of conflict between two perspectives, and they frequently occurred in each perspective.ConclusionsThe nurses in this study suggest that they make moral judgments based on moral values that are intertwined with justice and care perspectives complex manner.Organizational, professional, and patient-related factors influenced conflicts between justice and care. Additionally, multiple overlapping loyalties created conflicts within justice perspectives, and multifaceted aspects of care-provider’s responsibility and patient need created conflicts within care. Decision-making biased towards one perspective can be distorted. It is important to consider ethical issues from both perspectives to resolve conflicts, especially the effective use of the ethics of care is recommended. (shrink)

On the face of it, normative conflicts are commonplace. Yet standard deontic logic declares them to be logically impossible. That prompts the question, What are the proper principles of normative reasoning if such conflicts are possible? This paper examines several alternatives that have been proposed for a logic of 'ought' that can accommodate normative conflicts, and finds all of them unsatisfactory as measured against three criteria of adequacy. It then introduces a new logic that does meet all (...) three criteria, and so allows for the possibility of genuine normative conflicts. (shrink)

Background: Decision-making and assessment in emergency situations are complex and result many times in ethical conflicts between different healthcare professionals. Aim: To analyse and describe situations that can generate ethical conflict among nurses working in emergency situations. Methods: Qualitative analysis. A total of 16 emergency nurses took part in interviews and a focus group. Ethical considerations: Organisational approval by the University Hospital, and informed consent and confidentiality were ensured before conducting the research. Result/conclusion: Two categories emerged: one in ‘ethical (...) issues’ and one in ‘emotions and feelings in caring’. The four ethical subcategories are presented: Autonomy, the first sub category: first, the nurse’s ability to practise care on an emergency ward and, second, to support the patient and/or relatives in terms of care and medical treatment. The conflicts arise when the nurse ends up in the middle between the patient and the physician responsible for the diagnosis and treatment from a nature scientific perspective. Reification of injured body: patient was often reified and fragmented, becoming just a leg or arm. Different factors contributed in this perspective. Pain: pain relief was often inadequate but more effectively treated in the emergency medical services than at the emergency department. The nurses highlighted the phenomenon of suffering because they felt that pain was only an object, forgetting the patients’ care need, like separating mind from body. Death: the nurses felt that the emergency services are only prepared to save lives and not to take care of the needs of patients with ‘end-of-life’ care. Another issue was the lack of ethical guidelines during a cardiac arrest. Resuscitation often continues without asking about the patient’s ‘previous wishes’ in terms of resuscitation or not. In these situations, the nurses describe an ethical conflict with the physician in performing their role as the patient’s advocate. The nurses express feelings of distress, suffering, anger and helplessness. (shrink)

: This essay provides an analysis of conflicts of interest in science. It gives an overview of some current conflict of interest policies and distinguishes between real, apparent, and potential conflicts of interest. The essay argues that scientists should disclose real, apparent, and potential conflicts of interest and that they should avoid conflicts that threaten scientific objectivity or trustworthiness. The essay also uses several hypothetical scenarios to illustrate some of the key points made in the analysis (...) and suggests some strategies for buffering the impact of conflicts of interest in science. (shrink)

Background: The parent of a child with profound cognitive disability will have complex decisions to consider throughout the life of their child. An especially complex decision is whether to place a tracheotomy to support the child’s airway. The decision may involve the parent wanting a tracheotomy and the clinician advising against this intervention or the clinician recommending a tracheotomy while the parent is opposed to the intervention. This conflict over what is best for the child may lead to a bioethics (...) consult. Objective: The study explores the conflicts that may arise around tracheotomy placements. Research design: This study is a retrospective cohort study of pediatric patients for whom a tracheotomy decision required a bioethics consult. Participants and research context: Pediatric patients aged birth to 18 years old with a bioethics consult for a tracheotomy decision conflict between April 2010 and December 2016. A standardized data collection tool was used to review notes entered by the palliative care team, social workers, primary clinical team interim summaries, and the bioethics consult service. Ethical considerations: The study was reviewed and approved by the medical center’s institutional review board. Results: There were 248 clinical bioethics consults during the identified study period. There were 31 consults involving 21 children where the word tracheotomy was mentioned in the consult, and 13 of the 21 consults were for children with profound cognitive disability. Discussion and conclusion: Clinicians need to be aware of their own biases when discussing a child’s prognosis and treatment options while also understanding the parents’ values and what the parent might consider to be burdensome in the care of their child and the acceptable burden for the child to experience. (shrink)

The increasing interconnectedness of academic research and external industry has left research vulnerable to conflicts of interest. These conflicts have the potential to undermine the integrity of scientific research as well as to threaten public trust in scientific findings. The present effort sought to identify themes in the perspectives of faculty researchers regarding conflicts of interest. Think-aloud interview responses were qualitatively analyzed in an effort to provide insights with regard to appropriate ways to address the threat of (...) conflicts of interest in research. Themes in participant responses included disclosure of conflicts of interest, self-removal from situations where conflict exists, accommodation of conflict, denial of the existence of conflict, and recognition of complexity of situations involving conflicts of interest. Moral disengagement operations are suggested to explain the appearance of each identified theme. In addition, suggestions for best practices regarding addressing conflicts of interest given these themes in faculty perspectives are provided. (shrink)

The general area of business and professional ethics is full of vexing and confusing problems. For example, questions concerning the im portance of ethical standards, whether ethics is unnecessary given appropriate legal enforcement, whether it is imperative to teach ethical behavior in professional education, and similar questions are all controversial. The specific ethical problems to be found in the areas of accounting and finance are at least as difficult as those in other areas. However, there is one kind of ethical (...) problem which is unusually prominent in finance and accounting, which deserves to be recognized more widely in ethics as a significant kind of issue. This is the problem of conflicts of interest. (shrink)

Suppose that two competing norms, N1 and N2, can be identified such that a given person’s response can be interpreted as correct according to N1 but incorrect according to N2. Which of these two norms, if any, should one use to interpret such a response? In this paper we seek to address this fundamental problem by studying individual variation in the interpretation of conditionals by establishing individual profiles of the participants based on their case judgments and reflective attitudes. To investigate (...) the participants’ reflective attitudes we introduce a new experimental paradigm called the Scorekeeping Task. As a case study, we identify the participants who follow the Suppositional Theory of conditionals (N1) versus Inferentialism (N2) and investigate to what extent internally consistent competence models can be reconstructed for the participants on this basis. After extensive empirical investigations, an apparent reasoning error with and-to-if inferences was found in one of these two groups. The implications of this case study for debates on the proper role of normative considerations in psychology are discussed. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition (...) from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields. (shrink)

No discussion of academic freedom, research integrity, and patient safety could begin with a more disquieting pair of case studies than those of Nancy Olivieri and David Healy. The cumulative impact of the Olivieri and Healy affairs has caused serious self examination within the biomedical research community. The first part of the essay analyses these recent academic scandals. The two case studies are then placed in their historical context—that context being the transformation of the norms of science through increasingly close (...) ties between research universities and the corporate world. After a literature survey of the ways in which corporate sponsorship has biased the results of clinical drug trials, two different strategies to mitigate this problem are identified and assessed: a regulatory approach, which focuses on managing risks associated with industry funding of university research, and a more radical approach, the sequestration thesis, which counsels the outright elimination of corporate sponsorship. The reformist approach is criticised and the radical approach defended. (shrink)

This article outlines the role of globalized mass media in the perception of environmental and social threats and its reciprocal conditionality in the globalized society. It examines the reasons why the global environmental crisis will not lead to a world-wide environmental movement for change of the basic imperatives of the world economicpolitical system. Coherency between globalized mass media and wide-spreading of consumer lifestyle exists despite the fact that it deepens the devastation of environment and social conflicts. Globalized mass media (...) owned by transnational corporations are not only a part of the current global economic-political system, but also the prerequisite of its creation and existence, as well as social contradictions and conflicts. (shrink)

This case study examines the conflicts of interest that can arise in the selection of jury members to evaluate a PhD thesis, and the costs associated with trying to avoid COI.

: Protection of human subjects from investigators' conflicts of interest is critical to the integrity of clinical investigation. Personal financial conflicts of interest are addressed by university policies, professional society guidelines, publication standards, and government regulation, but "intrinsic conflicts of interest"—conflicts of interest inherent in all clinical research—have received relatively less attention. Such conflicts arise in all clinical research endeavors as a result of the tension among professionals' responsibilities to their research and to their patients (...) and both academic and financial incentives. These conflicts should be disclosed to research subjects and managed as assiduously as are financial conflicts of interest. (shrink)

Both Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger have defined what science is. Einstein includes not only physics, but also all natural sciences dealing with both organic and inorganic processes in his definition of science. According to Schrödinger, the present scientific worldview is based on the two basic attitudes of comprehensibility and objectivation. On the other hand, the notion of religion is quite equivocal and unless clearly defined will easily lead to all sorts of misunderstandings. Does science, as defined, encompass the whole (...) of reality? More importantly, what is the whole of reality and how do we obtain data for it? The Christian worldview considers a human as body, mind, and spirit (soul), which is consistent with Cartesian ontology of only three elements: matter, mind, and God. Therefore, is it possible to give a precise definition of science showing that the conflicts are actually apparent and not real? (shrink)

Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms represents a bold examination of previous feminist criticisms of Fanon and argues that Fanon's writings on women and resistance provide the formative kernels of a liberating praxis for women existing under colonial and neocolonial oppression. Sharpley-Whiting skillfully brings together approaches from a broad range of academic fields, including critical race theory, literary and cultural criticism, and psychoanalysis as she assesses the relevance of Fanon's theories of oppression to a feminist politics of resistance.

Recent years have seen a growth of interest in the great English idealist thinker T. H. Green as philosophers have begun to overturn received opinions of his thought and to rediscover his original and important contributions to ethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy. This collection of essays by leading experts, all but one published here for the first time, introduces and critically examines his ideas both in their context and in their relevance to contemporary debates.

: Animal ethics has presented convincing arguments for the individual value of animals. Animals are not only valuable instrumentally or indirectly, but in themselves. Less has been written about interest conflicts between humans and other animals, and the use of animals in practice. The motive of this paper is to analyze different approaches to interest conflicts. It concentrates on six models, which are the rights model, the interest model, the mental complexity model, the special relations model, the multi-criteria (...) model, and the contextual model. Of these, the contextual model is the strongest, and carries clear consequences for the practical use of animals. (shrink)

*An examination of the survival of cultural values in a postmodern environment*.

Community-based healthcare organisations manage competing, and often conflicting, priorities. These conflicts can arise from the multiple roles these organisations take up, and from the diverse range of stakeholders to whom they must be responsive. Often such conflicts may be titled conflicts of interest; however, what precisely constitutes such conflicts and what should be done about them is not always clear. Clarity about the duties owed by organisations and the roles they assume can help identify and manage (...) some of these conflicts. Taking divisions of general practice in Australia as an example, this paper sets out to distinguish two main types of conflicts of interest, so that they may be more clearly identified and more effectively managed. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 90-91.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's drug advisory committees provide expert assessments of the safety and efficacy of new therapies considered for approval. A committee hears from a variety of speakers, from six groups, including voting members of the committee, FDA staff members, employees of the pharmaceutical company seeking approval of a therapy, patient and consumer representatives, expert speakers invited by the company, and public participants. The committees convene at the request of the FDA when the risks and harms of (...) novel products are not immediately clear, and their final decisions carry significant weight, as most therapies that receive advisory committee approval are subsequently approved by the FDA. In recent years, across a series of diverse publications, the financial conflicts of interest of each category of participants in the meetings have been investigated. Here, we summarize these findings and their ethical implications, focusing on the FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee, and we suggest ways to move toward more transparent and impartial advisory committee meetings. (shrink)

In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts. Moving smoothly between moral philosophy and social theory, Honneth offers insights into such issues as the social forms of recognition and nonrecognition, the moral basis of interaction in human conflicts, the relation between the recognition model and conceptions of modernity, the normative basis of social theory, and the possibility of mediating between Hegel and Kant.

Background: For an effective treatment of patients, quality-assured safe implementation of drug therapy is indispensable. Fasting during Ramadan, an essential religious practice for Muslims, affects Muslim diabetics’ drug use in a number of different ways. Objectives: Ethical problems arising from fasting during the month of Ramadan for practicing Muslim patients are being discussed on the basis of extant research literature. Relevant conflicts of interest originating in this situation are being analysed from an ethical perspective. Material and methods: A number (...) of databases have been searched systematically in view of the stated objectives to identify relevant studies. Starting point for this review are the following questions: What information is available regarding the fasting behaviour of Muslim diabetics during Ramadan? What kind of ethical problems can be identified in the context of this religious practice? Results: The present review established a number of problems concerning medication adherence and drug use of practising Muslim diabetics during Ramadan, notably insufficient compliance, reduced frequency of consultations with their doctor, and inadequate, not sufficiently goal-oriented doctor-patient conversations about fasting. Conclusions: Deficiencies in medical as well as religious knowledge about fasting in Ramadan and a lack of sensitivity have been found among Muslim patients as well as among doctors. Compliance management and drug use in this area can be improved by effective, goal-oriented action plans and projects through which linguistic and cultural barriers can be addressed. (shrink)

In this essay, I use four war movies to explore conflicts of loyalty and how they are resolved, all to illustrate W.D. Ross’ multiple rule deontologism. The films are all fine WWII movies: The Enemy Below; Decision Before Dawn; John Rabe; and The Bridge on the River Kwai. In my analysis of each, I show how the protagonists face conflicts of their loyalty to themselves, their countrymen, their friends, and humanity in general, and resolve them in the face (...) of changing factual backgrounds. (shrink)

Western democracies experience profound conflicts that induce concerns about polarization and social cohesion. Yet although conflicts are a core feature of democracies, the forms, functions, and dynamics of democratic conflicts have rarely been subject of political theory. This paper aims at furthering our understanding of democratic conflicts. It analyzes the theory of conflict in Mouffe's agonistic pluralism, confronts it with sociological conflict theory, and presents concrete points of departure for a more comprehensive theory of democratic (...) class='Hi'>conflicts. The paper, thus, contributes to two lines of research: (1) Regarding agonistic theories, the paper shows that agonistic pluralism fails to provide a convincing theory of conflict since it underestimates the mechanisms and effects of conflict dynamics (e.g. intergroup cohesion, intragroup conflict, domination, and escalation) and fails to account for the variety of conflict interactions. Proponents of agonistic pluralism should therefore invest more into clarifying their core concept. (2) For a general account of democratic conflicts, the paper proposes to pursue interdisciplinary research on the cognitive concepts shaping conflict interactions, the linked practices of conflict regulation, and the processual dynamics of conflicts. (shrink)