[TofC cont.] Social ideals: Justice, A utilitarian theory of justice / J.S. Mill, Egalitarianism with changed motivation / G. Cohen; Equality, Multidimensional equality / M. Walzer, Equality of capacity / A. Sen; Liberty, rights, property, and self-ownership, A defense of the primacy of liberty rights / L. Lomasky, Atomism and the primacy of rights / C. Taylor -- Social institutions: Education, Educating about familial values / W. Galston, For vouchers and parental choice / M. Friedman; Family, In defense of filial (...) obligations / C.H. Sommers; Punishment, A utilitarian theory of punishment / J. Bentham. In [this book, the editors] provide students [with] a wide variety of readings covering the problems of political and social philosophy. Such topics as political obligation, democracy, rights, and justice are represented, in addition to less widely discussed subjects as the family. Both common approaches and those which are less familiar are presented, as well as recent developments in the topic area. -Back cover. (shrink)

In The Healer's Power, Howard Brody placed the concept of power at the heart of medicine's moral discourse. Struck by the absence of “power” in the prevailing vocabulary of medical ethics, yet aware of peripheral allusions to power in the writings of some medical ethicists, he intuited the importance of power from the silence surrounding it. He formulated the problem of the healer's power and its responsible use as “the central ethical problem in medicine.” Through the prism of power (...) he refracted a wide range of ethical problems, from informed consent to truth-telling, from confidentiality to futility, from the physician's fantasies to the physician's virtues. At times this prism shed new light on old problems, enabling us to see from an unexpected angle the elements of which the problem was composed. At other times it exposed issues of ethical significance that had been neglected in the bioethics literature. (shrink)

The texts collected in this volume, which was originally published in 1969, contain Herder's most original and stimulating ideas on politics, history and language. They had for the most part not been previously available in English. In his introduction, Professor Barnard analyses the basic premises of Herder's political thought against the background of the Enlightenment. He examines Herder's concepts of language, community and culture, his theory of historical interaction, and his approach to the problem of change and progress. Finally, he (...) provides a brief comparative analysis of traditionalist thought following the French Revolution, showing how substantive writers like Burke differed from Herder despite the close similarity of political vocabulary. (shrink)

The practice of voluntary physician‐assisted death as a last resort is compatible with doctors' duties to practice competently, to avoid harming patients unduly, to refrain from medical fraud, and to preserve patients' trust. It therefore does not violate physicians' professional integrity.

A predominant ethical view holds that physician‐investigators should conduct their research with therapeutic intent. And since a physician offering a therapy wouldn't prescribe second‐rate treatments, the experimental intervention and the best proven therapy should appear equally effective. "Clinical equipoise" is necessary. But this perspective is flawed. The ethics of research and of therapy are fundamentally different, and clinical equipoise should be abandoned.

Despite strong growth in scientific investigation of the placebo effect, understanding of this phenomenon remains deeply confused. We investigate critically seven common conceptual distinctions that impede clear understanding of the placebo effect: (1) verum/placebo, (2) active/inactive, (3) signal/noise, (4) specific/nonspecific, (5) objective/subjective, (6) disease/illness, and (7) intervention/context. We argue that some of these should be eliminated entirely, whereas others must be used with caution to avoid bias. Clearing away the conceptual underbrush is needed to lay down a path to understanding (...) and harnessing placebo effects in clinical medicine. (shrink)

A basic question of medical ethics is whether the norms governing medical practice should be understood as the application of principles and rules of the common morality to medicine or whether some of these norms are internal or proper to medicine. In this article we describe and defend an evolutionary perspective on the internal morality of medicine that is defined in terms of the goals of clinical medicine and a set of duties that constrain medical practice in pursuit of these (...) goals. This perspective is developed by means of a critical examination of the essentialist conception of the internal morality of medicine advocated by Edmund Pellegrino and the critique of internal morality approaches by Robert Veatch and Tom Beauchamp. (shrink)

This essay is written on the following premises and argues for them. “Enlightenment” is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as “the Enlightenment,” but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided. In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety of statements made, and assumptions proposed, to which the (...) term “Enlightenment” may usefully be applied, but the meanings of the term shift as we apply it. The things are connected, but not continuous; they cannot be reduced to a single narrative; and we find ourselves using the word “Enlightenment” in a family of ways and talking about a family of phenomena, resembling and related to one another in a variety of ways that permit of various generalizations about them. We are not, however, committed to a single root meaning of the word “Enlightenment,” and we do not need to reduce the phenomena of which we treat to a single process or entity to be termed “the” Enlightenment. It is a reification that we wish to avoid, but the structure of our language is such that this is difficult, and we will find ourselves talking of “the French” or “the Scottish,” “the Newtonian” or the “the Arminian” Enlightenments, and hoping that by employing qualifying adjectives we may constantly remind ourselves that the keyword “Enlightenment” is ours to use and should not master us. (shrink)

In some sense, survival seems to be an intrinsic matter. Whether or not you survive some event seems to depend on what goes on with you yourself —what happens in the environment shouldn’t make a difference. Likewise, being a person at a time seems intrinsic. The principle that survival seems intrinsic is one factor which makes personal fission puzzles so awkward. Fission scenarios present cases where if survival is an intrinsic matter, it appears that an individual could survive twice over. (...) But it’s well known that standard notions of “intrinsicality” won’t do to articulate the sense in which survival is intrinsic, since ‘personhood’ appears to be a maximal property. We formulate a sense in which survival and personhood (and perhaps other maximal properties) may be almost intrinsic—a sense that would suffice, for example, to ground fission arguments. It turns out that this notion of almost-intrinsicality allows us to formulate a new version of the problem of the many. (shrink)

Cosmetic surgery is a fast-growing medical practice. In 1997 surgeons in the United States performed the four most common cosmetic procedures443,728 times, an increase of 150% over the comparable total for 1992. Estimated total expenditures for cosmetic surgery range from $1 to $2 billion. As managed care cuts into physicians' income and autonomy, cosmetic surgery, which is not covered by health insurance, offers a financially attractive medical specialty.

With breathtalung speed, traditional criminal prohibitions against assisted suicide have been declared unconstitutional in twelve states, including California and New York. This poses great promise and great peril. The promise is that competent terminally ill patients, as a compassionate measure of last resort, will have the option of putting an end to their suffering by physician-assisted suicide. More sigmficant, legally permitting this controversial option may be a catalyst for doctors, health care institutions, and society to improve the care of the (...) dying. PAS should be limited only to those relatively few competent patients who continue to suffer intolerably despite unrestrained efforts to palliate and who face a continued existence that they regard as worse than death. When dying patients know they will not be abandoned to miserable and pointless suffering if palliative care fails, they will be fortified to cope better with the process of dying.The immediate peril is that PAS will become a quick fix, available on demand to any patient diagnosed as terminally ill, thus bypassing palliative care and producing premature deaths. (shrink)

It is proved that the relevance logic \ has no structurally complete consistent axiomatic extension, except for classical propositional logic. In fact, no other such extension is even passively structurally complete.

*The opinions expressed are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy of the National Institutes of Health, the Public Health Service, or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

This article presents evidence supporting the claim that ethical reasoning is a skill that can be taught and assessed. We propose a working definition of ethical reasoning as 1) the ability to identify, analyze, and weigh moral aspects of a particular situation, and 2) to make decisions that are informed and warranted by the moral investigation. The evidence consists of a description of an ethical reasoning education program—Ethical Reasoning in Action —designed to increase ethical reasoning skills in a variety of (...) situations and areas of life. ERiA is housed at a public, major comprehensive U.S. university—James Madison University—and assessment of the program focuses on interventions delivered prior to and during orientation for incoming first-year students. Findings indicate that the interventions measurably enhance the ability of undergraduate students to reason ethically. ERiA’s competency-targeted program and positive student learning outcomes offers a promising model for higher education ethics programs seeking to connect classroom learning in ethics to decision-making in everyday life. (shrink)

It is a landmark theorem of McKinsey and Tarski that if we interpret modal diamond as closure, then $$\mathsf S4$$ S4 is the logic of any dense-in-itself metrizable space. The McKinsey–Tarski Theorem relies heavily on a metric that gives rise to the topology. We give a new and more topological proof of the theorem, utilizing Bing’s Metrization Theorem.

The reception history of the French Revolution in France and England is well documented among Anglophone scholars; however, the debate over the Revolution in Germany is much less well known. Fichte's Contribution played an important role in this debate. Presented here for the first time in English, Fichte's work provides a distinctive synthesis of Locke's "possessive individualism," Rousseau's general will, and Kant's moral philosophy. This eclectic blend results in an unusual rights theory that at times veers close to a form (...) of anarchism. Written in 1792–93, just before Fichte moved to Jena to develop his philosophical system in a series of works—above all the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794—the Contribution provides invaluable insight into Fichte's early development. In addition, Fichte's work predates much of Kant's political philosophy, and can shed light on the rich dialogue in German political thought in the 1790s. (shrink)

The 2010 Nagoya Protocol is an international framework for access and benefit sharing (ABS) of the use of genetic and biological resources, with particular focus on indigenous communities. This is especially important in Africa, where local communities have a close reliance on environmental resources and ecosystems. However, national legislation and policies commonly lag behind international agreements, and this poses challenges for legal compliance as well as practical applications. This study reviews the academic literature on the Nagoya Protocol and ABS applications, (...) and then considers the implications of this analysis for research in Africa. Results show that there is uneven engagement with the principles of the Nagoya Protocol across different academic disciplines; local communities are sometimes sidelined in these studies; and only 8% of researchers in the literature analysed are located in Africa. Future developments should focus on ensuring national compliance with the Nagoya Protocol, and that researchers and industry work in partnership with local African communities on ABS issues. (shrink)

The leading ethical position on placebo-controlled clinical trials is that whenever proven effective treatment exists for a given condition, it is unethical to test a new treatment for that condition against placebo. Invoking the principle of clinical equipoise, opponents of placebo-controlled trials in the face of proven effective treatment argue that they (1) violate the therapeutic obligation of physicians to offer optimal medical care and (2) lack both scientific and clinical merit. We contend that both of these arguments are mistaken. (...) Clinical equipoise provides erroneous ethical guidance in the case of placebo-controlled trials, because it ignores the ethically relevant distinction between clinical trials and treatment in the context of clinical medicine and the methodological limitations of active-controlled trials. Placebo controls are ethically justifiable when they are supported by sound methodological considerations and their use does not expose research participants to excessive risks of harm. (shrink)

The beginning of the seventy-sixth poem of Catullus appears to cause some modern readers considerable dismay. One may instance the reactions of R. O. A. M. Lyne: ‘Our first reaction to the beginning of this poem may be one of incredulity’ ; ‘The effect of such language is to imply an outrageous and implausible self-righteousness’ ; of K. Quinn: ‘a self-righteousness that makes us feel a little uncomfortable’ ; or of G. Williams: ‘this is sheer melodrama, a deft and surprising (...) reversal of “count your blessings”’; and, further down, on ‘si vitam puriter egi’: ‘This could be simply priggish or outrageous or both, but he does not mean it as a general statement’. (shrink)

The first English translation of Fichte’s second set of 1804 lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre.

With advances in genetic technology, there are increasing concerns about the way in which genetic information may be abused, particularly in people at increased genetic risk of developing certain disorders. In a recent case in Hong Kong, the court ruled that it was unlawful for the civil service to discriminate in employment, for the sake of public safety, against people with a family history of mental illness. The plaintiffs showed no signs of any mental health problems and no genetic testing (...) was performed. This was the first case concerning genetic discrimination in common law jurisdictions, therefore the court's judgment has implications for how genetic discrimination cases may be considered in the future. The court considered it inappropriate to apply population statistics or lifetime risks to individuals while examining fitness for work. It recommended an individualised assessment of specific risks within the job, relative to other risks posed by that workplace. (shrink)