The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 11, Page 13-14, November 2011.

Thirty years later we seem no closer to a consensus on the ethics of sterilizing profoundly mentally compromised young girls than was Judge Blumenfeld.

After John Dewey, Addison W. Moore was recognized as the chief spokesman for the instrumentalist version of pragmatism. Never before available, this complete collection of Moore's work contains dozens of philosophical articles, essays, book reviews, writings by other philosophers, and reviews of his work, together with his book, Pragmatism and its Critics (1910).

The integration of first-, second-, and third-personal information within joint intentional collaboration provides the foundation for broad-based second-personal morality. We offer two additions to this framework: a description of the developmental process through which second-personal competence emerges from early triadic interactions, and empirical evidence that collaboration with a concrete goal may provide an essential focal point for this integrative process.

We consider the various criticisms and requests for clarification made by the commentators of our framework for understanding intentional relations. Our response is organized according to the main themes in the target article: general theory, phylogeny, development, and autism. We also add some discussion of further issues, such as simulation and moral theory, that were not addressed in the target article.

Students of the Papal State are understandably inclined to concentrate on those geographical areas in central Italy, from the Campagna to Ravenna, that were to become the more or less permanent Papal State of modern history, even though everyone acknowledges that papal claims and the reality of papal control within this region fluctuated widely throughout the centuries. Tuscany, southern Italy, and Sicily were sometimes claimed by the popes but not ultimately incorporated into the Papal State, and these areas also receive (...) due attention from historians of the Papal State. But papal claims also extended to other areas less frequently discussed, among them Sardinia. (shrink)

Organisms engage in various activities that are directed at objects, whether real or imagined. Such activities may be termed “intentional relations.” We present a four-level framework of social understanding that organizes the ways in which social organisms represent the intentional relations of themselves and other agents. We presuppose that the information available to an organism about its own intentional relations (or first person information) is qualitatively different from the information available to that organism about other agents’ intentional relations (or third (...) person information). However, through the integration of these two sources of information, it is possible to generate representations of intentional relations that are uniformly applicable to the activities of both self and other. The four levels of the framework differ in the extent to which such integration occurs and in the degree to which imagination is involved in generating these representations. Most animals exist at the lowest level, at which integration of first and third person sources of information does not occur. Of nonhuman species, only great apes exhibit social understanding at intermediate levels, at which integration of these sources of information provides uniform representations of intentional relations. Only humans attain the highest level, at which it is possible to represent intentional relations with mental objects. We propose that with the development of the imagination, children progress through three stages, equivalent to the later three levels of the framework. The abnormalities in social understanding of autistic individuals are hypothesized to result from a failure to develop integrated representations of intentional relations. (shrink)

AA 180& 'What has to be accepted, the given, is, so one could say, forms of life'. (PI p 226) Compare with Nietzsche. Nietzsche works out a theory of demoralisation. Understanding of the logic of language games makes a difference to those one will play. Compare Heraclitus. The form of life as the will, prana, that which determines whatever it is that is said or believed. The language is merely the medium. Yet this is not something to be set up (...) as a metaphysical theory. It is too particular, and any motive for demolishing it is likely to be sufficient to do so. There is no one way which is true over and above all others. To be able to talk on this plane we need a kind of higher logic. There are those who are desperate to discover the one explanation which is in a sense true. For them, an philosophy which focus on the nature of explanation itself, and thus dissolves the problem will appear irrelevant. Henceforth what is needed is not philosophical statements but logical tools. What we do with these tools is not the business of philosophy. 'one wonders what philosophy would have been like in Britain and the United States if it had not been for the accident of Wittgenstein, for he might not have been on the scene at all…. I meant that he became known to the world of philosophy through the very special circumstances of making a strong impression on Bertrand Russell, and being accepted into the world of philosophy through the bold initiative of Cambridge. Nature is wasteful, and if one wants to get something exceptionally good, one must take great risks about having a great deal that is simply wild. I am sure that both Russell and Cambridge were right to adopt such a policy. Cambridge is possibly the only university in the world that would have touched Wittgenstein at any price. Had it not been for Cambridge, and had it not been for Russell, - and some people would hold that he made an error of judgement- almost certainly nothing more would have been heard of Wittgenstein'.. (shrink)

Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude represents an attempt at intellectual cooperation. No effort has been made, however, to attain unanimity of belief nor to proffer a platform of "planks" on which there is agreement. The consensus represented lies primarily in outlook, in conviction of what is most likely to be fruitful in method of approach. As the title page suggests, the volume presents a unity in attitude rather than a uniformity in results. Consequently each writer is definitively responsible (...) only for his own essay. The reader will note that the Essays endeavor to embody the common attitude in application to specific fields of inquiry which have been historically associated with philosophy rather than as a thing by itself. Beginning with philosophy itself, subsequent contributions discuss its application to logic, to mathematics, to physical science, to psychology, to ethics, to economics, and then again to philosophy itself in conjunction with esthetics and religion. The reader will probably find that the significant points of agreement have to do with the ideas of the genuineness of the future, of intelligence as the organ for determining the quality of that future so far as it can come within human control, and of a courageously inventive individual as the bearer of a creatively employed mind. (shrink)

There can be good reasons to doubt the authority of a group of scientists. But those reasons do not include lack of unanimity among them. Indeed, holding science to a unanimity or near-unanimity standard has a pernicious effect on scientific deliberation, and on the transparency that is so crucial to the authority of science in a democracy. What authorizes a conclusion is the quality of the deliberation that produced it, which is enhanced by the presence of a non-dismissible minority. Scientists (...) can speak as one in more ways than one. We recommend a different sort of consensus that is partly substantive and partly procedural. It is a version of what Margaret Gilbert calls “joint acceptance” – we call it “deliberative acceptance.” It capitalizes on there being a persistent minority, and thereby encourages accurate reporting of the state of agreement and disagreement among deliberators. (shrink)

By focusing primarily on communication between adult and child and on adult-set criteria for appropriate action, Carpendale & Lewis's (C&L's) account of the development of social understanding in the epistemic triangle tends toward an enculturation view, while diminishing the role of individuals. What their proposed mechanism fails to acknowledge is that the two agents in the epistemic triangle necessarily have independent perspectives of the object and of each other.

BOOK REWEWS 309 down, Adam's "happy sin" sin was a fall "upward" that reversed involution and initiated the agonizing evolution of consciousness. Following Gnosticism, He- gel maintains that the divine "image" according to which humankind was created lies not "in the archaeological past but in the eschatological future" . The third moment of the trinitarian narrative, Spirit, involves the process whereby finite humankind attains "sonship" with the infinite divine. In Hegel's Christology, the "death of God" represents the temporary divine absence (...) needed for the emergence of divine presence in human community understood as Spirit. Far from constituting a once-and-for-all soteriological event, the life and death of Jesus opened the way for others to follow him to mystical union with God. For Hegel, mysticism involves not irrationality, but divine self-manifestation achieved in the highest form of knowing, Reason, available to the most illuminated members of the Christian community. Before closing his discussion of Spirit, O'Regan addresses the issues of 1) whether Hegel's theodicy fails to account adequately for the particularity of human suffering, and 2) whether divine self-realization as spirit in the human community provides an adequate account of the divine transcendence prefigured in the immanent trinity. Finally, O'Regan examines Spinoza and Schelling's influence on the "denarratizing operators" used by Hegel.. (shrink)

Informed consent is the gateway to research participation. We report on the results of the formative evaluation that follows the electronic informed consent process for the All of Us Research Program. Of the nearly 250,000 participants included in this analysis, more than 95% could correctly answer questions distinguishing the program from medical care, the voluntary nature of participation, and the right to withdraw; comparatively, participants were less sure of privacy risk of the program. We also report on a small mixed-methods (...) study of the experience of persons of very low health literacy with All of Us informed consent materials. Of note, many of the words commonly employed in the consent process were unfamiliar to or differently defined by informants. In combination, these analyses may inform participant-centered development and highlight areas for refinement of informed consent materials for the All of Us Research Program and similar studies. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine healthcare organizations’ responses to high profile cases of doctor–parent disagreement. We argue that, once a conflict crosses a certain threshold of public interest, the stakes of the disagreement change in important ways. They are no longer only the stakes of the child’s interests or who has decision‐making authority, but also the stakes of public trust in healthcare practitioners and organizations and the wide scale spread of medical misinformation. These higher stakes call for robust organization‐level responses. (...) There are responsible and thoughtful ways for healthcare organizations to directly engage with these cases. Hospitals should seek an alliance with the parents around the goal of public discussion and utilize web‐based platforms to provide the public with information about medical conditions, experimental treatments, and how clinical ethics deliberation in hospitals works. We outline five important lessons for healthcare organizations to keep in mind when responding to such cases. Approached with care, these cases could become “teachable moments” for both healthcare organizations and society. (shrink)

Dominic Wilkinson suggests that one of Schubert’s songs has relevance for neonatologists today. In the song, Schubert suggests that death sometimes comes as a friend. Wilkinson ponders whether the song has a message for doctors and parents, who sometimes struggle to figure out whether death is an enemy or a friend to a dying baby. Wilkinson reflects on the case of baby ‘Hal’, who was born with serious cardiomyopathy. Hal’s parents and doctors disagree about whether to withdraw life-support. Through his (...) recreations of their discussions, Wilkinson shows how hard it is to confront—and maybe even welcome—death for a child. While adults often frame their own decision to forego life-sustaining treatment with thoughts that they have lived a good life, death in childhood can seem unfair because it robs the child of their opportunity to live a good or completed life. Much as we try, we cannot really imagine what a critically ill neonate experiences or desires. We have very little insight into Hal’s interests or subjective experience. Without direct access to the child’s experience, it is impossible to know whether, like an adult, a child would choose to allow death to occur. We cannot verify the claim that the child’s death was good in the sense that it was good for them. Wilkinson proposes that a prolonged dying process …. (shrink)