Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 1, January 2022.

On April 2, 1987, Professor of Philosophy, Judith Jarvis Thomson of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s seventh Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: "The Decline of Cause." Judith Jarvis Thomson works in ethics and metaphysics. Her book, The Realm of Rights (Harvard University Press, 1990) is a study of the questions what it is to have a right, and which ones we have. An article entitled "Self-Defense" appeared in Philosophy and Public Affairs (Fall (...) 1991); another entitled "On some ways in which a thing can be good" appeared in Social Philosophy and Policy (Spring 1992). Her work in metaphysics has largely been on the ontology of events, and the identity across time of people and other physical objects. An article entitled "People and their bodies," which takes issue with views expressed by Derek Parfit in Part III of his Reasons and Persons, has recently appeared in a collection of essays (edited by Jonathan Dancy) written on topics dealt with in that book. She is currently working on the question what it is for one event to cause another. (shrink)

In a book contribution responding to H.L.A. Hart and Tony Honoré, Judith Jarvis Thomson casts a certain analysis of causation in an attractive light, but says that it unfortunately faces two objections. I draw attention to another objection.

The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival.

A review‐article of Julius Stone, Legal System and Lawyers' Reasonings, Stanford, University Press Herbert Wechsler, Principles, Politics and Fundamental Law, Harvard University Press H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, Oxford University Press Richard A. Wasserstrom, The Judicial Decision, Toward a Theory of Legal Justification, Stanford University Press Judith N. Shklar, Legalism, Harvard University Press.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 159-161 [Access article in PDF] Benedict's Dharma: Buddhist Reflections on the Rule of Saint Benedict. By Norman Fischer, et al. Edited by Patrick Hart, with an afterword by David Steindl-Rast and a translation of the Rule by Patrick Berry. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. xvi + 222 pp. When Buddhist and Christian monastics meet, they recognize each other as brothers and sisters engaged in (...) a similar quest, despite their doctrinal differences. The nature of this quest is explored in Benedict's Dharma, in which four Buddhists (Norman Fischer, Joseph Goldstein, Judith Simmer-Brown, and Yifa, representing the Zen, Theravadin, Tibetan, and Chinese Buddhist traditions) ruminate on their fraternal and sororal feelings.Venerable Yifa, a nun of the prominent Taiwanese monastery Fo Guang Shan, is the only one of the four in monastic vows, and the reader may wonder what the three non-monastics could offer to a discussion on the monastic life. This is not a new problem. Patrick Henry and Donald Swearer's groundbreaking study, For the Sake of the World: The Spirit of Buddhist and Christian Monasticism (1989), spends a great deal of time on Zen monks, even though there are no Zen monks, theVinaya is kept by the Zen nuns or by the monastics of the parent and sibling lineages of Chan, Son, and Thien. (See my review article, "Why Are There Monks and Nuns?" in Buddhist-Christian Studies 12.) The monastic, it seems, is not confined to the habit.Brother David Steindl-Rast, a monk of Mount Saviour Monastery, grapples with this problem in his afterword, "Conclusions about a Beginning." It was at Mount Saviour that the phrase "the monastic dimension" was coined, to refer to those of monastic bent who for one reason or another did not or could not live in the cloister. One of Brother David's books was to be called, he told me, The Monk in Us, "us" meaning laypeople, but the title had an odd sound and was dropped. So, what is the monastic dimension? Brother David suggests that it is mindfulness, and he comes close to saying that wherever there is mindfulness, there is monasticism. "If mindfulness is all that matters, the monastery is merely a most convenient environment for this kind of life, but it can be lived anywhere, by anyone" (126). He goes on to discuss the phenomenon of monasteries shrinking in size at the same time as the number of long- and short-term visitors to monasteries grows, and proposes that we are moving toward a new understanding of the terms "contemplative," "monastic," and "lay."This insight may point to the most important contribution of this book. It is not about monasticism per se, and it is not a comparative study of the Rule and the Vinaya, with practical suggestions for their mutual reform; rather, it is a meditation on how anyone, monastic or lay, might live the contemplative or mindful life. Throughout the history of the Church and the sangha, laypeople have been in the majority, but attention has been focused on the priests and monastics. Pope Pius X [End Page 159] put it bluntly: the laypeople are the sheep who are to be led, and the clergy are the shepherds who lead. The Church, he added, is not a democracy. I do not know of a Buddhist who has been quite this straightforward, but many have come close, and the history of Buddhism is not that of a democracy. Occasionally, lay movements in both traditions have arisen, basing themselves on the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers or on the teaching of universal Buddha-nature, but they have quickly been co-opted by leaders who proclaimed themselves to be more equal than their fellows. The tragedy for both Buddhism and Christianity is that the contemplative or mindful life has become restricted to a group of professionals, with the attendant belief that such a life is unattainable by most Buddhists and Christians. Now that the dharma has come to the land of the red-faced people, where democracy is... (shrink)

Roger White argued for a principle of indifference. Hart and Titelbaum showed that White’s argument relied on an intuition about conditioning on biconditionals that, while widely shared, is incorrect. Hawthorne, Landes, Wallmann, and Williamson argue for a principle of indifference. Remarkably, their argument relies on the same faulty intuition. We explain their intuition, explain why it’s faulty, and show how it generates their principle of indifference. 1Introduction 2El Caminos and Indifference 2.1Overview 2.2Fins and antennas 2.3HLWW in the example 2.4The (...) restrictiveness of Condition 2 2.5Summary 3The Specifics of HLWW s Argument 3.1Mapping their conditions to our equations 3.2HLWW’s responses to objections. (shrink)

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

Language is a cognitively demanding human trait, but it is also a fundamentally cooperative enterprise that rests on the motivation to share information. Great apes possess many of the cognitive prerequisites for language, but largely lack the motivation to share information. Callitrichids (including marmosets and tamarins) are highly vocal monkeys that are more distantly related to humans than great apes are, but like humans, they are cooperative breeders and all group members help raising offspring. Among primates, this rearing system is (...) correlated with proactive prosociality, which can be expressed as motivation to share information. We therefore propose that the unique coincidence of these two components in humans set the stage for language evolution: The cognitive component inherited from our great ape-like ancestors, and the motivational one added convergently as a result of cooperative breeding. We evaluate this scenario based on a review of callitrichd vocal communication and show that furthermore, they possess many of the mechanistic elements emphasized by the mirror system hypothesis of language evolution. We end by highlighting how more systematic phylogenetic comparisons will enable us to further promote our understanding of the role of cooperative breeding during language evolution. (shrink)

The Netherlands is one of the few countries where euthanasia is legal under strict conditions. This study investigates whether Dutch newspaper articles use the term ‘euthanasia’ according to the legal definition and determines what arguments for and against euthanasia they contain. We did an electronic search of seven Dutch national newspapers between January 2009 and May 2010 and conducted a content analysis. Of the 284 articles containing the term ‘euthanasia’, 24% referred to practices outside the scope of the law, mostly (...) relating to the forgoing of life-prolonging treatments and assistance in suicide by others than physicians. Of the articles with euthanasia as the main topic, 36% described euthanasia in the context of a terminally ill patient, 24% for older persons, 16% for persons with dementia, and 9% for persons with a psychiatric disorder. The most frequent arguments for euthanasia included the importance of self-determination and the fact that euthanasia contributes to a good death. The most frequent arguments opposing euthanasia were that suffering should instead be alleviated by better care, that providing euthanasia can be disturbing, and that society should protect the vulnerable. Of the newspaper articles, 24% uses the term ‘euthanasia’ for practices that are outside the scope of the euthanasia law. Typically, the more unusual cases are discussed. This might lead to misunderstandings between citizens and physicians. Despite the Dutch legalisation of euthanasia, the debate about its acceptability and boundaries is ongoing and both sides of the debate are clearly represented. (shrink)

In this paper, we critically and constructively examine the methodology of evidence-based development economics, which deploys randomized field experiments as its main tool. We describe the...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Further Reflections on Conversations of Our TimeJudith Butler (bio)The exchange that Ernesto Laclau and I conducted through e-mail last year at this time begins a conversation that I expect will continue. And I suppose I would like to use this “supplementary” reflection to think about what makes such a conversation possible, and what possibilities might emerge from such a conversation.First of all, I think that I was drawn to (...) the work of Laclau and Mouffe when I began to read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and realized that I had found a set of Marxist thinkers for whom discourse was not merely a representation of preexisting social and historical realities, but was also constitutive of the field of the social and of history. The second moment came when I realized that central to the notion of articulation, appropriated from Gramsci, was the notion of rearticulation. As a temporally dynamic and relatively unpredictable play of forces, hegemony had been cast by both Laclau and Mouffe as an alternative to forms of static structuralism that tend to construe contemporary social forms as timeless totalities. I read in Laclau and Mouffe the political transcription of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play”: a structure gains its status as a structure, its structurality, only through its repeated reinstatement. The dependency of that structure on its reinstatement means that the very possibility of structure depends on a reiteration that is in no sense determined fully in advance, that for structure, and social structure as a result, to become possible, there must first be a contingent repetition at its basis. Moreover, for some social formation to appear as structured is for it to have covered over in some way the contingency of its own installation.The theoretical rearticulation of structure as hegemony marked the work of Laclau and Mouffe as consequentially poststructuralist and offered perhaps the most important link between politics and poststructuralism in recent years (along with the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.It is, of course, impossible in this context to reconstruct the particular way in which Derrida’s work and Foucault’s work converge in the reconceptualization of hegemony that Laclau and Mouffe have offered. One of the points, however, that became most salient for me is the reintroduction of temporality and, indeed, of futurity into the thinking of social formations. Among many critical social theorists, the tendency has been to underscore how the systemic character of capital tends to incorporate any instance of opposition in the service of capital’s own self-augmentation. I would clearly agree that the incorporative and domesticating possibilities of capital are immense. But I would also [End Page 13] argue that any theory that fails to think the possibilities of transformation from within that “systemic” formation is itself complicit with the idea of the “eternal” character of capital that capital so readily produces. Hegemony also marks a limit to the totalizing terms within which social formations are to be thought. For what hegemony attends to are the moments of breakage, of rearticulation, convergence, and resistance that are not immediately coopted by social formations in their past and present forms. That no social formation can endure without becoming reinstated, and that every reinstatement puts the “structure” in question at risk, suggests that the possibility of its own undoing is at once the condition of possibility of structure itself.Before I knew the work of Laclau and Mouffe very well, I came close to this kind of insight in my work on gender. 1 There I argued that gender is not an inner core or static essence, but a reiterated enactment of... (shrink)

This paper begins with a discussion of the value of privacy,especially for medical records in an age of advancing technology.I then examine three alternative approaches to protection ofmedical records: reliance on governmental guidelines, the useof corporate self-regulation, and my own third hybrid view onhow to maintain a presumption in favor of privacy with respectto medical information, safeguarding privacy as vigorously andcomprehensively as possible, without sacrificing the benefitsof new information technology in medicine. None of the threemodels I examine are unproblematic, yet (...) it is crucial to weighthe strengths and weaknesses of these alternative approaches. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a new theoretical framework to analyse socio‐technical epistemic practices and systems on the Web and beyond, and apply it to the topic of web‐based scientific publishing. This framework is informed by social epistemology, science and technology studies (STS) and feminist epistemology. Its core consists of a tripartite classification of socio‐technical epistemic systems based on the mechanisms of closure they employ to terminate socio‐epistemic processes in which multiple agents are involved. In particular I distinguish three mechanisms (...) of closure, integration, aggregation and selection, and argue that they correspond to three different types of epistemic sociality. Different systems can employ different mechanism of closure or combinations thereof. Yet each mechanism has its own epistemic merits, depends on specific social, technical and epistemic prerequisites, has different strengths and weaknesses, and is optimal for different epistemic tasks. The aim of my analysis is twofold. Distinguishing different modes of epistemic sociality is a way for me not only to put forward a more nuanced framework for analysing socio‐epistemic practices, such as web‐based scientific publishing and scholarly communication. It can also serve as the theoretical basis for improving them. (shrink)

Faculty resistance to Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is an issue that has been recognized by WAC program directors and practitioners for decades, yet it remains unresolved. Perhaps the problem is not resistance per se, but how we interpret and react to it. Faculty resistance is typically viewed as an impediment to the pedagogical change WAC programs hope to achieve. Moreover, the label of "resistance" is often used without further examination of the underlying causes. Based on research and experience as (...) doctoral Writing Fellows in the Borough of Manhattan Community College WAC Program, we argue that so-called resistances are often justified concerns in regard to implementing WAC under given institutional, disciplinary, departmental, and personal constraints. We also suggest that if we listen and respond to these concerns, they become means to facilitate faculty engagement with WAC. By working through their concerns and adapting WAC to their context, faculty can take ownership of WAC and further develop the practice. Thus, what at first appears to be an impediment to deep-rooted pedagogical change ”resistance” can be used to encourage faculty to make WAC their own. (shrink)

Moral distress is the sense that one must do, or cooperate in, what is wrong. It is paradigmatically faced by nurses, but it is almost a universal occupational hazard.

A discussion of the ethics of stem cell research, and attempts to regulate it.

When two agents of unequal strength compete, the stronger one is expected to always win the competition. This expectation is based on the assumption that evaluation of performance is complete, hence flawless. If, however, the agents are evaluated on the basis of only a small sample of their performance, the weaker agent still stands a chance of winning occasionally. A theoretical analysis indicates that, to increase the chance of this happening the weaker agent ought to give up on enough occasions (...) so that he or she can match the stronger agent on the remaining ones. We model such a competition in a game, present its game‐theoretic solution, and report an experiment, involving 144 individuals, in which we tested whether players (both weak and strong) are actually sensitive to their relative strengths and know how to allocate their resources accordingly. Our results indicate that they do. (shrink)

This anthology applies phenomenological concepts and methods to issues of philosophical theology and philosophical theology and philosophy: the being and nature of God, and the divine modes of relatedness to nature, to society, and to the self. Essays in Phenomenological Theology contains previously unpublished papers by Iso Kern, J. N. Findlay, Charles Courtney, Thomas Prufer, Robert Williams, James Hart, Steven Laycock, and James Buchanan. It is the first volume to assemble an entire spectrum of phenomenological-theological ideas, including those of (...) neo-Platonic meditation, phenomenological neo-Thomism, Hegelian phenomenological dialectics, Husserlian transcendental reflection, and post-modern deconstructive iconoclasm. The book will be useful to philosophers and theologians seeking an enriched understanding of the rapidly-burgeoning discipline of phenomenological theology, and promises unexpected insights even to seasoned phenomenologists seeking to expand their horizons. (shrink)

Margaret Urban Walker argues that hospital ethics committees should think of their task as "keeping moral space open." I develop her suggestion with analogies: Enlarge the windows (i.e., expand what counts as an ethical issue); add rooms and doors (i.e., choose particular issues to engage). Examples include confidentiality defined as information flow, and moral distress in the healthcare workplace.

Shelah, S., C. Laflamme and B. Hart, Models with second order properties V: A general principle, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 64 169–194. We present a general framework for carrying out the construction in [2-10] and others of the same type. The unifying factor is a combinatorial principle which we present in terms of a game in which the first player challenges the second player to carry out constructions which would be much easier in a generic extension of (...) the universe, and the second player cheats with the aid of ♦. Section 1 contains an axiomatic framework suitable for the description of a number of related constructions, and the statement of the main theorem 1.9 in terms of this framework. In Section 2 we illustrate the use of our combinatorial principle. The proof of the main result is then carried out in Sections 3–5. (shrink)

Hermes' maturation into a god of commerce and diplomacy is punctuated by a series of oaths. At first he uses tricky or unsworn oaths in the investigation of his theft of Apollo's cattle, but eventually he and Apollo exchange oaths that evoke the protocols of ritualized friendship. Although the ceremony suggests that Hermes has achieved adulthood, a narrative sleight of hand leaves some ambiguity about the completion of the ritual.

As feminist theory explicates its fundamental principles – justice for the oppressed – it can lose its essential focus on the situation of women. One example is the inattention to nurses within feminist bioethics. Nurses deserve attention because most are women, but also because their lack of power is paradigmatic of patriarchy. Those examining ethics consultations should discuss whether nurses are allowed to request them. But feminists also need to imagine ways in which nurses can be heard when, for instance, (...) their worklives are “redesigned.” Doing so would also allow attention to other classes of the disempowered. (shrink)

We describe delusional disorder–jealous type (“morbid jealousy”) with the adaptationist perspective used by Darwinian psychiatrists and evolutionary psychologists to explain the relatively common existence and continued prevalence of mental disorders. We then apply the “harmful dysfunction” analysis to morbid jealousy, including a discussion of this disorder as (1) an end on a continuum of normal jealousy or (2) a discrete entity. (Published Online November 9 2006).

This book gets to the heart of trophy hunting, unpacking and explaining its multiple facets and controversies, and exploring why it divides environmentalists, the hunting community, and the public. Bichel and Hart provide the first interdisciplinary and comprehensive approach to the study of trophy hunting, investigating the history of trophy hunting, and delving into the background, identity and motivation of trophy hunters. They also explore the role of social media and anthropomorphism in shaping trophy hunting discourse, as well as (...) the viability of trophy hunting as a wildlife management tool, the ideals of fair chase and sportsmanship, and what hunting trophies are, both literally and in terms of their symbolic value to hunters and non-hunters. The analyses and discussions are underpinned by a consideration of the complex moral and practical conflicts between animal rights and conservation paradigms. This book appeals to scholars in environmental philosophy, conservation and environmental studies, as well as hunters, hunting opponents, wildlife management practitioners, and policymakers, and anyone with a broad interest in human–wildlife relations. (shrink)

One of the earliest and best-known of Bentham's works, the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation sets out a profound and innovative philosophical argument. This definitive edition includes both the late H. L. A. Hart's classic essay on the work and a new introduction by F. Rosen.

Leo Strauss is widely recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of Maimonides. His studies of the medieval Jewish philosopher led to his rediscovery of esotericism and deepened his sense that the tension between reason and revelation was central to modern political thought. His writings throughout the twentieth century were chiefly responsible for restoring Maimonides as a philosophical thinker of the first rank. Yet, to appreciate the extent of Strauss’s contribution to the scholarship on Maimonides, one has traditionally had to (...) seek out essays he published separately spanning almost fifty years. With _Leo Strauss on Maimonides_, Kenneth Hart Green presents for the first time a comprehensive, annotated collection of Strauss’s writings on Maimonides, comprising sixteen essays, three of which appear in English for the first time. Green has also provided careful translations of materials that had originally been quoted in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, German, and French; written an informative introduction highlighting the original contributions found in each essay; and brought references to out-of-print editions fully up to date. The result will become the standard edition of Strauss’s writings on Maimonides. (shrink)

Fackenheim was one of the most philosophically serious, knowledgeable, and provocative contemporary Jewish thinkers. His original focus as a philosophical theologian was mainly on revelation, but in his later work he concerned himself primarily with the wide-ranging implications of the Holocaust. In this book, Kenneth Hart Green examines Fackenheim's intellectual trajectory and traces how and why he focused so intently on the Holocaust. He explores the deeper thought that Fackenheim developed about the Holocaust, which he construed as a cataclysmic (...) event that ruptured history and one that also brought about a change in the very structure of being. As Green demonstrates, the Holocaust, according to Fackenheim's interpretation, changes how we view all things, from God to man to history. It also radically affects Judaism, Christianity, and philosophy, the major traditions that have shaped the Western world. (shrink)

Since the time of the Enlightenment in Western Europe, discussions of faith and reason have often pitted the believer against the skeptic, the theist against the atheist, and the person of one faith against the person of no professed faith. But the relation of reason to faith has been a matter of debate among believers as well. There are those who hold that religious faith can be proven or supported by rational argument. Others say that to try to give reasons (...) and arguments does violence to religious faith, or opens it to misunderstanding and doubt, or trivializes it. Responses to the Enlightenment: An Exchange on Foundations, Faith, and Community is a dialogue between Hendrik Hart and William Sweet, two philosophers who identify themselves as Christians, and who seek to respond to the challenges of the Enlightenment and its legacy. The authors approach the relation of faith to reason, however, in very different ways: Hart from the perspective of the Calvinian tradition and postmodern philosophy, Sweet from the Catholic tradition and analytic philosophy. Among the topics discussed are the nature of religious faith and of reason, liberalism and orthodoxy in religion, the relation of religious experience and rationality, and building community in a religiously and culturally pluralistic world. This exchange presents two distinctive perspectives to some of the major challenges of the reason to religious belief, but seeks to find common ground between them. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the dominant discourse of our day is econ omic universalism. This has translated comfortably from modernity to postmodernity. Within this discourse real differences and inequalities are homogenized by narratives such as those of choice and diversity. I shall question this in two ways: first, by borrowing from French post- structuralism to rename the discourse a 'masculine economy', and thus to invoke a 'feminine economy' both as a philosophical structure of difference and as a deliberate (...) introduction of the body; second, by analysing economic narratives concerning women's work which tend to flatten out difference altogether or recast it as (well-advised) choice. Within this economic language game, I shall try to emphasize material differences and inequalities, in other words, I shall borrow from the language of opposition. I claim that only the asymmetrical oscillation between difference and opposition can attempt to prevent either one falling back into some kind of more or less comfortable universalism. (shrink)

Because the Israeli kibbutz is innovative in collective ownership, production, consumption, and child care, and in part also because it is erroneously assumed to have once had a gender-egalitarian ideology and structure, it is taken to be a valid test case for many theories explaining or justifying gender inequality or gender equality. This article argues that the kibbutz cannot serve as a test case for theories that blame inequality on the family as such, on the exclusivity of infant rearing by (...) women, on the precultural differences between the sexes, or on compulsory heterosexuality for women. Kibbutz experience refutes theories that blame the inferior social status of women on material inequality, on private ownership of the means of production, or on the inferior ritual evaluation of women's activities. Kibbutz experience is indeed a unique test case for, but also a refutation of, theories that base gender equality on maximal participation of women in work in the public sphere or on the maximal socialization of housework and child care. Finally, kibbutz experience corroborates the theory that gender equality depends on equal control over surplus resources and, conspicuously so, the theory that in modern society, gender equality depends on the full abolition of the gender segregation of all social roles, especially work roles, whether performed in the private sphere or in the public sphere, whether paid for or unpaid. (shrink)

To help professionals in all health care disciplines grapple with ethical issues, Ahronheim (medicine, New York Medical College), Moreno (biomedical ethics, U. of Virginia) and Zuckerman (Center for Ethics in Medicine, Beth Israel Medical Center) review the history and theory of clinical ethics and present 31 case studies analyzed from medical, ethical and legal perspectives. This second edition expands the original discussions of ethical dilemmas caused by advances in medical genetics, organ transplants, HIV medicine and other developments. The appendix includes (...) Internet references, suggested readings and other resources. (shrink)

_Illegal Leisure _offers a unique insight into the role drug use now plays in British youth culture. The authors present the results of a five year longitudinal study into young people and drug taking. They argue that drugs are no longer used as a form of rebellious behaviour, but have been subsumed into wider, acceptable leisure activities. The new generation of drug user can no longer be seen as mad or bad or from subcultural worlds - they are ordinary and (...) everywhere. Illustrated throughout with interview material, _Illegal Leisure _shows how drug consumption has become normalised, and provides a well-informed analysis of the current debate. (shrink)

This paper begins with an analysis of global problems shaping education, particularly as they impact upon learning and life chances. In addressing these problems a range of philosophical positions and controversies are considered, including: traditional romantic and institutional views of schooling; and more recent maximalist, neo-liberal, emancipatory and post-modern-perspectives of lifelong learning. In this paper we argue that these do not represent 'the last word' on the provision of learning and the enhancement of life chances and instead we put forward (...) an alternative view based upon the notion of adopting an inclusive problem-solving approach, which we believe may be better suited to offering solutions to the various global problems that have been identified or that are still emerging. We believe that such an approach addresses and expands the individual, social, economic and political features of education and conduces to the improvement and expansion of learning and life chances. (shrink)

Although testing for substance abuse can be intrusive, inaccurate, and ineffective at ferreting out those who are a threat to others, it can be morally justified in certain carefully circumscribed cases.