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Objective—To explore the opinions of unpaid healthy volunteers on the payment of research subjects.Design—Prospective cohort.Setting—Southern Alberta, Canada.Participants—Medically eligible persons responding to recruiting advertisements for a randomised vaccine trial were invited to take part in a study of informed consent at the point at which they formally consented or refused trial participation. Of 72 invited, 67 returned questionnaires at baseline and 54 at follow-up.Outcome measures—Proportions of persons who agreed or disagreed with three close-ended statements on the payment of research subjects; themes (...) and categories identified by content analysis of responses to an open-ended question.Results—A minority agreed with paying either patient or healthy volunteer participants. Opinions did not change over time. Participants' comments addressed: benefits and drawbacks to research participation; benefits and drawbacks to paying research participants; conditions under which payment of research subjects would be acceptable, and the nature of acceptable recognition. Acceptable conditions were to improve problematic recruitment, to reimburse costs, and to recognise participants, particularly for their time investment. Both non-monetary and monetary recognition of volunteers were thought to be appropriate.Conclusions—Most unpaid volunteers disagreed with paying research participants. The themes arising from their comments are similar to those that have been raised by ethicists and suggest that recognising the time and effort of participants should receive greater emphasis than presently occurs. (shrink)

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Formal training in clinical ethics must become a central part of residency curricula to prepare practitioners to manage the ethical dimensions of patient care. Residency educators must ground their teaching in an understanding of the conceptual, biomedical, and psychosocial aspects of the important ethical issues that arise in that field of practice. Four aspects of professional competence in clinical ethics provide a useful framework for curricular planning. The physician should learn to: (1) recognize ethical issues as they arise in clinical (...) care and identify hidden values and unacknowledged conflicts; (2) think clearly and critically about these issues in ways that lead to ethically justifiable courses of action; (3) apply those practical skills needed to implement an ethically justifiably course of action; and (4) judge when the management of a clinical situation requires consultation with individuals or institutional bodies with additional expertise or authority. We argue that these practical goals can be accomplished with a relatively modest emphasis on the theoretical aspects of medical ethics. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that the Homeric Hymn to Apollo was not conceived as a single poem but is a combination of two: a Delian hymn, D, performed at Delos and concerned with the god's birth there, and a Pythian hymn, P, concerned with his arrival and establishment at Delphi. What above all compels us to make a dichotomy is not the change of scene in itself, but the way D ends. The poet returns from the past to the present, (...) and takes leave of his audience; farewell, he says, and remember me ever after. He is quite clearly finishing. Whereupon there is an abrupt and unsatisfactory transition to P. (shrink)

This paper describes the change of emphasis that occurred in the teaching of ethics to small groups of clinical students. Although the original focus of the course was on the analysis of ethical dilemmas associated with individual patients known to the students, it soon became evident that there were, for the students themselves, more fundamental ethical dilemmas in their new role as clinical students. These included worries about how to respond when patients asked questions which their consultants had previously deceived (...) them about, worries about inflicting pain on patients, as with intravenous cannulation, and the role of the medical student in the clinical team. We emphasise the need to explore student experiences as part of the process of ethics teaching. (shrink)

In view of the confusion about the use of the term ‘population’ in biology, an analysis has been made of the use of the concept of population in biology. Origin and development, logic and epistemology of the population-concept have been investigated for that purpose. It appears that several concepts of population coexist in biology. The term ‘population’ is used for all these concepts, so it is not amazing that confusion has arisen. This confusion is the more dangerous, since ‘population’ plays (...) an important part in the theory of evolution. A modus has been suggested to diminish this confusion by defining ‘population’ in a very wide sense of the term and by proposing a ‘deme’—terminology to specify the various special concepts of population. (shrink)

This review of issues and research is in two parts: 1) practical problems surrounding patient-held records and 2) ethical arguments for and against patient-held records. We argue that research on patient-held records indicates that there are no substantial practical drawbacks and considerable ethical benefits to be derived from giving patients custody of their medical records.

Histories of literature tend to treat Stesichorus as just one of the lyric poets, like Alcman or Anacreon. But the vast scale of his compositions puts him in a category of his own. It has always been known that his Oresteia was divided into more than one book; P. Oxy, 2360 gave us fragments of a narrative about Telemachus of a nearly Homeric amplitude; and from P. Oxy. 2617 it was learned that the Geryoneis contained at least 1,300 verses, the (...) total being perhaps closer to two thousand. Even allowing for the shorter lines, this was as long as many an epic poem. Indeed, these were epic poems, in subject and style as well as in length: epics to be sung instead of recited. What was behind them ? Who was this Stesichorus, and how did he come to be, in Quintilian's phrase, ‘sustaining on the lyre the weight of epic song’ ? The biographical problem must be tackled first. The question of Stesichorus’ historical setting and date is confused by legendary elements as well as by contradiction in the sources. On the whole scholars remain spellbound by the specious precision of the Suda's dates , although it has long been realized that they are founded on nothing but the assumption that Stesichorus was younger than Alcman and older than Simonides. There have been excellent discussions by Wilamowitz and Maas, but they seem to have had little influence. (shrink)

This article critically evaluates the central claims of the various feminist responses to new reproductive arrangements and technologies. Proponents of a “progressivism” object to naive technological optimism and raise questions about the control of such technology. Others, such as the FINRRAGE group, raise concerns about the potentially damaging consequences of the new technologies for women. While a central concern is whether these technologies reinforce harmful biologically determinist stereotypes of women, it may be that these critiques function with a devastating gender (...) blindness that puts women at risk in other, heretofore unnoticed, ways. (shrink)

Some people have supposed that utility is good in itself, non-in-strumentally good, as distinct from good because conducive to other good things. And in modern versions of this view, utility often means want-satisfaction, as distinct from pleasure or happiness. For your want that p to be satisfied, is it necessary that you know or believe that p, or sufficient merely that p is true? However that question is answered, there are problems with the view that want-satisfaction is a non-instrumental good. (...) What if you want something only because you have a false belief? What if the time at which you want that p is fifty or five hundred years before the time to which p itself refers? To meet these difficulties, qualifications have to be introduced, and much has been written about how exactly these qualifications are to be framed.1 There is however what may be a rather more serious objection to the view that want-satisfaction is a non-instrumental good, or rather to the combination of that view with the principle that it is sufficient for your want that p to be satisfied simply that p is true. The objection is that this combination forces you to give undue weight to the mere acquisition of desires when you come to make judgements about changes in the value of things. It forces you to say that for any true proposition p, which initially you do not want to be true, your mere acquisition of a desire that p will, other things being equal, make the world better. Non-instrumental value can be increased merely by multiplying desires, even though everything else remains the same. Surely, however, improving the world is not as easy as that. (shrink)

A Papyrus commentary on Alcman published in 19571 brings us news of a poem in which Alcman “physiologized”. The lemmata and commentary together witness to a semi-philosophical cosmogony unlike any other hitherto known from Greece. The evidence is meagre, but it seems worth while to see what can be made of it; for it is perhaps possible to go a little farther than has so far been done.

In his paper, “Grand Unified Gauge Theories and the Number of Elementary Particles,“ Robert Weingard suggests what he calls the Extended Redhead's Principle for elementary particles: “Two particles for which there are conceivable circumstances in which one can be ‘rotated’ or reoriented into the other are the same particles”. The philosophical soundness of such a principle is questionable.

The paper is concerned with explaining some of the principal theoretical developments in elementary particle physics and discussing the associated methodological problems both in respect of heuristics and appraisal. Particular reference is made to relativistic quantum field theory, renormalization, Feynman diagram techniques, the analytic S-matrix and the Chew — Frautschi bootstrap.

This paper focuses on natural dualities for varieties of bilattice-based algebras. Such varieties have been widely studied as semantic models in situations where information is incomplete or inconsistent. The most popular tool for studying bilattices-based algebras is product representation. The authors recently set up a widely applicable algebraic framework which enabled product representations over a base variety to be derived in a uniform and categorical manner. By combining this methodology with that of natural duality theory, we demonstrate how to build (...) a natural duality for any bilattice-based variety which has a suitable product representation over a dualisable base variety. This procedure allows us systematically to present economical natural dualities for many bilattice-based varieties, for most of which no dual representation has previously been given. Among our results we highlight that for bilattices with a generalised conflation operation. Here both the associated product representation and the duality are new. Finally we outline analogous procedures for pre-bilattice-based algebras. (shrink)

In the long section of anapaests with which they make their entry, the old men of Argos methodically deliver three essential messages to the audience: 40–71. It is the tenth year of the Trojan War. 72–82. We are men who were too old to go and fight in it. 83–103. Some new situation seems to be indicated by the fact that Clytemnestra is organizing sacrifices throughout the town.

For more than fifty years, Sterling M. McMurrin served as one of the preeminent intellectual voices of the LDS community. From his beginnings as an Institute of Religion instructor to U.S. Commissioner of Education, and from a professor of philosophy to U.S. Envoy to Iran, he showed by example how personal and institutional morality can be defended.In a series of candid discussions with Jack Newell, McMurrin reveals his ability to reconcile freedom and conscience. In a spirit of repartee and friendship, (...) writes Boyer Jarvis in the foreword, Newell probes, challenges, and constantly draws McMurrin out as he... reflects upon his wide-ranging ideas and experiences. Rich in insight and humor, this remarkable dialogue captures the sweep and depth of McMurrin's thoughts as Newell engages him in discussing his approaches to philosophy, education, and religion.Among the qualities that characterized McMurrin's life and mind, explains Newell, perhaps the most notable is the freedom with which he has spoken his views on both the sacred and the profane. His intellectual integrity -- coupled as it almost always is with his humane instincts and innate fairness -- has simultaneously confounded and earned the respect of critics. (shrink)

The article aims to show the value of taking ecclesiology – the theology of the church – into account in the study of British imperial ideology by describing how Anglican intra-ecclesiological debates shaped mid-nineteenth-century discourse about the British Empire. It highlights the impact of the Oxford Movement on the mind of the British colonial administrator Sir Frederic Rogers, Lord Blachford (1811-1889), by revealing the connections between his imperial thought and concepts arising from Tractarian ecclesiology. In particular, it argues that Rogers’ (...) understanding of British colonial development builds on Tractarian ideas of balance and consistency. By retaining a sense of the importance of the historic connection with the colonies of settlement while respecting their right to be free, Rogers constituted the imperial relationship as a _ via media. _. (shrink)

The use of human brain tissue in neuroscience research is increasing. Recent developments include transplanting neural tissue, growing or maintaining neural tissue in laboratories and using surgically removed tissue for experimentation. Also, it is likely that in the future there will be attempts at partial or complete brain transplants. A discussion of the ethical issues of using human brain tissue for research and brain transplantation has been organized around nine broadly defined topic areas. Criteria for human brain tissue transplantation and (...) laboratory use of brain tissue are proposed. (shrink)