The purpose of Key Approaches to Biblical Ethics is to address fundamental as well as practical questions of methodology in examining the ethical material of the Bible. Sixteen scholars of international reputation, most of them leaders in the field of biblical ethics, discuss questions of biblical interpretation from the perspectives of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament ethics in close dialogue with one another. In the present volume both established and new approaches to biblical ethics are presented and discussed. The (...) result is a volume of unprecedented scholarly interaction that provides key insights into issues of biblical ethics that play a significant role both for biblical interpretation as well as for methodological questions in Jewish and Christian ethics today. (shrink)

We all categorize ourselves. You might think of yourself as a student, or as a painter, or as being good with numbers, or as being civic-minded. These labels we use to categorize ourselves have a huge effect on how we make our decisions–when faced with the choice of doing X vs. doing Y, whether I think of myself as someone’s who’s civic-minded and whether someone who’s civic-minded would do X can both play a huge role in influencing whether I decide (...) to do X. What does all that have to do with freedom? Our guest this month thinks that freedom just is the ability to affect, shape, or even create these sorts of labels, before then applying them to yourself. It isn’t as though anyone invents every label they apply to themselves; plenty of them are handed down to us from popular culture and other sources. But Mariam Thalos thinks that if you’re living freely, you are playing at least some creative role in fashioning your own self-conception. (shrink)

The Ethical Business will provide up-to-date coverage of key issues and perspectives in business ethics from a critical perspective. After providing an overview of theoretical approaches to ethics, a wide range of relevant practical questions will be explored. The book will cover the issues in greater depth, and in a more critical manner, than other introductory texts.

Background Little is known about communication between patients, families, and healthcare providers regarding ethical concerns that patients and families experience in the course of illness and medical care. To address this gap in the literature, we surveyed patients and family members to learn about their ethical concerns and the extent to which they discussed them with their healthcare providers. Methods We surveyed adult, English-speaking patients and family members receiving inpatient care in five hospitals in the Washington DC-Baltimore metropolitan area from (...) July 2017 to March 2020. Descriptive statistics were used to determine the frequency, comfortableness, and helpfulness of discussions regarding ethical concerns experienced when sick or receiving medical care. Univariable and multivariable stepwise logistic regression models were used to identify associations between healthcare provider and respondent characteristics and attitudes and (1) the likelihood of speaking to a healthcare provider about their ethical concern and (2) their level of comfort during these discussions. Results Of 468 respondents who experienced ethical issues, 299 (64%) reported discussing the situation with a member of their healthcare team; 74% (197/265) of respondents who had such a discussion found the discussion comfortable, and 77% (176/230) of respondents found the discussion helpful. To make discussions more comfortable and helpful, respondents proposed suggestions in open-ended responses involving (1) content and quality of communication; (2) positive healthcare provider qualities such as empathy, open-mindedness, knowledge, honesty, and trustworthiness; and (3) other contextual factors including having adequate time and available resources. Conclusions Patients and families often have ethical concerns that they discuss with clinicians, and they want clinicians to be routinely receptive and attentive to such discussions. (shrink)

Chipman, Meagher, and Barwise (2024) propose a public health ethics framework to assess current medical interpretation policies and provide guidelines for healthcare providers to meet their respons...

Ghosn, Mariam Predictive genetic testing Part 2 will examine the issues and ethical aspects that must be considered when adolescents below the age of majority make a request to undergo predictive genetic testing for Huntington's disease.

Ghosn, Mariam; Ford, Norman The adult stem cells are capable of self-renewal and are responsible for replenishing cells throughout an individual's lifetime, residing not only at embryonic stage but also in children and adults. The latest advancements and updates in adult stem cell technology demonstrate that it might be possible to generate stem cells for therapeutic uses without the creation or destruction of human embryos.

A venerable tradition in the metaphysics of science commends ontological reduction: the practice of analysis of theoretical entities into further and further proper parts, with the understanding that the original entity is nothing but the sum of these. This tradition implicitly subscribes to the principle that all the real action of the universe (also referred to as its "causation") happens at the smallest scales-at the scale of microphysics. A vast majority of metaphysicians and philosophers of science, covering a wide swath (...) of the spectrum from reductionists to emergentists, defend this principle. It provides one pillar of the most prominent theory of science, to the effect that the sciences are organized in a hierarchy, according to the scales of measurement occupied by the phenomena they study. On this view, the fundamentality of a science is reckoned inversely to its position on that scale. This venerable tradition has been justly and vigorously countered-in physics, most notably: it is countered in quantum theory, in theories of radiation and superconduction, and most spectacularly in renormalization theories of the structure of matter. But these counters-and the profound revisions they prompt-lie just below the philosophical radar. This book illuminates these counters to the tradition principle, in order to assemble them in support of a vaster (and at its core Aristotelian) philosophical vision of sciences that are not organized within a hierarchy. In so doing, the book articulates the principle that the universe is active at absolutely all scales of measurement. This vision, as the book shows, is warranted by philosophical treatment of cardinal issues in the philosophy of science: fundamentality, causation, scientific innovation, dependence and independence, and the proprieties of explanation. (shrink)

A superselection rule advanced in the course of a quantum-mechanical treatment of some phenomenon is an assertion to the effect that the superposition principle of quantum mechanics is to be restricted in the application at hand. Superselection accounts of measurement all have in common a decision to represent the indicator states of detectors by eigenspaces of superselection operators named in a superselection rule, on the grounds that the states in question are states of a so-called classical quantity and therefore not (...) subject to quantum interference effects. By this strategy superselectionists of measurement expect to dispense with use of projection postulates in treatments of measurement. I shall argue that superselection accounts of measurement are self-contradictory, and that treatments of infinite systems, if they can avoid the contradiction, are not true superselection accounts. (shrink)

This article addresses the relations between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (and those characteristics associated with ‘the natural’ and ‘the cultural’) in the context of the debates about Prozac. Following Marilyn Strathern, I focus specifically on the contested issue of enablement - that is, on what Prozac does or does not enable, and on the relation between enablement and enhancement, normality and pathology. I argue that the implications of the model of the brain that accompanies explanations of Prozac are such that commentators (...) are obliged to address not only the nature of normality but also the nature of nature itself. Through a close analysis of these debates, I suggest that critiques of Prozac should be understood not as objections to reductionism - to a biology that closes things down - but rather to one that opens things up: that opens up the relations between nature, culture, biology and the individual, relations that are now cross-cut and thrown about by artificiality. Objections to Prozac, then, might be characterized as an attempt to put these concepts back into their ‘proper’ positions, to re-establish the relationality between them. In conclusion, I argue that the biology put forward by proponents of psychopharmacology, regardless of the desirability of the latter, challenges not only the frequent assumptions that are made about the claims of materialist science, but also some of the terms and concepts that are commonly deployed in the social sciences. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on finding better ways to conceptualize precaution. Precaution has now become an established principle of environmental governance, although it has not been distinguished from conventional risk assessment. It has been considered by some as the antithesis of risk assessment in the sense that it is done to avoid serious potential harm, without scientific certainty as to the likelihood, magnitude, or causation of that harm. The first and foremost task of this chapter is to show that these concepts (...) are non-overlapping. It also elaborates on the reasons why precaution should be taken seriously, and that, on the flipside, traditional risk assessment, or cost-benefit analysis, does not take precaution seriously because of its pervasive nature. This fact represents the ascendancy of a decision-making calculus that grew out of twentieth-century British moral theory and culminated in 1944 with the presentation of the doctrine now familiarly known as the theory of expected utility. (shrink)

Ghosn, Mariam The causes of obesity are complex. Both our attitudes and lifestyles will need to change in order to successfully address this issue.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Algerian universities embraced e-learning as a new educational model. The study aimed to uncover the reality of university professors’ engagement with e-learning technologies and the factors influencing the consolidation of that teaching approach. A quantitative field study was conducted at the University of Ghardaia, utilising a questionnaire to survey a sample of faculty members. The findings underscored the critical need for comprehensive training programs to equip professors with the requisite skills for effective e-learning (...) delivery. Moreover, the research highlighted the pivotal role of university administrations in encouraging faculty participation, providing guidance, and establishing a supportive infrastructure conducive to the successful implementation of e-learning initiatives. These insights offer valuable perspectives for optimising the integration of digital learning modalities within the Algerian higher education landscape. (shrink)

This book demonstrates how and why vitalism—the idea that life cannot be explained by the principles of mechanism—matters now. Vitalism resists closure and reductionism in the life sciences while simultaneously addressing the object of life itself. The aim of this collection is to consider the questions that vitalism makes it possible to ask: questions about the role and status of life across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities and questions about contingency, indeterminacy, relationality and change. All have special importance now, (...) as the concepts of complexity, artificial life and artificial intelligence, information theory, and cybernetics become increasingly significant in more and more fields of activity. (shrink)

Cet article esquisse les angles morts d’une histoire, celle de la qualification du savoir au xix e siècle, à partir de l’apparition conjointe du néologisme épistémologie et du syntagme philosophie des sciences. Au-delà des déterminations linguistiques et institutionnelles, il s’efforce de cerner la logique de leur assise commune, en un siècle qui consolida à la fois le rôle central de l’histoire et celui de la recherche d’un statut propre à la pensée. Ainsi, il espère suppléer aux confusions dues à l’impact (...) de la circulation des idées (traductions, traditions et réceptions) et souhaite exposer le lieu d’une profusion conceptuelle, en s’attachant à rendre compte de l’unité d’habitudes générées par l’héritage d’une époque. (shrink)

In this paper we show how a student can learn the basics of the system databases using (W3school CSS) which was built as intelligent tutoring educational system by using the authoring tool called (ITSB). The learning material contains CSS and HTML. We divided the material in a group of lessons for novice learner which combines relational system and lessons in the process of learning. The student can learn using example of CSS, and types of CSS color. Furthermore, the intelligent tutoring (...) system supports not only lessons; but exercises of different difficult levels for each lesson. When a student finish successfully the first difficulty level in a lesson, the student is allowed to move to the next difficulty level of the exercises of the lesson. (shrink)

This paper investigates the religiosity/secularity dichotomy in Naguib Mahfouz’s novels, which is shaped by cultural narratives that convey his ideas. It analyzes a defined corpus of Mahfouz’s narratives that articulate his notions of religiosity/secularity. Through an interdisciplinary methodology combining the application of pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, and contextual analysis, it aims to determine Mahfouz’s potentiality for perceiving and narrativizing religiosity and secularity in twentieth-century Egypt. It discusses how Mahfouz adopts sociopragmatic techniques to give a bright picture of the secularist discourse but (...) a negative one for the Islamist one presented as inevitably incapable, crude, schizophrenic and idiosyncratic. Mahfouz openly destabilizes the religious/secular dichotomy by juxtaposing religious and secular discourses in his early and later narratives, where he scrutinizes secularity, advocating it as the only way out of and uprooting, religiosity. The adoption of an interdisciplinary framework proves to be theoretically and empirically motivated in order to show how Mahfouz’s narratives reflect their originator’s own beliefs and those of the narrated society, including its value systems. (shrink)

The radical probabilist counsels the prudent never to put away uncertainty, and hence always to balance judgment with probabilities of various sizes. Against this counsel I shall advise in favor of the practice of full belief — at least for some occasions. This advice rests on the fact that it is sometimes in a person's interests to accept certain propositions as a means of bringing it about that others recognize oneself as having accepted those propositions. With the pragmatists, therefore, I (...) shall reject the view that belief formation must in every instance be a truth-directed affair. Unlike the pragmatists, however, I shall conclude that the enterprise of belief formation is not directed exclusively, or even primarily, at attaining knowledge. In other words, pursuit of that which it profits to believe, on the one hand, and pursuit of knowledge on the other, are distinct enterprises, which overlap (when they do) only accidentally. (shrink)

The traditional philosophical questions around human freedom are to do with how to square freedom for human organisms with increasingly scientific understandings of the universe itself. At the beginning of Western philosophical consciousness, Plato, unlike later philosophers eligible of the label rationalist, maintained that there are obstacles to free and rational agency, owing in no small measure to pressures exerted by the human psyche from what later were referred to as biological drives and drives for social status. In subsequent eras, (...) these obstacles came under the heading of “weakness of will”—a conception shared widely in popular and traditional culture. Today the realities of addiction, social stresses, forces of habit, culture, social position, and group identity, together with psychological findings about cognitive biases, have come to dominate the landscape of empirically-based obstacles to agency. Can the image of the human being under the microscope of contemporary science, including cognitive and social science, be reconciled with the “manifest image” of human beings as sources of their individual behaviors (and held responsible accordingly), particularly if the scientific image is best construed in terms of governance by laws of nature? (The phrases manifest image and scientific image were coined by the twentieth-century American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, see Sellars 1962.) How is it possible to square the idea of laws of nature with the manifest image in which humans exercise free agency as they play their various parts in the drama that is life? Does the manifest image thus square better with a theistic image of the world, as both seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes and eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant seem to have thought, and by contrast the scientific image square better with atheism? A deterministic universe, such as was proposed during the Enlightenment, was early on thought to pose a threat to the idea of human freedom. (It does not pose the same threat to the idea of a sovereign creator, however, because the notion of a creator of the universe already puts the entity who qualifies for the office outside the regime of those laws, ahead of them both in time and in ontological status.) One traditional answer to the threat has been the notion of compatibilism— which simply asserts that freedom and determinism are not incompatible. The devil, of course, has been in the details of explaining how this can be so, and many schools of thought on the matter exist. It is worthwhile noting that there are enormously compelling reasons, from the quantum regime so well described by quantum theory, to reject determinism: the laws governing the universe are simply not fully deterministic. This, of course, vitiates the need to confront the threat as originally posed. However, the trouble, if one follows along this line of thought, is to make sense of the nature of freedom in a world governed partly by deterministic laws and partly by nondeterministic ones that admit of an element of chance. Is such a world itself any more compatible with the idea of human freedom? In this section we grapple with the question of human freedom, what it could mean, and whether it is best accepted in the context of a form of theism. We find that theism has no more resources for addressing these difficulties than atheism does. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has emphasized the contributions of the great Maliki jurist Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī to Islamic legal thought. However, al-Qarāfī’s compilation of legal maxims and distinctions, al-Furūq, has not yet been studied, nor has the collection of his teacher, the prominent Shafiʿi jurist Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām, known as al-Qawāʿid al-kubrā. Furthermore, the original thought of Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām and his formative influence on al-Qarāfī have been understated. This article compares their two works to demonstrate that al-Qarāfī based his collection in (...) large part on Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s al-Qawāʿid and it examines the techniques that al-Qarāfī used, which included reordering, refining, and supplementing borrowed maxims, and anonymizing references to his teacher. Most salient, however, is al-Qarāfī’s “Malikization” of maxims, which entailed replacing Shafiʿi doctrines and authorities with their Maliki counterparts and deploying maxims to defend Maliki doctrines. The article concludes by explaining al-Qarāfī’s authorial choices in light of his Maliki affiliation and the politics between the legal schools in Mamluk Cairo. (shrink)

On the classical instrumental view, practical reason is an all-things-considered enterprise, concerned not merely with identifying and evaluating appropriate means to the realization of ends construed as uncriticizable, but also with coordinating achievement of their sum. The concept of a totality of ranked concerns is the cornerstone of the theory of utility. This paper discusses some of the ways that practical reasoning, on the ground, is not instrumental in this sense. The paper will demonstrate that some of what goes on (...) by way of practical reasoning on the ground involves a certain simple inference schema—to be called “imitative reasoning”—that involves mobilization of what has been alternately referred to as archetypes, scripts, stereotypes and schemas including most importantly self-schemas or self-concepts. Imitative reasoning, as the paper will argue, is especially hostile to deliberations that involve the sorts of tradeoffs that applications of utility theory routinely advise. It is therefore no expression or realization, however imperfect, of the notion of maximization. What is more, this framework routinely evokes as authoritative the norms of privilege, however removed from or irrelevant to the matter at hand, which might be as simple as where to go for dinner. For it is the basis of—among other things—class and race consciousness. Furthermore, it is highly subject to manipulation by the unscrupulous; such as, for example, by those who market consumer goods, especially to children. For this form of reasoning is employed so as to protect or enhance self-concepts: imitative reasoning is a form of motivated reasoning. Laying it out in schema form will shed light on the sort of reasoning processes that transpire in many cases of cognitive dissonance reduction. (shrink)

Talk abounds regarding the loss of public trust in such institutions as science or mainstream news media, but there is little clarity about the nature of public trust. Public trust, as this paper explains, is a correlate of a certain type of power in the sphere of communication—one enjoyed by a broadcast source (such as a scientific publication or a news outlet) in proportion to a number of recipients in its broadcast area who adopt its messages, or at least are (...) open to receiving them. This essay proposes new language and ontological tools for the analysis of this sort of power, because the present crop of concepts currently in circulation for handling questions around power broadly construed, and communicative power specifically, are inadequate. The possibilities of communication, and therefore of power in and through communication, differ—as the paper will also explain—according to whether the network through which they flow is governed by an authoritarian regime or instead a western-style democracy. Communicative power is the fundament of what will be referred to here as “people power”, consonant with its usage by Chenoweth et al. (2019), a nonviolent power that constitutes a natural and enormously potent check on the power of tyrants, and thereby forms one natural limit on tyranny. Communicative power has in recent memory been associated with Science and with the free press. The concepts about power articulated here will also contribute to clear formulation of numerous research questions in connection with the internet. (shrink)

What do we learn when we focus analysis – not so much on the content of experience – as on its universal features and functioning? Descartes believed that such focus (when exercised by someone employing his first-personal method of inquiry) held the key to the fundamental metaphysics of our universe – that it could reveal fundamental truths about the nature of substance, or at any rate could reveal some fundamental metaphysical categories and their contrasts. He believed such focus could lead (...) to a certain doctrine of dualism. Philosophers now widely hold that Descartes’ method was profoundly wrongheaded, in no way a candidate method for illuminating the material universe that is our own. In fact, however, Descartes’ method is considerably more serviceable. While unable to do what Descartes thought it could do, nonetheless it is ideal for examining a taxon that this essay will refer to as grammar or structure in the most general sense. Grammar is a contrary of content or materiality, though not the only one since materiality enjoys multiple contraries. Thus Descartes’ method can lead us to a certain dualism, but not the one that Descartes imagined. (shrink)

Ghosn, Mariam Huntington's disease (HD) is an inherited disorder. Sufferers usually develop symptoms in midlife between the ages of 30 and 50 years. HD causes neurodegeneration resulting in the progressive development of physical, cognitive and emotional symptoms. The impact on sufferers worsens over time with the final stage of the disease resulting in the need for professional assistance in a long-term care facility. More rarely HD develops in children and young adults, with less than 5% of HD sufferers being (...) affected by Juvenile HD. This article considers the ethical aspects of such testing. (shrink)

Ghosn, Mariam A seven-year $1 million dollar study conducted by Dr. M. Soffritti found that significant trend of increasing lymphoma and leukaemia incidence in female rats fed aspartame with a significant increase in the number of female rats affected at dosages of 20 mg/kg per day and upward, thus questioning aspartame's safety. However, the European Food Safety Authority's (EFSA's) Scientific Panel on Food Additives, Flavourings, Processing Aids and Materials in Contact with Food (AFC) argued that there was not enough (...) evidence to conclude that aspartame causes an increased incidence of lymphomas and leukaemias, also arguing that the increase in the number of rats affected with lymphomas and leukaemias could be due to chronic respiratory infections of the rats used in the study. (shrink)

This article aims at showing the similarities between the financial and the tech sectors in their use and reliance on information and algorithms and how such dependency affects their attitude towards regulation. Drawing on Pasquale’s recommendations for reform, it sets out a proposal for a constant and independent scrutiny of internet service providers.

The recently reported cases of coerced sterilisation of women at a privately operated immigration detention facility in the USA are egregious in their disregard for human dignity and professional ethics, but sadly not surprising. These abuses represent a continuation of efforts to control the reproductive capacity of women, fueled by racist and xenophobic motives. Physicians helped create and legitimise the pseudoscientific framework for the eugenics movement, which would implement forceful sterilisation as its tool of choice to eliminate undesirable traits that (...) were thought to be biologically inherited and predominant among racial and ethnic minorities. Although state-endorsed forcible sterilisation programs have ended, incarcerated women have remained particularly vulnerable to sterilisation abuse. The intersectional vulnerabilities of racism, xenophobia and carcerality must be addressed to prevent such abuses from recurring. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Traditional articulations of the conception of dirty hands, as the doing of wrong in order to do right, invite construals of the issues raised thereby as mired in conceptual confusions and inconsistencies, and moreover as generating unproductive discussions of the scope of the proposed notion itself. The status of the concept of dirty hands is thus precarious, in spite of its provenance in the work of political thinkers such as Machiavelli. This essay articulates one nonparadoxical conception of dirty hands, as (...) the uncomfortable phenomenology of agents authorized to act on behalf of others, when they are called upon to do things that, while morally correct, are also personally or morally distasteful. The key point is that the dirt of action remains on these agents’ hands, even if moral responsibility for the relevant actions should be conceived as falling on the persons in whose name they take the said action. This articulation opens up for investigation questions about the phenomenology of authorized agency, as well as the moral labor involved in leadership and in other contexts of authorized distasteful action. These are questions of social ontology. Here there is important philosophical work that remains to be done. (shrink)

Using C. Wright Mills' book The Sociological Imagination as a touchstone for its discussion, this article addresses the relations between the sociological problem, relevance and experience as they are and could potentially be understood within sociology. Beginning with the historical relation between sociology, science and literature — a relation which has been productively but differently complicated by poststructuralist and postconstructivist theories — this article asks: to what extent does the empirical offer a referent for the sociological problem? To what is (...) sociology obliged to be relevant? Arguing for the continued relevance of relevance, particularly in the light of recent reforms in higher education in the UK and the USA, the article explores how the sociological problem might be transformed — and perhaps, more importantly, might be transformative — if the basic commitments of a research project were not to historical social structures but to virtual structures. (shrink)