Reproductive health technology allows married couples who experience infertility to have a child through assisted reproductive technology (ART), such as the in vitro fertilisation (IVF) process. The transfer of the extracted embryo to the woman’s womb is called surrogacy technology (gestational surrogacy). The legality of the practice of surrogacy is still questionable, both on a national and international level. This research discussed the legality of surrogacy in some religious countries, focusing on Indonesia. This research used normative juridical research methods or (...) literature review through a comparative religion-legal approach. This study indicated that most do not have a specific legal instrument regarding surrogacy practice. International law also does not have a standard legal instrument regarding the legality of surrogacy. Legality is determined by each religious country’s national laws and customs. For example, Indonesian law prohibits this practice implicitly under Law No. 36 of 2009 concerning health. The United Kingdom legalised surrogacy through the Surrogacy Agreement Act 1985, which was amended to the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act 2008, Greece through the Greek Legislation Law 3089/2002 and Law 3305/2005, and India through the 2019 Surrogacy Regulation Bill. Those countries have their limitations and characteristics that rule surrogacy. Surrogacy is indeed a technological advancement in the health sector. However, for countries that are influenced much by religion, technological advances sometimes conflict with the culture and the belief that has long been followed by most of the population. For Indonesia, the largest of Sunni Islam ruled surrogacy against the law. Next, Iran, as a Shia Islam country, ruled that surrogacy is a legal action.Contribution: The research provided information and knowledge regarding the different settings of surrogacy practice. Most religious countries bravely rejected or put strict limits on the practice of surrogacy. (shrink)

G.W.F. Hegel is often vilified for his conservative reactionary philosophy, particularly with respect to the rights of women. Alternatively, tracing a path through G.W.F Hegel's political thought, MacDonald demonstrates that, in fact, the logic of Hegel's argument necessitates the recognition of equal political and civil rights for all human beings. Combining a thoughtful study of Hegel's political thought with close readings of two pivotal works of literature, MacDonald's book shows how the perennial tension between fulfilled, yet diverse, personal lives and (...) stable political communities has historically developed. While Sophocles' Antigone highlights the tension that exists in states that deny the particular interests of their citizens, MacDonald argues that an alternative image, one that admits the freedom of all humans as the grounds for an ethical family and state and one that is consistent with Hegel's thought in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and The Philosophy of Right, is offered in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In an era of political cynicism and apathy, Finding Freedom seeks to recover the strengths of modern political life, arguing that Hegel's understanding of the true nature of human freedom, one that is based on our willing participation in rationally demonstrable goods, can be grounds for reinvigorating both the family and the political community. (shrink)

In Recovering Hegel from the Critique of Leo Strauss, Sara MacDonald and Barry Craig provide a study unique in its focus on Leo Strauss’s reading of Hegel. While MacDonald and Craig find value in Strauss’s thought, they argue that his pessimism concerning modernity lies in a misunderstanding of both modernity’s greatest philosophical advocate, G.W.F. Hegel, and modernity’s virtues.

`Folk Psychology' - our everyday talk of beliefs, desires and mental events - has long been compared with the technical language of `Cognitive Science'. Does folk psychology provide a correct account of the mental causes of our behaviour, or must our everyday terms ultimately be replaced by a language developed from computational models and neurobiology? This broad-ranging book addresses these questions, which lie at the heart of psychology and philosophy. Providing a critical overview of the key literature in the field, (...) including the seminal work of Fodor and Churchland, the author explores the classic `Frame Problem' and assesses the future prospects of cognitive science. The scope of the frame problem, touching on connec. (shrink)

Ethical dilemmas involving tax issues were identified by members of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants as posing the most difficult ethical problem for them (Finn et al., Journal of Business Ethics 7(8), pp. 607–609, 1988). The KPMG tax shelter fraud case proves that the tax profession has not gone untainted in the age of numerous accounting and corporate scandals, such as the Enron débâcle (Sikka and Hampton, Accounting Forum 29(3), 325–343, 2005). High-profile scandals serve to highlight the problems (...) caused by differences in ethical judgement among accountants and tax practitioners and the issue of ethics has been brought publicly to the forefront of the profession. Nevertheless, the nature and dimension of ethical issues in tax practice have been largely unexplored (Erard, Journal of Public Economics 52(2), 163–197, 1993; Marshall et al., Journal of Business Ethics 17(12), 1265–1279, 1998; Frecknall Hughes, Unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Leeds, 2002). This research aims to contribute to the debate on ethics in tax practice by reporting interview data on tax practitioners’ perceptions of ethics in the jurisdictions of Ireland and the United Kingdom and exploring the link or equation of ethics with risk management. (shrink)

Rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence are leading to an increasing human reliance on machine decision making. Even in collaborative efforts with Decision Support Systems (DSSs), where a human expert is expected to make the final decisions, it can be hard to keep the expert actively involved throughout the decision process. DSSs suggest their own solutions and thus invite passive decision making. To keep humans actively ‘on’ the decision-making loop and counter overreliance on machines, we propose a ‘reflection machine’ (RM). This (...) system asks users questions about their decision strategy and thereby prompts them to evaluate their own decisions critically. We discuss what forms RMs can take and present a proof-of-concept implementation of a RM that can produce feedback on users’ decisions in the medical and law domains. We show that the prototype requires very little domain knowledge to create reasonably intelligent critiquing questions. With this prototype, we demonstrate the technical feasibility to develop RMs and hope to pave the way for future research into their effectiveness and value. (shrink)

In this module, which first appeared in Vol. 9, Nos. 2&3, pp. 168-170, 1989, an error in a formula appeared three times: CO2 and C2HSOH should read CO2. The entire article is reprinted here. The editors apoligize for this and regret any confusion this may have caused.