This chapter contains sections titled: Warming Up Seeking Early Solace Experience and Thought So Be It Against Lukewarmness Pragmatic Use of Belief.

Phenomenology in medicine’s main contribution is to present a first-person narrative of illness, in an effort to aid medicine in reaching an accurate disease diagnosis and establishing a personal relationship with patients whose lived experience changes dramatically when severe disease and disabling condition is confirmed. Once disease is diagnosed, the lived experience of illness is reconstructed into a living-with-disease narrative that medicine’s biological approach has widely neglected. Key concepts like health, sickness, illness, disease and the clinical encounter are being diversely (...) and ambiguously used, leading to distortions in socio-medical practices such as medicalization, pharmaceuticalization, emphasis on surveillance medicine. Current definitions of these concepts as employed in phenomenology of medicine are revised, concluding that more stringent semantics ought to reinforce an empirical phenomenological or postphenomenological approach. (shrink)

Latin American countries have slowly enacted laws decriminalizing abortion in three circumstances: Life‐threatening risk for the pregnant woman, extra‐uterine non‐viability of malformed foetus, and pregnancy due to rape or incest. Chile is one of the last countries to adopt such a law, formulated in an increasingly restrictive format. Conservative politicians and Church‐related healthcare institutions promptly announced individual and institutional conscientious objection based on the right of private facilities to obey their ideology and personal moral integrity. Juridical consultations and Constitutional Court (...) rulings allowed private hospitals to uphold their objection even if contracted to provide some public health services. Under these conditions, only a few hundred women requested and obtained a legal abortion, while an estimated 100,000 continued to depend on unsafe procedures. Bioethical debate was silenced by the unfettered drive for conscientious objection that continues to limit women’s autonomy, and fails to ease the public health scourge of massive unsafe clandestine abortions. (shrink)

Concern about the rapid ageing of all societies reaches alarming proportions as healthcare inequities are steeply rising, prompting the elderly to live longer but subject to insufficient social protection and healthcare in the wake of dwindling public resources. The aged population of developing nations are facing additional hardships due to the growing gap between needs and the financial reductions of public institutions, retirement funds, and the trend towards privatization of essential services turned into commodities. Current approaches to allocation of insufficient (...) resources without ageist discrimination are briefly discussed: individual self‐care aimed at successful, active and healthy ageing based on resourcefulness of the privileged elderly; utilitarian approaches founded on QALY and fair innings, and human rights focused on the plights of the elderly. These approaches cannot apply to resources poor nations, who need to engage in context‐bound bioethics dealing with the realities of their exposed ageing population. A developing world bioethics is needed to face the plights of the elderly in countries with low and middle‐income and insufficient social capital. Suggested are: 1) a phenomenological approach based on the interaction of bioethics and ethnology, furthering grass‐roots input from the elderly; 2) Create small communities –campus‐like boroughs– to simplify accessibility to social services and healthcare facilities, as an alternative to the high‐cost WHO proposal of age‐friendly large cities. (shrink)

The multidisciplinary provenance of bioethics leads to a variety of discursive styles and ways of reasoning, making the discipline vulnerable to criticism and unwieldy to the setting of solid theoretical foundations. Applied ethics belongs to a group of disciplines that resort to deliberation rather than formal argumentation, therefore employing both factual and value propositions, as well as emotions, intuitions and other non logical elements. Deliberation is thus enriched to the point where ethical discourse becomes substantial rather than purely analytical. Caution (...) must be exercised to avoid this formal permissiveness from accepting empty and incorrigible statements that are but flatus voci since they can neither be supported nor falsified. It is therefore suggested that deliberation in bioethics should comply with three sets of conditions: (1) Be understandable, truthful, honest and pertinent, as suggested by communicative ethics; (2) Allow for second order, thick judgements as suggested by pragmatism; (3) Abide by additional criteria as here proposed: Doxastic propositions should be bolstered by a cognitive element; statements should be specific and proportional to the issue at hand, and they should be arguable and coherent. (shrink)

Neglected diseases are severe conditions that mainly affect the world's poorest people. Those suffering from neglected diseases are mostly suffering from tropical infections that have failed to receive priority in pharmaceutical research and development programs, as well as in public health policies aimed at improving availability and access to preventive, diagnostic and curative medicine. The World Health Organization has issued a number of documents directing attention to the plight affecting one third of the world's population, assisted by active support from (...) private organizations, notably the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, but the overall situation remains dismal. In the wake of major socioeconomic processes including globalization, steadily growing economic disparity, healthcare inequality, the instability created by rogue states and terrorism, as well as massive migration, and epidemic outbreaks, the features of neglected diseases have been changing. Neglected populations affected by tropical diseases are suffering increasingly from non-infectious degenerative conditions and disabilities due to untreated chronic maladies. Pockets of poverty and neglect can also be detected in high-income countries, contributing to the emergence of new diseases and the reemergence of infections believed to be disappearing such as tuberculosis and the measles. Included in the issues of neglect are rare diseases, mostly of genetic origin, affecting a small number of patients that suffer from multiple life-shortening functional impairment and organ defects. Effective medicines are extremely expensive, allegedly because research and development of appropriate drugs is resources and time consuming, requiring exorbitant prices to recoup investment from a small number of consumers. Bioethics has been tardy in addressing the suffering and destitution of neglected and rare diseases. Convinced that permanently repeated denunciations blunt the sensitivity towards suffering, whereas statistics are bloodless and unable to elicit commitment, this book attempts to explore a different strategy. In an upstream approach, bioethics needs to engage in ethnographic fieldwork that confronts and shares the context in which people suffer, vividly presenting what epidemiological research has blunted into statistical data. Additionally, a downstream approach is suggested, requiring bioethics to vigorously and openly denounce unethical biomedical and pharmaceutical research, misdeeds in registration and marketing of drugs, and misalignment of policies with the unmet healthcare needs of the destitute. More than being critical observers, bioethicists ought to shed lurking conflicts of interests and seek active participation in planning research and public healthcare practices aimed at improving the lives of medically neglected populations. (shrink)

Clinicians' work depends on sincere and complete disclosures from their patients; they honour this candidness by confidentially safeguarding the information received. Breaching confidentiality causes harms that are not commensurable with the possible benefits gained. Limitations or exceptions put on confidentiality would destroy it, for the confider would become suspicious and un-co-operative, the confidant would become untrustworthy and the whole climate of the clinical encounter would suffer irreversible erosion. Excusing breaches of confidence on grounds of superior moral values introduces arbitrariness and (...) ethical unreliability into the medical context. Physicians who breach the agreement of confidentiality are being unfair, thus opening the way for, and becoming vulnerable to, the morally obtuse conduct of others. Confidentiality should not be seen as the cosy but dispensable atmosphere of clinical settings; rather, it constitutes a guarantee of fairness in medical actions. Possible perils that might accrue to society are no greater than those accepted when granting inviolable custody of information to priests, lawyers and bankers. To jeopardize the integrity of confidential medical relationships is too high a price to pay for the hypothetical benefits this might bring to the prevailing social order. (shrink)

Human beings are essentially vulnerable in the view that their existence qua humans is not given but construed. This vulnerability receives basic protection from the State, expressed in the form of the universal rights all citizens are meant to enjoy. In addition, many individuals fall prey to destitution and deprivation, requiring social action aimed at recognising the specific harms they suffer and providing remedial assistance to palliate or remove their plights.Citizens receive protection against their biologic vulnerability by means of an (...) in rem right to health [care], which is more an attitude of protection than a specific programme. When individuals become susceptible, that is, biologically weak or diseased, they also increase their predisposition to additional harm, and require social actions to treat their demeaned condition. Such assistance takes the form of positive healthcare rights.Research on human beings has been slow to observe that the subjects recruited are susceptible, especially so if research is done in less developed countries. By mislabelling them as vulnerable – a characteristic they share with all humans – sponsors avoid registering the deprivation these people suffer, and the ethical obligation to offer them remedial help.The distinction between vulnerability and susceptibility also marks the difference between being intact but fragile – vulnerable – and being injured and predisposed to compound additional harm – susceptible. Awareness of this difference should give additional force to the rejection of double standards in research ethics. (shrink)

Medical ethics could be better understood if some basic theoretical aspects of practices in health care are analysed. By discussing the underlying ethical principles that govern medical practice, the student should also become familiar with the notion that medical ethics is much more than the external application of socially accepted moral standards. Professions in general and medicine in particular have internal values that command their moral virtuosity at the same time as their technical excellence. Three examples where clinical practice can (...) be clearly shown to require an ethical analysis are given: medical praxiology illustrates the motives, means and aims of physicians and patients; clinical decision-making as a practical syllogism that reaches prescriptive conclusions based on medical knowledge and the patient's wishes/intentions. Finally, diagnostics as an ethical bayesian approach is discussed, where the patient informedly decides the benefits and risks of further testing. (shrink)

For a standard Finsler F on a manifold M, the domain is the whole tangent bundle T M and the fundamental tensor g is positive-definite. However, in many cases, these two conditions hold in a relaxed form only, namely one has either a psuedo-Finsler metric or a conic Finsler metric. Our aim is twofold. First, we want to give an account of quite a few subtleties that appear under such generalizations, say, for conic pseudo-finsler metrics. Second, we aim to provide (...) some criteria that determine when a pseudo-Finsler metric F obtained as a general homogeneous combination of Finsler metrics and one-forms is again a Finsler-metric -- or, more precisely, that the conic domain on which g remains positive-definite. Such a combination generalizes the known -metrics in different directions. Remarkably, classical examples of Finsler metrics are reobtained and extended, with explicit computations of their fundamental tensors. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the Spanish mobile phone industry to determine how mobile phone companies and certain institutions can improve protection for children who use mobile phones. We carried out a multivariate statistical analysis using anonymous primary data from mobile phone companies, and institutions and associations that protect children, to compare these stakeholders’ opinions and to put forward solutions. We proved that, even though some European countries have made an effort to provide safer ICT services, all (...) stakeholders still need to cooperate and agree on solutions to the commercial problems associated with children using mobile phones. This can be done by signing codes of conduct. We found that even though some companies implement measures to protect children from accessing harmful content via their mobile phones, they do so for reasons of legal and not social responsibility. (shrink)

Clinical and research practices designed by developed countries are often implemented in host nations of the Third World. In recent years, a number of papers have presented a diversity of arguments to justify these practices which include the defence of research with placebos even though best proven treatments exist; the distribution of drugs unapproved in their country of origin; withholding of existing therapy in order to observe the natural course of infection and disease; redefinition of equipoise to a more bland (...) version, and denial of post-trial benefits to research subjects. These practices have all been prohibited in developed, sponsoring countries, even though they invariably have pockets of poverty where conditions comparable to the Third World prevail. Furthermore, the latest update of the Declaration of Helsinki clearly decries double ethical standards in research protocols. Under these circumstances, it does not seem appropriate that First World scholars should propose and defend research and clinical practices with less stringent ethical standards than those mandatory in their own countries. Recent years have witnessed frequent reports of less stringent ethical standards being applied to both clinical and research medical practices, for the most part in the field of drug trials and drug marketing, initiated by developed countries in poorer nations. Still more unsettling, a number of articles have endorsed the policy of employing ethical norms in these host countries, which would be unacceptable to both the legislations and the moral standards of the sponsor nations. Also, these reformulations often contravene the Declaration of Helsinki or one of its updates. This paper is not so much concerned with the actual practices, which have been subjected to frequent scrutiny and publicly decried when gross misconduct occurred. Rather, my concern relates to the approval and support such practices have found in the literature on bioethics from authors who might be expected to use their energy and scholarship to explore and endorse the universalisability of ethics rather than to develop ad hoc arguments that would allow exceptions and variations from accepted moral standards. To this purpose, issue will be taken with arguments in three fields: medical and pharmaceutical practices, research strategies, and local application of research results. (shrink)

Secular culture often advocates for the liberation of human libido and views Christian morality as a source of damaging restrictions. However, closer examination of Church teaching reveals a depth of understanding of human nature not found in contemporary secular culture. One Church father in particular, St. Augustine, offers a keen understanding of human sexuality and its importance not only as a means of promulgating the human race but also as a means of fostering the sort of spousal unity that improves (...) life in general. Studies of neurochemistry seem to confirm much of what Augustine claimed about human sexuality over fifteen hundred years ago. (shrink)

The development of the philosophy of medicine in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1945 is presented in a thematic form. The first two decades were characterized by the evolution of an anthropological school of thought that aimed at relating physician and patient in a more personal and existential form than had hitherto been the case. In the last years, this tendency to demand deeper psychic and broader social involvement with medical problems had increased. Somatic disorders were considered to be (...) fundamentally caused by socially induced mental stress. After a brief period during which the theme of organisms in general and phenomenologically grasped living-body of human beings in particular were discussed, there followed since the mid-seventies an essential preoccupation with the methodology and epistemology of medicine. According to this trend, medicine is to be analyzed in terms of the theory of action, with its conceptual and strategic orientation towards practice and not, as generally believed, towards the standards of scientific truth. The concepts of disease, diagnosis and therapy are therefore relative and their validity is dependent on time, persons and circumstances involved. Thus, the highest criteria of utility for medical actions cannot but be the affected patient and society. (shrink)

Medical ethics needs to be on its guard against those in military or political power who would seek to subvert its most basic tenets in order to serve their own endsEmergencies and warlike situations often force medical personnel to follow orders and perform actions or duties pertaining to their field of expertise in flagrant violation of their professional code of ethics. Opposing such orders may be contextually impossible, or elicit unduly high personal costs. Medical ethics, while lamenting these impositions, is (...) often reduced to passive and silent disagreement. In recent years, however, biomedical ethics has become active in accepting and supporting these estrangements from accepted standards and values of the healthcare professions, coming up with justifications of torture; suggesting non-treatment of the wounded, depending on their combatant status; prompting collaboration in the development of biological weapons, and disregarding informed consent.Physicians’ participation in torture has been unanimously condemned and, although acknowledging that such conduct “is the result of the displacement of their medical vocation by the doctrine of ‘national security’”, such an “ideological substrate” has nevertheless been deemed untenable.1 Perpetrators were found to have committed their deeds in an ethical void2; this was recognised, but in no way did it serve to excuse physicians from the duty of opposing induced suffering and assuaging its effects to the best of their abilities.Torture in its “humane” form has been defended on utilitarian grounds,3 using weak arguments that are unable to justify physicians’ active participation in torture. For the most part, professional ethics has remained adamant in its undaunted disapproval of medical non-therapeutic involvement in violent scenarios such as war, terrorism, and even torture. Nobody would have thought, in earlier times, that medical ethics could take any other position than to unrelentingly reject physicians’ participation in torture, …. (shrink)

Black Africans who were brought to Cuba as slaves represented a variety of origins and belonged to linguistic groups that were as divergent as their cultural backgrounds. A huge majority, however, originated in the Congo basin. The last officially recorded arrival of a slave ship in a Cuban port took place in 1873.It would be impossible to classify expressions of Bantu origin that were used in the slave trade. The arbitrary label “Congo” has been applied to most such expressions with (...) a view to noting and suggesting a kinship with the cultural and religious heritage branching off from the Bantu linguistic trunk. (shrink)

This article outlines the theoretical developments experienced in historical studies over the last two decades. As a consequence of the growing critical reconsideration of some of the main theoretical assumptions underlying historical explanation of individuals' meaningful actions, a new theory of society has taken shape among historians during this time. By emphasizing the empirical and analytical distinction between language as a pattern of meanings and language as a means of communication, a significant group of historians has thoroughly recast the conventional (...) notions of society, experience, interests, culture, and identity, and has developed a new concept of social action. Thus, historiographical debate seems to have started to transcend, for the first time, the longstanding and increasingly futile contest or dilemma between objectivism and subjectivism, between materialism and culturalism, between social and intentional explanation, or between social constraints and human agency. The groundwork has now been laid for an alternative to the declining paradigm of social history that does not entail a revisionist return to idealist history but opens a quite different path. (shrink)

Autonomy has been hailed as the foremost principle of bioethics, and yet patients’ decisions and research subjects’ voluntary participation are being subjected to frequent restrictions. It has been argued that patient care is best served by a limited form of paternalism because the doctor is better qualified to take critical decisions than the patient, who is distracted by illness. The revival of paternalism is unwarranted on two grounds: firstly, because prejudging that the sick are not fully autonomous is a biased (...) and unsubstantial view; secondly, because the technical knowledge of healthcare professionals does not include the ethical qualifications and prerogative to decide for others.Clinical research settings are even more prone to erode subjects’ autonomy than clinical settings because of the tendency and temptation to resort to such practices as shading the truth when consent to participation is sought, or waiving consent altogether when research is done in emergency settings.Instead of supporting such dubious practices with unconvincing arguments, it would seem to be the task of bioethics to insist on reinforcing autonomy. (shrink)

Classical medicine operates in a climate of rational discourse, scientific knowledge accretion and the acceptance of ethical standards that regulate its activities. Criticism has centred on the excessive technological emphasis of modern medicine and on its social strategy aimed at defending exclusiveness and the privileges of professional status. Alternative therapeutic approaches have taken advantage of the eroded public image of medicine, offering treatments based on holistic philosophies that stress the non-rational, non-technical and non-scientific approach to the unwell, disregarding traditional diagnostic (...) categories and concentrating on enhancing subjective comfort and well-being, but remaining oblivious to the organic substrate of disease. This leads to questionable ethics in terms of false hopes and lost opportunities for effective therapy. (shrink)

Summary Care and cure have been described as different kinds of ethical approaches to clinical situations. Female concerns in nursing care have been contrasted with masculine, cure orientated physician's attitudes. Ethics in such different voices may have sociologic determinants, but they do not represent intrinsic distinctions. Medicine has shown a divergent development, on the one hand stressing cure in a deterministic and instrumental way, on the other hand being aware that disease is as much a pathographic as a biographic, care‐requiring (...) existential situation. Disease is a breakdown of the living organism, to be cured by therapeutic efforts, but it is also the distressing failure of the lived body, requiring concern and care. Based on Lévinas’ ethics of encounter, it is suggested that any interpersonal relatedness is based on concern for the other, being grounded on an essentially ethical interaction. The clinical encounter is a paradigm of such ethics‐based relationships, which necessarily builds on awareness of the other qua other, and is concerned with fulfilling the therapeutic mandate. Caring for the other means doing one's best to help her/him, so that care and cure are inextricably interwoven, although care is the more fundamental form of human relatedness. Thus, neither gender nor professional tasks can allow for a caring attitude to develop without curing concerns, just as trying to cure without caring is unthinkable. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:To have a virtue is to possess a certain kind of trait of character that is appropriate in pursuing the moral good at which the virtue aims. Human beings are assumed to be capable of attaining those traits. Yet, a number of scholars are skeptical about the very existence of such character traits. They claim a sizable amount of empirical evidence in their support. This article is concerned with the existence and explanatory power of character as a way to assess (...) the possibility of achieving moral virtue, with particular attention paid to business context. I aim to unsettle the so-called situationist challenge to virtue ethics. In the course of this article, I shall defend four claims, namely, that virtues are more than just behavioral dispositions, that at least some virtues may not be unitary traits, that psychologists cannot infer virtues from overt behavior, and that the situationist data do not account for the observational equivalence of traits. Since it rests on a misconception of what virtue is, the situationist objection remains unconvincing. (shrink)

Based on the distinction between living body and lived body, we describe the disease-subject as representing the impact of disease on the existential life-project of the subject. Traditionally, an individual's subjectivity experiences disorders of the body and describes ensuing pain, discomfort and unpleasantness. The idea of a disease-subject goes further, representing the lived body suffering existential disruption and the possible limitations that disease most probably will impose. In this limit situation, the disease-subject will have to elaborate a new life-story, a (...) new character or way-of-being-in-the-world, it will become a different subject. (shrink)

How computer games can be designed to create ethically relevant experiences for players. Today's blockbuster video games—and their never-ending sequels, sagas, and reboots—provide plenty of excitement in high-resolution but for the most part fail to engage a player's moral imagination. In Beyond Choices, Miguel Sicart calls for a new generation of video and computer games that are ethically relevant by design. In the 1970s, mainstream films—including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver—filled theaters but also treated their (...) audiences as thinking beings. Why can't mainstream video games have the same moral and aesthetic impact? Sicart argues that it is time for games to claim their place in the cultural landscape as vehicles for ethical reflection. Sicart looks at games in many manifestations: toys, analog games, computer and video games, interactive fictions, commercial entertainments, and independent releases. Drawing on philosophy, design theory, literary studies, aesthetics, and interviews with game developers, Sicart provides a systematic account of how games can be designed to challenge and enrich our moral lives. After discussing such topics as definition of ethical gameplay and the structure of the game as a designed object, Sicart offers a theory of the design of ethical game play. He also analyzes the ethical aspects of game play in a number of current games, including Spec Ops: The Line, Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer, Fallout New Vegas, and Anna Anthropy's Dys4Ia. Games are designed to evoke specific emotions; games that engage players ethically, Sicart argues, enable us to explore and express our values through play. (shrink)

This paper presents the influence that Bergson’s theory of subjectivity had on Lévinas. We start by examining Bergson’s “centripetal theory of mind.” Considering the relationship between perception and action, Bergson develops an understanding of subjectivity as a process that unifies disparate perceptions. Guided by the body, this unifying principle is deemed affective. This being done, we then present a contradiction in Bergson’s thinking: While humans are described as different in kind from other animals, the framework used to determine the nature (...) of their world remains unchanged. Bergson never fully embraced the centripetal theory. We then turn to Lévinas and compare his critiques of Bergson and Heidegger. Lévinas believes that both instrumentalize desire, and that a philosophy of subjectivity can only escape this problem by radically embracing the affective nature of Bergson’s centripetal theory. The latter accounts for the place of Lévinas’ phenomenology of enjoyment. (shrink)

Cybersecurity aggregates are numerical data obtained by aggregation on features along a database of cybersecurity reports. These aggregates are obtained by integration of time-stamped tables using some recent results of non-standard calculus. Time-series of aggregates are shown to contain relevant information about the concrete system dealt with. Trend time series is also forecasted using known data-driven methods. Although absolute forecasting of trend time series is not obtained, a directional forecasting of trend time series is achieved thence validated by means of (...) a rolling cross validation scheme on a public database of Scareware reports. (shrink)

Despite the emergence of computer games as a dominant cultural industry, we know little or nothing about the ethics of computer games. Considerations of the morality of computer games seldom go beyond intermittent portrayals of them in the mass media as training devices for teenage serial killers. In this first scholarly exploration of the subject, Miguel Sicart addresses broader issues about the ethics of games, the ethics of playing the games, and the ethical responsibilities of game designers. He argues (...) that computer games are ethical objects, that computer game players are ethical agents, and that the ethics of computer games should be seen as a complex network of responsibilities and moral duties. Players should not be considered passive amoral creatures; they reflect, relate, and create with ethical minds. The games they play are ethical systems, with rules that create gameworlds with values at play. Drawing on concepts from philosophy and game studies, Sicart proposes a framework for analyzing the ethics of computer games as both designed objects and player experiences. After presenting his core theoretical arguments and offering a general theory for understanding computer game ethics, Sicart offers case studies examining single-player games, multiplayer games, and online gameworlds from an ethical perspective. He explores issues raised by unethical content in computer games and its possible effect on players and offers a synthesis of design theory and ethics that could be used as both analytical tool and inspiration in the creation of ethical gameplay. (shrink)

The fundamental problem proponents of truth conditional semantics must face is to specify what role a truth theory is supposed to play within a meaning theory. The most detailed proposal for tackling this problem is the account developed by Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig. However, as I will show in this paper, theories along the lines of Lepore and Ludwig do not suffice to put someone into the position to understand the objectlanguage. The fundamental problem of truth conditional semantics thus (...) remains unsolved. (shrink)

Alleged self-evidence aside, conceivability arguments are one of the main reasons in favor of the claim that there is a Hard Problem. These arguments depend on the appealing Kripkean intuition that there is no difference between appearances and reality in the case of consciousness. I will argue that this intuition rests on overlooking a distinction between cognitive access and consciousness, which has received recently important empirical support. I will show that there are good reasons to believe that the intuition is (...) misguided—at least on the reading that the conceivability arguments require—and hence that the arguments are unsupported. This, in turn, alleviates the Hard Problem but leaves us with what I think is a not easy problem. (shrink)

Derived measurements involve problems of coordination. Conducting them often requires detailed theoretical assumptions about their target, while such assumptions can lack sources of evidence that are independent from these very measurements. In this paper, I defend two claims about problems of coordination. I motivate both by a novel case study on a central measurement problem in the history of physical geodesy: the determination of the earth's ellipticity. First, I argue that the severity of problems of coordination varies according to scientists' (...) predictive and experimental control over perturbations of the measurement process. Second, I identify a methodology by which scientists can solve hard problems of coordination and gradually increase their predictive control over perturbations. I dub this methodology ‘operational pluralism’ since it is driven by the introduction of alternative measurement operations that involve different physical indicators. (shrink)

The FME symposium on teaching medical ethics takes up the issue of competence and responsibility in matters concerning bioethics (1). Foreseeably, the medical participants argue that physicians are prepared, or can be easily prepared, to handle all relevant aspects of medical ethics. The contrary position is sustained by the philosophically trained participants, who believe that physicians do not, in fact cannot, sufficiently manage medico-ethical problems. This paper sees a role for both parties. Medical ethicists should properly be involved in medical (...) education and in analytical and systematic study of medical ethics. They should not generally be involved in clinical medico-moral decision-making, which is properly the realm of patient and (ethically competent) doctor. (shrink)

Se busca precisar cómo la Crítica de la razón pura responde al problema fundamental del Iluminismo alemán: la articulación entre la autoridad de la razón y la fe. Kant busca rescatar las intenciones del racionalista dogmático -compatibilizar la fe y la razón-, pero rechaza el racionalismo y su método. La "Antinomia de la razón pura" y la "Disciplina de la razón pura" llevan a cabo esta estrategia: la primera evidencia que el racionalismo no puede fundamentar la fe por medio de (...) la razón y elucida el origen de esta incapacidad; la segunda se distancia del método racionalista utilizado en las pruebas de la "Antinomia". Queda así abierto el camino para una razón finita pero crítica, capaz de ser restituida al lugar de autoridad que la Ilustración le ha reservado. This article seeks to show how the Critique of Pure Reason answers the fundamental problem of the German Enlightenment: the linkage between the authority of reason and faith. Kant seeks to rescue the intentions of the dogmatic rationalist -reconcile faith and reason- but rejects rationalism and its method. The "Antinomy of Pure Reason" and the "Discipline of Pure Reason" accomplish this strategy: the first shows that rationalism cannot justify faith by means of reason and clarifies the origin of this incapability; the second distances itself from the rationalist method using the proofs of the "Antinomy". This leaves room for a finite but critical reason, able to be reinstated to the place of authority that the Enlightenment has reserved for it. (shrink)