It has generally been assumed that Anselm was the originator of the ontological argument. Notwithstanding the fact that it has received much criticism, Malcolm defends its so-called second version. In this paper we shall examine some features of ibn Sina’s notion of the Necessary Existent which show that prior to Anselm, ibn Sina formulated a version of this argument which corresponds in some senses to Malcolm’s version, and that a close examination of ibn Sina’s peculiar version enables us to criticize (...) Malcolm’s version as it has not been done heretofore. (shrink)

Background: Moral distress has been experienced by about 67% of critical care nurses which causes many complications such as job dissatisfaction, loss of capacity for caring, and turnover for nurses and poor quality of care for patients as well as health system. Objective: The purpose of this research was to provide a moral empowerment program to nursing directors, school of nursing, and the heads of hospitals to reduce moral distress in nurses and improve the quality of care. Methods: This research (...) was a randomized clinical trial conducted in two groups and three stages before, after 2 weeks, and 1 month after the intervention in order to evaluate the changes in moral distress of 60 nurses working in adults’ intensive care unit wards of Al-Zahra teaching hospital of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. Data were collected using the standard Hamric’s Moral Distress Scale (2012) and analyzed using SPSS software version 22. Ethical considerations: This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran. Results: Results showed that in the three stages, there was no significant difference between the mean score of moral distress before (4.12 ± 2.70), 2 weeks after (4.23 ± 2.70), and 1 month after the intervention (4.04 ± 2.54) in the control group (p > 0.05), while in the experimental group, there was a significant difference between the three stages (p 0.05). However, this score significantly decreased 1 month after the intervention (2.64 ± 2.23; p < 0.05). Conclusion: In this research, it was observed that moral empowerment program has been effective in reducing the mean score of moral distress. Therefore, it is recommended that nursing managers and hospital directors implement empowerment program, in order to reduce the moral distress of nurses and improve the quality of care. (shrink)

Michael Lamb’s recent book A Commonwealth of Hope presents an opportunity for bioethicists to engage in critical self-evaluation in order to consider anew why and how to engage difficult bioethical problems and questions with those who maintain diverse moral and metaphysical perspectives. Drawing on an account of the virtue of hope from Augustine of Hippo, Lamb develops a political theory in which hope provides common ground for political cooperation between diverse citizens of a commonwealth. The purpose of this introduction is (...) to sketch out a framework by which to assess and evaluate whether bioethics demonstrates hope. This article provides a summary description of Lamb’s presentation of Augustine’s virtue of hope and his concept of politics. Then it considers implications of Lamb’s politics of hope for bioethics, identifying three features of hopeful bioethics, with which bioethicists can engage in self-reflection and evaluation. (shrink)

This book explores, through their Neoplatonism, the philosophies of four cultures: North African, Moorish Spanish, Greek, and Islamic. Originating in North Africa, Neoplatonism became the framework for philosophical reflection in these diverse cultural settings. Neoplatonic themes like emanationism are found in all of them, despite the difficulty of reconciling such philosophical ideas with religious orthodoxy. The wide appeal of Neoplatonism, perhaps, is due to its development of the mystical dimension of Platonism. From this perspective, this volume presents eternally recurring Neoplatonic (...) themes like the monistic vision of the entire universe descending from a single principle, and a potentiality of a mystical ascent— a return to the origin. In addition, this book investigates the questions of self knowledge, the relation between the universal and the particular soul, and the transformation of spiritual substance into bodily substance in these cultures. These studies offer a rich and varied perspective of these cultures themselves, revealing the spirit of each in its adaptation to Neoplatonism. (shrink)

Given the evolution of the public health (PH) and the changes from the phenomenon of globalization, this area has encountered new ethical challenges. In order to find a coherent approach to address ethical issues in PH policy, this study aimed to identify the evolution of public health ethics (PHE) frameworks and the main moral values and norms in PH practice and policy. According to the research questions, a systematic search of the literature, in English, with no time limit was performed (...) using the main keywords in databases Web of Science (ISI) and PubMed. Finally, the full text of 56 papers was analyzed. Most of the frameworks have common underpinning assumptions and beliefs, and the need to balance PH moral obligation to prevent harm and health promotion with respect for individual autonomy has been specified. As such, a clear shift from liberal values in biomedical ethics is seen toward the community’s collective values in PHE. The main moral norms in PH practice and policy included protecting the population against harm and improving PH benefits, utility and evidenced-based effectiveness, distributive justice and fairness, respect for all, privacy and confidentiality, solidarity, social responsibility, community empowerment and participation, transparency, accountability and trust. Systematic review of PHE frameworks indicates utilization of the aforementioned moral norms through an practical framework as an ethical guide for action in the PH policy. The validity of this process requires a systematic approach including procedural conditions. (shrink)

In January 2023, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward to 90 s before midnight.

Over 200 health journals call on the United Nations, political leaders, and health professionals to recognize that climate change and biodiversity loss are one indivisible crisis and must be tackle...

This article challenges the widely-held belief, within and outside academia, that premodern Muslims did not make a distinction between the religious and secular. I explore the issue by examining several usages of the dīn – dunyā binary across diverse genres of medieval Islamic writings and assessing to what extent it accords with or diverges from the categories of the religious and secular as commonly used in the modern Western world. I situate my particular counter-claim vis-à-vis the argument against the relevance (...) of the religious–secular distinction to Islam made by Shahab Ahmed in his, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. My findings show that contrary to Ahmed and the broader consensus, premodern Muslims did in fact view the world in terms of distinct spheres of religion and non-religion and that this distinction was used to understand phenomena as diverse and significant as politics and prophethood. Nevertheless, the two categories interacted in a way distinct from the common understanding of the two in the modern world insofar as, under the medieval Islamic conception, it was religion that regulated the secular. My article will make sense of these similarities and differences in an effort to present an indigenous account of the religious–secular dialectic in medieval Islam, one that problematizes the current standard account which holds that these categories were invented within the modern West. (shrink)

Background: Plagiarism is an ethical and academic issue, which is affected by several factors. Objectives: This study is an attempt to introduce a model for elaborating on the causes of plagiarism in Iran. Research design: The study was carried out as a grounded theory study. Participants and research context: Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 32 university professors and postgraduate students at Iranian universities of medical sciences. The participants were selected through purposeful and theoretical sampling. Data analysis was (...) done following Strauss et al.’s work. To ensure study rigor, Lincoln and Guba’s measures were used. Ethical considerations: All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Results: A conceptual model of the causes of plagiarism was developed based on analyzing and coding the data. The main core of the model was the emergence of plagiarism, and other cores were (1) causal condition: lack of skills, pressure by education system, and lack of awareness; (2) intervening factors: technological advances, legal gaps, and lack of efficient supervision; (3) ground factors: personal traits and attitudes of the academic community; (4) strategy and interventions: role model, supervision, national/international coordination, and higher awareness; (5) outcomes: regeneration of plagiarism and negative attitudes toward Iranian authors in the world academic communities. Conclusion: Several factors affect plagiarism. Among the approaches to attenuate plagiarism in Iranian academic communities are improving self-esteem and self-efficacy in Iranian researchers, emphasizing on quality rather than quantity of published works, discouraging boasting attitudes in the practitioners, denouncing intense competition among researchers, and introducing clear laws and severe punishments for plagiarism. (shrink)

During the last decade, children have shown an increasing need for mental wellbeing interventions due to their anxiety and depression issues, which the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated. Socially Assistive Robotics have been shown to have a great potential to support children with mental wellbeing-related issues. However, understanding how robots can be used to aid the measurement of these issues is still an open challenge. This paper presents a narrative review of child-robot interaction (cHRI) papers (IEEE ROMAN proceedings from 2016–2021 and (...) keyword-based article search using Google Scholar) to investigate the open challenges and potential knowledge gaps in the evaluation of mental wellbeing or the assessment of factors affecting mental wellbeing in children. We exploited the SPIDER framework to search for the key elements for the inclusion of relevant studies. Findings from this work (10 screened papers in total) investigate the challenges in cHRI studies about mental wellbeing by categorising the current research in terms of robot-related factors (robot autonomy and type of robot), protocol-related factors (experiment purpose, tasks, participants and user sensing) and data related factors (analysis and findings). The main contribution of this work is to highlight the potential opportunities for cHRI researchers to carry out measurements concerning children’s mental wellbeing. (shrink)

Little attention has been given by researchers in organizational behavior to the study of public managers' values and how these values affect their managerial behavior. Therefore, the major objective of this study was to identify the personal value systems and value profiles of public managers, and to systematically examine and discuss the relationship between personal values and related organizational behavior including decision making. The significance of the findings for public policy is briefly discussed, and the need for future research is (...) indicated. (shrink)

Background: The current study intends to enrich the content of the relationship between personality, subjective well-being, and narcissism. Previous studies have shown that extroverted individuals have higher subjective well-being. Methodology: In order to study the relationship between personality, subjective well-being, and narcissistic behavior of college students, a convenient sampling method was used to select college students; they were tested by Eysenck personality questionnaire, total well-being scale, and overt narcissism questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed by t-test and correlation analysis. Results: (...) The findings suggest that there is a positive correlation between College Students' personality type and subjective well-being. College students with extraversion personalities have high subjective well-being, while college students with introversion personalities have low subjective well-being. There is a positive correlation between College Students' personality type and narcissistic behavior. College students with extraverted personalities are more narcissistic, and college students with introverted personalities are less likely to be narcissistic. There is a positive correlation between College Students' subjective well-being and narcissistic behavior. College students with high subjective well-being are more narcissistic, and college students with low subjective well-being are less likely to be narcissistic. Contributions of the study: This study provides an important basis and Enlightenment for discussing the relationship between College Students' personalities, subjective well-being, and narcissistic behavior. College students with different personality types will feel different levels of well-being and narcissistic behavior. There is also a close relationship between College Students' overall well-being and narcissistic behavior. (shrink)

Peaceful protests and strikes are a basic human right as stated in the United Nations’ universal declaration on human rights. But for doctors, their proximity to life and death and the social contract between a doctor and a patient are stated as the reasons why doctors are valued more than the ordinary beings. In Pakistan, strikes by doctors were carried out to protest against lack of service structure, security and low pay. This paper discusses the moral and ethical concerns pertaining (...) to the strikes by medical doctors in the context of Pakistan. The author has carefully tried to balance the discussion about moral repercussions of strikes on patients versus the circumstances of doctors working in public sector hospitals of a developing country that may lead to strikes. (shrink)

BackgroundOrgan donation following brain death has become an important way of supplying organs for transplantation in many countries. This practice is less common in Iran for different reasons. Therefore, this study aims to explore the obstacles to organ donation following brain death in Iran.MethodsThis qualitative research was conducted following the conventional content analysis method. The study population consisted of individuals with a history of brain death among their blood relatives who refused to donate the organs. Snowball sampling was employed to (...) select the participants. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted for data gathering. Theoretical saturation was achieved through 20 interviews. Data analysis was done following the steps proposed by Graneheim and Lundman. Lincoln and Guba’s criteria were used to ensure data rigor and transferability of the study.ResultsData analyses revealed 185 codes, 23 categories, and seven themes including, poor knowledge about brain death and organ transplantation from a dead body, cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, deficiencies of requesting process, fear and concerns, inability to make a decision, and social learning.ConclusionThere were several factors in families’ reluctance to donate organs of a brain-dead patient. Through improving knowledge and changing cultural beliefs in society, it is possible to take large steps towards promoting organ donation from brain-dead patients. (shrink)

This book provides a critique of current international law-making and draws on a set of principles from Persian philosophers to present an alternative to influence the development of international law-making procedure. The work conceptualizes a substantive notion of democracy in order to regulate international law-making mechanisms under a set of principles developed between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries in Persia. What the author here names 'democratic egalitarian multilateralism' is founded on: the idea of 'egalitarian law' by Suhrawardi, the account of (...) 'substantial motion' by Mulla Sadra, and the ideal of 'intercultural dialectical democracy' developed by Rūmī. Following a discussion of the conceptual flaws of the chartered and customary sources of international law, it is argued that 'democratic egalitarian multilateralism' could be a source for a set of principles to regulate the procedures through which international treaties are made as well as a criterion for customary international law-ascertainment. (shrink)

This paper seeks to analyse the concept of atmosphere in the philosophical system of Hermann Schmitz, the founder of New Phenomenology, as a fundamental concept for understanding his philosophical system; he uses this concept to transcend the duality of subject-object as well as to show the hidden realities and the foundations of lived experience of reality, by looking at how phenomenological analysis is revealed. Beside being used in sciences such as physics, meteorology, and psychology, the term also refers to the (...) atmosphere as a concrete phenomenon; it is also an evidence of his understanding the phenomenology and reformulating it. This paper aims to show the connection between the concept of the felt-body (Leib), as the theoretical core of his work, and space and emotion as other key concepts in his philosophical system, by using the structural analysis of the concept and the phenomen of atmosphere.The result of the analysis in this paper shows the special place of the concept of atmosphere in Schmitz's philosophical system and its prominent role in establishing his method of New Phenomenology. (shrink)

The concept of space has always been a fundamental theme and issue since the beginning of philosophy and abstract thinking in ancient Greece, and has been fundamentally change due to cultural-historical changes of spatiality throughout the history of knowledge. At the beginning of philosophy, there was a metaphysical question about the beginning or the first cause of all things, to which the concept of space, as a fundamental concept, is the answer. The main lines of philosophical discourse in ancient Greece, (...) which flowed in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, were conceived in the context of Euclid's geometry and Ptolemy's worldview. In the modern era, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant tried to conceptually influence space with Copernican rotation and Newtonian physics. Finally, spatial imagery is challenged by the application of physiological problems through non-Euclidean geometry, and especially through phenomenology. Hence, the opening of phenomenological concepts in philosophy and other disciplines that focus on the concept of space could be of interest to researchers in the foundations of phenomenology. Therefore, the aspect of effort in this article is the descriptive analytical development of the opinions of three expert phenomenologists on space. These three philosophers base their theories on a critique of the way of speaking on space. This approach taken by Descartes and Newton has been completed in recent times. In this article, we discuss the philosophical foundations of these philosophers. We discuss the space with each of these three philosophers in terms of a key concept in their philosophical system. Therefore, for Cassirer, we discuss the concept of symbolic spaces, for Heidegger, the concept of being-in-the-world, and for Schmitz, the concept of surfaceless space and felt-bodily space. (shrink)

Publication date: 16 April 2018 Source: Author: Parto Fazli, Ebrahim Abbasi The objective of the study is to test experimentally the Kuznets curve of energy intensity in selected developing countries with the focus of D-8 countries during 1990-2014. According to the results, and by using the static and dynamic estimators and the Panel- ARDL model, the Kuznets curve was accepted for energy intensity and the per capita income threshold was estimated $3931.25. The urbanization rate and the degree of industrialization have (...) a positive and significant effect on the GDP of consuming energy of D-8 countries in the long term. The most important policy recommendations were discussed for policy-makers and researchers. (shrink)

Public health ethics is a subfield of bioethics that focuses on population health. This study aims to conform the principles of biomedical ethics to Islamic values in the context of public health. It culturally helps to optimize health care delivery. The approach is based on the method of immanent critique. The principle of the common good in Islam has a rational justification to draw public interests and ward off harms. The rule of “no harm”, with an emphasis on the preferability (...) of preventing harm to increase benefits, is consistent with the principle of utility, intending to produce a maximum balance of benefit over harm in the context of public health. Thus, on the one hand, the government is obliged to prevent harm and improve public benefits and, on the other hand, as a steward of health and with reference to the article “limitation of the ownership dominance”, it has the right to protect public health with the least justifiable harm. Islam attention to human dignity, individual justice and good will in the rule of goodness implies that Islam, beyond distributive justice, knows that human flourishing and the cultivation of moral virtues are a requisite for the realization of social justice. The present study discusses about the adjustment of the principles of PHE to the principles of the Islamic jurisprudence and, at the same time, it explains why the optimal PH in Muslim societies requires research in order to define accurate indicators of benefit and harm based on the teachings of revelation and reason. (shrink)