As the structure of healthcare delivery undergoes a breathtaking transformation, many ethics committees are wondering how and if they will be affected. Although the impact has not yet been widely felt, hospital-based ethics committees cannot avoid the pressures and upheaval caused by the reorganization of healthcare. This article will briefly review some of the factors contributing to the transformation of medicine, and suggest a number of ways in which ethics committees can respond proactively.

Moral agency is limited, imperfect, and structurally constrained. This is evident in the many ways we all unwittingly participate in widespread injustice through our everyday actions, which I call ‘structural wrongs’. To do justice to these facts, I argue that we should distinguish between summative and formative moral criticism. While summative criticism functions to conclusively assess an agent's performance relative to some benchmark, formative criticism aims only to improve performance in an ongoing way. I show that the negative sanctions associated (...) with summative responses are only justifiably imposed under certain conditions when persons exercise their agency wrongly — conditions that do not always hold for structural wrongs. Yet even in such cases we can still use formative responses, which are warranted whenever agents fall short of moral ideals. Expanding our repertoire of moral criticism to include both summative and formative responses enables us to better appreciate both the powers and limitations of our agency, and the complexity of moral life. (shrink)

The story of Musicologia unfolds in thirty-one chapters from primordial considerations of silence, communication, selfhood, balance, and motion to focus on more recent and specific issues of chaos, order, relativity, and artificial ...

Based on original texts this essay attempts to describe two main conceptual constructions and practices of ideal womanhood in the Chinese tradition: Lienu (exemplary women) as the Confucian social inspirations for women and Kundao (way of female) as the Daoist commitment to bodily and spiritual transformation.

The first principle of chemical composition is that elements are actually present in their compounds. It is a golden thread running through the history of compositional thinking in chemistry since before the chemical revolution. Opposed to this principle, which I call Actually Present Elements (APE), is the idea that elements are merely potentially present in their compounds: although not actually present, it is possible to recover them. In this paper I follow that golden thread, and then discuss the status of (...) APE itself: is it true? What arguments were there for it, and when? I argue that APE is a metaphysical principle, albeit at a lower level of generality and abstraction than the term ‘metaphysical’ usually suggests. I critically examine a range of different views on how metaphysical principles might be involved in research programmes in empirical science, and conclude by endorsing Elie Zahar’s view that metaphysical principles such as APE are to be found at the very heart of science. Moreover, they can be recipients of empirical support just like other parts of scientific theory. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether gender affects ethically sensitive decisions of a personal or business nature. Data from 51 practicing accountants from both public accounting and private industry suggest that while differences exist between female and male accountants in responses to specific situations, overall responses are quite similar. Statistically significant differences were found for only five of the sixteen ethically sensitive situations. Further, when personal and business situations of a similar nature were paired together, two of the eight differences between personal (...) and business responses were significantly different between females and males. Taken as a whole, the results refute the suggestion that the ethical decision making of organizations may be enhanced as more women enter the business field. (shrink)

We report an experiment where each subject’s ambiguity sensitivity is measured by an ambiguity premium, a concept analogous to and comparable with a risk premium. In our design, some tasks feature known objective risks and others uncertainty about which subjects have imperfect, heterogeneous, information. We show how the smooth ambiguity model can be used to calculate ambiguity premia. A distinctive feature of our approach is estimation of each subject’s subjective beliefs about the uncertainty in ambiguous tasks. We find considerable heterogeneity (...) among subjects in beliefs and ambiguity premia; and that, on average, ambiguity sensitivity is about as strong as risk sensitivity. (shrink)

This book re-orients our thinking about strategy away from its being a mode of control and towards its being one of self awareness. The author defines strategic inquiry as the undertaking of successive attempts to present an organization to itself and others. This, the book argues, is an activity of judgment, not decision.

Traditionally, in Anglo-American and Continental philosophy, music is addressed as the object of philosophical analysis: it is either a case study for developing broader, generalizable ideas about ontology, metaphysics, or ethics, or it is the thing that we apply philosophical methods and concepts to.1 It is the philosophy of music, remember. But in the last several decades philosophers in these traditions have increasingly taken “music” as a model for philosophical analysis: There is a branch of Deleuze studies dedicated to this; (...) new materialisms constantly refer to things such as vibration, resonance, and other wave behaviors such as diffraction; and Continental figures such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Adriana... (shrink)

In his posthumously published lectures, Politics in Commercial Society, István Hont argues that Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith should be understood as theorists of commercial society. This article challenges Hont’s interpretation of both thinkers and shows that some of his key claims depend on conflating the terms ‘commercial society’ and ‘commercial sociability’. I argue that, for Smith, commercial society should not be defined in terms of the moral psychology of commercial sociability, before questioning Hont’s Epicurean interpretation of Smith’s theory of (...) sociability. I then turn to Rousseau and outline some of the difficulties involved with classifying him as a theorist of commercial society, the most important of which is that he often appeared to be more deeply opposed to commercial progress than Hont suggests. I conclude by highlighting some of the most salient differences between Rousseau’s and Smith’s views of the politics of eighteenth-century Europe. (shrink)

One of the most important students of Franz Brentano was Anton Marty, who made it his task to develop a philosophy of language on the basis of Brentano’s analysis of mind. It is most unfortunate that Marty does not receive the attention he deserves, primarily due to his detailed and distracting polemics. In the analysis presented here his philosophy of language and other aspects of his thought, such as his ontology , are examined first and foremost in their positive rather (...) than critical character. The analysis is moreover supplemented by translations of four important works by Marty, including his entire work On the Origin of Language. These are in fact the first English translations of any substantial writings by him. The resulting picture that emerges from the analysis and translations is that Marty has much to say that proves to be of enduring interest for the philosophy of language on a range of topics, especially the meanings of statements, of emotive expressions, and of names as regards both their communicative and their ontological aspects. The volume will be of interest not only to philosophers and historians of philosophy, but also to historians of linguistics and psychology. (shrink)

Can room be found in between the matter and void of a Newtonian universe for an immaterial and immortal soul? Can followers of Locke with his agnosticism about the nature of substances claim to know that some of them are immaterial? Samuel Clarke, well versed in Locke's thought and a defender both of Newtonian science and Christian orthodoxy, believed he could do both and attempted to prove his case by means of some hard-boiled reductionism. Anthony Collins, a deist whose only (...) lapse from materialism concerned God himself, rejected Clarke's argument. In this paper I discuss their controversy' in order to bring out the state of debate about material systems and consciousness among people influenced by Locke and Newton in the early eighteenth century, and I also assess Clarke's reductionist premise, as he himself frequently invites "the impartial reader" to do. (shrink)

While many of Bernard Mandeville's contemporary critics read him as trying to ridicule and subvert all ideas of morality and virtue, others criticized him for insisting on too demanding a conception of virtue as self-denial. In this article, I take the latter line of criticism as my point of departure and evaluate whether Mandeville's ‘origins of virtue’ thesis can be reconciled with his claims about virtue requiring self-denial. To do so, I trace the changes to Mandeville's account of virtue between (...) the different editions of The Fable of the Bees and An Enquiry Into the Origin of Honour, placing particular emphasis on the conceptual distinctions introduced in the 1723 edition of the Fable. I show that there are important tensions in Mandeville's argument and I evaluate potential ways in which they might be resolved. The most important inconsistency, I argue, is that it is unclear whether Mandeville's speculative historical explanation of the origins of virtue can support the strongest claims he makes about virtue requiring a complete conquest of the passions, even if it can support weaker conceptualizations of virtue as self-denial. (shrink)

Traditional pedagogical approaches to the Platonic forms pose problems that can be best addressed by presenting students two rival interpretations: one that understands the forms in terms of definitions, and another in terms of ideals. The second, if not the first interpretation, models, for students of even a relativistic stripe, how one can conceive the existence of thought-objects about which no consensus exists. It also serves to illustrate how knowledge of such thought-objects may be attained nonetheless. This approach is to (...) be preferred, therefore, to traditional approaches that tend to reinforce, rather than counteract, relativism in students. (shrink)

For sociologist Emile Durkheim, the “sacred” constitutes all those things “set apart and forbidden.” Within Evangelical Christianity, and to a lesser degree Protestantism in general, the sacred has arguably centered on the individual believer and her/his personal relationship with God and scripture. Recently, however, a growing movement within Evangelical Christianity has emphasized the sacred nature of relationships and community, culminating in the mantra “God is love.” This shift has set community above the personal in the hierarchy of sacred Evangelical things, (...) and is reminiscent of earlier progressive forms of Evangelicalism, such as Social Gospel Christianity. Rob Bell, an Evangelical author, pastor, and Oprah Network star, possibly best exemplifies this change and its ramifications, which extend from a postcolonial critique of mission work and evangelism to a move to more inclusive and even Universalist soteriology. Such efforts that have left Bell labeled as a heretic in some Evangelical circles. (shrink)

To simplify the relation between desire and morality, and between personal and moral good, we can imagine a world of only two people; let us call them Adam and Eve, for the sake of tradition. This gives us two types of personal good: good for Adam and good for Eve. What is good for Adam (or Eve) is what tends to realise his or her desires in general, and, where desires conflict, realises the desires that are stronger in the long-term. (...) A benevolent and omniscient observer - let's call him Snake out of perversity - could therefore draw up two plans of action, one which is good for Adam and one which is good for Eve. However, at this point, Snake must choose sides, since obviously these goods are not always compatible. It is here that Snake must evolve into a moral being, since he must find a way to choose between good-for-Adam and good-for-Eve in order to produce a general good (even though we have not really decided what the general good might involve yet). (shrink)

The Daodejing is a fascinating text that has captivated scholarly minds and the popular imagination for centuries. Is it a manual for self-cultivation and government, a work of philosophy providing a metaphysical account of reality, or a treatise for deep mystical insight? Is it perhaps an ethical masterpiece intended for the ruling class, with concrete strategic suggestions aimed at remedying the moral and political turmoil surrounding Warring States China? Or is it a way of life characterized by simplicity, calmness, and (...) freedom from the tyranny of desire? In a comprehensive and refined study, Thomas Michael sheds new light on the Daodejing in his effort to read it apart from Western Sinology's inheritance of... (shrink)