We provide an empirical investigation of leadership characteristics and social justice issues in the context of financial literacy service-learning. Using a unique dataset of student self-ratings, we find that students experience statistically significant increases in 8 of the 10 leadership dimensions and 7 of the 7 social justice issues examined in this study. Leadership dimensions include: persuasion, building community, “commitment to the growth of people,” stewardship, empathy, awareness, foresight, and listening. Interest in social justice issues include: dignity of the human (...) person, community and the common good, rights and responsibilities, option for the poor, dignity of work, solidarity, and care for God’s creation. The statistically significant increases in these dimensions following the completion of the service-learning suggest positive effects on students’ self-perception of leadership qualities and interests in social justice issues: business school students sense improvement in nurturing growth of employees and colleagues, commitment to serving the need of others, understanding and empathizing with others, ethics, ability to foresee the likely outcome of a situation, and listening intently to others. As a consequence of the financial literacy service-learning, we believe that business students become more prepared toward becoming ethical leaders and citizens with compassion to serve the world for the well-being of all people, rich and poor alike. (shrink)

Background Informed consent is an integral component of good medical practice. Many researchers have investigated measures to improve the quality of informed consent, but it is not clear which techniques work best and why. To address this problem, we propose developing a core outcome set to evaluate interventions designed to improve the consent process for surgery in adult patients with capacity. Part of this process involves reviewing existing research that has reported what is important to patients and doctors in the (...) informed consent process. Methods This qualitative synthesis comprises four phases: identification of published papers and determining their relevance; appraisal of the quality of the papers; identification and summary of the key findings from each paper while determining the definitiveness of each finding against the primary data; comparison of key themes between papers such that findings are linked across studies. Results Searches of bibliographic databases returned 11,073 titles. Of these, 16 studies met the inclusion criteria. Studies were published between 1996 and 2016 and included a total of 367 patients and 74 health care providers. Thirteen studies collected data using in-depth interviews and constant comparison was the most common means of qualitative analysis. A total of 94 findings were extracted from the primary papers and divided into 17 categories and ultimately 6 synthesised findings related to: patient characteristics, knowledge, communication, the model patient, trust and decision making. Conclusions This qualitative meta-aggregation is the first to examine the issue of informed consent for surgery. It has revealed several outcomes deemed important to capture by patients and clinicians when evaluating the quality of a consent process. Some of these outcomes have not been examined previously in research comparing methods for informed consent. This review is an important step in the development of a COS to evaluate interventions designed to improve the consent process for surgery. Registration The study protocol was registered on the international prospective register for systematic reviews. (shrink)

After a period during which the theological categories of sin and forgiveness were ignored or trivialized, presently these notions are being rediscovered. What could their impact be on bioethics, either in the narrow sense of medical ethics, or in the more encompassing sense of the ethics of the life sciences? This essay begins with describing the processes of transcending and ethitization, which gave rise to the biblical notion of sin. It portrays the theological foundation of sin in terms of a (...) twofold refusal of proper relations to God and other humans. Through the practise of confession in the face of God (coram deo), sin is placed into a horizon of hope for forgiveness and reconciliation. The heuristic and hermeneutical significance of these categories results from their introducing a “surplus value,” which transcends biological and ethical considerations. This additional dimension is illustrated in view of care (cura) for the injured, and in view of individual as well as collective willingness to forgive. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A Unity of Order":Aquinas on the End of PoliticsWilliam McCormick S.J.Nonspecialists are often surprised to learn that Aquinas's thought on Church and state is a matter of obscurity. After all, Aquinas is the most famous medieval thinker in the West, and the question of Church and state is one of the best-known medieval political questions. And yet his thought on that polemical topic remains obscure. As John Watt puts (...) it: "There are too many ambiguities in his doctrine and too many unanswerable questions about what he did or did not hold."1Why is his view not better understood? Part of its obscurity is the relative infrequency with which he writes on politics.2 Another is the relative lack of interest in medieval political thought among political scientists and historians of political thought, an obscurity dating back to the Renaissance.3 Those who do study Aquinas's thought, moreover, have been mired in a controversy over two key texts: one from book II of his Scriptum or commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences (d. 44, q. 2, a. 3, exp. text.), and the other in book II of De regno (On kingship), chapter 3 (no. 110). For brevity, I will use S for the Scriptum passage and R for the De regno passage.4 These two [End Page 1019] appear to contradict each other, and with respect to fundamental political questions. The debate over these two texts points to what most contributes to the obscurity of Aquinas's teaching on Church and state: confusion about his vision of politics in human life. As I will show in this paper, Aquinas transcends modern categories of the "secular" and "belief" in his treatment of politics. Aquinas valorizes the integrity of political activity: that autonomy is not just a concession to the modern condition. It is in fact when Aquinas is most theological that he is most open to that integrity. The integrity of the political speaks to the intrinsic goodness of that order: it mirrors God's unity in its complex and ordered diversity.In this paper I examine R and S to show their concordance. I argue that they are complementary in what they prescribe for relations between Church and state, and indeed grounded in the same account of the origins of political authority. Through this investigation we will uncover key principles of Aquinas's political thinking that show him to have a capacious vision of politics where humans achieve the actualization of their full beings as human.A key notion will be unitas ordinis, or unity of order: the form of human cooperation in political life. As we will see, that form strikes a middle path between the simple unity of the individual person and the orderless collectivity of a crowd. For Aquinas, that order is itself a common good of politics, and an intrinsic one at that, before any "extrinsic" common good achieved by the people through that order. Part of why this seemingly secular consideration is good is its theological importance: it mirrors God.Further, if Aquinas does not elaborate on political arrangements as much as one would like, nevertheless he offers sure guidance for the principles which ought to guide the prudent development of those arrangements in a particular time and place. Ultimately Aquinas shows that medieval political thought is in key respects not as alien and hostile to us as we might imagine, but in its own way equally concerned about the integrity of the political life.5The Teaching of SAquinas's teaching on Church and state in S is widely accepted as his mature "two powers" teaching. Aquinas's most famous work, the Summa theologiae [ST], would eventually replace Lombard's Sentences, but in Thomas's own thirteenth century it was that compendium of quotations and arguments [End Page 1020] from Christian sources compiled by the twelfth-century theologian-bishop Lombard that was the standard theology textbook in the Latin West—the Ur-text for theological teaching and scholarship.6The Sentences is perhaps the most important Western book no one has heard of. It was so influential not only because it collected a rich trove of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vessel of Honor: The Virgin Birth and the Ecclesiology of Vatican II by Brian A. GraebeAaron Pidel S.J.Vessel of Honor: The Virgin Birth and the Ecclesiology of Vatican II. By Brian A. Graebe (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2021), 351 pp.Though Mary's undiminished virginity in giving birth (virginitas in partu) was long understood to be an event as miraculous and a teaching as authoritative as her virginity in conceiving (...) (virginitas ante partum), virginitas in partu underwent a kind of existential reinterpretation in the middle of the twentieth century. Authors such as Albert Mitterer and Karl Rahner suggested that, physically speaking, Jesus's birth might have happened like any other, rupturing the hymen, distending the birth canal, and causing Mary pain, albeit not in the spiritually disintegrating way common to postlapsarian humanity. These arguments effectively "unsettled" the traditional understanding of virginitas in partu, leading theologians of the highest stature to distinguish between the doctrine itself and the anatomical aspects attached to it over time. Fr. Brian Graebe has written a fine book arguing that the bodily dimensions of the virgin birth, including the physical "seal" of virginity, belong to the substance of the doctrine. This more inclusive understanding not only does better justice to the data of tradition, he argues, but illuminates the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council. The book impresses by its theologically reflective method, its clarity of exposition, [End Page 1106] and its depth of research—especially into the archival and antepreparatory sources of Vatican II.Vessel of Honor responds in effect to Rahner's argument that physical intactness is peripheral to the dogmatic core of Mary's virginity in partu. To show otherwise, Rahner contended, one would need to show that such a doctrine can be found directly in the apostolic teaching, or that it, "being implicitly contained therein, has grown out of the apostolic doctrine, by a legitimate historical, logical, and theological process, as its authentic development" (68–69). If the bodily aspects of this doctrine really belonged to the deposit of faith, in other words, one would need to show how they are implied in the traditio divino-apostolica, as well as how they cohere organically with the rest of the deposit. The two major parts of Vessel of Honor respond in turn to each aspect of Rahner's challenge.The first three chapters argue that Mary's bodily integrity in parturition belongs at least implicitly to the traditio divino-apostolica. Turning first to the postapostolic tradition, Fr. Graebe shows that—apart from the early exceptions of Origen and Tertullian—patristic sources either affirm or strongly imply a miraculous delivery. This constant witness culminates in the Lateran Council (649 AD), which, while not itself an ecumenical council, was received into the magisterium of Pope Martin and affirmed by the Third Council of Constantinople (680 AD). Its teaching that Mary "gave birth without corruption" (incorruptibiliter... genuisse) would be defended by Paschasius, Ratramnus, Thomas Aquinas, and others. This consensus remained undisturbed until the eve of Vatican II.Even at Vatican II, Fr. Graebe argues in the next chapter, the Council Fathers intended to reaffirm the more inclusive idea of virginitas in partu against those who would marginalize its bodily dimensions. Here he really breaks new ground, delving deep into the antepreparatory, preparatory, and conciliar drafting history. He shows convincingly that many of the chief drafters of the final formula—"Our Lord, who did not diminish his mother's virginal integrity but sanctified it..." (Lumen Gentium §57)—saw it as excluding Rahner's and Mitterer's minimalizing interpretations. Drawing on material from the Vatican Apostolic Archives, Fr. Graebe shows that some of the very theologians who voted to omit the pointed phrase "in the birth itself" (in ipsomet partu) did so for tonal rather than substantive reasons.The third chapter argues that Mary's physical integrity in birth is to be believed with divine and Catholic faith, despite the ongoing confusion introduced by Rahner and others. Admittedly, Vatican II did not define but merely reaffirmed the traditional understanding of virginitas in partu. But there are other reasons for including it in the traditio divino-apostolica. [End Page 1107] Drawing heavily... (shrink)

There is, in the Ramsey Archive at the Hillman Library of the University of Pittsburgh, a note, written in 1929, in Ramsey's hand and mostly in German, consisting of twenty paragraphs the contents...

This article concerns the morality of establishing regulated kidney markets in an effort to reduce the chronic shortage of kidneys for transplant. The article tries to rebut the view, recently defended by James Taylor, that if we hold autonomy to be intrinsically valuable, then we should be in favor of such markets. The article then argues that, under current conditions, the buying and selling of organs in regulated markets would sometimes violate two Kantian principles that are seen as moral constraints. (...) One principle forbids expressing disrespect for the dignity of humanity; the other forbids treating others merely as means. In light of the moral danger posed by regulated markets, the article advocates an alternative way of diminishing the current organ shortage, namely opt-out systems of cadaveric organ donation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Who or What is the Preembryo?S.J. Richard A. McCormick (bio)IntroductionAlthough widely used by scientists, the term "preembryo" has raised some suspicions. Histopathologist Michael Jarmulowicz (1990), for example, asserts that the term was adopted by the American Fertility Society (AFS) and the Voluntary Licensing Authority (VLA) in Britain "as an exercise of linguistic engineering to make human embryo research more palatable to the general public."I cannot speak for the VLA, (...) but I can clarify that this was not the motive of the AFS. As a member of the AFS ethics committee that discussed and adopted this terminology, I know that our discussion was not tied to embryo research or moral issues. The term "preembryo" was adopted because the earliest stages of mammalian development primarily involve establishment of the nonembryonic trophoblast, rather than the formation of the embryo. As Clifford Grobstein (1988, p. 61), a distinguished basic scientist who also sat on the AFS committee notes:The scientific rationale for the term preembryo... is its greater accuracy in characterizing the initial phase of mammalian and human development.... The status implications of such a change in terminology were not at issue in the discussion.This is not to say that the moral status of the preembryo is not a concern worthy of independent consideration. It is an important question with significant practical implications, especially in the context of in vitro fertilization. At stake are issues such as: (1) what may be done to preembryos before transfer; (2) whether all preembryos must be transferred; and (3) what may be done to preembryos that are not transferred (Ethics Committee of the American Fertility Society (AFS) 1986, p. 29S). Furthermore, emergency treatment of rape cases may also depend on such a determination. [End Page 1]Cryopreservation, which entails freezing unused preembryos for possible later use, is one example of a procedure that raises issues associated with the moral status of the preembryo. Cryopreservation decreases the number of stimulated egg recovery cycles a woman must undergo and increases flexibility in transfer protocols. But thawing of the preembryos is not a completely benign process; significant numbers of the preembryos die in the process and injury cannot be excluded.In addition, down the road a year or so lies preimplantation genetic diagnosis, now being tested in several centers of reproductive research. This would involve the removal of one or more cells from a preembryo developing in vitro. The DNA from these cells would be studied and then only genetically normal preembryos would be transferred. With the growth in knowledge about single gene defects and the rapid advance of amplification technology, which allows gene visualization, it is not difficult to imagine scientists embarking on a variety of micromanipulations of the preembryo for the sake of gaining knowledge.Not all research with gametes involves preembryos, but clearly some experiments and procedures await resolution of the moral status of the preembryo. I contend in this paper that the moral status—and specifically the controversial issue of personhood—is related to attainment of developmental individuality (being the source of one individual). This contrasts with the view that holds that personhood occurs earlier, at the point of genetic uniqueness. I believe that an embryo that has developed to the point where it can be one individual and one individual only, differs in moral status from a preembryo that has not, even if in many cases we may choose to treat them similarly.The Scientific UnderpinningsTwo things must be kept in mind—and in a sense, in tension—in turning to science for help in assessing the status of the preembryo. First, science is not competent to decide the question of personhood or ensoulment. As the Catholic document, Declaration on Procured Abortion, which I will return to later, notes: "It is a philosophical problem" (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) 1974, p. 10, endnote 19). On the other hand, another Catholic document, Donum vitae(CDF 1987), notes that the conclusions of science provide a "valuable indication" for reason's deliberations about personhood. We might say that if science cannot decide the question of personhood, neither can it be decided without science.For my review of embryological science... (shrink)

The ‘death’ of German Idealism has been decried innumerable times since its revolutionary inception, whether it be by the 19th-century critique of Western metaphysics, phenomenology, contemporary French philosophy, or analytic philosophy. Yet in the face of two hundred years of sustained, extremely rigorous attempts to leave behind its legacy, German Idealism has resisted its philosophical death sentence. For this exact reason it is timely ask: What remains of German Idealism? In what ways does its fundamental concepts and texts still speak (...) to us? Drawing together new and established voices from scholars in Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, this volume offers a fresh look on this time-honoured tradition. It uses myriad of recently developed conceptual tools to present new and challenging theories of its now canonical figures. (shrink)

Cora Diamond has recently criticised as mere legend the interpretation of a quip of Ramsey's, contained in the epigraph below, which takes him to be objecting to or rejecting Wittgenstein's Tractarian distinction between saying and showing. Whilst I agree with Diamond's discussion of the legend, I argue that her interpretation of the quip has little evidential support, and runs foul of a criticism sometimes made against intuitionism. Rather than seeing Ramsey as making a claim about the nature of propositions, as (...) Diamond does, we should understand him as making a claim about the grammar of the logical connectives. Such a view coheres with the extant evidence of the nature of Wittgenstein's and Ramsey's 1929 philosophical encounters. It is also compatible with attributing to Ramsey a recognition of Wittgenstein's distinction and with denying that criticising it is the lesson of the quip. (shrink)

Problem: Mitterer's critique of the central argumentations of radical constructivists has been mostly neglected until today. The paper presents and evaluates his criticism and, in the second part, outlines a format of constructivism that tries to draw appropriate consequences. Solution: In his critique Mitterer explains why the radical constructivism represented above all by Maturana, Varela, von Glasersfeld or Roth still remains in a dualistic format. In his view Neurobiology is used in their writings as the indisputable basis for deriving far-reaching (...) epistemological consequences. Therefore constructivism evades self-application. To overcome this serious critique a different approach to constructivist thinking is sketched that operates without using any biological or psychological theories, tries to avoid dualism, and elaborates Mitterer's basic argument that the description of an object and the object under description are the same. Benefits: The paper shows what constructivism can learn from a serious critique and how it can be rewritten in a non-dualistic way. (shrink)

Gaston Fessard employs Hegel’s dialectical logic to clarify how St. Ignatius’s _Spiritual Exercises_ envisage and prepare the decisions and choices between contrasting options or major turning points in spiritual life, in moments of what Ignatius would call _Election_.