In this paper, I develop an approach to population ethics which explains what we are permitted to do in virtue of the possible complaints against our action. This task is made difficult by a serious problem that arises when we attempt to generalize the view from two-option to many-option cases. The solution makes two significant moves – first, accepting that complaints are essentially pairwise comparative, and second, reimagining decision-making as a tournament between options competing two at a time. The right (...) view about when one option defeats another with respect to complaints, paired with the right view about how to pick the winners of the tournament given the relations of defeat, leads to a uniquely attractive view in the person-affecting tradition. (shrink)

Introduction: Midwives play an important role in maintaining and increasing women’s health and well-being. Training professional midwives is one of the main policies of any healthcare system. Since the number of complaints against midwives has increased recently, this study was conducted to explore the perspectives of midwives regarding patients’ complaint to authorities and their impacts on the profession of midwifery. Methods: Being conducted in 2013, this qualitative study was the first of its type in Iran. Data were collected through (...) in-depth semi-structured interviews with 14 midwives working in different cities across the country. The participants were selected using a purposive sampling method. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed following a qualitative content analysis approach. Written text was then coded, and themes were extracted from the data. Ethical considerations: The study was conducted with midwives’ free informed consent and was approved by Ethics Committee of Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Findings: By analyzing the data, four main themes regarding the impact of complaint on midwifery profession were developed. These included the following: “dissatisfied of midwifery, professional deviation, obsession with work, and weakening of the professional status.” Conclusion: The experience of patients’ complaint to legal authorities against midwives was described, by participants, as a painful experience. Lack of midwives’ knowledge about professional rules and litigation process created many problems for them and could negatively affect their practice and the society’s attitude toward midwifery. Thus, we suggest that in order to prevent such problems, midwives and midwifery students should be educated regarding factors that have the potential to create such problems and also prevention strategies. (shrink)

Background:In their daily practice, Brazilian nurses have been met with complaints from co-workers and patients, as well as bioethical dilemmas intrinsic to the profession, particularly in the cont...

Several philosophers have defended versions of Minimax Complaint, or MC. According to MC, other things equal, we should act in the way that minimises the strongest individual complaint. In this paper, I argue that MC must be rejected because it has implausible implications in certain cases involving risk. In these cases, we can apply MC either ex ante, by focusing on the complaints that could be made based on the prospects that an act gives to people, or ex (...) post, by focusing on the complaints that could be made based on the actual results that an act has for people. I argue that MC has implausible implications either way. I then defend a view on which, other things equal, we should act in the way that minimizes the sum of complaints. (shrink)

How should contractualists assess the permissibility of risky actions? Both main views on the question, ex ante and ex post, fail to distinguish between different kinds of risk. In this article, I argue that this overlooks a third alternative that I call “objective ex ante contractualism”. Objective ex ante substitutes discounting complaints by epistemic risk in favor of discounting by objective risk. I further argue in favor of this new view. Objective ex ante contractualism provides the best model of justifiability (...) to each. (shrink)

Today, monitoring of patient complaints in healthcare services is being used as a tool for quality assurance systems and in the future development of services. This nationwide register study describes the number of all complaints processed, number of complaints between different state provinces, healthcare services and healthcare professionals, and outcomes of complaints in Finland during the period 2000–2004. All complaints processed at the State Provincial Offices and the National Authority for Medicolegal Affairs were analysed by statistical methods. Complaints about mental (...) healthcare were explored in greater detail. The analysis showed that the number of patient complaints increased considerably during the study period. There were changes in the number of complaints between study years in different provinces. Out of different healthcare services, an especially marked increase was seen in private healthcare. Nearly all complaints were lodged against physicians, and over half of the complaints were made because of medical error. In mental health care, patients more often complained about unsatisfactory certificates and statements and the use of compulsory hospital care. An analysis of the outcomes revealed that in mental health care complaints more seldom led to consequences. The results need to be utilised when planning interventions for advanced supervision, prevention of adverse events and patient safety in healthcare, and especially in mental health care. From the patients’ perspective, it is important to create a culture where most problem situations are handled where the treatment was provided, thus avoiding a complex complaints process. (shrink)

The Analects appears to offer two bodies of testimony regarding the felt, experiential qualities of leading a life of virtue. In its ostensible record of Confucius’ more abstract and reflective claims, the text appears to suggest that virtue has considerable power to afford joy and insulate from sorrow. In the text’s inclusion of Confucius’ less studied and apparently more spontaneous remarks, however, he appears sometimes to complain of the life he leads, to feel its sorrows, and to possess some despair. (...) Where we attend to both of these elements of the text, a tension emerges. In this essay, I consider how Confucius’ complaints appear to complicate any clean conclusion that Confucius wins a good life, particularly where we attend to important pre-theoretical sensibilities regarding what a “good life” ought to include and how it ought to feel for the one who leads it. (shrink)

Québec's complaint examination system has devoted considerable effort to supporting dissatisfied users who may wish to register complaints. It is open to question, however, whether this level of effort has, in fact, aided users in filing their complaints, and whether, once filed, the intake and processing of complaints has been rigorous and fair. Has the intake and handling of complaints at least improved? This is the question we shall attempt to answer here by presenting the results of our study (...) concerning the impact of the Complaint Assistance and Support Centers (CAAPs) on the intake of complaints. The results show that the Québec complaint examination system and its Complaint Assistance and Support Centers help make complaints more admissible and ensure that each complaint is examined. However, the system is also hindered by differences and conflicting interpretations among the various stakeholders regarding the legitimacy of complaints, respect for users’ rights, and the mission of the system. Although complaint examination systems seek to encourage users to express their points of view, users’ voices are still only partly audible. (shrink)

Reference groups and complaints about inequality Although influence of reference population on assessment of individual position is well recognized on the ground of sociology, its impact is rarely taken into account in economic analysis of inequality. Few analyses that are concerned with issue of reference groups in the context of inequality and relative deprivation measurement deal, however, with single reference group. The aim of the paper is consideration on how concept of reference populations of different kind may be applied to (...) assessment of aggregated complaint that results from inequality in income distribution. (shrink)

This commentary invites reflection on the positive and negative outcomes of “assistances” provided by a Complaints Commissioner. While the goal of an assistance is to help the user navigate the health system, a lack of clarity and understanding of the process can lead to the user obtaining undue privileges. We suggest three key values to guide the equitable conduct of assistances and we suggest a mixed method research methodology to document the positive and negative impacts of assistances.

This study investigates to what extent Turkish formal complaint letters followed the ‘Problem-Solution Pattern’, and on how the writers expressed their wishes when they explained their problem and asked the authorities to amend a mistake. The study is based on a corpus of 134 Turkish complaint letters. It draws upon Flowerdew’s approach to the problem-solution pattern and the role of clause relations in this text pattern. Results showed that age-old Turkish rhetorical norms led writers’ choice of lexico-grammatical patterns (...) in reflecting politeness in order to maintain their own and the recipients’ faces. The speech acts in the ‘Problem and Solution’ parts below were hedged and impersonalized. The Turkish traditional rhetorical formula that was used in the request does not explicitly ask the reader to do something; in this way, the writers attempt to protect both their own face and that of the reader. (shrink)

SUMMARYAmong the elements of the modern scientific ethos, as identified by R.K. Merton and others, is the commitment of individual effort to a long-term inquiry that may not bring substantial results in a lifetime. The challenge this presents was encapsulated in the aphorism of the ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates of Kos: vita brevis, ars longa. This article explores how this complaint was answered in the early modern period by Francis Bacon’s call for the inauguration of the sciences over several (...) generations, thereby imagining a succession of lives added together over time. However, Bacon also explored another response to Hippocrates: the devotion of a ‘whole life’, whether brief or long, to science. The endorsement of long-term inquiry in combination with intensive lifetime involvement was embraced by some leading Fellows of the Royal Society, such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. The problem for individuals, however, was to find satisfaction in science despite concerns, in some fields, that current observations and experiments would not yield material able to be extended by future investigations. (shrink)

인식적 양상 및 취향에 대한 참 상대주의에 따르면, “p이다”와 같이 어떤 기준도 명시적으로 제시되지 않은 문장은 〈p이다〉는 명제를 표현하며, 이것은 판정자 혹은 판단자 상대적으로 진리치가 결정될 수 있다. 이런 참 상대주의 중에서 현재 가장 많은 학자들에 의해서 지지를 받고 있는 두 입장은 맥팔레인의 참 상대주의와 스티븐슨의 참 상대주의이다. 이들의 두드러진 차이점중에 하나는 그것들이 각각 ‘판정의 시간에서의 판정자’ 제한조건과 ‘평가상황의 시간에서의 판단자’ 제한조건을 갖는다는 점이다. 하지만 나는 ‘판정[단]자 중심성이라는 참 상대주의의 중요한 직관이 보다 널리 인정받는 데 있어서, 이들 제한조건이 불필요한 걸림돌이 (...) 된다’고 생각한다. 따라서 이들은 약화되거나 혹은 거부되어야 한다. (shrink)

This up-to-date and comprehensive handbook guides the reader, step-by-step, through all aspects of complaints and grievance management. It includes useful addresses, current codes of ethics from the major organizations, protocols and sample letters.

In the course of the Complaint, which Thomas Hoccleve composed, probably in 1420, as the first part of his so-called Series, the poet claims to have derived comfort from a certain “lamentacioun of a woful man” which he found in a book. There he read of a dialogue between the woeful man and Reason; and he reports the lamentations of the one and the good advice of the other up to the point at which, he says, the owner of (...) the book asked for it back. This text remained a mystery until, in the 1970 volume of this journal, A. G. Rigg identified it as a work of Isidore of Seville, the Synonyma, commonly subtitled De lamentatione animae peccatricis. This Latin treatise of moral advice and spiritual consolation, though now commonly overshadowed by the same author's Etymologiae, was a work widely read and admired in the Middle Ages. Professor Rigg was assisted in his identification by the fact that five of the six surviving copies of the Complaint accompany the English verse with a series of Latin glosses evidently taken from Hoccleve's source. Consulting the Patrologia Latina text of the Synonyma, Rigg found that these glosses could be matched there more or less exactly, scattered over the first twenty-four paragraphs of that edition. (shrink)

The effectiveness of complaint handling and service recovery policies in customer retention has been the focus of both scholars and service organizations. In the past decade, Justice Theory has provided the basis of the dominant theoretical framework for complaint management and service recovery. However, it does not explicitly address unfair trade practices, which constitute an ethical issue. Favorable outcomes in complaint handling may not be able to restore the reputation of a company and the potential harm perceived (...) by consumers. Using face-to-face interviews, this study applies Fairness Theory to explore the psychological responses of consumers in the post-complaint phase, particularly in ethical judgment. The findings suggest that an unfavorable outcome in the post-complaint stage leads to counterfactual thinking by the consumer about the consumer's state of well-being. The complaint must be due to the discretionary actions of the service provider whose accountability is assessed. Those harmful actions are then judged against an ethical standard. Explanations can reduce blame, and their effectiveness is moderated by outcome favorability but not ethical judgment. Favorable outcome, captured by "Would Perception," has only limited influence on Perceived Potential Harm (PPH), which is an important determinant of ethical judgment. This study makes both theoretical and practical contributions. It is the first study to validate Fairness Theory empirically and apply it to complaint handling as a complement of Justice Theory in the information and communication technology (ICT) service context. The study indicates that customers may condemn a service provider because of PPH even though the outcome is favorable. Unfair trade practices are what make customers hate ICT service providers. (shrink)

Reflecting on the debts collected by Shoshana Felman's work, within the theoretical contexts of the time in which the 1977 Yale French Studies issue of ‘Psychoanalysis and Literature’ first appeared, this article takes as its point of departure Lacan's analysis of Hamlet's father as the barred Other, focusing on Hamlet's ‘complaint’. The nature of the complaint is then explored in relation to various writers and thinkers — Rilke, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, among others — and more specifically via a (...) reading of François Roustang's La Fin de la plainte, and his own interpretations of Freudian narcissism. Scanning the wreckage for which the little narcissists are responsible, the article aims to give more insight into the structuring principles of those who whine incessantly. (shrink)

Overstretched resources and steady increases in the number of complaints filed with the offices of the Quebec Service Quality and Complaints Commissioner prompted us to investigate the complaint-handling systems of health-related organizations operating in Commonwealth and Western European countries. We also examined guidelines used to identify higher priority files (i.e., urgent files). Urgent files can then be prioritized in terms of the time taken to provide a conclusion as well as the depth of the examination. A system where a (...) small fraction of complaints is deemed “urgent” was preferred over systems where complaints are categorized into three or more priority levels, because files categorized in the lowest of three or more priority levels risk being neglected. Applying lessons from other systems and considering the Service Quality and Complaints Commissioner’s mandate, we identified three guiding criteria for determining whether files warrant urgent status: threat to safety, involvement of vulnerable person(s) and risk of recurrence (but only when coupled with safety issues). Since determining which files should be considered urgent is not straight forward, these broad criteria can be adapted and applied on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

In her final fragmentary novel Sanditon, Jane Austen develops a theme that pervades her work from her juvenilia onward: illness, and in particular, illness imagined, invented, or self-inflicted. While the “invention of odd complaints” is characteristically a token of folly or weakness throughout her writing, in this last work imagined illness is also both a symbol and a cause of how selves and societies degenerate. In the shifting world of Sanditon, hypochondria is the lubricant for a society bent on turning (...) health into a commodity. As a result, people’s rationality and their moral character come under attack. Catherine Belling’s recent subtle study, A Condition of Doubt: The Meanings of Hypochondria, unveils hypochondria’s discursive and cultural character. Running sharply against the tenor of Austen’s treatment, however, she argues in defense of the rationality of hypochondriacs; the notion that the condition may involve morally significant defects is not entertained; any connection to the commercialization of health care is muted. Here, I contrast Austen’s morally and epistemically negative rendering of her hypochondriacal characters in Sanditon with Belling’s efforts to create a sympathetic understanding of people with hypochondria. I will argue that, despite time gaps and genre differences, joint consideration of these texts can help bioethicists better appreciate how medicine can intensify, pathologize, and exploit anxieties about illness and death, thus adding to the challenges of living well in the face of mortality and morbidity. (shrink)

Tziporah Kasachkoff received her doctorate in philosophy from New York University, teaches at The City University of New York, and has been a visiting professor at Ben Gurion University in the Negev, in Israel. Dr. Kasachkoff has published widely in applied philosophy and, since 1986, has been the editor of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy.

This paper examines how people assess inequality of income distribution and how inequality could be measured. We start from the philosophical analysis of Temkin, who distinguishes nine plausible aspects of inequality. His approach is based on the concept of ‘complaints’ or distances between incomes. We examine the Temkin approach by means of the questionnaire-experimental method pioneered by Amiel and Cowell to find out whether the aspects of equality have any plausibility for student respondents and, if so, whether there are aspects (...) which are more appealing than others. Both the numerical and verbal responses show that a considerable majority of the respondents might be influenced by the intuitions included in the combination of the Weighted Additive Principle and the Average view of complaints. The questionnaire results also shed some empirical light on the acceptance of the Transfer Principle and the attitudes towards the Sequence. Footnotes I would like to thank Erik Schokkaert, Frank Cowell, and Liema Davidovitz for various suggestions which have led to improvements in this paper. I am very grateful for helpful comments from seminar participants and an anonymous referee. I remain responsible for any remaining error. This paper was written while the author enjoyed the hospitality of Sticerd, LSE, London and he acknowledges the financial support provided by the Training and Mobility of Researchers Program of the European Communities, grant #ERBFMRXCT980248. (shrink)

Famously, Saul Kripke proposes that there are contingent a priori truths, and has offered a number of examples to illustrate his claim. The most well-known example involves the standard meter bar in Paris. Purportedly, a certain agent knows a priori that the bar is one meter long. However, in response to a long-standing objection to such examples - the "existential complaint" - generally only modified examples having a conditional form are now considered candidates for the contingent a priori. Gareth (...) Evans argues that these conditionals must be understood free-logically, and on this basis argues against Keith Donnellan's analysis of the contingent a priori. I show Evans' argument mistaken. I also take issue with the existential complaint, and suggest a way of understanding Kripke's original examples that is not subject to it. My approach focuses the debate in its right place, and allows us to take Kripke's original examples seriously. (shrink)

The relevance of social norms for understanding appropriate behaviour in context has taken central stage in politeness research in recent years, and particularly in studies of workplace interaction. As an example of this research, this paper explores the way in which a group of nurses interacting with their colleagues negotiates complaints. The data were collected in a ward of a public healthcare institution in New Zealand and consist of audio and video recordings of four roster meetings involving nurses and nurse (...) managers. Instances of nurses’ complaints are explored from an interactional sociolinguistic point of view, allowing the researcher to investigate emergent facework. The findings suggest that multiple ingroup and outgroup memberships, achieved through the dynamic use of personal pronouns, enact preferred politic behaviour for both, transactional and relational goals. In addition, nurses’ convergence in their display of socio-pragmatic norms governing their complaining practices suggests that this group of nurses belongs to the same workplace community. Finally, strong emphasis is placed on the role that complaining plays in the positive presentation of nurses’ identities. (shrink)

This article examines the role of metapragmatic expressions (MPEs) in constructing common ground (CG) in the call taker’s responses to customer direct complaints in telephone interactions in the framework of the socio-cognitive approach proposed and developed by Kecskes (2008,2010,2013,2017) and Kecskes and Zhang (2009,2013). Based on five extracts drawn from the data of about two hours of 15 recordings of telephone interactions that include successful complaint settlements made between customers and the customer service department of one Chinese airline, it (...) reveals that the call taker mainly employs five types of MPEs as CG construction devices to explicitly manifest intentions of giving accounts and explanations, confirming and checking information, negotiating adequate compensations, establishing close interpersonal relationships, and aligning with the organization. This article enhances our understanding of the functioning process of metapragmatic indicators in complaint settlement in institutional telephone interactions. (shrink)

It has been suggested that understanding our obligations to address large-scale moral problems such as global poverty and the threat of severe climate change as fundamentally collective can allow us to insist that a great deal must be done about these problems while denying that there are very demanding obligations, applying to either individuals or collectives, to contribute to addressing them. I argue that this strategy for limiting demandingness fails because those who endorse collective obligations to address large-scale moral problems (...) have no grounds for denying that the relevant collectives are obligated to do what is impartially best. Specifically, I argue that appeals to the claim that collective obligations to do what is impartially best would be objectionably demanding cannot succeed, for two reasons. The first is that demandingness complaints cannot be aggregated across the individual members of a collective. And the second is that demandingness complaints cannot plausibly be asserted on behalf of collectives themselves. I conclude by suggesting some reasons to think that collective obligations to address large-scale problems will tend to imply demanding individual obligations. (shrink)

In recent decades, academic science has increasingly been directed toward commercializable ends by neoliberal governments. In this article, I outline a concern that academic scientists have not been consulted about the transformation of science, but nevertheless, in some ways accept commercialization as the way things are done. I focus on the ways in which academic scientists attempt to exercise agency, albeit within the parameters of the neoliberal knowledge economy. In this economy, scientific inquiry has transformed to be focused more on (...) producing marketable products. In order to explore the parameters of scientists’ agency in the context of that transformation, I first elaborate on the idea of agency’s “parameters” and argue that the literature on commercialization lacks attention to how researchers’ agency is encouraged and discouraged in the context of academic research in the United States and Canada; second, I make a case for using the concept of hegemony to understand the ideas and practices of contemporary science; third, I propose a methodological direction that can attend to researchers’ agency in the contemporary context of the neoliberal knowledge economy. (shrink)

Bioethicists have long advocated for patients’ rights by deliberating on what physicians should or should not do for the well-being of patients. Part of this advocacy has involved challenging a paternalistic medical model where physicians are seen as authoritative figures above reproach. Through ombudsperson offices, patients can submit complaints that may lead to medical examiners conducting detailed examinations of physicians’ conduct and decision-making. Prior research indicates that complaints can have serious and broad effects on physicians. We conducted a scoping review (...) to explore and evaluate the extent of the quantitative and qualitative literature examining the effects of complaints on physicians in European and Commonwealth countries. We systematically searched electronic databases (CINAHL, MEDLINE and PsycInfo) and grey literature for primary research that collected information directly from physicians on at least one potential effect of formal complaints. After screening the titles/abstracts of 14,913 records and reviewing 137 full-texts, 25 studies were included. The 25 studies reported on several potential effects, including the patient-physician relationship (3 studies), defensive medicine (14 studies), anxiety (8 studies), depression (8 studies), one’s identity as a physician (5 studies), and anger (5 studies). Generally, the effects evaluated in the included studies were negative. Although the existing literature covered a range of possible effects, few studies assessed the same effects via different methods, and in different regions and contexts. The findings of this scoping review suggest that complaints processes can have negative effects on physicians. (shrink)

The fascinating Journey of the Renaissance Medicine.

Advances in the understanding of genetics have led to the belief that it may become possible to use genetic engineering to manipulate the DNA of humans at the embryonic stage to produce certain desirable traits. Although this currently cannot be done on a large scale, many people nevertheless object in principle to such practices. Most often, they argue that genetic enhancements would harm the children who were engineered, cause societal harms, or that the risks of perfecting the procedures are too (...) high to proceed. However, many of these same people do not have serious objections to what is called ‘genetic planning’ procedures (such as the selection of sperm donors with desirable traits) that essentially have the same ends. The author calls the view that genetic engineering enhancements are impermissible while genetic planning enhancements are permissible the ‘popular view’, and argues that the typical reasons people give for the popular view fail to distinguish the two practices. This paper provides a principle that can salvage the popular view, which stresses that offspring from genetic engineering practices have grounds for complaint because they are identical to the pre-enhanced embryo, whereas offspring who are the result of genetic planning have no such grounds. (shrink)

When may someone complain, morally? And what, if any, is the relationship between legitimate moral complaint and one's own behaviour? I point out a perplexity about a certain class of moral complaints. Two very different conceptions of moral complaint seem to be operating, and they often have contrary implications. Moreover, both seem intuitively compelling. This is theoretically and practically troubling, but has not been sufficiently noticed. The Paradox of Moral Complaint seems to point to an inherent difficulty (...) in our reflective moral intuitions. Given the legislative nature of moral agency, the plausible limitations upon reasonable moral complaint seem to contradict the inviolability of central moral constraints and the complaints they allow. In the sort of cases under discussion, morality seems at once both to insist upon the possibility of moral complaint, and to deny it. (Published Online August 21 2006). (shrink)

Malpractice issues in psychotherapy and psychological treatments refer to the unethical behavior of a psychologist or psychotherapist toward the patient. The current study reviewed complaints directed at psychologists and psychotherapists in Sweden with regard to possible incidents of malpractice. Eligible cases were retrieved from a database managed by the Health and Social Care Inspectorate [Inspektionen för vård och omsorg (IVO)], an administrative authority responsible for the safety and quality of healthcare and social services delivery. These cases were analyzed using thematic (...) analysis. In total, 33 complaints matched the keywords proposed by IVO, and were scrutinized in detail. The cases primarily involved psychiatric care by a psychologist in outpatient settings, although many cases comprised multiple healthcare providers responsible for the patient’s care, or targeted the healthcare unit as a whole. The results demonstrated that different forms of malpractice occur, and can be classified in two general themes, Incorrect administration and implementation and Attitude and behavior, which involve organizational aspects as well as examples of malpractice and unethical behavior. Implications for clinical practice and future research include further training in ethics and malpractice, video recording or auditing sessions, routine outcome monitoring, and providing patients with information on how to file complaints. (shrink)