There is a need for all industries, including healthcare, to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. In anaesthetic practice, this not only requires a reduction in resource use and waste, but also a shift away from inhaled anaesthetic gases and towards alternatives with a lower carbon footprint. As inhalational anaesthesia produces greenhouse gas emissions at the point of use, achieving sustainable anaesthetic practice involves individual practitioner behaviour change. However, changing the practice of healthcare professionals raises potential ethical issues. The purpose of (...) this paper is twofold. First, we discuss what moral duties anaesthetic practitioners have when it comes to practices that impact the environment. We argue that behaviour change among practitioners to align with certain moral responsibilities must be supplemented with an account of institutional duties to support this. In other words, we argue that institutions and those in power have second-order responsibilities to ensure that practitioners can fulfil their first-order responsibilities to practice more sustainably. The second goal of the paper is to consider not just the nature of second-order responsibilities but the content. We assess four different ways that second-order responsibilities might be fulfilled within healthcare systems: removing certain anaesthetic agents, seeking consensus, education and methods from behavioural economics. We argue that, while each of these are a necessary part of the picture, some interventions like nudges have considerable advantages. (shrink)

In this paper we continue, from [2], the development of provably recursive analysis, that is, the study of real numbers defined by programs which can be proven to be correct in some fixed axiom system S. In particular we develop the provable analogue of an effective operator on the set C of recursive real numbers, namely, a provably correct operator on the set P of provably recursive real numbers. In Theorems 1 and 2 we exhibit a provably correct operator on (...) P which is discontinuous at 0; we thus disprove the analogue of the Ceitin-Moschovakis theorem of recursive analysis, which states that every effective operator on C is (effectively) continuous. Our final theorems show, however, that no provably correct operator on P can be proven (in S) to be discontinuous. (shrink)

Hegel held that philosophy ought to be a science. By this he meant that it should be categoreal, systematic, and complete. After thirty years and ten volumes of Paul Weiss's Philosophy in Process we have ample reason to ask: Must philosophy be a science? This volume of Philosophy in Process is the latest in a series, the first entries of which date back to 1955 and which provide an unrivaled record of original philosophical thought as it develops.