Background Nonanonymized direct contact between organ recipients and donor families is a topic of international interest in the adult context. However, there is limited discussion about whether direct contact should be extended to pediatric settings due to clinician and researcher concerns of the potential harms to pediatric patients.Methods We interviewed pediatric organ recipients, their families, and donorfamilies in British Columbia, Canada, to determine their views on direct contact. Interviews were conducted in two stages, with those who were further removed from (...) the transplant process informing the approach to interviews with those who more recently went throughthe transplant process.Results Twenty-nine individuals participated in twenty in-depth interviews. The study included participants from three major organ systems: kidney, heart, and liver. Only five participants expressed that direct contact might cause harm or discomfort, while twenty-three indicated they saw significant potential for benefits. Nearly half focused on the harms to others rather than themselves, and nearly two-thirds focused on the benefits for others rather than themselves.Conclusion There appears to be a community desire for direct contact in pediatric organ transplant programs among those living in British Columbia, Canada. These results suggest a need to revisit the medical community’s assumptions around protection and paternalism in our practice as clinicians and researchers. (shrink)

Cheaters and noncheaters were assessed on 2 types of motivation, on perceived social norms regarding cheating, on attitudes about cheating, and on knowledge of institutional policy regarding cheating behavior. All 5 factors were significant predictors of cheating rates. In addition, cheaters were found lower in mastery motivation and higher in extrinsic motivation in courses in which they cheated than in courses in which they did not cheat. Cheaters, in courses in which they cheated, were also lower in mastery motivation and (...) higher in extrinsic motivation than were noncheaters. Finally, cheaters differed from noncheaters on perceived social norms regarding cheating, on their knowledge of institutional policy regarding cheating, and on their attitudes toward cheating. Implications of these findings for institutional interventions are discussed. (shrink)

Political apologies are commonly imagined as gestures of finality and closure: capstone moments that summate public knowledge. One manifestation of these assumptions is the position that apologies should be timed to come only after appropriate investigation into the wrongdoing has been completed. This article takes a different view, for two reasons. First, even apologies that seem based on robust knowledge can come to seem incomplete or inadequate in the light of subsequent learning and knowledge. Second, because apologies are complexly embedded (...) in longer-term processes of activism and response, they can contribute to their own unravelling by encouraging further consideration and inquiry. We develop these arguments by considering two Canadian cases that illustrate these dynamics: apologies that addressed, respectively, the wartime internment of Japanese Canadians and the policy of forcing Indigenous children to attend residential schools. (shrink)

This investigation applies a social cognition framework to examine moral awareness in business situations. Using a vignette-based instrument, the investigation compares the recall, recognition, and ascription of importance to moral-versus strategy-related issues in business managers (n = 86) and academic professors (n = 61). Results demonstrate that managers recall strategy-related issues more than moral-related issues and recognize and ascribe importance to moral-related issues less than academics. It also finds an inverse relationship between socialization in the business context and moral awareness. (...) Future directions for moral awareness research and the practical implications for these findings are discussed. (shrink)

In this essay, I present three arguments for the claim that theists should reject divine command theory in favor of divine attitude theory. First, DCT implies that some cognitively normal human persons are exempt from the dictates of morality. Second, it is incumbent upon us to cultivate the skill of moral judgment, a skill that fits nicely with the claims of DAT but which is superfluous if DCT is true. Third, an attractive and widely shared conception of Jewish/Christian religious devotion (...) leads us naturally to an attitude-based conception of morality rather than a command-based one. (shrink)

The evidential argument from evil seeks to show that suffering is strong evidence against theism. The core idea of the evidential argument is that we know of innocent beings suffering for no apparent good reason. Perhaps the most common criticism of the evidential argument comes from the camp of skeptical theism, whose lot includes William Alston, Alvin Plantinga, and Stephen Wykstra. According to skeptical theism the limits of human knowledge concerning the realm of goods, evils, and the connections between values, (...) undermines the judgment that what appears as pointless evil really is pointless. For all we know the suffering of an innocent being, though appearing pointless, in fact leads to a greater good. In this paper I argue that no one who accepts the doctrines of skeptical theism has a principled way of avoiding moral skepticism. (shrink)

What does the term academic ethics mean? How does this term relate to others in the academic integrity literature, such as research misconduct? Does conceptual confusion in the study of academic ethics complicate development of valid analyses of ethical behavior in an academic setting? The intended goal of many empirical projects on academic ethics is to draw causal conclusions about the factors that lead to faculty or students possessing or disregarding academic integrity. Yet, it is not clear that scholars using (...) the concept academic ethics are measuring the same phenomenon when they use associated concepts, such as responsible conduct of research. The purpose of this paper is to develop a taxonomy of concepts for the empirical study of academic ethics. Based in research on comparative analysis of democracy, another normatively preferable but multifaceted concept, I argue for a taxonomy of concepts for the study of academic integrity that reduces problems of “conceptual stretching” and challenges to the validity of empirical research in this field. (shrink)

Here I propose to undertake a brief survey of the statements of the argument given by these proponents, formulating and qualifying as I go what seems to me a sound version of it, capable of withstanding both Ayer's criticism and others that I have developed. There must be additional ways in which the same or similar points can be expressed. Another review of Kant, Paton, Taylor, and Kenner would no doubt produce a somewhat different result. All that is claimed here (...) is that the argument advanced in this paper is sound and that it was suggested by certain statements of theirs. (shrink)

In this essay, I present three arguments for the claim that theists should reject divine command theory (DCT) in favor of divine attitude theory (DAT). First, DCT (but not DAT) implies that some cognitively normal human persons are exempt from the dictates of morality. Second, it is incumbent upon us to cultivate the skill of moral judgment, a skill that fits nicely with the claims of DAT but which is superfluous if DCT is true. Third, an attractive and widely shared (...) conception of Jewish/Christian religious devotion leads us naturally to an attitude-based conception of morality rather than a command-based one. (shrink)

The term "human dignity" is the source of considerable confusion in contemporary bioethics. It has been used by Kantians to refer to autonomy, by others to refer to the sanctity of life, and by still others to refer—albeit obliquely—to an important but infrequently discussed set of human goods. In the first part of this article, I seek to disambiguate the notion of human dignity. The second part is a defense of the philosophical utility of such a notion; I argue that (...) there is nothing implausible about appealing to a deontological "principle of dignity" to solve bioethical problems, especially those concerning the development of new biotechnologies. There may, however, be problems associated with any attempt to use dignity as a basis for public policy. This sort of worry is explained and briefly addressed in the final section. (shrink)

In a series of important papers, Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson argue that all extant neo-sentimentalists are guilty of a conflation error that they call the moralistic fallacy. One commits the moralistic fallacy when one infers from the fact that it would be morally wrong to experience an affective attitude—e.g., it would be wrong to be amused—that the attitude does not fit its object—e.g., that it is not funny. Such inferences, they argue, conflate the appropriateness conditions of attitudinal responses with (...) the fittingness conditions of the associated evaluative properties. Further, they argue that moral considerations are irrelevant for determining if amusement fits its object. We agree that a strong moralizing of humor is wrongheaded and that jokes can be quite funny even in cases where we have a compelling moral reason to not be amused. However, we argue that pace D’Arms and Jacobson moral considerations can be relevant for property ascription. On our view, in order for a joke to be funny, a properly sensitive agent must take herself to have a contributory reason to be amused, and in some cases that she lacks such a reason is best explained by appeal to moral considerations. We use this constraint as the basis of what we call our modest proposal for a modest sentimentalism. (shrink)

Within John Dewey's pragmatic naturalism, consciousness, meaning, and value were conceptualized as ontologically real phenomena. During the century that has passed since Dewey's time, naturalism has come to be dominated by physicalist and realist perspectives within which the reality of consciousness, meaning, and value are problematic. Given this historical tension in naturalism, the present paper does the following: describes why consciousness, causality, and the body were all at home in Dewey's naturalism, and why Dewey's naturalism fell out of favour during (...) the century that followed, describes a sample of unsuccessful twentieth-century attempts to get consciousness back into naturalism, including the contemporary embodiment movement, presents a recently developed holist, post-naturalist philosophy of embodiment that challenges the physicalist and realist assumptions at work in most contemporary forms of naturalism, and presentsWST as an intra-disciplinary framework for scholarship, and as a potential means of addressing the scholarship-culture tensions that have emerged during the zeitgeist of naturalism. (shrink)

How far is Thomas Aquinas available for current discussions in political philosophy? While there are certainly things to be learned from him about our political preoccupations, the pedagogy of his moral teaching typically resists our familiar questions. This holds even when the question is put in terms that Thomas should recognize—say, as a question about the virtues appropriate for a democracy. Thomas not only gives different meanings to these terms, he moves political topics away from the center of theological attention (...) and so organizes them very differently. A reader can notice these differences at many points but perhaps especially in the attention that Thomas gives in the Summa to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. His account of these gifts qualifies significantly what he says of virtue and suggests large limits on human agency, whether in ethics or in politics. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The most obvious cases of ego-involvement in conscious life are those which Husserl calls conscious acts or cogitationes.[2] They are the most obvious cases because they are the ones in which the ego explicitly involves himself in some way ; they exhibit the character of being engaged in by the ego or having been engaged in by him. This ego-quality or character belongs demonstrably to every conscious process in which the ego engages or lives. In the ego's conscious life, the (...) life to which his, her, or its acts belong, there also occur mental or intentive processes in which the ego does not or did not engage, and these Husserl calls passive or non-actional processes as contrasted with the active or actional processes characterized by egoengagement. (shrink)

SummaryBorn to a noble family in the Italian Trentino, Prati studied philosophy in Austria and Germany. Returning to Italy, he joined the carbonari, a network of revolutionary secret societies. Forced into exile in Switzerland, he worked as an educator alongside Pestalozzi. Following his expulsion from Switzerland, Prati sought refuge in Britain, becoming acquainted with Coleridge, the Benthamite utilitarians, and the Owenites. Following the July Revolution, Prati went to Paris, where he became a Saint-Simonian. Returning to Britain, he sought to convert (...) the British to Saint-Simonism, before undertaking a series of other literary projects. He eventually returned to Italy, where he entered into correspondence with the Roman Catholic philosopher Antonio Rosmini. Prati left behind him a trail of letters, newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books, written in four different European languages. These have been hitherto neglected by scholars, and constitute the basis of the current article. (shrink)

The first part of this paper exposits William Rowe's latest version of the evidential argument from evil. Integral to this new version is what we can call the 'level-playing field' requirement, which regulates probability values. It is the argument of the second part of this paper that either the two premises of the new version are regulated by the level-playing-field requirement or they're not. If they are both regulated, then no one would be in position to rationally accept one of (...) those premises; if they're not both regulated, then the theist would have good reason to reject the one that is. Either way, Rowe's latest version of the evidential argument fails. (shrink)