Ethical decision-making is inherent in nursing practice. Although a definite portion of the nursing literature is devoted to ethics and ethical decision-making, the profession is just beginning to ground its ethics research in the actual experience of nurses. Therefore, the purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine the experience of staff nurses as they engage in ethical decision-making. Interview data were collected from 19 staff nurses in a large, midwestern American metropolitan hospital. Interviews were subse quently transcribed and Giorgi's (...) method of data analysis applied. The emerging descrip tion revealed four common aspects of ethical decision-making among staff nurses: context, trigger, ethical decision-making process (i.e. deliberation and integration), and outcomes. This description provides a foundation for future research regarding a descrip tive theory of ethical decision-making in nursing. (shrink)

Despite an abundance of theoretical literature on virtue ethics in nursing and health care, very little research has been carried out to support or refute the claims made. One such claim is that ethical nursing is what happens when a good nurse does the right thing. The purpose of this descriptive, qualitative study was therefore to examine nurses’ perceptions of what it means to be a good nurse and to do the right thing. Fifty-three nurses responded to two open-ended questions: (...) (1) a good nurse is one who...; and (2) how does a nurse go about doing the right thing? Three hundred and thirty-one data units were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Seven categories emerged: personal characteristics, professional characteristics, patient centredness, advocacy, competence, critical thinking and patient care. Participants viewed ethical nursing as a complex endeavour in which a variety of decision-making frameworks are used. Consistent with virtue ethics, high value was placed on both intuitive and analytical personal attributes that nurses bring into nursing by virtue of the persons they are. Further investigation is needed to determine just who the ‘good nurse’ is, and the nursing practice and education implications associated with this concept. (shrink)

The epidemic of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) has led to many ethical problems. Most studies have focused on the ethical issues faced by nurses who provide care to persons with AIDS (PWA), rather than the ethical issues faced by PWAs themselves. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to explore the ethical issues faced by five HIV/AIDS-infected African-American women. An analysis of interview data revealed that these women deal with four broad categories of ethical issues: (...) diagnosis; disclosure; treatment by, and of, others; and future pregnancies. The results of this study provide an initial description of the ethical issues faced by HIV/AIDS-infected African-American women, and begin to lay the foundation necessary for nurses appropriately to facilitate and support their decisions. (shrink)

This open access casebook addresses complex and important ethical challenges arising when health-related research in conducted in the context of epidemics and pandemics. This book provides contextually-rich real-world case studies illustrating research ethics issues encountered by researchers, ethics reviewers and regulators around the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The accompanying commentaries outline relevant conceptual approaches and ethical considerations. These promote understanding and reflection on relevant ethical issues, ethical approaches and competing considerations in a manner supporting thoughtful evaluation of their implications (...) for practice. As such the casebook is relevant to academic and professional audiences with an interest in global health, research ethics, and outbreaks and epidemics. (shrink)

Book IV of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations concerns two rival economic theories, Mercantilism and Physiocracy. The latter, François Quesnay's system, occupies only the ninth and final chapter, and it begins with a stunning dismissal. Yet, fifteen pages later, Smith praises this theory to the skies. That cries out for explanation. Like Mercantilism, Smith's system emphasizes commerce, whereas Quesnay's is confined to agriculture. But like Physiocracy, Smith's system is built on individual liberty, whereas Mercantilism is one (...) of government control. Despite his initial put-down, Smith is naturally inclined more toward Quesnay's philosophy. And the main thesis of my paper is to suggest one reason for this that has not previously been brought to light, and that can explain Smith's extravagant praise for it. Quesnay employs a Newtonian scientific method different from the one emphasized in Smith's early ‘Astronomy’ treatise, a method Smith first prominently introduced a decade after his meetings with Quesnay, in Wealth of Nations and Smith's eulogy for Hume, and in the sixth edition of his Theory of Moral Sentiments. (shrink)

Jacob Viner introduced the term ‘sub-rational’ to characterize the faculties – human instinct, sentiment and intuition – that fall between animal instinct and full-blown reason. The Scots considered sympathy both an affective and a physiological link between mind and body, and by natural history, they traced the most foundational societal institutions – language and law, money and property – to a sub-rational origin. Their ‘social evolutionism’ anticipated Darwin's ‘dangerous idea’ that humans differ from the lower animals only in degree, not (...) in kind. Darwin had the ability to ‘trade places in the imagination’, as Adam Smith would say, with plants and animals, and ‘think’ as they do. The trend today is to ‘positivize,’ ‘behaviorize’ and otherwise reduce the sub-rational to the purely biological. My suggestion is that we trade places in the imagination with the Scottish moral scientists and Darwin, and try thinking as they did. (shrink)

Building on work by Popper, Schweber, Nozick, Sober, and others in a still-growing literature, I explore here the conceptual kinship between Adam Smith''s ''invisible hand'' and Darwinian natural selection. I review the historical ties, and examine Ullman -Margalit''s ''constraints'' on invisible-hand accounts, which I later re-apply to natural selection, bringing home the close relationship. These theories share a ''parent'' principle, itself neither biological no politico-economic, that collective order and well-being can emerge parsimoniously from the dispersed action of individuals. The (...) invisible hand operates on ''memes'' the way natural selection operates on genes. Like Darwin''s concept, it brings together traditional opposites, ''nature'' and ''selection,'' forming a saltation-mitigating transition between biological instinct and full-blown conscious design. Herschel''s criterion of confirmation, which Darwin long strove to satisfy, is itself an invisible hand-like meme – a ''Midas effect'' revealing and rewarding the fittest theories, Darwin''s and Smith''s emphatically among them. (shrink)

The Scientific Revolution spawned not just one methodology, but two. We have emphasized Bacon's inductivism at the expense of Galileo's more abstract, sophisticated method of successive approximation, and so have failed to appreciate Galileo's contribution to the ceteris paribus problem in philosophy of science. My purpose here is to help redress this imbalance. I first briefly review the old unsolved problems, and then point out the Baconian basis of ceteris paribus, as this clause is conventionally understood, and its history from (...) Aristotle to twentieth century Positivism. Then I explore Galileo's method of dealing with unwanted impediments, and the more general problem of 'accidents.' I trace his methodology back to Archimedes and forward through the economic theories of Adam Smith (18th century), J. S. Mill (19th) and Milton Friedman (20th). Finally, I point out ways in which I think Galileo's scientific method sheds light on, and provides a partial solution to, the ceteris paribus problem. (shrink)

Steven Vogel’s Thinking like a Mall, which continues themes developed in his previous work Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory, is clearly intended to provok...

There are a number of relevant alternatives accounts of knowledge in the literature, including those by contextualists (like Lewis and Cohen), and invariantists (like Dretske). Despite widespread discussion of such views, an explication of the notion of relevance is conspicuously absent from the literature. Without a careful explication of that notion, relevant alternatives accounts resist evaluation. This paper attempts to aid in the evaluation of those accounts, by providing an account of relevance. The account rejects two common presuppositions about the (...) notion of relevance. The account holds that worlds, rather than alternatives, are relevant, and that distant worlds can be relevant. Relevant worlds turn out to be those worlds at which an alternative to one’s belief obtains, and is such that one’s epistemic position (with respect to what one believes at the actual world) is worse than it is at the actual world. (shrink)

The way society is organised means that we all get made into members of various types of people, such as judges, wives, or women. These ‘human social kinds’ may be brought into being by oppressive social arrangements, and people may suffer oppression in virtue of being made into a member of a certain human social kind. This book argues that we should pay attention to the ways in which the very fact of being made into a member of a certain (...) human social kind can be oppressive in and of itself. For example, someone who becomes a wife under circumstances where husbands have unjust powers over their wives has suffered a wrong, even if her husband never in fact exercises these powers. The book argues that social movements against racial and gendered oppression, including efforts to advance trans liberation, must get to grips with this phenomenon, and it supplies the conceptual tools needed to do so. The first tool is an analysis of this general form of wrong, termed ‘ontic injustice’. The second tool is an account of ‘ontic oppression’, a particular kind of ontic injustice in which the wrong amounts to a form of oppression, in the sense of being structural and pervasive. The third tool is a pluralist account of race and gender kinds, according to which there is no single social kind that corresponds to a gender category such as ‘woman’, but, rather, there are various different social kinds, each of which is explanatory for different purposes. (shrink)

This article argues that rape myths and domestic abuse myths constitute hermeneutical injustices. Drawing on empirical research, I show that the prevalence of these myths makes victims of rape and of domestic abuse less likely to apply those terms to their experiences. Using Sally Haslanger's distinction between manifest and operative concepts, I argue that in these cases, myths mean that victims hold a problematic operative concept, or working understanding, which prevents them from identifying their experience as one of rape or (...) of domestic abuse. Since victims in this situation lack the conceptual resources needed to render their experience sufficiently intelligible, they are suffering a form of hermeneutical injustice. Attending to this distinctive case sheds new light not only on the functioning of social myths of this kind but on the nature of hermeneutical injustice itself, since the case of the victim who accepts myths is importantly different from other cases of hermeneutical injustice discussed in the literature to date. In practical terms, this analysis supports calls for juries in rape trials to be warned about rape myths at the start of the trial, and may have implications for calls for statutory Sex and Relationships Education in schools. (shrink)

Katharine Tait, daughter of Bertrand and Dora Russell, here vividly portrays the extraordinary and stimulating environment she grew up in. In refreshing contrast to the interpretation of Russell as philosopher and public figure, Tait's is a close personal account of her deep love and admiration for her father and its gradual tempering by the imperfections she came to see in him. Touchingly written and beautifully described, the book shows Russell to be a man of great warmth, charm and humour, (...) but is also a testament to the traumas created when he applied his views on marriage and education to his own home. My Father Bertrand Russell is essential reading for those seeking to understand the private background to Russell's ideas, the personal effects of his lifestyle prescriptions, and what it was like to live with a man of such genious. (shrink)

To investigate the metaphysics of gender categories—categories like “woman,” “genderqueer,” and “man”—is to ask questions about what gender categories are and how they exist. This chapter offers a pluralist account of the metaphysics of gender categories, according to which there are several different varieties of gender categories. I begin by giving a brief overview of some feminist accounts of the metaphysics of gender categories and illustrating how certain moral and political considerations have been in play in these discussions as constraints (...) on acceptable accounts of gender categories. I then present my pluralist account of gender categories and highlight some of its virtues. Finally, I assess how my pluralist account fares relative to the moral and political considerations identified earlier in the chapter. I argue that although the account does not fare well, we should in fact revise our understanding of what those considerations are and how they should constrain our accounts of gender categories. I then show that, on this revised understanding, my pluralist account emerges as a viable position. (shrink)

Slurs are expressions that can be used to demean and dehumanize targets based on their membership in racial, ethnic, religious, gender, or sexual orientation groups. Almost all treatments of slurs posit that they have derogatory content of some sort. Such views—which I call content-based—must explain why in cases of appropriation slurs fail to express their standard derogatory contents. A popular strategy is to take appropriated slurs to be ambiguous; they have both a derogatory content and a positive appropriated content. However, (...) if appropriated slurs are ambiguous, why can only members in the target group use them to express a non-offensive/positive meaning? Here, I develop and motivate an answer that could be adopted by any content-based theorist. I argue that appropriated contents of slurs include a plural fi rst-person pronoun. I show how the semantics of pronouns like ‘we’ can be put to use to explain why only some can use a slur to express its appropriated content. Moreover, I argue that the picture I develop is motivated by the process of appropriation and helps to explain how it achieves its aims of promoting group solidarity and positive group identity. (shrink)

Introduction: Fundamental Ontology as a "Fundamental Ethics" In his "Letter on Humanism" Martin Heidegger claims that the fundamental ontology he works out ...

In this paper, I aim to shed some light on what rape myths are and what we can do about them. I start by giving a brief overview of some common rape myths. I then use two philosophical tools to offer a perspective on rape myths. First, I show that we can usefully see rape myths as an example of what Miranda Fricker has termed ‘epistemic injustice’, which is a type of wrong that concerns our role as knowers. Then, I (...) show that it is important to recognise that rape myths are instances of misogyny. This word is of course a more familiar one, but I'll be drawing on a specific philosophical account of what misogyny is, developed by Kate Manne, that I think is useful here. Finally, I briefly consider some upshots of these claims. (shrink)

This paper is a cross-cultural examination of the development of hunting skills and the implications for the debate on the role of learning in the evolution of human life history patterns. While life history theory has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding the evolution of the human life course, other schools, such as cultural transmission and social learning theory, also provide theoretical insights. These disparate theories are reviewed, and alternative and exclusive predictions are identified. This study of cross-cultural (...) regularities in how children learn hunting skills, based on the ethnographic literature on traditional hunters, complements existing empirical work and highlights future areas for investigation. (shrink)

The foundation for a system of morals, this 1749 work is a landmark of moral and political thought. Its highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment, and virtue offer a reconstruction of the Enlightenment concept of social science, embracing both political economy and theories of law and government.

Feminist analyses of gender concepts must avoid the inclusion problem, the fault of marginalizing or excluding some prima facie women. Sally Haslanger’s ‘ameliorative’ analysis of gender concepts seeks to do so by defining woman by reference to subordination. I argue that Haslanger’s analysis problematically marginalizes trans women, thereby failing to avoid the inclusion problem. I propose an improved ameliorative analysis that ensures the inclusion of trans women. This analysis yields ‘twin’ target concepts of woman, one concerning gender as class and (...) the other concerning gender as identity, both of which I hold to be equally necessary for feminist aims. (shrink)

This volume puts together twelve new essays by scholars who have done groundbreaking work in epistemology over the past four decades. Unfortunately, the editor’s brief introduction offers only a sketchy presentation of the papers and their background. Given the variety and complexity of the issues tackled, one would have expected a more detailed account of the nature and developments of the epistemological theories and arguments put forward and discussed by the contributors. The absence of such an account is all the (...) more surprising considering that the editor does not himself contribute a paper to the volume. (shrink)

This book examines the philosophical foundations of the realist view of the progress of science as cumulative. It is a view that has recently been faced with a number of powerful attacks in which successive scientific theories are seen, not as extending their scope and honing their explanations, but as incommensurable. There is, it is held, in principle no way of establishing that they are about the same things. From the voluminous literature on the topic, Dr Smith has selected (...) relevantly and incisively and his exposition of the contending arguments is vigourous and clear, without undue technicality. As an explication and defence of realism it will interest all those concerned with this basic question in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence and robotics have increasingly been adopted in agri-food systems—from milking robots to self-driving tractors. New projects extend these technologies in an effort to automate skilled work that has previously been considered dependent on human expertise due to its complexity. In this paper, we draw on qualitative research carried out with farm managers on apple orchards and winegrape vineyards in Aotearoa New Zealand. We investigate how agricultural managers’ perceptions of future agricultural automation relates to their approach to expertise, or (...) the degree to which they think specialised skills and knowledge are required to perform agricultural work on their orchards and vineyards. Our research generates two insights: the perceived potential for work to be automated is related to the degree to which it is seen to require technical or embodied expertise, with technical expertise being more automatable; and, while embodied expertise is perceived to be more difficult to automate, it is sometimes attributed more exclusively to those in positions of power, such that embodied expertise can be highly valued while the majority of embodied work is viewed as non-expert and thus automatable. Our analysis illustrates that a robot can be an expert when expertise is technical. It also shows variability in the conceptualization of skilled or unskilled work, and that those conceptualizations can set the stage for the future effects of new technologies. This generates new insights into the conditions under which automation might reproduce existing inequalities in agriculture, and also raises new questions about responsibility in the context of automation. (shrink)

The principal findings of experimental economics are that impersonal exchange in markets converges in repeated interaction to the equilibrium states implied by economic theory, under information conditions far weaker than specified in the theory. In personal, social, and economic exchange, as studied in two-person games, cooperation exceeds the prediction of traditional game theory. This book relates these two findings to field studies and applications and integrates them with the main themes of the Scottish Enlightenment and with the thoughts of F. (...) A. Hayek. (shrink)

This title presents a comprehensive guide to interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) which is an increasingly popular approach to qualitative inquiry taught to undergraduate and postgraduate students today.

In this article, I identify a distinctive form of injustice—ontic injustice—in which an individual is wronged by the very fact of being socially constructed as a member of a certain social kind. To be a member of a certain social kind is, at least in part, to be subject to certain social constraints and enablements, and these constraints and enablements can be wrongful to the individual who is subjected to them, in the sense that they inflict a moral injury. The (...) concept of ontic injustice is valuable in three main ways: it draws our attention to the role played by social kinds in enacting wrongful constraints and enablements; it clarifies our options for developing accounts of the ontology of particular social kinds, such as gender kinds; and, along with the related concept of ‘ontic oppression’, it helps us to understand and respond to oppression. (shrink)

This article presents two studies that examine cause-related marketing promotions that require consumers’ active participation. Requiring a follow-up behavior has very valuable implications for maximizing marketing expenditures and customer relationship management. Theories related to ethical behavior, like motivated reasoning and defensive denial, are used to explain when and why consumers respond negatively to these effort demands. The first study finds that consumers rationalize not participating in CRM by devaluing the sponsored cause. The second study identifies a tactic marketers can utilize (...) to neutralize consumers’ use of defensive denial. Allowing the consumer to choose the sponsored cause seems to effectively refocus their attention and increases consumers’ threshold for campaign requirements. Implications for nonprofits and marketing managers include a tendency for consumers to be more likely to perceive a firm as ethical and socially responsible when they are allowed to choose the specific cause that is supported. (shrink)

Although the concept of gender identity plays a prominent role in campaigns for trans rights, it is not well understood, and common definitions suffer from a problematic circularity. This paper undertakes an ameliorative inquiry into the concept of gender identity, taking as a starting point the ways in which trans rights movements seek to use the concept. First, I set out six desiderata that a target concept of gender identity should meet. I then consider three analytic accounts of gender identity: (...) the dispositional account, the self-identification account, and the norm-relevancy account. I argue that only the norm-relevancy account can meet all six desiderata. Finally, I defend the norm-relevancy account from three objections: that it is cis-normative, that it has problematic implications regarding trans women, and that it entails that some people do not have the gender identity they take themselves to have. (shrink)

What is unique about the development of business ethics in the USA, and how does it compare with various countries of Europe and with Japan? Institutional, legal, social and cultural factors are identified by the Professor of Business and Public Policy at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. An earlier version of this article titled “The Globalization of Business Ethics: Why America Remains Distinctive” was published in the Fall 1992 issue of the California Management Review, Vol. (...) 35, No. 1. Reprinted by Permission of The Regents of the University of California. (shrink)

The Problem of Perception offers two arguments against direct realism--one concerning illusion, and one concerning hallucination--that no current theory of ...

The essays are grouped in three sections. In Part I Vogel considers the relationship between feminism and socialism.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, maintained in this vastly important work that Westerners have misperceived religious life by making "religion" into one thing.

In this paper I develop a systemic discrimination approach to defining a narrowly construed category of ‘hate speech’, as speech that harms to a sufficient degree to warrant government regulation. This is important due to the lack of definitional clarity, and the extraordinarily wide usage, of the term. This article extends current literature on how hate speech can harm by identifying under what circumstances speakers have the capacity to harm, and under what circumstances targets are vulnerable to harm. It also (...) shows how the capacity to harm can be mobile and involve the construction of new targets. Finally, it bridges the gap between conceptual understandings of hate speech and policy designed to regulate it. (shrink)

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals>, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Despite (...) the vast differences in humanity between cultures and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives and histories, there remains an underlying structure of human personhood that helps to order human culture, history, and narration. Drawing on important recent insights in moral philosophy, epistemology, and narrative studies, Smith argues that humans are animals who have an inescapable moral and spiritual dimension. They cannot avoid a fundamental moral orientation in life and this, says Smith, has profound consequences for how sociology must study human beings. (shrink)

Atheists have tacitly conceded the field to theists in the area of philosophical cosmology, specifically, in the enterprise of explaining why the universe exists. The theistic hypothesis is that the reason the universe exists lies in God’s creative choice, but atheists have not proposed any reason why the universe exists. I argue that quantum cosmology proposes such an atheistic reason, namely, that the universe exists because it has an unconditional probability of existing based on a functional law of nature. This (...) law of nature (“the wave function of the universe”) is inconsistent with theism and implies that God does not exist. I criticize the claims of Alston, Craig, Deltete and Guy, Oppy and Plantinga that theism is consistent with quantum cosmology. (shrink)