The Dutch law states that a physician may perform euthanasia according to a written advance euthanasia directive when a patient is incompetent as long as all legal criteria of due care are met. This may also hold for patients with advanced dementia. We investigated the differing opinions of physicians and members of the general public on the acceptability of euthanasia in patients with advanced dementia.

BackgroundThe rise of Big Data-driven health research challenges the assumed contribution of medical research to the public good, raising questions about whether the status of such research as a common good should be taken for granted, and how public trust can be preserved. Scandals arising out of sharing data during medical research have pointed out that going beyond the requirements of law may be necessary for sustaining trust in data-intensive health research. We propose building upon the use of a social (...) licence for achieving such ethical governance.Main textWe performed a narrative review of the social licence as presented in the biomedical literature. We used a systematic search and selection process, followed by a critical conceptual analysis. The systematic search resulted in nine publications. Our conceptual analysis aims to clarify how societal permission can be granted to health research projects which rely upon the reuse and/or linkage of health data. These activities may be morally demanding. For these types of activities, a moral legitimation, beyond the limits of law, may need to be sought in order to preserve trust. Our analysis indicates that a social licence encourages us to recognise a broad range of stakeholder interests and perspectives in data-intensive health research. This is especially true for patients contributing data. Incorporating such a practice paves the way towards an ethical governance, based upon trust. Public engagement that involves patients from the start is called for to strengthen this social licence.ConclusionsThere are several merits to using the concept of social licence as a guideline for ethical governance. Firstly, it fits the novel scale of data-related risks; secondly, it focuses attention on trustworthiness; and finally, it offers co-creation as a way forward. Greater trust can be achieved in the governance of data-intensive health research by highlighting strategic dialogue with both patients contributing the data, and the public in general. This should ultimately contribute to a more ethical practice of governance. (shrink)

My object in this paper is to suggest a few reflections on some themes in Bentham's work which others as well as I have noted, without perhaps developing them as fully as might with advantage be done. There will be nothing like full development in the limited compass of what is said here, but what is said may at least indicate possible directions for further exploration. The greater part of the paper will be concerned with the notion of natural authority; (...) but I want to begin by taking a broader, though no doubt rather superficial, view of the role in Bentham's thinking of the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’. (shrink)

The author argues that there is a sharp contrast between Plato's earlier teleological explanation of nature and his later conception. In the Phaedo Anaxagoras' νοṽς as a teleological principle is rejected, the forms taking its place, in the Philebus the existence of a νοṽς explaining order and finality in nature, is strictly demonstrated. After that nature and consequences of this new doctrine are briefly discussed : the ineffable character of the transcendent cause of the world ; the reduction of the (...) number of the Forms to those of substances in nature ; the causality of νοṽς as an immanent and intermediate one ; the foundation of a mathematical science of nature. Thirdly the author makes an effort to reconstruct the philosophical grounds of this development, starting from the three theses, on which the argumentation of the Philebus is based. 1) νοṽς can only exist in a soul. It is argued that the dynamic conception of soul in the Phaedrus logically leads to the conclusion, that νοṽς also is movement . 2) To explain cosmic order and finality a νοṽς has to be accepted. This new idea occurs for the first time in the Sophistes and in the myth of the Politicus. 3) Cosmic order has a mathematical and astronomical character. This aspect is absent before the Philebus and seems to have been a consequence of Plato's discovery of the regularity in the planitary motions . Finally the author thinks he can indicate in the Sophistes the turning-point in the theory of Forms, as a result of the extension of the notion of being. (shrink)

A total of 944 expressed sequence tags generated 2212 EST loci mapped to homoeologous group 1 chromosomes in hexaploid wheat. EST deletion maps and the consensus map of group 1 chromosomes were constructed to show EST distribution. EST loci were unevenly distributed among chromosomes 1A, 1B, and ID with 660, 826, and 726, respectively. The number of EST loci was greater on the long arms than on the short arms for all three chromosomes. The distribution of ESTs along chromosome arms (...) was nonrandom with EST clusters occurring in the distal regions of short arms and middle regions of long arms. Duplications of group 1 ESTs in other homoeologous groups occurred at a rate of 35.5%. Seventy-five percent of wheat chromosome 1 ESTs had significant matches with rice sequences, where large regions of conservation occurred between wheat consensus chromosome 1 and rice chromosome 5 and between the proximal portion of the long arm of wheat consensus chromosome 1 and rice chromosome 10. Only 9.5% of group 1 ESTs showed significant matches to Arabidopsis genome sequences. The results presented are useful for gene mapping and evolutionary and comparative genomics of grasses. (shrink)

The object of this article is to examine, with the work of Jeremy Bentham as the principal example, one strand in the complex pattern of European social theory during the second half of the eighteenth century. This was of course the period not only of the American and French revolutions, but of the culmination of the movements of thought constituting what we know as the Enlightenment. Like all great historical episodes, the Enlightenment was both the fulfilment of long-established processes and (...) the inauguration of new processes of which the fulfilment lay in the future. Thus the seminal ideas of seventeenth-century rationalism realized and perhaps exhausted their potentialities in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The ideas with which this article is concerned, however—conveniently grouped and labelled as the ideas of utilitarianism—only began to achieve systematic development in these later decades of the eighteenth century. Within that period—during the first half and more of Bentham's long life—attempts to apply those ideas to the solution of social problems met largely with failure and frustration. Yet unrealized potentialities remained, the realization of which was reserved for a time when the world of the philosophes no longer existed. The movements for social and political reform which have played so large a part in modern history since the French Revolution may be judged in widely differing ways; but whatever the verdict, these movements surely cannot be understood without due consideration of that part of their origins which lies in eighteenth-century utilitarianism. (shrink)

A naturalistic theory of intentionality is proposed that differs from previous evolutionary and tracking theories. Full-blown intentionality is constructed through a series of evolvable refinements. A first, minimal version of intentionality originates from a conjectured internal process that estimates an organism’s own fitness and that continually modifies the organism. This process produces the directedness of intentionality. The internal estimator can be parsed into intentional components that point to components of the process that produces fitness. It is argued that such intentional (...) components can point to mistaken or non-existing entities. Different Fregian senses of the same reference correspond to different components that have different roles in the estimator. Intentional components that point to intentional components in other organisms produce directedness towards semi-abstract entities. Finally, adding a general, population-wide means of communication enables intentional components that point to fully abstract entities. Intentionality thus naturalized has all of its expected properties: being directed; potentially making errors; possibly pointing to non-existent, abstract, or rigid entities; capable of pointing many-to-one and one-to-many; distinguishing sense and reference; having perspective and grain; and having determinate content. Several examples, such as ‘swampman’ and ‘brain-in-a-vat’, illustrate how the theory can be applied. (shrink)