On 12 May 1962, a frail Douglas MacArthur delivered his final public speech to the cadets at the United States Military Academy. A West Point graduate himself, MacArthur served as Superintendent of...

The classical utilitarian legacy of Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, James Mill, and Henry Sidgwick has often been charged with both theoretical and practical complicity in the growth of British imperialism and the emerging racialist discourse of the nineteenth century. But there has been little scholarly work devoted to bringing together the conflicting interpretive perspectives on this legacy and its complex evolution with respect to orientalism and imperialism. This volume, with contributions by leading scholars in the field, represents the first (...) attempt to survey the full range of current scholarly controversy on how the classical utilitarians conceived of 'race' and the part it played in their ethical and political programs, particularly with respect to such issues as slavery and the governance of India. The book both advances our understanding of the history of utilitarianism and imperialism and promotes the scholarly debate, clarifying the major points at issue between those sympathetic to the utilitarian legacy and those critical of it. (shrink)

: This paper presents a method of moral problem solving in clinical practice that is inspired by the philosophy of John Dewey. This method, called "clinical pragmatism," integrates clinical and ethical decision making. Clinical pragmatism focuses on the interpersonal processes of assessment and consensus formation as well as the ethical analysis of relevant moral considerations. The steps in this method are delineated and then illustrated through a detailed case study. The implications of clinical pragmatism for the use of principles in (...) moral problem solving are discussed. (shrink)

Der folgende Artikel ist im Jahr 2003 unter dem Titel „Clinical Pragmatism: A Method of Moral Problem Solving“ in dem Sammelband „Pragmatic bioethics“ erschienen, welcher sich mit der Bedeutung der pragmatistischen Philosophie für die Praxis befasst. In dem vom Internisten und Bioethiker Joseph J. Fins, dem Thoraxchirurgen Matthew D. Bacchetta und dem Philosophen und Medizinethiker Franklin G. Miller verfassten Beitrag wird der pragmatistische Ansatz in der klinischen Ethik anhand eines Fallbeispiels gleichzeitig beschrieben, begründet und demonstriert. Obgleich die Denkrichtung (...) der pragmatistischen Philosophie sowohl wissenschaftstheoretisch wie praktisch hoch bedeutsam ist – ohne diese ist weder die heutige sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung noch die angewandte, insbesondere die klinische Ethik denkbar –, werden pragmatistische Ansätze im deutschsprachigen Raum bis heute eher rudimentär rezipiert. (shrink)

In The Healer's Power, Howard Brody placed the concept of power at the heart of medicine's moral discourse. Struck by the absence of “power” in the prevailing vocabulary of medical ethics, yet aware of peripheral allusions to power in the writings of some medical ethicists, he intuited the importance of power from the silence surrounding it. He formulated the problem of the healer's power and its responsible use as “the central ethical problem in medicine.” Through the prism of power he (...) refracted a wide range of ethical problems, from informed consent to truth-telling, from confidentiality to futility, from the physician's fantasies to the physician's virtues. At times this prism shed new light on old problems, enabling us to see from an unexpected angle the elements of which the problem was composed. At other times it exposed issues of ethical significance that had been neglected in the bioethics literature. (shrink)

Bioethics has been an interdisciplinary field since its inception. From the founding of the Hastings Center in 1969 and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics in 1971, scholars from many disciplines have come together to create a field of study strengthened by its interdisciplinarity. In this special issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, we celebrate the interdisciplinary character of bioethics by means of essays by eight distinguished bioethics scholars hailing from backgrounds in philosophy, law, medicine, nursing, public health, history, sociology, (...) and narrative methods. Each contributor offers a personal perspective on their journey into bioethics from a particular disciplinary background... (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

This is a description of an avian-shaped feature that rests below a network of cellular structures found on a mound within the Argyre Basin of Mars in Mars Global Surveyor image M14-02185, acquired on April 30, 2000, and released to the public on April 4, 2001. The area examined is located near 48.0° South, 55.1° West. The formation is approximately 2,400 meters long from the tip of its beak to the tip of its farthest tail feather. There is a minimum (...) of six different variations in appearance of the surface material over this small area. Utilizing the public targeting request form provided on the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) website, co-author Miller secured a second image of the area that was obtained on July 3, 2006, showing this feature under different conditions S20-00165. The new image was then released to the public on August 11, 2006. A third image of the formation identified as MGS S13-01480 was acquired on December 15, 2005, and although officially processed on June 20, 2006, it was not made available to the public until August 22, 2009, on NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS) website. All three of the MGS images reveal defining aspects of this avian feature, including a head, beak, body, eye, leg, foot, toes, wing, and feathers. When taken together, these components induce the visual impression of an avian-shaped formation that exhibits a unique set of proportional features. Adjoining this formation is a composite of complex cellular features that form a compartmentalized infrastructure. The three authors who are veterinarians provide a critical analysis of the avian features, and the geologist and geoscientist authors examine natural mechanisms that could contribute to the formation of this feature. An extensive search of comparable regions within and beyond the area of the Argyre Basin was conducted. A list of these sites is provided, and terrestrial comparisons are also offered. (shrink)

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

This book demonstrates the presence of literature within speech act theory and the utility of speech act theory in reading literary works. Though the founding text of speech act theory, J. L. Austin's _How to Do Things with Words_, repeatedly expels literature from the domain of felicitous speech acts, literature is an indispensable presence within Austin's book. It contains many literary references but also uses as essential tools literary devices of its own: imaginary stories that serve as examples and imaginary (...) dialogues that forestall potential objections. _How to Do Things with Words_ is not the triumphant establishment of a fully elaborated theory of speech acts, but the story of a failure to do that, the story of what Austin calls a "bogging down." After an introductory chapter that explores Austin's book in detail, the two following chapters show how Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man in different ways challenge Austin's speech act theory generally and his expulsion of literature specifically. Derrida shows that literature cannot be expelled from speech acts—rather that what he calls "iterability" means that any speech act may be literature. De Man asserts that speech act theory involves a radical dissociation between the cognitive and positing dimensions of language, what Austin calls language's "constative" and "performative" aspects. Both Derrida and de Man elaborate new speech act theories that form the basis of new notions of responsible and effective politico-ethical decision and action. The fourth chapter explores the role of strong emotion in effective speech acts through a discussion of passages in Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Austin. The final chapter demonstrates, through close readings of three passages in Proust, the way speech act theory can be employed in an illuminating way in the accurate reading of literary works. (shrink)

We study the sets that are computable from both halves of some (Martin–Löf) random sequence, which we call 1/2-bases. We show that the collection of such sets forms an ideal in the Turing degrees that is generated by its c.e. elements. It is a proper subideal of the K-trivial sets. We characterize 1/2-bases as the sets computable from both halves of Chaitin’s Ω, and as the sets that obey the cost function c(x,s)=Ωs−Ωx−−−−−−−√. Generalizing these results yields a dense hierarchy of (...) subideals in the K-trivial degrees: For k<n, let Bk/n be the collection of sets that are below any k out of n columns of some random sequence. As before, this is an ideal generated by its c.e. elements and the random sequence in the definition can always be taken to be Ω. Furthermore, the corresponding cost function characterization reveals that Bk/n is independent of the particular representation of the rational k/n, and that Bp is properly contained in Bq for rational numbers p<q. These results are proved using a generalization of the Loomis–Whitney inequality, which bounds the measure of an open set in terms of the measures of its projections. The generality allows us to analyze arbitrary families of orthogonal projections. As it turns out, these do not give us new subideals of the K-trivial sets; we can calculate from the family which Bp it characterizes. We finish by studying the union of Bp for p<1; we prove that this ideal consists of the sets that are robustly computable from some random sequence. This class was previously studied by Hirschfeldt [D. R. Hirschfeldt, C. G. Jockusch, R. Kuyper and P. E. Schupp, Coarse reducibility and algorithmic randomness, J. Symbolic Logic81(3) (2016) 1028–1046], who showed that it is a proper subclass of the K-trivial sets. We prove that all such sets are robustly computable from Ω, and that they form a proper subideal of the sets computable from every (weakly) LR-hard random sequence. We also show that the ideal cannot be characterized by a cost function, giving the first such example of a Σ03 subideal of the K-trivial sets. (shrink)

Despite the supreme political and economic significance of boundaries--and ongoing challenges to existing national boundaries--scant attention has been paid to their ethics. This volume explores how diverse ethical traditions understand the political and property rights reflected in territorial and jurisdictional boundaries. It is the first book to bring together thinkers from a range of traditions, both religious and secular, to discuss the ethics of boundaries. Each contributor represents a tradition's views on questions surrounding the use of boundaries to delimit property (...) and political rights. What does it mean to own something? What resources should not be privately owned? What justifies the erection of political boundaries between one people and another? How ''hard'' should such boundaries be? What rights extend to minorities within a state? Should territorial boundaries coincide with social ones? Does national autonomy have an ethical basis, or is it an aspect of modern power politics? Should we aim for a more inclusive community than that afforded by modern nation-states? Cross-chapter dialogue and a substantive conclusion draw out similarities and differences among the traditions represented, traditions that include Christianity, classical liberalism, Confucianism, international law, Islam, Judaism, liberal egalitarianism, and natural law. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Nigel Biggar, Joseph Boyle, Joseph Chan, Russell Hardin, Will Kymlicka, Loren Lomasky, Robert McCorquodale, Richard B. Miller, David Novak, Sulayman Nyang, Michael Nylan, Raul C. Pangalangan, Daniel Philpott, Jeremy Rabkin, Hillel Steiner, M. Raquibuz Zaman, and Noam J. Zohar. (shrink)

: This response to Lynn Jansen's critique of clinical pragmatism concentrates on two themes: (1) contrasting approaches to moral epistemology and (2) the connection between theory and practice in clinical ethics. Particular attention is paid to the status of principles and the role of consensus, with some closing speculations on how Dewey might view the current state of bioethics.

The use of growth attenuation therapy (GAT) is becoming more common in order to enable a family to care for a child with profound cognitive and physical disabilities (PCPD) as they age into adulthood. The first published study on the use of GAT was done with the family of a six-year-old girl with PCPD by Daniel Gunther and Douglas Diekema in Pediatrics in 2006. The ethical application of GAT generated considerable discussion on the use among children with PCPD in the (...) medical and ethics communities. This paper discusses the use of GAT for children with profound cognitive and physical disabilities from a Catholic bioethics perspective. (shrink)

In this article I argue against the claim that “actual entity” and “actual occasion” are synonymous in Whitehead. My examination of these terms will help to illuminate the role of “society” in Whitehead’s philosophy and to prepare the way for a fruitful comparison of process thought and contemporary systems theory in the sciences.

Purpose Prescription stimulant use as “cognitive enhancers” has been described among undergraduate college students. However, the use of prescription stimulants among future health care professionals is not well characterized. This study was designed to determine the prevalence of prescription stimulant misuse among students at an academic health sciences center. -/- Method Electronic surveys were e-mailed to 621 medical, pharmacy, and respiratory therapy students at East Tennessee State University for four consecutive weeks in fall 2011. Completing the survey was voluntary and (...) anonymous. Surveys asked about reasons for, frequency of, and side effects of nonprescription misuse of prescription stimulants. Given the sensitive material, an opportunity to win one of ten $50 gift cards was used as an incentive. -/- Results Three hundred seventy-two (59.9%) students completed the survey from three disciplines (47.6% medical, 70.5% pharmacy, and 57.6% respiratory therapy). Overall, 11.3% of responders admitted to misusing prescription stimulants. There was more misuse by respiratory therapy students, although this was not statistically significant (10.9% medicine, 9.7% pharmacy, 26.3% respiratory therapy; P = .087). Reasons for prescription stimulant misuse included to enhance alertness/ energy (65.9%), to improve academic performance (56.7%), to experiment (18.2%), and to use recreationally/get high (4.5%). -/- Conclusions Prescription stimulant misuse was prevalent among participating students, but further research is needed to describe prevalence among future health care workers more generally. The implications and consequences of such misuse require further study across professions with emphasis on investigating issues of academic dishonesty (e.g., “cognitive enhancement”), educational quality, and patient safety or health care quality. (shrink)

Research examining consumer responses to the provision of nutritional information as part of restaurant menus has produced mixed results. In light of pending legislation requiring the provision of nutritional information, the authors examine the how corporate social responsibility impacts consumer service evaluation of restaurants. Findings from three studies demonstrate that the relationship between consumer attitudes toward the disclosure of nutrition information and their subsequent evaluation of the food provider is impacted by CSR-related initiatives. Studies one and two find that consumer (...) evaluations are enhanced when the firm has an existing reputation for CSR and when the firm includes healthy product options as part of the introduction of the nutritional information. Study 3 finds these effects are particularly strong with fast-food restaurants. Overall, the findings suggest that, for some firms, the introduction of the legislation provides an opportunity to strengthen relationships with customers and gain advantage over some competitors. (shrink)

Here we prove that if T and T′ are strongly minimal theories, where T′ satisfies a certain property related to triviality and T does not, and T′ is model complete, then there is no computable embedding of Mod(T) into Mod(T′). Using this, we answer a question from [4], showing that there is no computable embedding of VS into ZS, where VS is the class of infinite vector spaces over Q, and ZS is the class of models of Th(Z, S). Similarly, (...) we show that there is no computable embedding of ACF into ZS, where ACF is the class of algebraically closed fields of characteristic 0. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to reconsider (...) the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)