Over the past two years, debate about the use of data taken from Nazi concentration camp experiments has intensified. Many survivors of the Holocaust have been particularly offended at the publication of hypothermia or other data. This article argues against the use of unethically obtained data, and considers the debate from the perspective of the rights of Holocaust victims.

This article presents a set of moral arguments regarding the selective abortion of fetuses on the basis of prenatal screening for late onset genetic diseases only, and for Huntington's Disease* in particular. After discussion of human suffering, human perfection and the distinctive features of the lives of people confronting late onset genetic disease, the author concludes that selective abortion is difficult to justify ethically, although it must remain a matter of personal choice.

Ecologists traditionally regard time as part of the background against which ecological interactions play out. In this book, Eric Post argues that time should be treated as a resource used by organisms for growth, maintenance, and offspring production. Post uses insights from phenology -- the study of the timing of life-cycle events -- to present a theoretical framework of time in ecology that casts long-standing observations in the field in an entirely new light. Combining conceptual models with field (...) data, he demonstrates how phenological advances, delays, and stasis, documented in an array of taxa, can all be viewed as adaptive components of an organism's strategic use of time. Post shows how the allocation of time by individual organisms to critical life history stages is not only a response to environmental cues but also an important driver of interactions at the population, species, and community levels. To demonstrate the applications of this exciting new conceptual framework, Time in Ecology uses meta-analyses of previous studies as well as Post's original data on the phenological dynamics of plants, caribou, and muskoxen in Greenland.--Back cover. (shrink)

This remarkable book--the fruit of almost two decades of study--traces in compelling fashion the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Aries shows how, (...) from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Aries identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Aries shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century--how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives--and points out what may be done to "re-tame" this secret terror. The richness of Aries's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history--indeed the pathology--of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death. (shrink)

Anti-racist debate today remains polarised between ‘class reductionist’ (any attempt to address racial disparities reinforces capitalist class relations) and ‘liberal identity’ (disparities in racial representation can be resolved without questioning class inequality) politics. Both positions share a common perspective – racial oppression and class exploitation are the products of distinctive social dynamics whose relationship is historically contingent. This essay is an initial step toward characterising a structurally necessary relationship between capitalism and racial oppression. The essay draws upon Anwar Shaikh and (...) Howard Botwinick’s elaboration of Marx’s political economy, and Ellen Wood’s analysis of the specificity of capitalist imperialism. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION In ita original form the present paper was presented to the American Mathematical Society, April 2k,, as a companion piece to the writer's ...

A growing body of work suggests that the presence of women and of independent directors on boards of directors is associated with higher corporate environmental performance. However, the mechanisms linking board composition to corporate environmental performance are not well understood. This study proposes and empirically tests the mediating role of sustainability-themed alliances in the relationship between board composition and corporate environmental performance. Using the population of public oil and gas firms in the United States as the sample, the study relies (...) on renewable energy alliances to measure sustainability-themed alliances and longitudinally analyzes lagged data for independent and control variables. The study found that the higher the representation of women on a firm’s board, the more likely the firm is to form sustainability-themed alliances, and the higher the representation of independent directors on a firm’s board, the more likely the firm is to form sustainability-themed alliances. Such alliances, in turn, positively contribute to corporate environmental performance. This paper discusses the study’s contributions to the board composition-social performance literature. (shrink)

This article describes the nature of ethical dilemmas in perioperative nursing practice. Using the Critical Incident Technique, common ethical dilemmas experienced by periop erative nurses are explored. The aim of the study was to elicit the ethical dilemmas that arise in perioperative nurses' practice. The study has a descriptive design and the data are critical incidents described by 48 anaesthetic nurses and 76 operating theatre nurses. An analysis of the critical incidents gave four domains of ethical dilemmas: those arising as (...) value conflicts in the intraoperative phase of surgery; those emanating from the patient's right of self- determination ; those arising in caring for patients; and those resulting from the alloca tion of scarce resources and the demands of increased effectiveness. (shrink)

This essay argues that Knafo and Teschke fundamentally misread Brenner’s original contribution to the transition debate. They equate his rejection of trans-historical or trans-modal laws of motion with the notion that social-property relations do not have strong rules of reproduction that structure the actions of agents and give rise to ‘developmental patterns’ specific to each form of social labour. Knafo and Teschke’s critique of Brenner’s analysis of capitalist expansion and crisis is also theoretically and empirically questionable.

Theory as History brings together twelve essays by Jarius Banaji addressing the nature of modes of production, the forms of historical capitalism and the varieties of pre-capitalist modes of production. Problematic formulations concerning the relationship of social-property relations and the laws of motion of different modes of production and his notion of merchant and slave-holding capitalism undermines Banaji’s project of constructing a non-unilinear, non-Eurocentric Marxism.

Aneivas and Nişancıoğlu’s provocative book,How the West Came to Rule, attempts to provide an alternative account of the origins of capitalism to both ‘Political Marxism’ and ‘World-Systems Theory’. By making uneven and combined development a universal dynamic of human history and by utilising a flawed concept of ‘Eurocentrism’, however, they introduce a high degree of causal pluralism into their analysis. Despite important insights into the specific dynamics of different pre-capitalist forms of social labour, their account of the origins of capitalism (...) inHow the West Came to Rulesuffers from causal indeterminacy and historical inaccuracies. (shrink)

Mathematical tradition has it that transformations characterized by a negative Jacobian determinant are referred to as improper transformations. The symmetry of a physical object corresponding to such an improper transformation becomes an improper symmetry. Improper symmetries have been successfully used for the purpose of crystal symmetry. The extension of these purely spatial symmetries to the domain of spacetime has led to a prejudicial use of light-cone properties, thus affecting adversely an unbiased symmetry classification. We pinpoint these prejudicial procedures and trace (...) their historical origin, while presenting an alternative that restores an unbiased treatment of improper spacetime symmetries. The applications discussed relate to recent developments in the symmetry classification of magnetic crystals and to the extension of Neumann's principle to the time domain. (shrink)

As medical technology becomes more sophisticate the ability to manipulate nature and manage disease forces the dilemma of when can becomes ought. Indeed, most bioethical discourse is framed in terms of balancing the values and interests and the benefits and burdens that inform principled decisions about how, when, and whether interventions should occur. Yet, despite advances in science and technology, one caregiver mandate remains as constant and compelling as it was for the earliest shaman—the relief of pain. Even when cure (...) is impossible, the physician's duty of care includes palliation. Moreover, the centrality of this obligation is both unquestioned and universal, transcending time and cultural boundaries.Although universally acknowledged, pain is a complex phenomenon for both the patient and the caregiver, influenced as much by personal values and cultural traditions as by physiological injury and disease. (shrink)

The Concept “hope,” (Greek), appears in two of Heraclitus’s fragments. This essay offers an attentive reading of these fragments and examines the role of hope in Heraclitus’s thinking. The essay is divided into two parts. The first part examines the meaning of the Greek notion for hope, (Greek), by looking into archaic and classical sources, particularly the myth about the origin of hope in Hesiod’s Works and Days. Based upon the renewed understanding of the concept, the second part of the (...) essay examines Heraclitus’s use of the concept of hope and demonstrates the central role of hope in Heraclitus’s thinking. (shrink)

In order to defend the regress argument for foundationalism against Post’s objection that relevant forms of inferential justification are not transitive, Lydia McGrew and Timothy McGrew define a relation E of positive evidence, which, they contend, has the following features: It is a necessary condition for any inferential justification; it is transitive and irreflexive; and it enables both a strengthened regress argument proof against Post’s objection and an argument that nothing can ever appear in its own justificational ancestry. (...) In reply, we construct in their own terms both a counterexample to the would-be transitivity of E, and a related objection to their never-in-its-own-ancestry argument. We also rebut their rejection of certain counterexamples to the would-be transitivity of some forms of inferential justification. By doing so, and by questioning their transitivity claim for E, we aim to further the project of undermining the circularity arguments advanced by a zoo of skeptics, relativists, antirealists and internalists against realism and externalism. (shrink)

Collingwood's theory of presuppositions has never been taken very seriously. But critics have completely overlooked its significance as a theory or model of inquiry intimately tied to certain aspects of discourse in a context of investigation. Viewed this way, Collingwood's theory is on very strong ground, especially when it is reconstructed with the aid of a formal language. The reconstruction shows what is essential to the theory and what is not, allowing us to disregard those of Collingwood's extravagant claims which (...) have frustrated an understanding of his theory's real strength. The reconstruction also provides a general framework within which recent discussion of presuppositions can be unified. (shrink)

Outlines a conceptual argument against the Principle of Sufficient reason. The argument is presented in detail in earlier work, and is based on deductive inferences from PSR's own concept of explanation. The argument shows that not everything can have an explanation of the sort claimed by PSR. So far from being a presupposition of reason itself, as some think, PSR can be refuted by reason, arguing only from PSR's own concept of explanation. Hence PSR cannot be used to argue that (...) there must be some explanation or reason for existence, invisible at least to science, or that because we do not or cannot know the explanation, there must be irreducible mystery about why there is anything at all rather than nothing, including why there was a Big Bang in the first place. (shrink)

This article focuses on the elderly patient with a progressive and irreversible dementia, most often of the Alzheimer type. However dementia, the decline in mental function from a previous state, can occur in all ages. For example, if Alzheimer's disease is the dementia of the elderly, increasingly AIDS is the dementia of many who are relatively young. I will not present the major ethical issues relating to dementia care following the progression of disease from the mild to the severe stages, (...) for I have done this elsewhere. Among the issues included are: presymptomatic testing, both psychological and genetic; responsible diag- nostic disclosure and use of support groups; restrictions on driving and other activities; preemptive assisted suicide; advance directives for research and treatment; quality of life in relation to the use of life-extending technologies; and euthanasia. (shrink)

Adoption, from the Latin opiate, “to choose,” means “to take into a relationship, especially another's child as one's own”. The word implies a permanent taking of responsibility. While the assumption that biological parents should rear their children is vital to society, adoption provides an alternative that is sometimes necessary.

The concept of altruism, or disinterested concern for another's welfare, has been discussed by everyone from theologians to psychologists to biologists. In this book, evolutionary, neurological, developmental, psychological, social, cultural, and religious aspects of altruistic behavior are examined. It is a collaborative examination of one of humanity's essential and defining characteristics by renowned researchers from various disciplines. Their integrative dialogue illustrates that altruistic behavior is a significant mode of expression that can be studied by various scholarly methods and understood from (...) a variety of perspectives in both the humanities and the sciences. Altruism and Altruistic Love establishes a framework for scholarship on altruism by presenting definitions, a historical overview, a review of contemporary research, and debates in various disciplines, as well as a discussion of directions for future work. (shrink)

The author observes that Plato's Republic and Job have a common premise, namely the extremely unjust treatment of a just person to prove that the person is just, proceeding with a close comparative commentary on both works.

David Papineau's model of scientific reduction, contrary to his intent, appears to enable a naturalist realist account of the primitive normativity involved in a biological adaptation's being “for” this or that (say the eye's being for seeing). By disabling the crucial anti‐naturalist arguments against any such reduction, his model would support a cogni‐tivist semantics for normative claims like “The heart is for pumping blood, and defective if it doesn't.” No moral claim would follow, certainly. Nonetheless, by thus “pressing from below” (...) we may learn something about moral normativity. For instance, suppose non‐cognitivists like Mackie are right that the semantics of normative claims should be “unified”: if the semantics of moral claims is non‐cognitivist, so too is that of all normative claims. Then, assuming that a naturalist reduction does yield a sound cognitivist account of the primitive normativity, it would follow that our semantics of moral claims is cognitivist as well. (shrink)

David Papineau’s model of scientific reduction, contrary to his intent, appears to enable a naturalist realist account of the primitive normativity involved in a biological adaptation’s being “for” this or that (say the eye’s being for seeing). By disabling the crucial anti-naturalist arguments against any such reduction, his model would support a cognitivist semantics for normative claims like “The heart is for pumping blood, and defective if it doesn’t.” No moral claim would follow, certainly. Nonetheless, by thus “pressing from below” (...) we may learn something about moral normativity. For instance, suppose non-cognitivists like Mackie are right that the semantics of normative claims should be “unified”: if the semantics of moral claims is non-cognitivist, so too is that of all normative claims. Then, assuming that a naturalist reduction does yield a sound cognitivist account of the primitive normativity, it would follow that our semantics of moral claims is cognitivist as well. (shrink)