The doctor's use of deception in appropriate circumstances has commonly been considered a necessity of the medical art. Resistance to full and frank communication is typical of many traditionally Catholic countries, and particularly of Italy, a western country where Catholicism remains particularly influential. The Catholic teaching on truth and lies, and the problem of telling the truth to a severely ill patient is discussed. It is suggested that the contemporary Catholic model of gradually telling a terminal patient the truth, which (...) looks reasonable and feasible in theory, is rarely followed in practice, as in the majority of cases the truth is not told tout court. Problems stem from the way in which medicine is currently practiced in Italy; from the synergism between Catholicism and the medical tradition's grounded paternalism; and from the ambiguity of the term ?hope?. Catholic ethics in fact recommends that the truth must be told without destroying hope, but the Catholic meaning of ?hope? is very different from its meaning in current language. (shrink)

The central question addressed in this paper is about the ethics of engaging with educational development in countries perceived as undemocratic or as failing to respect human rights. More particularly, it examines the nature of the arguments that are brought to bear on this issue. It suggests that these are essentially consequentialist in character and hence fall prey to many of the limitations of such consequentialism, including the unpredictability of what will unfold, the indeterminacy of the consequences and the complex (...) balance sheet of benefits and loss that might be anticipated. The paper also suggests some unease about the way judgements of the acceptability or otherwise of political processes are made across international boundaries and the presumptions of a ‘democratic’ western perspective. The observation of these complexities of principle and fact take the argument into the territory of case-based ethical judgement and the world of casuistry. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to present some of the differences and similari- ties in various versions of the double effect principle. The following formulations will be analyzed: that of Thomas Aquinas and two contemporary ap- proaches, namely those of Mangan and Boyle. It will be shown that the presented modern versions vary significantly and the distinction between their intended and only predicted effects is far from clear. As a result, the different contemporary for- mulations of DDE lead to (...) contradictory conclusions, with some justifying what the others condemn. Moreover, it will be demonstrated that, unlike Aquinas, contem- porary authors mostly concentrate on unintentionality condition while neglecting the proportionality requirement. So, unlike Aquinas, they only take into account a narrow scope of cases, where the evil effect occurs with certainty, which leads to a complicated and intricate hypothetical intention test like Donagan’s. It will be shown that, besides its theoretical indistinctness, DDE lead to serious pragmatic risks. It can be quite easily misused as a kind of psychological mechanism to protect self-esteem from a sense of guilt since wrong-doing is treated as merely a predicted unintended effect. (shrink)

Nobody's going to object to the advice "Do the right thing", but that doesn't mean everyone's always going to follow it. Sometimes this is because of our volitional limitations; we cannot always bring ourselves to make the sacrifices that right action requires. But sometimes this is because of our cognitive limitations; we cannot always be sure of what is right. Sometimes we can't be sure of what's right because we don't know the non-normative facts. But sometimes, even if we were (...) to know all of the non-normative facts, we'd still not be sure about what's right, because we're uncertain about the normative reasons those facts give us. In this dissertation, I attempt to answer the question of what we're to do when we must act under fundamentally normative uncertainty. It's tempting to think that, in such circumstances, we should do what we regard as most probably right. I argue that this view is mistaken, for it is insensitive to how degrees of actions' values compare across different normative hypotheses; if an action is probably right, but, if wrong, is terribly, terribly, wrong, it may be rational not to do that action. A better answer is that we should do the action with the highest expected value. I spend the first part of the dissertation providing arguments for and rebutting arguments against this view of action under normative uncertainty. I spend the next part of the dissertation explaining what degrees of value are, and showing how they can be compared across normative hypotheses. In the remaining parts of the dissertation, I consider two questions related to our primary question -- first, what is one required, or obligated, to do under normative uncertainty; and second, what is it rational for one to do when one is not only normatively uncertain in the way we've been discussing, but also uncertain about what it is rational to do under this sort of normative uncertainty. (shrink)