The essay begins from Alan Gewirth's influential account of human rights, and specifically with his argument that the human right to political participation can only be fulfilled by competitive, liberal democracy. I show that his argument rests on empirical, rather than conceptual grounds, which opens the possibility that in China, alternative forms of participation may be legitimate or even superior. An examination of the theory and contemporary practice of ‘democratic centralism’ shows that while it does not now adequately support the (...) right to political participation, a reformed version could. I focus in particular on the roles that could be played by consultative institutions, looking both to recent Chinese proposals and to analogues currently existing in Japan. I conclude that a reformed democratic centralism may well be the objective toward which Chinese people should strive. (shrink)

The most complete and up-to-date philosophy reference for a new generation, with entries ranging fromObjects to Wisdom, Socrates to Jean-Paul Sartre, Ancient Egyptian Philosophy to Yoruba Epistemology. The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes: * More than 2000 alphabetically arranged, accessible entries * Contributors from more than 1200 of the world's leading thinkers * Comprehensive coverage of the classic philosophical themes, such as Plato, Arguments for the Existence of God and Metaphysics * Up-to-date coverage of contemporary philosophers, ideas, schools and (...) recent developments, including Jacques Derrida, Poststructuralism and Ecological Philosophy * Unrivalled international and multicultural scope with entries such as Modern Islamic Philosophy, Marxist Thought in Latin America and Chinese Buddhist Thought * An exhaustive index for ease of use * Extensive cross-referencing * Suggestions for further reading at the end of each entry. (shrink)

The authors develop an analysis of education. They show how education carries an essentially arbitrary cultural scheme which is actually based on power. More widely, the reproduction of culture through education is shown to play a key part in the reproduction of the whole social system.

This book traces the growth of philosophical justifications of toleration. The contributors discuss the grounds on which we may be required to be tolerant and the proper limits of toleration. They consider the historical and conceptual relation between toleration and scepticism and ask whether toleration is justified by considerations of autonomy or of prudence. The papers cover a range of perspectives on the subject, including Marxist and Socialist as well as liberal views. The editor's introduction prepares the ground by discussing (...) the essential features of the subject and offers a lucid survey of the theories and arguments put forward in the book. The collection arises out of the Morrell Toleration Project at the University of York and all the papers were written as contributions to that project. The discussion will be of interest to specialists in philosophy, in political and social theory and in intellectual history. (shrink)

Creative accounting, which generally involves the preparation of financial statements with the intention of misleading readers of those statements, is prima facie a form oflying, as defined by Bok.1 This paper starts by defining and illustrating creative accounting. It examines and rejects the arguments for considering creative accounting, in spite of its deceptive intent, as not being a form of lying. It then examines the ethical issues raised by creative accounting, in the light of the literature on the ethics of (...) lying. This literature includes the evaluation of various excuses and justifications for lying, and these are examined here in relation to creative accounting. It is concluded that even in circumstances in which creative accounting would arguably serve a worthy purpose, that purpose would be at least as well served by honest communication. (shrink)

A distinction is made between moral indoctrination and instruction in ethics. It is argued that the legitimate and important field of computer ethics should not be permitted to become mere moral indoctrination. Computer ethics is an academic field in its own right with unique ethical issues that would not have existed if computer technology had not been invented. Several example issues are presented to illustrate this point. The failure to find satisfactory non-computer analogies testifies to the uniqueness of computer ethics. (...) Lack of an effective analogy forces us to discover new moral values, formulate new moral principles, develop new policies, and find new ways to think about the issues presented to us. For all of these reasons, the kind of issues presented deserve to be addressed separately from others that might at first appear similar. At the very least, they have been so transformed by computing technology that their altered form demands special attention. (shrink)

This paper reviews codes of ethics and codes of conduct from different countries. The differences and similarities between code content and between attitudes are considered. Distinction is drawn between a code of ethics and a code of conduct. Recommendations are made for establishing a common framework for IFIP (International Federation for Information Process) Member or Affiliate Societies.

The idea that reasoning is a singular accomplishment of the human species has an ancient pedigree.Yet this idea remains as controversial as it is ancient. Those who would deny reasoning to nonhuman animals typically hold a language-based conception of inference which places it beyond the reach of languageless creatures. Others reject such an anthropocentric conception of reasoning on the basis of similar performance by humans and animals in some reasoning tasks, such as transitive inference. Here, building on the modal similarity (...) theory of Vigo [J Exp Theor Artif Intell, 2008 (in press)], we offer an account in which reasoning depends on a core suite of subsymbolic processes for similarity assessment, discrimination, and categorization. We argue that premise-based inference operates through these subsymbolic processes, even in humans. Given the robust discrimination and categorization abilities of some species of nonhuman animals, we believe that they should also be regarded as capable of simple forms of inference. Finally, we explain how this account of reasoning applies to the kinds of transitive inferences that many nonhuman animals display. (shrink)

The use of role-playing (“active learning”) as a teaching tool has been reported in areas as diverse as social psychology, history and analytical chemistry. Its use as a tool in the teaching of engineering ethics and professionalism is also not new, but the approach develops new perspectives when used in a college class of exceptionally wide cultural diversity. York University is a large urban university (40,000 undergraduates) that draws its enrolment primarily from the Greater Toronto Area, arguably one of the (...) most culturally diverse cities in the world, embracing the largest percentage of Canada’s immigration. Among the area’s five million inhabitants, 50% identify themselves as a visible minority born outside Canada, while over 100 languages and dialects are spoken daily. Although students admitted from this international pool have usually been exposed to western attitudes during secondary education and are rapidly assimilated into Canadian culture, responses to specific ethical issues are strongly influenced by their prior culture. Two and three-part scripts for case studies based on NSF or original scenarios were written to illustrate issues such as gifts, attitudes towards women and ethnic minorities, conflict of interest, whistle-blowing, sexual harassment, individual rights, privacy, environment, intellectual property, and others. Following the presentation, the actors lead group discussion based on previously specified questions. Once the initial shyness and reluctance of some cultures has been overcome through the building of rapport, students have written original scripts based on hypothetical or prior personal situations. The method is now being adopted in a short course format to assist the professional integration of foreign trained engineers. (shrink)

How are Chinese philosophy and analytic philosophy-two very distinct traditions-alike? In this volume, fifteen distinguished scholars compare and contrast the methodologies, finding areas in which each tradition can learn from, contribute to, and complement the other.

The most complete and up-to-date philosophy reference for a new generation, with entries ranging fromObjects to Wisdom, Socrates to Jean-Paul Sartre, Ancient Egyptian Philosophy to Yoruba Epistemology. The _Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ includes: * More than 2000 alphabetically arranged, accessible entries * Contributors from more than 1200 of the world's leading thinkers * Comprehensive coverage of the classic philosophical themes, such as Plato, Arguments for the Existence of God and Metaphysics * Up-to-date coverage of contemporary philosophers, ideas, schools and (...) recent developments, including Jacques Derrida, Poststructuralism and Ecological Philosophy * Unrivalled international and multicultural scope with entries such as Modern Islamic Philosophy, Marxist Thought in Latin America and Chinese Buddhist Thought * An exhaustive index for ease of use * Extensive cross-referencing * Suggestions for further reading at the end of each entry. (shrink)

Health education lies on the boundary between family and school. Its contents are therefore difficult to define, even though the need to educate, especially through dialogue, is quite clear. Young people who feel uncomfortable with themselves are already half way to failure.

Scientific editors’ policies, including peer review, are based mainly on tradition and belief. Do they actually achieve their desired effects, the selection of the best manuscripts and improvement of those published? Editorial decisions have important consequences—to investigators, the scientific community, and all who might benefit from correct information or be harmed by misleading research results. These decisions should be judged not just by intentions of reviewers and editors but also by the actual consequences of their actions. A small but growing (...) number of studies has put editorial policies to a strong scientific test. In a randomized, controlled trial. blinding reviewers to author and institution was usually successful and improved the quality of reviews. Two studies have shown that, contrary to conventional wisdom, reviewers early in their careers give better reviews than senior reviewers. Many studies have shown low agreement between reviewers but there is disagreement about whether this represents a failing of peer review or the expected and valuable effect of choosing reviewers with complementary expertise. In a study of whether manuscripts are improved by peer review and editing, articles published in Annals of Internal Medicine were improved in 33 of 34 dimensions of reporting quality, but published articles still had room for improvement. Because of the central place of peer review in the scientific community and the resources it requires, more studies are needed to define what it does and does not accomplish. (shrink)

In this article, we focus on the mentoring process, and we argue that the internal and external pressures extant at research universities may create a research culture that may be antithetical to appropriate mentoring. We developed a scale based on motivation theory to determine the perceived research culture in departments and research laboratories, and a mentoring scale to determine approaches to mentoring graduate students. Participants were 610 faculty members across 49 departments at a research oriented university. The findings were that (...) a mastery-oriented research climate and an outcome-oriented research climate were manifested at the university. More importantly, each research climate had its own unique impact on how the faculty approached mentoring graduate students. A mastery research climate was related to a more supportive approach to mentoring than the outcome research climate. We concluded by suggesting that the outcome research climate may have an adverse effect on effective mentoring and on maintaining research ethics. (shrink)

Leading scholars explore the later thought of Merleau-Ponty and its central role in the modernism-postmodernism debate.

In the wake of the revolutions of 1989, the ongoing political turmoil in the Soviet Union, and the democratization of most of Latin America, what is the task of political theorists? Ronald Beiner's invigorating critique of liberal theory and liberal practices takes on the shibboleths of modern Western discourse. He confronts the aridity of liberal societies that possess incommensurable "values" and "rights," but no principles. To Beiner, this neutralist view is both a false description of liberal society and an incoherent (...) political ideal. Rather, he encourages the theorist to remain faithful to the important task of questioning and criticism, instead of serving as a source of ideological reassurance about our own superiority. Beiner looks to the Socratic tradition for guidance. Permitting ethos to replace values, and discourse about "the good" to replace talk about "rights," the theorist is able to reorder social priorities. Considered in this light, the liberal political philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s appears insufficiently Socratic, as does a liberal way of life that presents itself as a model of imitation. Polemical, impassioned, and brilliantly argued, What's the Matter with Liberalism? is essential reading for everyone who cares about contemporary theory and the future of liberal society. In the wake of the revolutions of 1989, the ongoing political turmoil in the Soviet Union, and the democratization of most of Latin America, what is the task of political theorists? Ronald Beiner's invigorating critique of liberal theory and liberal practices takes on the shibboleths of modern Western discourse. He confronts the aridity of liberal societies that possess incommensurable "values" and "rights," but no principles. To Beiner, this neutralist view is both a false description of liberal society and an incoherent political ideal. Rather, he encourages the theorist to remain faithful to the important task of questioning and criticism, instead of serving as a source of ideological reassurance about our own superiority. Beiner looks to the Socratic tradition for guidance. Permitting ethos to replace values, and discourse about "the good" to replace talk about "rights," the theorist is able to reorder social priorities. Considered in this light, the liberal political philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s appears insufficiently Socratic, as does a liberal way of life that presents itself as a model of imitation. Polemical, impassioned, and brilliantly argued, What's the Matter with Liberalism? is essential reading for everyone who cares about contemporary theory and the future of liberal society. (shrink)

Research is now an increasingly heterogeneous activity involving an expanded range of new actors and stake-holders and employing an eclectic range of epistemologies and methodologies. The emergence of these new research paradigms — and, in particular, of so-called ‘Mode 2’ knowledge production that is highly contextualised and socially distributed — raises new and challenging ethical issues and also important questions about the autonomy of science and the social responsibilities of scientists.

Professor King's concept of the philosophy of history leads him to offer this demonstration of the incoherence, even absurdity, of the notion that the past can have nothing to teach us - whether posed by those who argue that history is "unique" or that it is merely "contextual".

I argue that considerations about computational complexity show that all finite agents need characteristics like those that have been called epistemic virtues. The necessity of these virtues follows in part from the nonexistence of shortcuts, or efficient ways of finding shortcuts, to cognitively expensive routines. It follows that agents must possess the capacities – metavirtues –of developing in advance the cognitive virtues they will need when time and memory are at a premium.

World politics, international relations, representative government. Author's works in demand.

This book represents emerging alternative perspectives to the "constructivist" orthodoxy that currently dominates the field of science and technology studies. Various contributions from distinguished Americans and Europeans in the field, provide arguments and evidence that it is not enough simply to say that science is "socially situated." Controversial Science focuses on important political, ethical, and broadly normative considerations that have yet to be given their due, but which point to a more realistic and critical perspective on science policy.

This paper examines two different, but closely related, classes of problems. The first part deals with whistleblowers, and the difficulties and dangers that they have often faced, although their actions, in the rare cases where they become necessary, are indispensable for the maintenance of honest science. The problems are illustrated by discussion of several specific cases from 1960 to 1990.The second part deals with problems that face many young scientists today, and the stresses to which they are exposed in an (...) increasingly competitive atmosphere. There are powerful pressures for premature publication, and many gifted scientists are driven to spend an inordinate amount of time in writing grant applications that are turned down for lack of funds, while receiving high praise from reviewers. Correction of conditions is an important matter for science policy; it is also important, among other things, to relieve pressures that would tend to encourage deviations from the standards necessary for trustworthy science. (shrink)

An area where conflicts of interest can take place in Estonia is in the conduct of clinical trials. The paper lists the main areas where such conflicts of interest can occur. The author also briefly discusses Estonia’s current position with regard to regulating genetic information and the commencement of the Estonian Genome Project.

Indeed, this is the first serious book-length study of the subject by a philosopher of science.

Engineers and scientists, whose professional responsibilities often influence the natural environment, have sought to develop an environmental ethic that will be in tune with their attitudes toward the non-human environment, and that will assist them in decision making regarding questions of environmental quality. In this paper the classical traditions in normative ethics are explored in an attempt to formulate such an environmental ethic. I conclude, however, that because the discipline of ethics is directed at person-person interactions, ethics as a scholarly (...) discipline does not help us understand how we ought to treat non-human nature. We therefore cannot look to ethics as a source for understanding our attitudes and for providing guidance to our actions with regard to the environment. To do so is to ask too much of ethics.If we are to find an acceptable environmental morality, it must come from a new paradigm. One approach might be to understand our attitudes on the basis of spirituality, modeled after animistic religions. (shrink)

The Helsinki Declaration is the ‘gold standard’ — a directive, not a law, on how to conduct controlled studies in humans in conformity with ethical principles. In spite of many discussions about their unsuitability some articles have remained unchanged in the most recent (sixth) revision of the Declaration. The demand to use “the best treatment” excludes use of placebo in the control group and presents an obstacle to the scientific evaluation of a number of drugs and treatments in general. The (...) use of placebo is justified whenever its use does not cause irreversible damage or considerable suffering to the well informed patient. It must be, is, and will be used in the controlled clinical trials of treatments of a great number of diseases especially those which have a tendency to spontaneous improvement, even healing, or have a pronounced psychological component. (shrink)

This four-volume collection covers the organization, financing and regulation of health care systems in four distinct contexts: financing and delivering health care, reforming health care systems, new forms of health system, and rethinking health care systems. A general introduction provides a review of the collection as a whole, and individual introductions set the context for each volume, providing a unique and valuable resource for student and scholar alike.

This paper considers the relationship between ethics, technology and law, and the roles and limitations each has in this relationship. It argues that ethics has the key role in establishing a resilient, comprehensive and sensitive information infrastructure. It puts forward a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities for the electronic community. … the most important use of the internet, and indeed the NII, will be to allow individuals to communicate with each other and to rapidly access the information they require or (...) desire…. A combination of ethics, technology and law are needed to insure the effective development of this important aspect of the network of the future. Robert E. Kahn1. (shrink)

This paper attempts to define the concept of placebo as it is used in the clinical context The author claims that X is a placebo if and only if X has such a property dp, that whenever in a therapeutic situation T a stimulus S appears, then in attending conditions A, it will cause a beneficial reaction R in the patient. Formally, the same structure may be used to define any pharmacologically active drug. The main difference between the drug and (...) a placebo is in the range of possible substitutions for X and the property d. For the active drug there is only one possible substitution for X and property d and it can be scientifically explained why, and how the drug works. In the case of a placebo a set of possible substitutions for X and d is open, and so far it is impossible to offer any scientifically valid explanation of the action mechanism of placebo. (shrink)

The historical background of the discovery of adverse health effects of medicines, food additives, pesticides, and other chemicals is reviewed, and the development of national and international regulations and testing procedures to protect the public against the toxic effects of these drugs and chemicals is outlined. Ethical considerations of the safety evaluation of drugs and chemicals by human experimentation and animal toxicity studies, ethical problems associated with clinical trials, with the falsification of clinical and toxicological data, and with inadequate experimental (...) methodology, are reviewed, and the ethics of the marketing of drugs and their post-marketing surveillance, are similarly considered. These ethical problems are illustrated with many specific examples, including the drugs neoarsphenamine, chloramphenicol, thalidomide, diethyl stilboestrol and benoxaprofen. (shrink)

This paper addresses, and seeks to correct, some frequent misunderstandings concerning the claim that science is socially constructed. It describes several features of scientific inquiry that have been usefully illuminated by constructivist studies of science, including the mundane or tacit skills involved in research, the social relationships in scientific laboratories, the causes of scientific controversy, and the interconnection of science and culture. Social construction, the paper argues, should be seen not as an alternative to but an enhancement of scientists’ own (...) professional understanding of how science is done. The richer, more finely textured accounts of scientific practice that the constructivist approach provides are potentially of great relevance to public policy. (shrink)

Approaches to global ethics have drawn on a number of diverse theoretical traditions, such as Kantianism and utilitarianism. While emerging frameworks contribute to a growing awareness of and interest in ethics within a global society, the values that they prioritize are not adequate for realizing a just, equitable and fair system of global governance. This article considers the possibilities of an alternative ethic—a feminist ethic of care—and explores how it can bear on present circumstances, including global inequity and injustice. This (...) care ethic has been put forward as a viable normative approach to politics and policy. Little attention, however, has been paid to the potential of a care ethic within the globalization and ethics debate. This article illustrates how the values and corresponding principles of care, grounded in relationships and responsibilities, are essential to responding adequately to the current challenges of globalization. By examining the relevance of care in this context, the article seeks to broaden dominant ethical worldviews and contribute to the articulation of normative tools for examining globalization while at the same time avoiding the trappings of conventional universality—the abstract and a priori thinking typically associated with conceptions of global ethics. (shrink)