This article examines the account of the relationship between sin and suffering provided by J. L. A. Garcia in “Sin and Suffering in a Catholic Understanding of Medical Ethics,” in this issue. Garcia draws on the (Roman) Catholic tradition and particularly on the thought of Thomas Aquinas, who remains an important resource for Catholic theology. Nevertheless, his interpretation of Thomas is open to criticism, both in terms of omissions and in terms of positive claims. Garcia includes those elements of Thomas (...) that are purely philosophical, such as natural law and acquired virtue, but neglects the theological and infused virtues, the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit, and the beatitudes. These omissions distort his account of the Christian life so that he underplays both the radical problem posed by sin (and suffering), and the radical character of the ultimate solution: redemption in Christ through the grace of the Holy Spirit. (shrink)

The term ‘dignity’ is used in a variety of ways but always to attribute or recognize some status in the person. The present paper concerns not the status itself but the virtue of acknowledging that status. This virtue, which Thomas Aquinas calls ‘observantia’, concerns how dignity is honoured, respected, or observed. By analogy with justice observantia can be thought of both as a general virtue and as a special virtue. As a general virtue observantia refers to that respect for human (...) dignity that is implicit in all acts of justice. As a special virtue it concerns the specific way we show esteem for people. Healthcare represents a challenge to observantia because those in need of healthcare are doubly restricted in expressing their dignity in action: in the first place by their ill health, and in the second place by the conditions required by healthcare. To be understood properly, especially in the context of healthcare, the.. (shrink)

The diagnosis of death by neurological criteria (colloquially known as ‘brain death’) is accepted in some form in law and medical practice throughout the world, and has been endorsed in principle by the Catholic Church. However, the rationale for this acceptance has been challenged by the accumulation of evidence of integrated vital activity in bodies diagnosed dead by neurological criteria. This paper sets out 10 different Catholic responses to the current crisis of confidence and assesses them in relation to a (...) Catholic understanding of philosophical anthropology. Having considered each of these responses, none is found to provide good grounds for the moral certainty about death needed for current transplant practice to be ethically acceptable. Unless adequate grounds for the use of neurological criteria can be restored, current transplantation practice will have become what Pope John Paul II called a ‘furtive, but no less serious and real, form of euthanasia’. (shrink)

Slippery slope arguments have been important in the euthanasia debate for at least half a century. In 1957 the Cambridge legal scholar Glanville Williams wrote a controversial book, The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, in which he presented the decriminalizing of euthanasia as a modern liberal proposal taking its rightful place alongside proposals to decriminalize contraception, sterilization, abortion, and attempted suicide (all of which the book also advocated).1 Opposition to these reforms was in turn presented as exclusively religious (...) and particularly Roman Catholic. Thus Williams asserted that "euthanasia can be condemned only according to religious opinion" (1957, p. 312).The following year, in .. (shrink)

Although virtually all comparative research about risk perception focuses on which hazards are of concern to people in different culture groups, much can be gained by focusing on predictors of levels of risk perception in various countries and places. In this case, we examine standard and novel predictors of risk perception in seven sites among communities affected by a flood in Mexico (one site) and volcanic eruptions in Mexico (one site) and Ecuador (five sites). We conducted more than 450 interviews (...) with questions about how people feel at the time (after the disaster) regarding what happened in the past, their current concerns, and their expectations for the future. We explore how aspects of the context in which people live have an effect on how strongly people perceive natural hazards in relationship with demographic, well-being, and social network factors. Generally, our research indicates that levels of risk perception for past, present, and future aspects of a specific hazard are similar across these two countries and seven sites. However, these contexts produced different predictors of risk perception—in other words, there was little overlap between sites in the variables that predicted the past, present, or future aspects of risk perception in each site. Generally, current stress was related to perception of past danger of an event in the Mexican sites, but not in Ecuador; network variables were mainly important for perception of past danger (rather than future or present danger), although specific network correlates varied from site to site across the countries. (shrink)

The British Parliament has recently approved regulations to allow techniques ‘to prevent the transmission of serious mitochondrial disease from a mother to her child’. The regulations term these techniques ‘mitochondrial donation’, but in the popular media, the issue has been discussed under the heading of ‘three parent’ babies or ‘three parent’ embryos. This paper examines the language of the debate, with particular reference to one of the techniques approved. It concludes that the terminology of ‘mitochondrial donation’ is scientifically inaccurate and (...) ethically misleading, while the popular media description of ‘three parent’ embryos is broadly accurate, at least for one technique. This latter phrase also has the great merit, from an ethical perspective, of drawing attention to the ‘other woman’, the egg donor. She takes risks with her health in order to provide the egg which supplies the body of the embryo. Without her, this embryo simply would not exist. (shrink)

A recent online article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, which received wide media coverage, raised the possibility that children are being ‘subjected to torture’ due to the ‘fervent or fundamentalist views’ of their parents. However, the quality of argument in that article was inadequate to sustain such a radical thesis. There was no engagement with the perspectives of different religious traditions about end-of-life care. Instead the authors invoked practices such as male infant circumcision which are wholly irrelevant to the (...) end-of-life theme. There were serious failings in relation to core principles of social and epidemiological research practice: the study based its conclusion on a sample of only six cases and failed to consider even the more obvious confounding features. Rather than demonizing the religious beliefs of parents there should be recognition of the need for mutual respect, dialogue based on an ‘expert–expert relationship’ and collaboration based on ‘shared understanding’. (shrink)

It has become common, in both popular and scholarly discourse, to appeal to ‘delayed animation’ as an argument for abortion (DAAA). Augustine and Aquinas seemingly held that the rational soul was infused midway in pregnancy, and therefore did not regard early abortion as homicide. The authority of these thinkers is thus cited by some contemporary Christians as a reason to tolerate or, for proportionate reasons, to promote first-trimester abortion and embryo experimentation. The present essay is an exercise in aetiology. It (...) examines the origins of DAAA. Distinctions are drawn between different forms of DAAA in historical context, premises, and conclusions. Some forms raise important anthropological questions, though these arguments are not indefeasible. The most popular forms of DAAA, which are typically framed as appeals to precedent, are the weakest, in that there is little precedent for DAAA before 1950. The argument is in fact a novelty in the tradition. (shrink)

What are angels? Where were they first encountered? Can we distinguish angels from gods, faeries, ghosts, and aliens? And why do they remain so popular? This concise introduction investigates stories and speculations about angels in religions old and new, in art, literature, film, and the popular imagination.

What are angels? Where were they first encountered? Can we distinguish angels from gods, fairies, ghosts, and aliens? And why do they remain so popular? This Very Short Introduction investigates stories and speculations about angels in religions old and new, in art, literature, film, and the popular imagination.

Abstract‘Assisted dying’ (an umbrella term for euthanasia and/or assisted suicide) is frequently defended as an act of autonomous self-determination in death but, given a choice, between 93.3% and 100% of patients are reluctant to self-administer (median 99.5%). If required to self-administer, fewer patients request assisted death and, of these, a sizable proportion do not self-administer but die of natural causes. This manifest avoidance runs counter to the concept of autonomous self-determination, even on the supposition that suicide could truly be autonomous. (...) The avoidance of self-administration does not show that self-administration, when it occurs, is necessarily autonomous. It suggests, rather, that there are other frames by which assisted dying is being understood. One such is desire for medical control, a desire shared by patients and doctors. Such a frame is not directed towards an exacting autonomy (self-directed action by the patient) but towards a comforting heteronomy (letting the doctor take control). (shrink)

This article examines the claim of Paul Badham that there is theological precedent for ‘a Christian case for assisted dying’. The writings of Rev. William Inge and Joseph Fletcher do indeed advocate forms of assisted dying. However, this precedent is deeply problematic for its ugly attitude towards people with disabilities.

Volume 25, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 94-97.

There has been little considered reflection by Catholic theologians on the concepts of gender identity, gender dysphoria and gender transition. Seeking inspiration in the Scriptures, some Catholic thinkers have interpreted the first three chapters of Genesis and especially the text ‘male and female he created them’ (Gen. 1:27) as requiring all human beings to live in the gender role congruent with their biological sex, and have viewed the biology of sex as self-evident. This article argues that these chapters constitute an (...) appropriate locus for reflection on theological anthropology but that they need to be taken together with other texts and especially with the explicit teaching of Jesus Christ. In the Gospel according to Matthew, the one occasion in which Jesus invokes this passage from Genesis is when he draws attention to exceptional examples in nature and, in a striking phrase, states that some ‘have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 19:12). If the Genesis text is interpreted in the light of the words of Christ, the binary division of the sexes, while ordained by God and the basis for a vocation to marry and procreate, admits of exceptions both natural and supernatural. (shrink)

Rev. Kevin Flannery, SJ, has helpfully drawn attention to some key sources for magisterial teaching on “vital conflicts,” where interventions to save a mother’s life would involve or lead to the death of her unborn child. However, former responsa by the Holy Office on this topic from 1884 to 1902 need to be interpreted carefully and understood in relation to the context of the time. Recent teaching has indeed clarified that the condemnation of direct abortion is de fide. Nevertheless, in (...) the last forty years, the magisterium has, de facto, tolerated debate among faithful Catholic scholars over the ethics of craniotomy. Appeal to former magisterial teaching is not sufficient to settle this contemporary debate over what constitutes direct abortion. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 14.1 : 81–104. (shrink)

There are many books about suicide and not a few about physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia, but this is the first academic monograph on the phenomenon of cross-border medical-assistance in sui...

At the time of writing, a British Member of Parliament has just been suspended from his Party for posting a Tweet in which he compared the level of serious adverse events after vaccination for COVI...

Increasingly, taxonomies are being developed and used by industry practitioners to facilitate information interoperability and retrieval. Within a single industrial domain, there exist many taxonomies that are intended for different applications. Industry specific taxonomies often represent the vocabularies that are commonly used by the practitioners. Their jobs are multi-faceted, which include checking for code and regulatory compliance. As such, it will be very desirable if industry practitioners are able to easily locate and browse regulations of interest. In practice, multiple sources (...) of government regulations exist and they are often organized and classified by the needs of the issuing agencies that enforce them rather than the needs of the communities that use them. One way to bridge these two distinct needs is to develop methods and tools that enable practitioners to browse and retrieve government regulations using their own terms and vocabularies, for example, via existing industry taxonomies. The mapping from a single taxonomy to a single regulation is a trivial keyword matching task. We examine a relatedness analysis approach for mapping a single taxonomy to multiple regulations. We then present an approach for mapping multiple taxonomies to a single regulation by measuring the relatedness of concepts. Cosine similarity, Jaccard coefficient and market basket analysis are used to measure the semantic relatedness between concepts from two different taxonomies. Preliminary evaluations of the three relatedness analysis measures are performed using examples from the civil engineering and building industry. These examples illustrate the potential benefits of regulatory usage from the mapping between various taxonomies and regulations. (shrink)

The Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) was formed to create a suite of interoperable ontologies. Ontologies that would serve as a foundation for data and information interoperability in all areas of manufacturing. To ensure that each ontology is developed in a structured and mutually coherent manner, the IOF has committed to the tiered architecture of ontology building based on the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as top level. One of the critical elements of a successful tiered architecture build is the domain mid-level (...) ontologies. However, thus far there has been no mid-level manufacturing ontology that is based on BFO. The IOF has recently released the IOF Core version 1 beta to fill this gap. This paper documents the development process and gives an overview of the current content of the IOF Core. Finally, the paper describes how the IOF Core can be used as the basis for a more domain-specific Supply Chain Ontology. (shrink)

At the beginning of Derrida's ‘Before the Law’, a reading of Kafka's story with that title, is an epigraph from Montaigne's Essays: ‘… science does likewise (and even our law, it is said, has legitimate fictions on which it bases the truth of its justice)…’. Derrida again refers to this quotation in ‘Force of Law’, asking what a ‘legitimate fiction’ might be and what it would mean to establish the basis for the truth of justice. With reference to these writings (...) on the status of narrative and the law, as well as to other texts by Derrida, this paper examines the story of the judge-penitent in Camus' The Fall and, in particular, this ironic reading of the aporetic experience of standing ‘before the law’. What does the narrative, The Fall, entail? Camus writes that the man who speaks in this text is involved in a ‘calculated confession’. How are the borders between truth and fiction, justice and the law, negotiated in this reckoning ‘before the law’? (shrink)

There are two discourses that are used in connection with the provision of good healthcare: a rights discourse and a beneficial design discourse. Although the logical force of these two discourses overlaps, they have distinct and incompatible implications for practical reasoning about health policy. The language of rights can be interpreted as the ground of a well-designed healthcare system stressing the values of equality and inclusion, but it has less application when dealing with questions of cost-effectiveness. This difference reflects the (...) distinction between the deontological status of rights claims and a teleological approach presupposed in the language of beneficial design. However, the value of the separateness of persons contained in the discourse of rights can impose constraints on the adoption of a simple maximizing principle when thinking about the allocation of healthcare resources within a social contract for health. Throughout these issues are discussed by reference to the work of Peter Jones. (shrink)

(2012). Introduction: The value and limits of rights: essays in honour of Peter Jones. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 15, The Value and Limits of Rights: Essays in Honour of Peter Jones, pp. 387-394. doi: 10.1080/13698230.2012.699394.

. Implicit in the cognitive social learning model of personality as articulated by Walter Mischel, Albert Bandura, and others, is an epistemology which emphasizes the activity of the mind in the construction of knowledge. Using Mischel's five person variables as an outline, the epistemic implications of this model of personality are developed and then illustrated by application to William James's typology of the religious personality and to the current debate over hermeneutic and empirical approaches to studying human behavior. This (...) approach explicates the connection between personality characteristics and epistemological approaches in terms of cognitive social learning theory. (shrink)

I reply to each of the contributions in this issue. I agree with much that Hillel Steiner argues, especially his insistence that the associated ideas of impartiality and discontinuity are crucial to dealing satisfactorily with a diversity of competing claims. I am, however, less willing to conceive provision for that diversity as the role, rather than a role, that we should ascribe to rights. I question the success of David Miller?s endeavour to provide a unified justification of human rights grounded (...) in the concept of need. It is the notion of a minimally decent human life, rather than need itself, that does most of the justificatory work in Miller?s argument and, arguably, that notion does not deliver a genuinely unitary account of human rights. I concede the case for state funding of opera and the arts more generally to John Horton?s argument, but defend neutralism, and its associated distinction between the right and the good, as a strategy for dealing with diversity, including cultural diversity. I resist Richard Bellamy?s attempt to ground all basic rights in democracy and suggest that his argument relies upon idealized assumptions about the functioning of democracy. I share much of his objection to substituting judicial for political decision-making but argue that a strong moral commitment to rights need not imply a shift in power from democratic processes to courts. I endorse Albert Weale?s argument for favouring a beneficial design approach over a rights approach to healthcare and to many other social goods. Rights should not monopolize our moral and political thinking. (shrink)

L'article traite l'analyse que fait Thomas d'Aquin de la remarque faite par Aristote que, si il est estimé en termes de biens minimaux, le bonheur naturel comme auto-suffisant peut être augmenté. L'analyse de l'Aquinate est comparée avec de semblables analyses par Eustratius et Albert le Grand. Celle de Thomas semble comprendre l'auto-suffisant comme ne nécessitant rien dans le sens de ne manquant rien de ce qui est nécessaire pour la vie humaine. Deux sens des nécessités de la vie sont (...) ici proposés. L'article examine ensuite la relation entre la tempérance et les nécessités de la vie pour montrer que l'Aquinate admet une certaine classe de plaisirs non nécessaires qui sont une sorte de biens minimaux rendant le bonheur comme auto-suffisant meilleur s'ils s'y ajoutent. Enfin, l'article conclut en montrant que Thomas tient de façon cohérente que le bonheur naturel comme auto-suffisant est strictement compris dans le bonheur naturel en tant que bien parfait et final. (shrink)

I draw on earlier research to develop contrasts between interpreting the conception of God in the Divine Names in terms of Neoplatonic, Latin Scholastic(specifically Albertinian and Thomistic), and Byzantine / Eastern Christian frameworks. Based on these contrasts, I then explore whether Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas were influenced, and possibly led astray, by John Sarracen’s translation of key terms and phrases in the Divine Names such as (Greek), (Greek)and its cognates, (Greek), (Greek), and (Greek). I conclude that Sarracen’s (...) mistranslation of (Greek) by essentia clearly reinforces an essentialist interpretation of God in the Divine Names—that is, the view that God is an absolutely simple being identical to its essence. It is not clear that his translations of the other terms do the same, although they are most often read in an essentialist fashion by Albert and Aquinas. (shrink)