Health care institutions must decide whether to inform the patient of a medical error. The barriers to disclosure are an aversion to admitting errors, a concern about implicating other practitioners, and a fear of lawsuits and liability. However, admission of medical errors is the ethical thing to do and may be required by law. When examined, the barriers to such disclosures have little merit, and, in fact, lawsuits and liability may actually be reduced by informing the patient of medical errors. (...) Therefore, a health care institution should implement a written policy providing for disclosure of medical errors, using a process such as that outlined in the article. (shrink)

An anthology of the life and teachings of Tsongkhapa that includes transcendental aspects of sutra, tantra, insight meditation, mystic conversations, spiritual songs, and a new introduction by Robert Thurman.

The first in a series that collects the "Sermon Series" by renowned African American theologian Howard Thurman, this volume on "Man and the Moral Struggle" and "The Message of the Prophets.".

The author of the bestselling book The Lies We Believe challenges readers to recognize and overcome the misconceptions they have about God and enjoy a closer relationship with their Creator. --Publisher.

Originally published under the title: Tsong Khapa's Speech of gold in the Essence of true eloquence.

“There’s no disputing about taste.” That’s got a nice ring to it, but it’s not quite the ring of truth. While there’s definitely something right about the aphorism – there’s a reason why it is, after all, an aphorism, and why its utterance tends to produce so much nodding of heads and muttering of “just so” and “yes, quite” – it’s surprisingly difficult to put one’s finger on just what the truth in the neighborhood is, exactly. One thing that’s pretty (...) clear is that what’s right about the aphorism, that there’s no disputing about taste, isn’t that there’s no disputing about taste. There’s heaps of disputing about taste. People engage in disputes about which movies, music, paintings, literature, meals, furniture, architectural styles, etc. are good, beautiful, tasty, fun, elegant, ugly, disgusting, etc. all the time. This is obvious to anyone who has watched dueling-movie-critics shows, read theater reviews, or negotiated with a group or partner about which movie or restaurant to go to, or which sofa or painting to put in the living room. It takes great care and good aim to fling a brick without hitting somebody who’s engaged in a dispute about taste. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called the inflation of conflict (IC). A form of IC is a type of hasty generalization. A wider view of how things stand outside the courtroom may reveal little real disagreement among experts. Conventions in the popular press that promote “both sides of the story” or constant debate formats seem to encourage this type of IC. Another form of IC correctly points to disagreement in a field but incorrectly (...) implies that, as a result, little can be known. Noting disagreement among authorities can be the basis of a good argument. When there is widespread disagreement on the core aspects of a topic and the participants are bona fide authorities, then there is a good reason for a non‐expert to suspend judgment on the issue. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, 'kettle logic' (KL). KL is a fallacy in which multiple contradictory premises are presented to support a point. As such, it is logically impossible for all of the premises to be true. Formally, KL arguments are valid arguments, for it is impossible for contradictory premises to be true and the conclusion false. Sigmund Freud believes KL is employed in dreams quite often. Contradictory beliefs are commonly offered, which give (...) notice that one is in a dream. Freud's presentation of the tea kettle argument makes it clear that the man presents all of the premises as true. In real life and even in dreams, determining whether the arguer intends for all the considerations to be true, or whether additional information is missing, is much more difficult, but necessary in order to avoid the fallacy. (shrink)

A very simple contextualist treatment of a sentence containing an epistemic modal, e.g. a might be F, is that it is true iff for all the contextually salient community knows, a is F. It is widely agreed that the simple theory will not work in some cases, but the counterexamples produced so far seem amenable to a more complicated contextualist theory. We argue, however, that no contextualist theory can capture the evaluations speakers naturally make of sentences containing epistemic modals. If (...) we want to respect these evaluations, our best option is a relativist theory of epistemic modals. On a relativist theory, an utterance of a might be F can be true relative to one context of evaluation and false relative to another. We argue that such a theory does better than any rival approach at capturing all the behaviour of epistemic modals. (shrink)

BackgroundEmergency separation of conjoined twins is performed when one twin is already dead or dying and threatens the survival of the other. The particular decision to perform an emergency separation of conjoined twins provides an ethical dilemma that needs special attention. Adding to the complexity of surgical and postsurgical management in emergency separation, ethical and sociocultural aspects further complicate decision-making.Case presentationFrom 1987 to 2022, 18 conjoined twin separations were performed in our centre. This paper describes three conjoined twin emergency separations. (...) In the first case of thoracoomphalopagus babies at nine days of age, one baby was diagnosed with necrotizing enterocolitis with frequent desaturation and seizures, and the other baby was healthy. Emergency separation was performed on the twelfth day of age; unfortunately, neither baby survived the surgery. In the second case, emergency separation was performed on the 110th day of life due to sepsis in one baby. The nonseptic twin passed away six hours after surgery, while the septic twin died 12 days after surgery due to wound dehiscence and abdominal sepsis. The third case was of an omphalopagus conjoined twin with a parasitic twin. The healthy baby was deemed nonviable but found to be healthy upon birth. Immediate emergency separation was performed at 2 h of age. The living baby survived the surgery but passed away two months later.ConclusionsWhen separation is deemed necessary to save one twin, it becomes difficult to apply standard ethical medical reasoning. The decision to separate results in most cases in very high-risk surgeries with poor outcomes during surgery and postsurgery. Compounded by the complexity of the case, sociocultural and religious aspects further add to the dynamics of decision-making. A multidisciplinary team must work together with a health ethics committee and navigate through this ethical conundrum with the patient and family at its decision-making centre to decide on the best plan of care. (shrink)

I think that there are good reasons to adopt a relativist semantics for epistemic modal claims such as ``the treasure might be under the palm tree'', according to which such utterances determine a truth value relative to something finer-grained than just a world (or a <world, time> pair). Anyone who is inclined to relativise truth to more than just worlds and times faces a problem about assertion. It's easy to be puzzled about just what purpose would be served by assertions (...) of this kind, and how to understand what we'd be up to in our use of sentences like ``the treasure might be under the palm tree'', if they have such peculiar truth conditions. After providing a very quick argument to motivate a relativist view of epistemic modals, I bring out and attempt to resolve this problem in making sense of the role of assertions with relativist truth conditions. Solving this problem should be helpful in two ways: first, it eliminates an apparently forceful objection to relativism, and second, spelling out the relativist account of assertion and communication will help to make clear just what the relativist position is, exactly, and why it's interesting. (shrink)

The moral status of animals is a subject of controversy both within and beyond academic philosophy, especially regarding the question of whether and when it is ethical to eat meat. A commitment to animal rights and related notions of animal protection is often thought to entail a plant-based diet, but recent philosophical work challenges this view by arguing that, even if animals warrant a high degree of moral standing, we are permitted - or even obliged - to eat meat. (...) class='Hi'>Andy Lamey provides critical analysis of past and present dialogues surrounding animal rights, discussing topics including plant agriculture, animal cognition, and in vitro meat. He documents the trend toward a new kind of omnivorism that justifies meat-eating within a framework of animal protection, and evaluates for the first time which forms of this new omnivorism can be ethically justified, providing crucial guidance for philosophers as well as researchers in culture and agriculture. (shrink)

In this case, when the ethics committee is asked the questions that should be addressed are.

This book presents the major teachings of Mahāyāna Buddhism in a precise, dramatic, and even humorous form. For two millennia this Sūtra, called the “jewel of the _Mahāyāna Sūtras_,” has enjoyed immense popularity among Mahāyāna Buddhists in India, central and southeast Asia, Japan, and especially China, where its incidents were the basis for a style in art and literature prevalent during several centuries. Robert Thurman’s translation makes available in relatively nontechnical English the Tibetan version of this key Buddhist scripture, (...) previously known to the English-speaking world only through translations from Chinese texts. The _Tibetan_ version is generally conceded to be more faithful to the original Sanskrit than are the Chinese texts. The Tibetan version also is clearer, richer, and more precise in its philosophical and psychological expression. The twelve books of the Sūtra are accompanied by an introduction and an epilogue by Dr. Thurman and by three glossaries: Sanskrit terms, numerical categories, and technical terms. (shrink)

There is a lot that we don't know. That means that there are a lot of possibilities that are, epistemically speaking, open. For instance, we don't know whether it rained in Seattle yesterday. So, for us at least, there is an epistemic possibility where it rained in Seattle yesterday, and one where it did not. What are these epistemic possibilities? They do not match up with metaphysical possibilities - there are various cases where something is epistemically possible but not metaphysically (...) possible, and vice versa. How do we understand the semantics of statements of epistemic modality? The ten new essays in this volume explore various answers to these questions, including those offered by contextualism, relativism, and expressivism. (shrink)

Within the past few years, the topic of human dignity has demonstrated distinct signs of a revitalization of interest both within and beyond academic discourse. Outside the academy, news headlines and Twitter feeds continue to generate discussions about whose lives matter, both in the United States and abroad. This has served to renject into civil discourse, with a renewed sense of urgency, the question: what does it mean for a human life to matter? What does it mean for a human (...) life to have dignity? Within the academy,1 scholars have recently approached this question by focusing on how to renegotiate and... (shrink)

Problems about the accidental properties of properties motivate us--force us, I think--not to identify properties with the sets of their instances. If we identify them instead with functions from worlds to extensions, we get a theory of properties that is neutral with respect to disputes over counterpart theory, and we avoid a problem for Lewis's theory of events. Similar problems about the temporary properties of properties motivate us--though this time they probably don't force us--to give up this theory as well, (...) and to identify properties with functions from world, time pairs to extensions. Again, the replacement theory is neutral with respect to a metaphysical dispute that the old theory (arguably) forces us to take a stand on--the dispute over whether objects have temporal parts. It also allows us to give a smoother semantics for predication, to better accommodate our intuitions about which objects temporary properties are properties of, and to make temporally self-locating beliefs genuinely self -locating. (shrink)

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different (...) sort of externalism: an _active externalism_, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes. (shrink)

Many philosophers (myself included) have been converted to causal decision theory by something like the following line of argument: Evidential decision theory endorses irrational courses of action in a range of examples, and endorses “an irrational policy of managing the news”. These are fatal problems for evidential decision theory. Causal decision theory delivers the right results in the troublesome examples, and does not endorse this kind of irrational news-managing. So we should give up evidential decision theory, and be causal decision (...) theorists instead. Unfortunately, causal decision theory has its own family of problematic examples for which it endorses irrational courses of action, and its own irrational policy that it is committed to endorsing. These are, I think, fatal problems for causal decision theory. I wish that I had another theory to offer in its place. (shrink)

On many of the idealized models of human cognition and behavior in use by philosophers, agents are represented as having a single corpus of beliefs which (a) is consistent and deductively closed, and (b) guides all of their (rational, deliberate, intentional) actions all the time. In graded-belief frameworks, agents are represented as having a single, coherent distribution of credences, which guides all of their (rational, deliberate, intentional) actions all of the time. It's clear that actual human beings don't live up (...) to this idealization. The systems of belief that we in fact have are fragmented. Rather than having a single system of beliefs that guides all of our behavior all of the time, we have a number of distinct, compartmentalized systems of belief, different ones of which drive different aspects of our behavior in different contexts. It's tempting to think that, while of course people are fragmented, it would be better (from the perspective of rationality) if they weren't, and the only reason why our fragmentation is excusable is that we have limited cognitive resources, which prevents us from holding too much information before our minds at a time. Give us enough additional processing capacity, and there'd be no justification for any continued fragmentation. I argue that this is not so. There are good reasons to be fragmented rather than unified, independent of the limitations on our available processing power. In particular, there are ways our belief-forming mechanisms—including our perceptual systems—could be constructed that would make it better to be fragmented than to be unified. And there are reasons to think that some of our belief-forming mechanisms really are constructed that way. (shrink)

Very often, different people, with different constitutions and comic sensibilities, will make divergent, conflicting judgments about the comic properties of a given person, object, or event, on account of those differences in their constitutions and comic sensibilities. And in many such cases, while we are inclined to say that their comic judgments are in conflict, we are not inclined to say that anybody is in error. The comic looks like a poster domain for the phenomenon of faultless disagreement. I argue (...) that the kind of theory that does the best job of accounting for the appearance of faultless disagreement is a de se version of a response-dependence account, according to which thinking that x is funny is self-attributing a property of the type, being disposed to have R to x in C. (shrink)

We seem, or so it seems to some theorists, to experience a rich stream of highly detailed information concerning an extensive part of our current visual surroundings. But this appearance, it has been suggested, is in some way illusory. Our brains do not command richly detailed internal models of the current scene. Our seeings, it seems, are not all that they seem. This, then, is the Grand Illusion. We think we see much more than we actually do. In this paper (...) I shall (briefly) rehearse the empirical evidence for this rather startling claim, and then critically examine a variety of responses. One especially interesting response is a development of the so-called ‘skill theory’, according to which there is no illusion after all. Instead, so the theory goes, we establish the required visual contact with our world by an ongoing process of active exploration, in which the world acts as a kind of reliable, interrogable, external memory (Noe, Pessoa and. (shrink)

A great deal of philosophy of mind in the modern era has been driven by an intense aversion to Cartesian dualism. In the 1950s, materialists claimed to have succeeded once and for all in exorcising the Cartesian ghost by identifying the mind with the brain. In subsequent decades, cognitive science put scientific meat on this metaphysical skeleton by explicating mental processes as digital computation implemented in the brain's hardware.

Why do humans reason? Many animals draw inferences, but reasoning—the tendency to produce and respond to reason-giving performances—is biologically unusual, and demands evolutionary explanation. Mercier and Sperber advance our understanding of reason’s adaptive function with their argumentative theory of reason. On this account, the “function of reason is argumentative… to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade.” ATR, they argue, helps to explain several well-known cognitive biases. In this paper, I develop a neighboring hypothesis called the intention alignment model and (...) contrast it with ATR. I conjecture that reasoning evolved primarily because it helped social hominins more readily and fully align their intentions. We use reasons to advance various proximal ends, but in the main, we do it to overwrite the beliefs and desires of others: to get others to think like us. Reason afforded our ancestors a powerful way to build and maintain the shared outlooks necessary for a highly collaborative existence. Yes, we sometimes argue so as to gain argumentative advantage over others, or otherwise advantage ourselves at the expense of those we argue with, but more often, we reason in ways that are mutually advantageous. In fact, there are excellent reasons for thinking this must be so. IAM, I suggest, neatly explains the available evidence, while also providing a more coherent account of reason’s origins. (shrink)

There have been few attempts to answer the twin challenges for alethic pluralists to maintain standard accounts of the logical operators and of logical consequence in a sufficiently systematic and precise way. In this paper, I propose an account of logic and semantics on behalf of pluralists that answers both challenges in a sufficiently systematic and precise way. Crucially, the account accommodates mixed atomics, and its first-order extension also accommodates quantified sentences. Accordingly, pluralists can answer all the distinctively logical challenges (...) for their view. (shrink)

Discursive deference in the governance of science and technology is rebalancing from expert analysis toward participatory deliberation. Linear, scientistic conceptions of innovation are giving ground to more plural, socially situated understandings. Yet, growing recognition of social agency in technology choice is countered by persistently deterministic notions of technological progress. This article addresses this increasingly stark disjuncture. Distinguishing between “appraisal” and “commitment” in technology choice, it highlights contrasting implications of normative, instrumental, and substantive imperatives in appraisal. Focusing on the role of (...) power, it identifies key commonalities transcending the analysis/participation dichotomy. Each is equally susceptible to instrumental framing for variously weak and strong forms of justification. To address the disjuncture, it is concluded that greater appreciation is required—in both analytic and participatory appraisal—to facilitating the opening up of governance commitments on science and technology. (shrink)

Intentionalism is the view that the phenomenal character of an experience is wholly determined by its representational content is very attractive. Unfortunately, it is in conflict with some quite robust intuitions about the possibility of phenomenal spectrum inversion without misrepresentation. Faced with such a problem, there are the usual three options: reject intentionalism, discount the intuitions and deny that spectrum inversion without misrepresentation is possible, or find a way to reconcile the two by dissolving the apparent conflict. Sydney Shoemaker's (1994) (...) introduction of appearance properties is a particularly ingenious way of pursuing the third strategy, by maintaining that there is a representational difference between the phenomenally spectrum-inverted subjects.2 In introducing appearance properties, Shoemaker does two things: he identifies a theoretical role for some family of properties to play, and he suggests a family of properties as candidates to play that role. I'll argue that his proposed candidates do not play the role as well as we would like, suggest some new candidates, and argue that they do a better job. (shrink)

It's a presupposition of a very common way of thinking about contextsensitivity in language that the semantic contribution made by a bit of context-sensitive vocabulary is sensitive only to features of the speaker's situation at the time of utterance. I argue that this is false, and that we need a theory of context-dependence that allows for content to depend not just on the features of the utterance's origin, but also on features of its destination. There are cases in which a (...) single utterance semantically conveys different propositions to different members of its audience, which force us to say that what a sentence conveys depends not just on the context in which it is uttered, but also on the context in which it is received. (shrink)

Subjects with delusions profess to believe some extremely peculiar things. Patients with Capgras delusion sincerely assert that, for example, their spouses have been replaced by impostors. Patients with Cotard’s delusion sincerely assert that they are dead. Many philosophers and psychologists are hesitant to say that delusional subjects genuinely believe the contents of their delusions.2 One way to reinterpret delusional subjects is to say that we’ve misidentified the content of the problematic belief. So for example, rather than believing that his wife (...) is has been replaced by an impostor, we might say that the victim of Capgras delusion believes that it is, in some respects, as if his wife has been replaced by an impostor. Another is to say that we’ve misidentified the attitude that the delusional subject bears to the content of their delusion. So for example, Gregory Currie and co-authors have suggested that rather than believing that his wife has been replaced by an impostor, we should say that the victim of Capgras delusion merely imagines that his wife has been replaced by an impostor.3. (shrink)

There is a strong pull to the idea that there is some metaphysically interesting distinction between the fully real, objective, observer-independent qualities of things as they are in themselves, and the less-than-fully-real, subjective, observer-dependent qualities of things as they are for us. Call this (putative) distinction the primary/secondary quality distinction. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities is philosophically interesting because it is (a) often quite attractive to draw such a distinction, and (b) incredibly hard to spell it out in (...) any kind of satisfying and sensible way. I attempt such a spelling-out after first trying to pin down in more detail what we want from the primary/secondary quality distinction, and saying a bit about why that is such a hard thingto get. (shrink)

The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a United States taken over by a fundamentalist dictatorship called Gilead that also resembles Plato’s ideal city. Attempts to explain Gilead’s debt to Plato face two challenges. First, aspects of Gilead that recall Plato also contain features that differ, at times dramatically, from the Platonic original. Second, Gilead invokes distorted versions of ideas from philosophies other than Plato’s. I explore two ways of making sense of Gilead’s distorted philosophical appropriations. The explanations differ over whether such distortions (...) are best explained by the nature of the philosophies they misrepresent, or by the nature of Gilead. The explanation that emphasizes Gilead’s own agency is ultimately best able to make sense of how illiberal regimes misappropriate philosophical concepts, both in the novel and in reality, in order to limit the political imagination of their subjects. (shrink)

There is good evidence that, in general, autonomic conditioning in humans occurs only when subjects can verbalize the contingencies of conditioning. However, one form of conditioning, evaluative conditioning (EC), seems exceptional in that a growing body of evidence suggests that it can occur without conscious contingency awareness. As such, EC offers a unique insight into what role contingency awareness might play in associative learning. Despite this evidence, there are reasons to doubt that evaluative conditioning can occur without conscious awareness. This (...) paper aims to critically review the EC literature and to draw some parallels to what is known about autonomic conditioning. In doing so, some important general issues about measuring contingency awareness are raised. These issues are illustrated with a brief report of an experiment in which a sensitive measure of contingency awareness is compared against a commonly used measure. (shrink)

Adopting a dispositional theory of value promises to deliver a lot of theoretical goodies. One recurring problem for dispositional theories of value, though, is a problem about nonconvergence. If being a value is being disposed to elicit response R in us, what should we say if it turns out that not everybody is disposed to have R to the same things? One horn of the problem here is a danger of the view collapsing into an error theory—of it turning out, (...) on account of the diversity of agents' relevant dispositions, that nothing is really a value, since nothing is disposed to elicit R in everybody. Alternatively, there is a danger of an objectionable fragmentation of value, according to which there is no such thing as a value simpliciter, but only valuesme and valuesyou, valuesus and valuesthem. I advocate a de se relativist version of a dispositional theory of value. If we go for this sort of de-se-ified dispositional theory, we get to keep our theoretical goodies, but we avoid the problem of nonconvergence that leads to a danger of either collapse into an error theory, or else talking-past, and a loss of common subject matter. (shrink)

A common first reaction to expressivist and quasi-realist theories is the thought that, if these theories are right, there's some objectionable sense in which we can't be wrong about morality. This worry turns out to be surprisingly difficult to make stick - an account of moral error as instability under improving changes provides the quasi-realist with the resources to explain many of our concerns about moral error. The story breaks down, though, in the case of fundamental moral error. This is (...) where the initial worry finally sticks - quasi-realism tells me that I can't be fundamentally wrong about morality, though others can. (shrink)

There is a strong pull to the idea that there is some metaphysically interesting distinction between the fully real, objective, observer‐independent qualities of things as they are in themselves, and the less‐than‐fully‐real, subjective, observer‐dependent qualities of things as they are for us. Call this (putative) distinction the primary/secondary quality distinction. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities is philosophically interesting because it is (a) often quite attractive to draw such a distinction, and (b) incredibly hard to spell it out in (...) any kind of satisfying and sensible way. I attempt such a spelling‐out after first trying to pin down in more detail what we want from the primary/secondary quality distinction, and saying a bit about why that is such a hard thing to get. (shrink)

This article brings animal protection theory to bear on Temple Grandin’s work, in her capacity both as a designer of slaughter facilities and as an advocate for omnivorism. Animal protection is a better term for what is often termed animal rights, given that many of the theories grouped under the animal rights label do not extend the concept of rights to animals. I outline the nature of Grandin’s system of humane slaughter as it pertains to cattle. I then outline four (...) arguments Grandin has made defending meat-eating. On a protection-based approach, I argue, Grandin’s system of slaughter is superior to its traditional counterpart. Grandin’s success as a designer of humane slaughterhouses however is not matched by any corresponding success in offering a moral defence of meat-eating. Despite, or perhaps because of, the popularity of her work, Grandin’s arguments for continuing to eat animals are noteworthy only in how disappointing and rudimentary they are. If we can thank Grandin for making a difference in the lives of millions of farm animals, her work can also be criticized for not engaging the moral status of animals with the depth and rigor that it deserves. (shrink)