El text d’Ian Ground la traducció del qual transcrivim a continuació va ser llegit a l’acte de presentación del seu llibre ¿Arte o chorrada? (València, Publicacions de la Universitat de València / Col•lecció Estètica & Crítica, 2008) el dia 9 de juny de 2008 a l’Aula Magna de l’edifici del Carrer La Nau de la Universitat de València, amb la presència, a més d’Ian Ground, de Romà de la Calle (en qualitat de Director de la col•lecció Estètica & Crítica) i (...) de mi mateix, Salvador Rubio (en qualitat de traductor, editor i autor de la introducció del llibre). El text va ser llegit en anglés pel seu autor, alternat, paràgraf per paràgraf, amb la lectura de la traducció castellana. Hem preferit que el text traduit aparega ací en castellà, exactament igual al que va ser llegit a l’esmentat acte de presentació. La reflexió que ens proposa Ian Ground, en cara que específicament concebuda per a aquest acte, no necessita cap presentació i pot ser llegida perfectament com un text autònom. Tanmateix, em permet precedir-la amb unes quantes observacions que no pretenen sustituir les meues paraules a l’acte (on, naturalment, els agraïments eren els protagonistes) ni tampoc la introducció del llibre ja publicada, i a la qual es pot remetre directament el lector d’aquest article. (shrink)

Mechanisms in a theory are defined here as bits of theory about entities at a different level (e.g., individuals) than the main entities being theorized about (e.g., groups), which serve to make the higher-level theory more supple, more accurate, or more general. The criterion for whether it is worthwhile to theorize at lower levels is whether it makes the theory at the higher levels better, not whether lower-level theorizing is philosophically necessary. The higher-level theory can be made better by mechanisms (...) known to be inadequate in the discipline dealing with the lower level. Conditions for the usefulness of lower-level theorizing are proposed, with many examples from various social and physical sciences. (shrink)

There are competing ethical concerns when it comes to designing any clinical research study. Clinical trials of possible treatments for Ebola virus are no exception. If anything, the competing ethical concerns are exacerbated in trying to find answers to a deadly, rapidly spreading, infectious disease. The primary goal of current research is to identify experimental therapies that can cure Ebola or cure it with reasonable probability in infected individuals. Pursuit of that goal must be methodologically sound, practical and consistent with (...) prevailing norms governing human subjects research. Some maintain that only randomized controlled trials with a placebo or standard-of-care arm can meet these conditions. We maintain that there are alternative trial designs that can do so as well and that sometimes these are preferable to RCTs. (shrink)

Patients have received experimental pharmaceuticals outside of clinical trials for decades. There are no industry-wide best practices, and many companies that have granted compassionate use, or ‘preapproval’, access to their investigational products have done so without fanfare and without divulging the process or grounds on which decisions were made. The number of compassionate use requests has increased over time. Driving the demand are new treatments for serious unmet medical needs; patient advocacy groups pressing for access to emerging treatments; internet platforms (...) enabling broad awareness of compelling cases or novel drugs and a lack of trust among some that the pharmaceutical industry and/or the FDA have patients’ best interests in mind. High-profile cases in the media have highlighted the gap between patient expectations for compassionate use and company utilisation of fair processes to adjudicate requests. With many pharmaceutical manufacturers, patient groups, healthcare providers and policy analysts unhappy with the inequities of the status quo, fairer and more ethical management of compassionate use requests was needed. This paper reports on a novel collaboration between a pharmaceutical company and an academic medical ethics department that led to the formation of the Compassionate Use Advisory Committee. Comprising medical experts, bioethicists and patient representatives, CompAC established an ethical framework for the allocation of a scarce investigational oncology agent to single patients requesting non-trial access. This is the first account of how the committee was formed and how it built an ethical framework and put it into practice. (shrink)

If social relations often require the choice of a cooperative solution to a prisoners' dilemma, we must ask how people generally solve the games. Three possible devices are that those who choose non-cooperative strategies get a bad reputation and so learn to be cooperative, that people are taught by parents that non-cooperators have unhappy lives, or that an official can be paid a salary to make the cooperative choice. By analyzing erotic love and marriage, and why people try to do (...) their jobs, it is suggested that these devices result in people often solving prisoners' dilemma games without being conscious of them. How then do these structures that 'have the function' of solving prisoners' dilemmas get created and maintain themselves? It is suggested that Deweyan consciousness, existing only when structural strains or unsolved games create personal problems, is adequate to explain many such functional structures. (shrink)

Biomedical science suffered a loss of trust during the Covid‐19 pandemic. Why? One reason is a crisis fueled by confusion over the epistemology of science. Attacks on biomedical expertise rest on a mistaken view of what the justification is for crediting scientific information. The ideas that science is characterized by universal agreement and that any evolution or change of beliefs about facts and theories undermines trustworthiness in science are simply false. Biomedical science is trustworthy precisely because it is fallible, admits (...) error, adjusts to new information, and, most importantly, is practical. Successful diagnosis and cure demarcate the boundaries of warranted knowledge. The other reason is sociological. As the pandemic made all too clear, the loss of faith in scientific experts was due to the failure of most of them to engage in regular public dialogue, reflecting a failure to recognize the obligation that science has to bolster trust in its work and findings by concerted public engagement. (shrink)

The field of medical rehabilitation is relatively new.... Until recently, the ethical problems of this new field were neglected. There seemed to be more pressing concerns as rehabilitation medicine struggled to establish itself, sometimes in the face of considerable skepticism or hostility. There also seemed no pressing moral questions of the kind and intensity to be encountered, say, in high-technology acute care medicine or genetic engineering.... Those in biomedical ethics could and did easily overlook the quiet, less obtrusive issues of (...) rehabilitation.... The Hastings Center set out in 1985 to rectify that situation.... To explore the issues, the Center assembled a group of practitioners in the field, Hastings Center staff members, and individuals experienced in other areas of medical ethics.... The report that follows was written by Arthur Caplan and Daniel Callahan, assisted by Dr. Janet Haas of the Moss Rehabilitation Hospital in Philadelphia... (shrink)

A former Prime Minister of Israel is alleged to have said that her country would never ascend to the status of authentic statehood until it possessed certain well-known social attributes — organized crime, prostitution, and corruption. These features, while obviously undesirable, were she felt, reliable indices of societal maturation. This anecdote is suggestive in understanding current events pertaining to the field of applied ethics.Philosophers have produced a massive body of opinion and argument on a diverse range of subjects under the (...) rubric of applied ethics. Moreover, they have assumed positions on various panels, commissions, governmental bodies and committees in the hope of making an informed contribution to the formulation of institutional and public policy. These accomplishments have begun to elicit the kinds of attributes commonly associated with philosophical maturation — exposées, debunkings, refutations, and ideologically informed critiques. (shrink)

Doctoral students in clinical, counseling, and school psychology programs often collaborate with faculty on research projects in their training as scientist-practitioners. Yet, the determination of publications' credit and order of authorship on resulting manuscripts continues to be a major concern and challenging process for professional psychologists and student collaborators. This article describes the use of case-based learning and semi-structured interview approaches to instruct first-year clinical psychology doctoral students in publication ethics during a research seminar. The instructor models ethical decision-making with (...) 1) a discussion of four cases from his own professional experiences and 2) a description of the Authorship Eligibility Assessment form, which he developed for use with junior researchers. The authors advocate for more educational strategies to supplement the APA standards in teaching the ethics of the publication process. Implications in terms of graduate student development and research collaborations in the field of professional psychology were discussed. (shrink)

In this paper we study some statements similar to the Partition Principle and the Trichotomy. We prove some relationships between these statements, the Axiom of Choice, and the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis. We also prove some independence results. MSC: 03E25, 03E50, 04A25, 04A50.

The essays in this collection, on stratification, organization and the discipline of sociology, all bear upon a general theoretical question: what models of rationality are necessary or suitable to explain individual and collective action in institutional contexts? Professor Stinchcombe was one of the first sociologists to write on this question; and this collection includes a new essay which takes account of recent work done in the tradition Stinchcombe did much to institute. The first group of essays - on class, stratification (...) and mobility - addresses core problems of the discipline and offers imaginative conceptualizations with interesting empirical consequences. The second section - essays on the sociology of organizations - displays, like the first, Stinchcombe's wide knowledge of sociological traditions from structuralism to Marxism. The final section, 'comments on the discipline', deepens the readers understanding of sociological theorizing by presenting different modes of analysis of universities and research institutions and providing challenging, and often funny, insights into the subject. (shrink)

For decades The People’s Republic of China has been expanding its capacity to perform organ transplants, primarily kidneys and livers but also hearts, lungs and multiorgan transplants. The annual number of organ transplants performed is estimated to be over 30 000. The number is expected to grow with a projected market for immunosuppressants expected to be over ¥30 billion/$4.3 billion by 2024.1 China is second only to the USA and is expected to become the country with the largest number of (...) organ transplants by 2021 or 2022. Many transplants are performed on Chinese citizens but an active market in transplants for ‘tourists’ is ongoing.2 The source of the supply of organs to fuel this rapid growth has long been suspect.3 China had no system for obtaining organs for many years from cadaver sources making it impossible to credit claims that gifts from the newly dead were the sole or even majority source of transplantable organs. Critics, including myself, have long alleged that the only possible source of organs for both Chinese citizens and transplant tourists are executed prisoners. Many accounts, commissions and investigations have confirmed an immoral reliance on this vulnerable …. (shrink)

In the space at my disposal I cannot attempt to deal with all the points which arise in the Second Part of the dialogue, and I therefore confine myself to a few which seem to be of special interest and importance. I hope it may be possible to deal more exhaustively with the dialogue in a fuller commentary. As in the previous part of the article, I have assumed the results of my study of the Sophist already referred to.

In modern work on the Parmenides it is commonly supposed that in the First Part of the dialogue Plato's main concern is criticism of his own doctrine of Forms, or of some formulations of that doctrine, and that the criticisms have some sort of validity and are in some degree ‘damaging’ to the doctrine. It is thus often assumed that Plato's purpose is to make the reader ask himself, ‘Where is Plato wrong? Where is his doctrine of Forms, or his (...) statement of it, inadequate?’ This is no doubt due partly to the fact that no reply is offered to the criticisms, and partly to the fact that they are put into the mouth of Parmenides, for whom Plato had a very great respect. Nevertheless, Plato can hardly have had a greater respect for Parmenides than he had for Socrates; and therefore on general grounds it is at least as likely that he intends us to ask ourselves the question, ‘Where is Parmenides wrong, or inadequate?’ It is, of course, obvious that Socrates is represented as a young man, who, in his enthusiasm for a new doctrine which he has invented himself, has not thought out all the difficulties involved in it or prepared replies to all the possible criticisms. Yet again, on general principles it is not likely that Plato would have written a dialogue primarily to represent Parmenides' position as substantially more satisfactory than that of Socrates. It is therefore of the first importance not merely to have clearly in our minds the nature and purpose of the doctrine of Forms, but also to examine carefully the basis of the criticisms which Parmenides is made to bring against Socrates, and the methods by which Parmenides conducts his arguments. (shrink)

Can parents who choose not to vaccinate their children be held legally liable for any harm that results? The state of laboratory and epidemiological understanding of a disease such as measles makes it likely that a persuasive causal link can be established between a decision to not vaccinate, a failure to take appropriate precautions to isolate a non-vaccinated child who may have been exposed to measles from highly vulnerable persons, and a death. This paper argues that, even if a parent (...) chooses to not vaccinate a child under a state law permitting exemptions, that decision does not create complete protection against liability for the adverse consequences of that choice. (shrink)

Consider this hypothetical scenario involving a choice not to vaccinate a child. Ms. S has a niece who is autistic. The girl's parents are suspicious that there is some relationship between her autism and her Measles Mumps and Rubella vaccination. They have shared their concerns with Ms. S. She then declines to have her own daughter, Jinny S., vaccinated with the MMR vaccine. To bypass the state's mandatory vaccination requirement, Ms. S claims a state-legislated philosophical exemption, whereby she simply attests (...) to the fact that she is opposed to vaccinating her daughter due to a conscientiously held belief. At the age of four, Jinny goes on a trip by airplane to Germany with her mother. After returning to the United States, she attends daycare despite having some mild cold symptoms. Subsequently, she develops a classic measles rash, at which point her mother brings her to a pediatrician and keeps her home from daycare. (shrink)