Mr. Kimball, one of the best of our cultural critics, offers a lively and penetrating study of genius and pseudo-genius at work, and investigates the use and abuse of intelligence. Drawing on figures as various as Plutarch and Hegel, Kierkegaard and P.G. Wodehouse, Elias Canetti and Anthony Trollope, he provides a sharply observed tour of Western intellectual and artistic aspiration. "A master of the genre, as collections of his pieces attest, none more impressively than this set." Booklist Starred Review.".

Drawing on William F. Ogburn's cultural lag thesis, an inherent conflict is proposed between the rapid speed of modern technological advances and the slower speed by which ethical guidelines for utilization of new technologies are developed. Ogburn's cultural lag thesis proposes that material culture advances more rapidly than non-material culture. Technology is viewed as part of material culture and ethical guidelines for technology utilization are viewed as an adaptive aspect of non-material culture. Cultural lag is seen as a critical ethical (...) issue because failure to develop broad social consensus on appropriate applications of modern technology may lead to breakdowns in social solidarity and the rise of social conflict. Reasons for cultural lag between technology and ethics include the social structural and market conditions under which each are developed. The thesis is illustrated by reviews of technological trends involving computer-telecommunications electronics and bio- genetic engineering, and the implications of these and other technologies for privacy rights, electronic commerce, control of essential resources and social definitions of life are discussed. (shrink)

This paper considers Chinese Communist Party policies in Tibet from Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist perspectives. I first explain how these three traditions are unified in the sanjiao heyi, but I contend that this practice has been neglected in favor of state repression. I then elucidate Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism with respect to their general principles and application in Tibet. I conclude that a fuller embrace of the sanjiao heyi where Confucian tenets are balanced by insights from Daoism and Buddhism would (...) cultivate an anti-oppressive response to governmental control. (shrink)

Worldwide, there is renewed public and political attention focused on public health fueled by the globally explosive H1N1 pandemic. Pandemic planning emerged as a major area for public action in the absence of an overarching ethics framework appropriate for the community and population focus of public health. Baylis, Sherwin, and Kenny propose relational personhood and relational solidarity as core values for a public health ethics. The Catholic faith tradition makes three useful contributions in support of a relational ethic: first, a (...) religious ontology that aligns with the view that human persons are inherently relational; second, a coherent account of the requisite social and communal ideals and structures that this belief demands; and third, inspiration and motivation for the attitudes and actions that are required in response to a relational ontology. (shrink)

BackgroundSocial media has globalised compassion enabling requests for donations to spread beyond geographical boundaries. The use of social media for medical crowdfunding links people with unmet healthcare needs to charitable donors. There is no doubt that fundraising campaigns using such platforms facilitates access to financial resources to the benefit of patients and their caregivers.Main textThis paper reports on a critical review of the published literature and information from other online resources discussing medical crowdfunding and the related ethical questions. The review (...) highlighted the benefits of crowdfunding as well as the under-exploration of the risk of having patients’ desires and human rights undermined during online fundraising campaigns. Majority of these campaigns get initiated on behalf of the patients, especially the very sick and dependant. The ethical questions raised relate to the voluntariness of informed consent and the possibility of patients being used as a means to an end. Vulnerability of patients may expose them to coercion, undue influence, manipulation, and violation of their human rights. The success of these campaigns is influenced by the digital skills, pre-existing social networks and, the emotional potency. Healthcare is a public good, and online market forces should not determine access to essential health services. The benefits of crowdfunding cannot be subverted, but it can perpetuate unintended injustices, especially those arising from socio-economic factors.ConclusionsPolicymakers ought to monitor the utilisation of crowdfunding sites to identify policy failures and unmet essential health care needs responsible for driving individuals to use these platforms. The upholding of human rights and the fundamental respect of the individual’s wishes is a moral imperative. The need for an ethics framework to guide different stakeholders during medical crowdfunding needs further examination. (shrink)

Indeed, data from impaired performance have often played a central role in our understanding of the skills and abilities of the human mind/brain This volume ...

Starting from the earlier notions of stationary action principles, these tutorial notes shows how Schwinger's Quantum Action Principle descended from Dirac's formulation, which independently led Feynman to his path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics. Part I brings out in more detail the connection between the two formulations, and applications are discussed. Then, the Keldysh-Schwinger time-cycle method of extracting matrix elements is described. Part II will discuss the variational formulation of quantum electrodynamics and the development of source theory.

In seeking for an understanding of ethical practices in health care situations, our challenge is always both to recognize and respond to the call of individuals in need. In attuning ourselves to the call of the vulnerable other an ethical moment arises. Asking ‘how are you?’ in health care practice is our very first possibility to learn how a particular person finds herself or himself in this particular situation. Here, ‘how are you?’ shows itself as an ethical question that opens (...) up a relational space that calls forth a response. It is a way to understand the situated moments in which we are already that enables us to act respectfully. Our ethical frameworks assist us in trying to decide what is the right thing to do given a set of circumstances. Yet there is a prior step that already calls us to ethical attention; this is when we ask ‘how are you?’, which transforms a seemingly small interaction into an ethical moment. ‘How are you?’ is a question that turns us back to who we are as health care professionals and calls us to be more deeply attentive to the moment. When we sincerely ask ‘how are you?’ we enact our ethical commitments to one another. (shrink)

Despite a growing body of research by management scholars to understand and explain failures in ethical decision making (EDM), misconduct prevails. Scholars have identified character, founded in virtue ethics, as an important perspective that can help to address the gap in organizational misconduct. While character has been offered as a valid perspective in EDM, current theorizing on how it applies to EDM has not been well developed. We thus integrate character, founded in virtue ethics, into Rest’s (1986) EDM model to (...) reveal how shifting attention to the nature of the moral agent provides critical insights into decision making more broadly and EDM specifically. Virtue ethics provides a perspective on EDM that acknowledges and anticipates uncertainties, considers its contextual constraints, and contemplates the development of the moral agent. We thus answer the call by many scholars to integrate character in EDM in order to advance the understanding of the field and suggest propositions for how to move forward. We conclude with implications of a character-infused approach to EDM for future research. (shrink)

Employee performance plays a crucial role in the productivity of organizations, especially in the hospitality industry in Malaysia. This work performance is influenced by leadership style, and finding the type of leadership style that is suitable to apply to employees is crucial, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Transformational leadership theory is selected for this study in determining leadership styles. There are four dimensions under transformational leadership theory, namely idealized influence, individualized consideration, inspirational motivation and intellectual stimulation. Data (...) were collected online from 400 employees working in the hospitality industry in Malaysia and analyzed using partial least square structure equation modeling. The findings show that only two dimensions of transformational leadership, namely idealized influence and inspirational motivation, have a significant positive influence on employee performance. Implications in the context of human resource management and recommendations to increase employee performance are also discussed. (shrink)

While nursing practice embodies certain observable and sometimes habitual actions, much inheres in these actions that is not immediately discernible. Taking on Lyotard's exegesis of the unpresentable, I undertake an analysis of the unpresentable as it occurs in nursing practices. The unpresentable is a place of alterity often excluded from dominant discourses. Yet this very alterity is what practising nurses face day after day. Drawing from two nursing situations, one from a hermeneutic phenomenological study and the other from the literature, (...) I elucidate the unpresentable from a nursing point of view. Evoking Lyotard as well as selected philosophers from the continental philosophical tradition, I also question whether nursing in its present discourse is capable of responding to the unpresentable in nursing situations. Through the philosophical stance of presentation and representation, I delineate the urgent need to bring the otherness of the unpresentable into our nursing discourse. Nurses in practice confront a wide array of human differences and diversities and come to the realization that no framework alone can ever really have primacy over the multiform presentations of human suffering that so strikingly evoke alterity. (shrink)

The dominant discourse in chronic disease management centres on the ideal of person-centred healthcare, with an empowered patient taking an active role in decision-making with their healthcare provider. Despite these encouraging developments toward healthcare democracy, many person-centred conceptions of healthcare and programming continue to focus on the healthcare institution’s perspective and priorities. In these debates, the patient’s voice has largely been absent. This article takes the example of patient empowerment to show how the concept has been influenced by a variety (...) of competing and shifting influences that have led to conceptualisations and programming designed for the patient, but developed without the patient. The framework of epistemic injustice is proposed to unravel the complexity of these omissions. The concept can be defined as a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. It occurs when a person is ignored or not believed due to a prejudice of some kind. It has been applied to healthcare in order to better understand barriers for patient participation and will be used to better understand the problems with current empowerment definitions and implementation strategies. The article will end by proposing some methodologies to facilitate patient-developed concepts of empowerment. (shrink)

A citizen’s jury brings together a mix of citizens from different socio-economic groups who deliberate on a particular policy issue over a number of days. Since their development in the 1970s in th...

This essay evaluates Charles Taylor's defence of a politics of recognition in light of his broader account of modern identity and the self. I argue that his call for a politics of recognition betrays what is most ethically promising in his own account of modern subjectivity – namely, its emphasis on and affirmation of inner multiplicity. The first part of the paper identifies the ways in which his account of the self affirms inner multiplicity. The second part of the paper (...) outlines how a politics of recognition circumscribes this inner plurality by rendering core aspects of personal identity rigid and by promoting attitudes that inhibit attentiveness to multiplicity within the self. By outlining the ways in which it circumscribes inner multiplicity, I show that Taylor's preferred form of politics undermines two of his own central goals: that of securing the conditions in which authentic identity can be realized and that of promoting mutually receptive relations among diverse selves. A form of liberalism that strives for neutrality with respect to cultural symbols and practices more effectively facilitates the realization of these goals. (shrink)

Medical care of critically ill and injured infants and children globally should be based on best research evidence to ensure safe, efficacious treatment. In South Africa and other low and middle-income countries, research is needed to optimise care and ensure rational, equitable allocation of scare paediatric critical care resources.

This paper proposes a dynamic theory of embodiment that aims to get beyond the absent moving body in embodied social theory. The first somatic revolution, inspired by Merleau Ponty, provided theories based on the feeling and experience of the body. The theory of dynamic embodiment focuses instead on the doing itself as embodied social action, in which the embodied person is fore-grounded as a complex resource for meaning making. This represents a theoretical enrichment of the earlier turn to the body (...) in social theory, which tended to separate the semiotic, as necessarily representational and/or linguistic, from the somatic as a wide range of corporeal processes and practices assumed to be separated from mind, language and/or conscious thought. We argue that overcoming this persistent Cartesianism requires a New Realist approach to the proper location of human agency as a causal power, one that promotes a bio-psycho-social concept of personhood. Part one of the paper presents a general framework for this perspective, while part two applies this paradigm ethnographically to illustrate how bringing semiosis and somatics together requires a robust conception of multi-sensory modalities. (shrink)

Aim Genetic research representative of the population is crucial to understanding the underlying causes of many diseases. In a prospective evaluation of informed consent we assessed the willingness of individuals of different ethnicities, gender and drug dependence history to participate in genetic studies in which their genetic sample could be shared with a repository at the National Institutes of Health. Methods Potential subjects were recruited from the general population through the use of flyers and referrals from previous participants and clinicians (...) with knowledge of our study. They could consent to 11 separate choices so that they could specify how and with whom their genetic sample could be shared. Rates of affirmative consent were then analysed by gender, ethnicity and drug dependence history. Results Of 1416 volunteers enrolled, 99.7% gave affirmative informed consent for studies of addiction conducted in our laboratory. No significant difference was found for participation in genetic studies conducted in our laboratory by gender, ethnicity or drug dependence history. Over all 11 questions, individuals with a history of drug use were more likely to agree to consent to participate in our study than were healthy volunteers. Conclusion A high percentage of each category of gender, ethnicity and drug history, gave affirmative consent at all levels. The level of detail in and the amount of time spent reviewing the informed consent, and a relationship of trust with the clinical investigator may contribute to this outcome. (shrink)

This is an important collection of works, from an international team of authors, on corporate power and its justification and authority. It highlights the growing importance of corporate governance issues, an area which now has unprecedented coverage by the media in the commercial sector and is increasingly important in business schools.

It has usually been assumed that the Actian Games at Nicopolis were founded in 28 B.C. . In Mélanges d'Arch. et d'Hist., 1936, pp. 94 ff., J. Gagé argues also for 28 B.C., his principal grounds being as follows: ‘Comme Auguste leur conféra en même temps le rang isolympique et que le calcul du temps par Actiades fut admis çá et lá á remplacer celui des Olympiades, il est logique de penser que ces deux computs coïncidaient. Or, la première célébration (...) olympique après Actium est celle de l'an 28 av. J-C.; c'est done presque sûrement en 28 que commence en fait la première Actiade.’. (shrink)

This article explores an aspect of women’s transnational labor migration that has been understudied in many labor-sending countries: how men experience shifts in the household labor division triggered by women’s migration. In so doing, we shed light on the diverse ways notions of masculinity and gender identities are being reworked and renegotiated in the transnational family. Drawing on qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews with carers of left-behind children in Northern Vietnam, we show how men are confronted with the need (...) to take on child care duties, which have traditionally been ascribed to women, while at the same time being under considerable pressure to live up to locally accepted masculinity ideals. We provide interesting insights into the changing family structures and dynamics in Vietnamese society where patriarchal norms continue to exert significant influence on different facets of life. (shrink)

There is growing recognition that good ethics can have a positive economic impact on the performance of firms. Many statistics support the premise that ethics, values, integrity and responsibility are required in the modern workplace. For consumer groups and society at large, research has shown that good ethics is good business. This study defines and traces the emergence and evolution within the business literature of the concepts of values, business ethics and corporate social responsibility to illustrate the increased emphasis that (...) has been placed on these issues over time. Two organizations that have successfully dealt with these issues were analyzed to identify the links among values, ethics, and corporate social responsibility as they are incorporated into the culture and management of a firm. This study identified the presence and implementation of values, business ethics, and CSR actions within the two organizations studied. (shrink)

This article analyses how faith-based civil society organisations have advocated the value-add of faith to governmental and non-governmental development actors in the highly secularised context of the Netherlands. Its social value lies in the space for reflexivity it opens up on how the religious and the secular are entangled in the field of development through shifting the gaze towards secularised Europe. Its academic value lies in how it combines the study of faith and development, with a critical analysis of the (...) secular formations in which much of the thinking around faith and development is shaped. The article builds on an academic study of and long-term engagement with the Dutch non-governmental organisation (NGO)-based Knowledge Centre Religion and Development (KCRD), offering a critical overview of the KCRD’s work between 2006 and 2016. Data were gathered through interviews, document analysis and participant observation as part of the academic research, as well as informal observations and analysis through professional engagement. The KCRD, because of its institutional setting, had to adopt an instrumental approach towards the role of religion in development, which prevented it from challenging the reigning secular paradigm in development and its biases towards faith-based actors. The article will recommend that future initiatives on faith and development more consciously anchor their approach to faith in their institutional practices and mainstream discussions on the European continent. (shrink)

El objetivo principal de este artículo consiste en mostrar la organización, institucionalización y control de saberes y prácticas que tienen lugar en diversas representaciones de la armonía universal en los comienzos del siglo xvii. En primer lugar, nos proponemos analizar los fundamentos teológicos, físico-matemáticos y musicales de las nociones de armonía universal evocadas en el intercambio erudito entre Johannes Kepler, Robert Fludd, Marin Mersenne y Pierre Gassendi. En segundo lugar, examinaremos los elementos teóricos y prácticos que garantizan la legitimidad epistemológica (...) de sus demostraciones o experiencias científicas. En particular, procuraremos evitar caer en interpretaciones historiográficas que ponen énfasis en una oposición entre la tradición ocultista, que representa una armonía numerológica, y la revolución científica, que la concibe matemáticamente. De este modo, podremos considerar con justicia los aportes científico-filosóficos y las proyecciones político-religiosas de este debate. (shrink)

The present study explored a multi‐construct model of moral development. Variables commonly seen in the moral development literature, such as family interactions, spiritual life, ascription to various sources of moral authority, empathy, shame, guilt and moral judgement competence, were investigated. Results from the current study support previous research that the three moral emotions of empathy, shame and guilt interrelate. Further, it was found that the relationship one has with a higher power (spirituality) involves empathy and guilt. Implications for moral education (...) are discussed. Future research should continue to explore a multi‐construct model of morality. (shrink)