Quality and service improvement (QSI) research employs a broad range of methods to enhance the efficiency of healthcare delivery. QSI research differs from traditional healthcare research and poses unique ethical questions. Since QSI research aims to generate knowledge to enhance quality improvement efforts, should it be considered research for regulatory purposes? Is review by a research ethics committee required? Should healthcare providers be considered research participants? If participation in QSI research entails no more than minimal risk, is consent required? The (...) lack of consensus on answers to these questions highlights the need for ethical guidance. Three distinct approaches to classifying QSI research in accordance with existing ethical principles and regulations can be found in the literature. In the first approach, QSI research is viewed as distinct from other types of healthcare research and does not require regulation. In the second approach, QSI research falls within regulatory guidelines but is exempt from research ethics committee review. In the third approach, QSI research is deemed to be part of the learning healthcare system and, as such, is subject to a different set of ethical principles entirely. In this paper, we critically assess each of these views. While none of these approaches is entirely satisfactory, we argue that use of the ethical principles governing research provides the best means of addressing the numerous questions posed by QSI research. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

The myth of the homeland -- The Nietzschean self-assertion of the German University -- The geo-politics of Heidegger's Mitteleuropa -- Heidegger's Greeks and the myth of autochthony -- Heidegger's "Nietzsche".

Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a theory of international politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on the justice (...) of a state's domestic institutions, and a principle of international distributive justice to establish a fair division of resources and wealth among persons situated in diverse national societies. (shrink)

We present a minimum message length (MML) framework for trajectory partitioning by point selection, and use it to automatically select the tolerance parameter ε for Douglas-Peucker partitioning, adapting to local trajectory complexity. By examining a range of ε for synthetic and real trajectories, it is easy to see that the best ε does vary by trajectory, and that the MML encoding makes sensible choices and is robust against Gaussian noise. We use it to explore the identification of micro-activities within a (...) longer trajectory. This MML metric is comparable to the TRACLUS metric – and shares the constraint of abstracting only by omission of points – but is a true lossless encoding. Such encoding has several theoretical advantages – particularly with very small segments (high frame rates) – but actual performance interacts strongly with the search algorithm. Both differ from unconstrained piecewise linear approximations, including other MML formulations. (shrink)

Religion and Community: Adam Smith on the Virtues of Liberty CHARLES L. GRISWOLD, JR. The good temper and moderation of con- tending factions seems to be the most es- gential circumstance in the publick morals of a free people. Adam Smith' THE ARCHITECTS of what one might call "classical" or "Enlightenment" liberal- ism saw themselves as committed to refuting the claims to political sovereignty by organized religion. ~ The arguments against the legitimacy of a state- supported religion, and, in (...) the extreme case, of a religious monopoly, are so integral a part of the Enlightenment's effort to put politics on a stable and just foundation as to constitute one of the controlling themes of the period. Lib- eral politics requires toleration, or better, liberty of religious belief. And this in turn requires that religious institutions be privatized, as it were, and that just politics be secularized in that legitimate rule is to lie in the consent of the ruled rather than in the laws of God as interpreted by his ministers on earth. Differ- ' Wealth of Nations V.i.f.4o. My references to The Wealth of Nations are to the two-volume R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner edition . 2 The list of thinkers in the "classical liberal" tradition simply reads as the list of key Enlighten- ment figures: Bayle, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Smith, Voltaire, and Kant, to name a few. Consider the role that religious freedom plays in Kant's. (shrink)

Most philosophical explorations of responsibility discuss the topic solely in terms of metaphysics and the "free will" problem. By contrast, these essays by leading philosophers view responsibility from a variety of perspectives -- metaphysics, ethics, action theory, and the philosophy of law. After a broad, framing introduction by the volume's editors, the contributors consider such subjects as responsibility as it relates to the "free will" problem; the relation between responsibility and knowledge or ignorance; the relation between causal and moral responsibility; (...) the difference, if any, between responsibility for actions and responsibility for omissions; the metaphysical requirements for making sense of "collective" responsibility; and the relation between moral and legal responsibility. The contributors include such distinguished authors as Alfred R. Mele, John Martin Fischer, George Sher, and Frances Kamm, as well as important rising scholars. Taken together, the essays in _Action, Ethics, and Responsibility_ offer a breadth of perspectives that is unmatched by other treatments of the topic. Contributors: Joseph Keim Campbell, David Chan, Randolph Clarke, E.J. Coffman, John Martin Fischer, Helen Frowe, Todd Jones, Frances Kamm, Antti Kauppinen, Alfred R. Mele, Michael O'Rourke, Paul Russell, Robert F. Schopp, George Sher, Harry S. Silverstein, Saul Smilansky, Donald Smith, Charles T. Wolfe The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

Human rights have become one of the most important moral concepts in global political life over the last 60 years. Charles Beitz, one of the world's leading philosophers, offers a compelling new examination of the idea of a human right.

In this revised edition of his 1979 classic Political Theory and International Relations, Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a theory of international (...) politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on the justice of a state’s domestic institutions, and a principle of international distributive justice to establish a fair division of resources and wealth among persons situated in diverse national societies. (shrink)

The collapse of historicism was not merely the demise of an academic tradition but signified a shift in the understanding of hermeneutics and metaphysics. Whereas earlier books have explored the rise and dominance of historicism within academic history, this is the first to trace its collapse and to show how it was shaped by larger philosophical and scientific concerns. Charles R. Bambach's lucid account of the demise of historicism within the context of German metaphysics provides a rich new perspective (...) on the development of the young Heidegger's concept of "historicity" and on the origins of postmodern thought. Bambach reconstructs the methodological debates arising from a pervasive sense of crisis among German philosophers in the late nineteenth century. He details the divergent attempts by the Neo-Kantians, Nietzsche, and Dilthey to overcome the limitations of historical relativism. Heidegger's view of "historicity," Bambach shows, radically transforms the problematic of historicism into a discourse concerning the crisis of philosophical modernity. (shrink)

This book is meant to help resolve a couple of uncertainties.

Philosophical attention to problems about global justice is flourishing in a way it has not in any time in memory. This paper considers some reasons for the rise of interest in the subject and reflects on some dilemmas about the meaning of the idea of the cosmopolitan in reasoning about social institutions, concentrating on the two principal dimensions of global justice, the economic and the political.

Global economic and political inequalities are in most respects greater today than they have been for decades. From one point of view inequality is a bad thing simply because it involves a deviation from equality, which is thought to have value for its own sake. But it is controversial whether this position can be defended, and if it can, whether the egalitarian ideal on which the defense may depend applies at the global level as in individual societies. Setting aside directly (...) egalitarian reasons for concern about global inequality, this paper explores several reasons for concern that derive from nonegalitarian values – primarily those associated with poverty and material deprivation, humiliation, the impact of inequality on the capacity for self‐control and self‐government, and the unfairness of political decision‐making procedures with large economic inequalities in the background. (shrink)

"The Moral Standing of States" is the title of an essay Michael Walzer wrote in response to four critics of the theory of nonintervention defended in "Just and Unjust Wars." It states a theme to which he has returned in subsequent work. Beitz offers four sets of comments.

The description for this book, Political Equality: An Essay in Democratic Theory, will be forthcoming.

James's Fairness in Trade seeks to offer an account of fair trade that is “internal” to an existing practice he describes as “mutual market reliance.” This paper distinguishes several senses of the distinction between “internal” and “external” that occur in the book and asks how, in its various senses, the distinction shapes and influences judgments about the fairness of the practice.

This book is comprised of essays previously published in Philosophy & Public Affairs and also an extended excerpt from Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars.

Nihilism, Nietzsche and the Doppelganger Problem Was Nietzsche a nihilist? Yes, because, like J. L. Mackie, he was an error-theorist about morality, including the elitist morality to which he himself subscribed. But he was variously a diagnostician, an opponent and a survivor of certain other kinds of nihilism. Schacht argues that Nietzsche cannot have been an error theorist, since meta-ethical nihilism is inconsistent with the moral commitment that Nietzsche displayed. Schacht’s exegetical argument parallels the substantive argument (advocated in recent years (...) by Wright and Blackburn) that Mackie’s error theory can’t be true because if it were, we would have to give up morality or give up moralizing. I answer this argument with a little bit of help from Nietzsche. I then pose a problem, the Doppelganger Problem, for the meta-ethical nihilism that I attribute to Mackie and Nietzsche. (If A is a moral proposition then not-A is a moral proposition: hence not all moral propositions can be false.) I solve the problem by reformulating the error theory and also deal with a variant of the problem, the Reinforced Doppelganger, glancing at a famous paper of Ronald Dworkin’s. Thus, whatever its demerits, the error theory, is not self-refuting, nor does it require us to give up morality. (shrink)

Global Basic Rights brings together many of the most influential contemporary writers in political philosophy and international relations to explore some of the most challenging theoretical and practical questions provoked by Henry Shue's classic book Basic Rights.

Abstractftz is one of the ‘pair rule’ segmentation genes of Drosophila melanogaster, and is an important component of the segmentation process in the fruit fly. We discuss the transcriptional mechanism which causes ftz to be expressed in a seven stripe pattern during embryogenesis.

Contemporary approaches to the science of communication and control show some striking conceptual parallels with traditional aristotelian-Thomistic thought and suggest the major themes treated in this study: (a) the intellectual validity and necessity of non-Empirical models of the universe, (b) the clarification of traditional concepts of "form" and "in-Form-Ation" brought by communications theory, (c) the relation of form to the sensible and intelligible "species", (d) possible modes of persistence of the individual human "psyche" as an integral information pattern unified in (...) a systemic whole by the "selfness" manifest in human consciousness. The concepts of "system" and "information" are employed to analyze formal hierarchical relations and evolutionary processes in terms of structural and functional complexity, Perception, Self-Regulation, And consciousness. (shrink)

My first paper on the Is/Ought issue. The young Arthur Prior endorsed the Autonomy of Ethics, in the form of Hume’s No-Ought-From-Is (NOFI) but the later Prior developed a seemingly devastating counter-argument. I defend Prior's earlier logical thesis (albeit in a modified form) against his later self. However it is important to distinguish between three versions of the Autonomy of Ethics: Ontological, Semantic and Ontological. Ontological Autonomy is the thesis that moral judgments, to be true, must answer to a realm (...) of sui generis non-natural PROPERTIES. Semantic autonomy insists on a realm of sui generis non-natural PREDICATES which do not mean the same as any natural counterparts. Logical Autonomy maintains that moral conclusions cannot be derived from non-moral premises.-moral premises with the aid of logic alone. Logical Autonomy does not entail Semantic Autonomy and Semantic Autonomy does not entail Ontological Autonomy. But, given some plausible assumptions Ontological Autonomy entails Semantic Autonomy and given the conservativeness of logic – the idea that in a valid argument you don’t get out what you haven’t put in – Semantic Autonomy entails Logical Autonomy. So if Logical Autonomy is false – as Prior appears to prove – then Semantic and Ontological Autonomy would appear to be false too! I develop a version of Logical Autonomy (or NOFI) and vindicate it against Prior’s counterexamples, which are also counterexamples to the conservativeness of logic as traditionally conceived. The key concept here is an idea derived in part from Quine - that of INFERENCE-RELATIVE VACUITY. I prove that you cannot derive conclusions in which the moral terms appear non-vacuously from premises from which they are absent. But this is because you cannot derive conclusions in which ANY (non-logical) terms appear non-vacuously from premises from which they are absent Thus NOFI or Logical Autonomy comes out as an instance of the conservativeness of logic. This means that the reverse entailment that I have suggested turns out to be a mistake. The falsehood of Logical Autonomy would not entail either the falsehood Semantic Autonomy or the falsehood of Ontological Autonomy, since Semantic Autonomy only entails Logical Autonomy with the aid of the conservativeness of logic of which Logical Autonomy is simply an instance. Thus NOFI or Logical Autonomy is vindicated, but it turns out to be a less world-shattering thesis than some have supposed. It provides no support for either non-cognitivism or non-naturalism. (shrink)

Professor Flathman's main aim in this interesting paper is to set forth what we might call the “moderation thesis.” It holds that there may be occasions when the best thing to do, all things considered, is to violate a right – at least if the violation takes the form of what Flathman calls “civil encroachment” or “civil non-enforcement.” Moreover, it would be desirable, in a society whose practices include rights, for this belief to be generally accepted, so that those who (...) engaged with good reason in “civil encroachment” would receive the sympathetic support of the community. Let me begin by trying to explain the source of the problem to which this thesis is a response. As Flathman notes, rights have a discretionary character: if I have a right to do or to have something, it is up to me whether to do it or to have it. Having a right, I am entitled to make a choice. Since we cannot say, in advance, what choice I will make, we cannot say, in advance, what will be the state of the world after I make it. But since it seems plain that some states of the world are more desirable than others, it will always be possible that the consequences of my choice will be worse, on the whole, than the consequences of some other choice that I might have made but did not. To moderate rights is apparently to act in ways that redress or compensate for the undesirable results of their exercise. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Volume IV: Hermeneutics and the Study of History ed. by Rudolf A. Makkreel, Frithjof RodiCharles BambachRudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, editors. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Volume IV: Hermeneutics and the Study of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 409. Cloth, $59.50.Contemporary hermeneutics has been dominated by the work of Heidegger and Gadamer. Their phenomenological approach to the human world has (...) exerted such a powerful influence in recent years that one can hardly enter a discussion about the philosophical meaning of hermeneutics that is not already framed in the terms of their discourse. At the same time, there is less familiarity with the origins and sources of the hermeneutic method or with the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey. The editors of Dilthey’s Selected Works, Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, have set about trying to rectify this situation. They have sought to provide a richer context for the study of hermeneutics by bringing out a six-volume collection of writings from one of the major hermeneutical philosophers in the Western tradition. The publication of Volume Four in this series helps to accomplish this task by offering new translations of important Dilthey texts covering both the history and genesis of hermeneutics and a genealogical account of Dilthey’s own hermeneutical approach to history. Only one short essay in this volume, “The Rise of Hermeneutics” (1900), has been published before, and even this older translation has been revised and supplemented by material from the Nachlass. But what is the significance of this material and how does it help to achieve a fuller understanding of hermeneutics and its history?The selections in Volume Four cover the period from 1860 to 1903 with a heavy emphasis on the period from 1860 to 1868 (over two-thirds of the book focuses on Dilthey’s 1860 Preisschrift on “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics,” notes from his 1867–68 lectures “On Understanding and Hermeneutics,” and three reviews from 1862 on historical literature from Buckle, Burckhardt, and F.C. Schlosser). The remaining essays from 1900–1903 provide a sense of Dilthey’s later reflections on hermeneutics and on the meaning of the eighteenth century for historiography and as a philosophical approach to history. The editors of this collection have chosen these texts carefully; the selections in Volume Four are organized around a specific theme. By culling significant early texts about hermeneutics and history and juxtaposing them with a number of later texts on the same topics, they hope to show the genesis of Dilthey’s own path of thought. What emerges from an attentive reading of these sources—especially when carried out within the context of the editors’ own principle of selection—is a highly persuasive view of Dilthey and his work. In the texts themselves we see Dilthey moving from his earlier role as the chronicler and historian of Protestant thought (who conceives of hermeneutics as an ancillary method of textual exegesis) to his later position as the philosopher of the historical world (who views hermeneutics as the epistemological method for the grounding of the human sciences). What we see here is a developmental account of Dilthey’s thought path: from the traditional scholar who conceives of hermeneutics as a method for interpreting texts to the philosopher who understands it as the fundamental science for interpreting historical life. This shift within Dilthey’s work from a hermeneutics of textuality to a hermeneutics of historicity marks an important turning point in the history of the hermeneutical [End Page 641] tradition, a turning point that helped to form the basis of all later philosophical hermeneutics.The five essays from Part Two—“Interpretations of History”—offer a smattering of Dilthey’s own writings on historiography, the theory of history, and the role of the eighteenth-century German tradition in forging an historicist understanding of “human affairs” (373) whose “organic nexus” and “inner purposiveness as a whole” opened up a radically new conception of historical being. Most contemporary continental philosophers will get lost in the textured details of Dilthey’s analyses because what passes for “philosophy” in our epoch pales by comparison with the rich... (shrink)

Milgram’s experiments, subjects were induced to inflict what they believed to be electric shocks in obedience to a man in a white coat. This suggests that many of us can be persuaded to torture, and perhaps kill, another person simply on the say-so of an authority figure. But the experiments have been attacked on methodological, moral and methodologico-moral grounds. Patten argues that the subjects probably were not taken in by the charade; Bok argues that lies should not be used in (...) research; and Patten insists that any excuse for Milgram’s conduct can be adapted on behalf of his subjects. (Either he was wrong to conduct the experiments or they do not establish the phenomenon of immoral obedience). We argue a) that the subjects were indeed taken in b) that there are good historical reasons for regarding the experiments as ecologically valid, c) that lies (though usually wrong) were in this case legitimate, d) that there were excuses available to Milgram which were not available to his subjects and e) that even if he was wrong to conduct the experiments this does not mean that he failed to establish immoral obedience. So far from ‘disrespecting’ his subjects, Milgram enhanced their autonomy as rational agents. We concede however that it might (now) be right to prohibit what it was (then) right to do. (shrink)

Proponents of the view that social structures are ontologically distinct from the people in whose actions they are immanent have assumed that structures can stand in causal relations to individual practices. Were causality to be no more than Humean concomitance correlations between structure and practices would be unproblematic. But two prominent advocates of the ontological account of structures, Bhaskar and Giddens, have also espoused a powers theory of causality. According to that theory causation is brought about by the activity of (...) particulars, in the social psychological case, individuals of some sort. Consistence would demand that structure be those individuals. But neither Giddens nor Bhaskar wish to reify structure to the extent that would fit it for a role as a powerful particular. If only human beings can be powerful particulars in these contexts, the only way that structures can be real must be as properties of conversational interactions. Human action is social just in so far as people direct themselves to engage well in joint activities with others. (shrink)

In his celebrated 'Good and Evil' (l956) Professor Geach argues as against the non-naturalists that ‘good’ is attributive and that the predicative 'good', as used by Moore, is senseless.. 'Good' when properly used is attributive. 'There is no such thing as being just good or bad, [that is, no predicative 'good'] there is only being a good or bad so and so'. On the other hand, Geach insists, as against non-cognitivists, that good-judgments are entirely 'descriptive'. By a consideration of what (...) it is to be an A, we can determine what it is to be a good A, even where the ‘A’ in question is ‘human being’. These battles are fought on behalf of naturalism, indeed, of an up-to-date Aristotelianism. Geach plans to 'pass' from the 'purely descriptive' man to good/bad man, and from human act to good/bad human act. I argue: (l) That the predicative 'good' does have a genuine sense and that it is a mistake to suppose that ‘good’ is a purely attributive adjective. This does not entail that the predicative good (as used by Moore) denotes a non-natural property, but his mistake, if any is metaphysical or ontological not conceptual. (2) That the attributive 'good' cannot be used to generate a naturalistic ethic. It is difficult to extract a set of biologically based requirements out of human nature that are a) reasonably specific; b) rationally binding or at least highly persuasive; and c) morally credible. -/- On the way I protest against Geach’s tendency to try to win arguments by affecting not to understand things. -/- My views to some extent anticipate those of Kraut in *Against Absolute Goodness*. (shrink)