UK general practitioners (GPs) are self-employed entrepreneurs running small businesses with commercial considerations. In this situation there is no clear distinction between information, self-promotion and advertising. In response to the growing public demand for more information about medical services, the medical profession should voluntarily accept the notion of soft self-promotion in the form of 'notices' or 'announcements' placed in newspapers. Newspapers are the most effective way of giving easy access to information. The resistance to newspapers may be more concerned with (...) preserving certain medical traditions than consideration of the public interest. The General Medical Council's (GMC's) arguments against soft self-promotion are seen as misguided paternalism, inconsistent and irrational. (shrink)

Screening programmes are becoming increasingly popular since prevention is considered 'better than cure'. While earlier diagnosis may result in more effective treatment for some, there will be consequent harm for others due to anxiety, stigma, side-effects etc. A screening test cannot guarantee the detection of all 'abnormal' cases, therefore there will be false reassurance for some. A proper consideration of the potential benefit and harm arising from screening may lead to the conclusion that the programme should not be offered. A (...) modified utilitarian approach may be used for allocation of scarce resources in health care. Ethics has an important role in this evaluation. (shrink)

"By combining recent advances in the physical sciences with some of the novel ideas, techniques, and data of modern biology, this book attempts to achieve a new and different kind of evolutionary synthesis. I found it to be challenging, fascinating, infuriating, and provocative, but certainly not dull."--James H, Brown, University of New Mexico "This book is unquestionably mandatory reading not only for every living biologist but for generations of biologists to come."--Jack P. Hailman, Animal Behaviour , review of the first (...) edition "An important contribution to modern evolutionary thinking. It fortifies the place of Evolutionary Theory among the other well-established natural laws."--R.Gessink, TAXON. (shrink)

Professor R. J. Getty has drawn attention to a tenth- or early eleventh-century manuscript of Statius’ Thebaid, hitherto examined only in Book I, namely Turonensis . Dr. Klotz, in his Teubner edition of 1908, gave citations from Book I, and wrote , ‘dolendum est sane de hoc codice primum tantum librum innotuisse, sed cum Roffensis libri maxime affinis accuratiorem notitiam haberemus, collatione quamvis -aegre careri posse nobis visum est.’ I have collated both T and Roffensis in full, and find firstly (...) that the citations of r by Klotz are far from accurate, especially in the last six books, and secondly that while it is indeed true thatT and r are very closely related, T is a much better representative than r of their common source. (shrink)

Recently, Bohr’s complementarity principle was assessed in setups involving delayed choices. These works argued in favor of a reformulation of the aforementioned principle so as to account for situations in which a quantum system would simultaneously behave as wave and particle. Here we defend a framework that, supported by well-known experimental results and consistent with the decoherence paradigm, allows us to interpret complementarity in terms of correlations between the system and an informer. Our proposal offers formal definition and operational interpretation (...) for the dual behavior in terms of both nonlocal resources and the couple work-information. Most importantly, our results provide a generalized information-based trade-off for the wave–particle duality and a causal interpretation for delayed-choice experiments. (shrink)

We report the results of a randomized trial to assess the impact of an innovative ethics curriculum on the knowledge and confidence of 85 medical house officers in a university hospital programme, as well as their responses to a simulated clinical case. Twenty-five per cent of the house officers received a lecture series, 25 per cent received lectures and case conferences, with an ethicist in attendance, and 50 per cent served as controls. A post-intervention questionnaire was administered. Knowledge scores did (...) not differ among the groups. Confidence regarding ethical issues was significantly greater in the aggregate intervention group compared to the control group. Confidence regarding procedural issues related to ethics was significantly higher for the EI group than for the controls. Responses to a simulated case showed that significantly fewer house officers in the EI group would intubate a patient for whom such therapy would be futile. We conclude that ethics education can have an impact on house officers' confidence and their responses to a simulated case, and that the EI was more effective than the LI. Such results have implications regarding the implementation of ethics education during residency. (shrink)

Currently, an emphasis is being placed on the integration of ethical issues into the business curriculum. This paper investigates the viability of using student group interaction to induce an upward movement in the stages of moral development as advanced by Kohlberg. The results of a classroom experiment using graduate business law students suggest that formulating groups that mix stages of moral development can provide a robust environment for upward movement. In addition, the results suggest strategies for formulating effective groups, based (...) upon entry levels as measured by the Defining Issues Test. (shrink)

D. R. Bell; XI—Imperatives and the Will, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 66, Issue 1, 1 June 1966, Pages 129–148, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristo.

Due to the competitive nature of business as a whole, it is sometimes difficult to develop moral relationships with others. However, though friendships are possible in business, most relationships must be kept on the lower level of business acquaintanceship.

This essay offers a critique of the culture of specio-vocationalism in American higher education by first drawing on Edmund Husserl’s conception of “world” and connecting this notion to education conceived as a “world-disclosing” activity. The essay will then give an account of how the trends of vocationalization and specialization manifest themselves in contemporary university culture, and how they work together to “de-world” the lives of our students and deprive them of possibilities that are part of what it means to be (...) human. After showing how this impoverishment undermines the world-disclosing function of higher education, the essay will then suggest one way to counter this “de-worlding of world”: the teaching of the situated finitude of the human condition by reminding our students that our knowledge or sense of the world is always only partial. It is this realization that has the potential of placing our students once again before the vastness of the world in wonder and curiosity. In this realization they will gain a better sense of the world as a distant horizon still to be explored in all of its inexhaustible complexity and meaning. At the same time, coming to grips with their own ignorance will imbue them with an intellectual humility that will shield them not only from their own finitude, but the finitude of others as well. (shrink)

In recent years a burgeoning bicycle culture has reanimated the city of Detroit. The following essay analyzes this reanimation through the themes of embodiment, mobility, spatiality, and the intersubjective creation of place, using the techniques of phenomenology. The description that emerges is an evolving social ontology with implications for cities like Detroit. In such cities any plan for re-urbanization must re-conceptualize both transportation schemas and public space on terrain once dominated by the automobile. The provisional phenomenological description on offer here (...) should be thought of as just one tool in this project, as Detroit and cities like it negotiate the reconstitution of their communities. (shrink)

Of the unusual grammatical constructions which Statius employs for the sake of variety and novel effect, among the most remarkable is his use of the ablative case. There are striking instances at Th. 8. 157, Th. 10. 309, Ach. 1. 219, Ach. 2. 129; and W. C. Summers was led to say: ‘We see some traces in Valerius of the lax use of this case which became almost a disease with Statius, who employs it for almost any kind of idea.’ (...) There are three passages in Statius which have been misinterpreted or emended through the failure to recognize a use of the ablative to which he was especially prone—the local ablative where the poetic dative of ‘motion towards’ would seem more normal. I shall first list examples of this use in Statius where there is little or no doubt about interpretation or reading, and in the light of this accumulated evidence consider the three passages which are disputed. (shrink)

[D. H. Mellor] Kant's claim that our knowledge of time is transcendental in his sense, while false of time itself, is true of tenses, i.e. of the locations of events and other temporal entities in McTaggart's A series. This fact can easily, and I think only, be explained by taking time itself to be real but tenseless. /// [J. R. Lucas] Mellor's argument from Kant fails. The difficulties in his first Antinomy are due to topological confusions, not the tensed nature (...) of time. Nor are McTaggart' s difficulties due to the tensed nature of time. The ego-centricity of tensed discourse is an essential feature of communication between selves, each of whom refers himself as 'I', and is required for talking about time as well as experience and agency. Arguments based on the Special Theory are misconceived. Some rest on a confused notion of 'topological simultaneity'. In the General Theory a cosmic time is defined, as also in quantum mechanics, where a natural present is defined by a unique hyperplane of collapse into eigen-ness. (shrink)

Ethical guidelines for conducting clinical trials have historically been based on a perceived therapeutic obligation to treat and benefit the patient-participants. The origins of this ethical framework can be traced to the Hippocratic oath originally written to guide doctors in caring for their patients, where the overriding moral obligation of doctors is strictly to do what is best for the individual patient, irrespective of other social considerations. In contrast, although medicine focuses on the health of the person, public health is (...) concerned with the health of the entire population, and thus, public health ethics is founded on the societal responsibility to protect and promote the health of the population as a whole. From a public health perspective, research ethics should be guided by giving due consideration to the risks and benefits to society in addition to the individual research participants. On the basis of a duty to protect the population as a whole, a fiduciary obligation to realise the social value of the research and the moral responsibility to distribute the benefits and burdens of research fairly across society, how a public health perspective on research ethics results in fundamental re-assessments of the proper course of action for two salient topical issues in research ethics is shown: stopping trials early for reasons of efficacy and the conduct of research on less expensive yet less effective interventions. (shrink)