While tens of thousands of people across the United States serve on hospital and other healthcare ethics committees , almost no carefully prepared educational material exists for HEC members. Ethics by Committee is a one volume collection of chapters developed exclusively for this educational purpose. Experts in bioethics, clinical consultation, health law, and social psychology from across the country contribute chapters on ethics consultation, education, and policy development.

Buridan’s Ass faced a choice between two identical bales of hay; governed only by reason, the donkey starved, unable to choose. It seems clear that we face many such cases, and resolve them successfully. Our success seems to tell against any view on which action and intention require evaluative preference. I argue that these views can account for intention and intentional action in cases like that of Buridan’s Ass. A decision to act nonintentionally allows us to resolve these cases without (...) their being a damaging theoretical counterexample. (shrink)

G.E. Moore noticed the oddity of statements like: “It's raining, but I don't believe it.” This oddity is often seen as analogous to the oddity of believing akratically, or believing what one believes one should not believe, and has been appealed to in denying the possibility of akratic belief. I describe a Belief Akratic's Paradox, analogous to Moore's paradox and centered on sentences such as: “I believe it's raining, but I shouldn't believe it.” I then defend the possibility of akratic (...) belief against appeals to this analogy, arguing both that akratic belief does not require belief-akratic-paradoxical belief, and that the latter is importantly different from Moorean belief. I conclude by considering the implications of these arguments for an understanding of both Moorean and akratic belief. (shrink)

The calibration solution to the stability of the world despite eye movements depends, according to Bridgeman et al., upon a combination of three factors which presumably all need to operate to achieve the goal of stability. Although the authors admit (sect. 4.3, para. 5) that the relative contributions of retinal and extraretinal factors will depend on the particular viewing situation, Figure 5 (sect. 4.3) makes it clear in its representation that the role of perceptual factors is relatively minor compared to (...) extraretinal ones. It is with this representation that this commentary wishes to take issue, believing that it occurs as a result of some assumptions about terminology that may be ambiguous, as well as some misconceptions about the circumstances in which there is a need for stability. (shrink)

Many philosophers have thought that human beings do or pursue only what we see as good. These “guise-of-the-good” views face powerful challenges and counterexamples, such as akratic action, in which we do what we ourselves believe we ought not do. I propose a new way for guise-of-the-good views to address this central counterexample by appealing to conflicting beliefs. I then answer concerns that this appeal is insufficiently explanatory, attributes too much conflict, leaves out an essential asymmetry in action against one’s (...) “better” judgment, attributes systematic error about one’s own beliefs, and is too implausible. (shrink)

The concept of business ethics has continued to remain a major item on the agenda of corporate America for the last twenty years. Regrettably, this longevity of interest has not been matched by equal attention to the pedagogical methods and techniques used to address these issues. The current mode of teaching business ethics generally involves reliance on “war stories,” case studies, andseminars. Today’s dynamic environment creates pressures for higher levels of ethical behavior by business. Many ethical challenges faced by contemporary (...) managers are not easily resolved by existing guidelines, and require managers to expand their scope of analysis in attempting to arrive at satisfactory resolutions. Literature can be an especially alternative source of insights, as authors are able to highlight behaviors that may not be available from traditional sources. Historically, the use of literature in examining business ethics has been focused primarily on novels such as The Jungle, Babbit, and The Great Gatsby. Plays are more useful than novels in attempting to inculcate moral and ethical values since they more sharply address the interactions of characters, and the reader becomes more involved in their situations. The plays selected for analysis, Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, have intense plots and characters and allow the reader to observe a wide range motives, emotions, and traits. This untraditional approach to teaching business ethics enhances the ability to relate to the increasingly complex ethical issues facing the individual and the organization. (shrink)

The most compelling arguments for ethical veganism hinge on premise-pairs linking the serious wrongness of factory farming to that of buying its products: one premise claiming that buying those products stands in a certain relation to factory farming itself, and one claiming that entering into that relation with a seriously wrong practice is itself wrong. I argue that all such “linkage arguments” on offer fail, granting the serious wrongness of factory farming. Each relevant relation is such that if it holds (...) between factory farming and buying its products, then it holds between some seriously wrong practice and economic transactions of an absurd number and breadth. Hence, all these premise-pairs would, if true, generate unacceptable moral overreach; each premise-pair contains at least one unacceptable member, and the linkage arguments for ethical veganism fail. (shrink)

Multi-level selection can be understood via the Price equation or contextual analysis, which offer incompatible statistical decompositions of evolutionary change into components of group and individual selection. Okasha argued that each approach suffers from problem cases. I introduce further problem cases for the Price approach, arguing that it is appropriate for MLS 2 group selection but not MLS 1. I also show that the problem cases Okasha raises for contextual analysis can be resolved. For some such cases, however, it emerges (...) that there is no determinate answer to the question of how much of the total selective effect was due to group selection compared to individual selection. This suggests that when there is interaction between the effect of group character and individual character, one cannot separate selection into distinct ‘levels’ at all. (shrink)

The paper suggests replacing the shareholder/stakeholder distinction with a “Dual-Investor” model of business: stockowners provide the specific capital for business ventures, while society provides the “opportunity capital.” Thus society is an investor in every business venture. Dual-Investor theory provides a response (based purely on the ethics of investment) to Milton Friedman’s arguments that executives should maximize profit by any legal means, avoids recent criticisms by Kenneth Goodpaster and Thomas McMahon, and suggests that the dichotomy between private and public ownership overlooks (...) several important alternatives. Some consequences of the theory are detailed and a sketch of a theory of property, based on Dual-Investor theory, is appended. (shrink)

This letter explores the intricate historical and contemporary links between large language models (LLMs) and cognitive science through the lens of information theory, statistical language models, and socioanthropological linguistic theories. The emergence of LLMs highlights the enduring significance of information‐based and statistical learning theories in understanding human communication. These theories, initially proposed in the mid‐20th century, offered a visionary framework for integrating computational science, social sciences, and humanities, which nonetheless was not fully fulfilled at that time. The subsequent development of (...) sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, especially since the 1970s, provided critical perspectives and empirical methods that both challenged and enriched this framework. This letter proposes that two pivotal concepts derived from this development, metapragmatic function and indexicality, offer a fruitful theoretical perspective for integrating the semantic, textual, and pragmatic, contextual dimensions of communication, an amalgamation that contemporary LLMs have yet to fully achieve. The author believes that contemporary cognitive science is at a crucial crossroads, where fostering interdisciplinary dialogues among computational linguistics, social linguistics and linguistic anthropology, and cognitive and social psychology is in particular imperative. Such collaboration is vital to bridge the computational, cognitive, and sociocultural aspects of human communication and human−AI interaction, especially in the era of large language and multimodal models and human‐centric Artificial Intelligence (AI). (shrink)

The present discussion arose from the desire to explain, to an audience of non-physicists, the epistemology to which one is forced if one pursues the quantum mechanical theory of observation to its ultimate consequences. However, the conclusions will not be derived from the aforementioned theory but obtained on the basis of a rather general analysis of what we mean by real. Quantum theory will form the background but not the basis for the analysis. The concept of the real to be (...) arrived at shows considerable similarity to that of the idealist. As the title indicates, it is formulated as a dualism. It is quite possible that it will soon be rejected not only by the community of the philosophers but also by that of the scientists. If this should be the case, the attempt to derive an epistemology from physics will prove to have been premature. Naturally, the author hopes that this will not be the case because, quite apart from the quantum theoretical background, the concepts to be presented appear natural also as an outgrowth of common sense considerations. They have been arrived at by many who did not accept the epistemology of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Schlossberger contends that we are to be judged morally on the basis of what we are, our "world-view," rather than what we do.In Moral Responsibility and ...

Informed consent is one of the most important ethical and legal principles in the United States, including Texas, and reflects a profound respect for individuals and their ability to make decisions in their own best interest. It is also a critical underpinning of medical practice, although how it is actually carried out has not been well studied. A survey was conducted in the private practices and a hospital in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas to ascertain how physicians, patients (...) and patient's family members perceive and demonstrate the elements of informed consent. In-depth interviews of twelve physicians, three patients and three family members were carried out. For physicians, consent was an explicit and implicit aspect of virtually all medical practice. Physicians would seek patient input concerning medical decisions whenever possible and might also discuss care choices with families. However, they often made decisions based upon what they perceived as the patient's best interests. Patients expected the physician to involve them in the decision process, but whether they turned to family members, or even others to assist them, varied considerably. Although Texas physicians respect the competent patient as the primary decision maker, they may bypass a formal surrogate decision maker to gain input from others, including their own view of what is in the patient's best interest. (shrink)

Background Changes in policies and practices related to repeat cesareans and home birth in the U.S. have been influenced by different interpretations of the risk of poor outcomes. Methods This article examines two cases—vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) and home birth to illustrate how an emphasis on relative over absolute risk has been used to characterize outcomes associated with these practices. The case studies will rely on reviews of the research literature and examination of data on birth trends and outcomes. (...) Results Childbirth involves some unique challenges in assessing health risks, specifically the issues of: (1) timing of risks (lowering health risk in a current birth can increase it in subsequent births); (2) the potential weighing of risks to the mother’s versus the infant’s health; (3) the fact that birth is a condition of health and many of the feared outcomes (for example, symptomatic uterine rupture) involve very low absolute risk of occurrence; and (4) a malpractice environment that seizes upon those rare poor outcomes in highly publicized lawsuits that receive widespread attention in the clinical community. In the cases of VBAC and home birth, the result has been considerable emphasis on relative risks, typically an adjusted odds ratio, with little consideration of absolute risks. Conclusion Assessments of the safety of interventions in childbirth should involve careful consideration and communication of the multiple dimensions of risk, particularly a balancing of relative and absolute risks of poor health outcomes. (shrink)

Husserl and others have spent a great deal of time writing introductions to phenomenology, and in trying to explain its nature. One thing that becomes clear from these efforts is that phenomenology claims to have a method for analyzing the essential structures of “mental events”. This raises the possibility of phenomenology turning back on itself, for surely the analysis itself must consist of “mental events”. Hence, at some point in its investigations, phenomenology itself could become what phenomenologists seek to analyze. (...) Husserl foresaw this when he suggested the possibility that:transcendental phenomenology itself then becomes a theme for constitutional and critical inquiry at a higher level, for the sake of conferring on it the highest dignity of genuineness: the ability to justify itself down to its roots.What becomes apparent here is that phenomenology's self-reflection is necessary, not merely possible: without self-reflection phenomenology would lack final “genuineness” or the “ability to justify itself down to its roots”. Unfortunately while Husserl, here and in other places, signals the necessity of this sort of reflection, he nowhere seems actually to carry it out at length. (shrink)

Nelson and Winter’s An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982) was the foundational work of what has become the thriving sub-discipline of evolutionary economics. In attempting to develop an alternative to neoclassical economics, the authors looked to borrow basic ideas from biology, in particular a concept of economic “natural selection.” However, the evolutionary models they construct in their seminal work are in many respects quite different from the models of evolutionary biology. There is no reproduction in any usual sense, “mutation” (...) is directed as opposed to blind, and there is no meaningful distinction between phenotype and genotype. Despite these substantial departures from the conceptions of evolutionary biology, I argue that the “evolutionary” economics of Nelson and Winter is indeed a legitimate extension of Darwinian evolutionary principles to a novel domain, and that the traditional conception of evolution by natural selection must be revised. The novel features of evolutionary economics models reflect the distinctive theoretical requirements faced by economists. I further contend that reproduction, heredity, blind variation, and the genotype/phenotype distinction are all inessential to evolutionary theory, and that their role in evolutionary biology is a domain-specific feature of biological theory. (shrink)

In this paper I analyse the current trends in educational philosophy which utilise Emmanuel Levinas's thought. An ever-growing number of scholars have articulated many different aspects of his thought for educational purposes. I propose that there is a general split between these scholars, those who favour Levinas's philosophical writings and those who favour his confessional writings. I analyse the variegated theories presented by both of these trends and offer a critique largely based on the need for the incorporation of Levinas's (...) complete writings in order to better understand what may be called his ‘educational thought’. Lastly, in order to demonstrate this approach, I offer a reading of his seminal lecture ‘The Temptation of Temptation’ with a focus on the pedagogical features of the Sinaitic revelation, while also demonstrating the proximity between his thought and different aspects of Jewish mysticism. (shrink)

Many people have noted the similarities between case theories in linguistics and frame representations in artificial intelligence. In particular, the cases of a verb seem to correspond to the slots of a frame. This has led many people, including Fillmore [1977] and Winston [1977] to assert that cases and slots are one and the same. This hypothesis has not attracted much attention, probably because the notion of “slot” in frame representations is so underconstrained that the theory would seem to be (...) content free. In this note, we wish to show that this is not true. For one thing, the case‐slot identity theory can explain the difficulty linguists have had in deciding how many cases there are. Furthermore, its adoption will place certain interesting, and plausible constraints on the frame and case theories compatible with it. (shrink)

Using chess decision making as a model for ethical decision making, I show that ethical decisions rarely involve the conscious application of moral rules. I discuss the metaethical and normative implications of this aspect of ethical decision making in terms of the moral philosophies of Sartre, Hare, and Aristotle. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the chess model in research and teaching in applied ethics.