Philosophy of Communication Ethics is a unique and timely volume that creatively examines communication ethics, philosophy of communication, and "the other.".

The majority of healthcare professionals regularly witness fragility, suffering, pain and death in their professional lives. Such experiences may increase the risk of burnout and compassion fatigue, especially if they are without self-awareness and a healthy work environment. Acquiring a deeper understanding of vulnerability inherent to their professional work will be of crucial importance to face these risks. From a relational ethics perspective, the role of the team is critical in the development of professional values which can help to cope (...) with the inherent vulnerability of healthcare professionals. The focus of this paper is the role of Communities of Practice as a source of resilience, since they can create a reflective space for recognising and sharing their experiences of vulnerability that arises as part of their work. This shared knowledge can be a source of strength while simultaneously increasing the confidence and resilience of the healthcare team. (shrink)

Unable to answer the call of our patients: mental health nurses’ experience of moral distress When health practitioners’ moral choices and actions are thwarted by constraints, they may respond with feelings of moral distress. In a Canadian hermeneutic phenomenological study, physicians, nurses, psychologists and non‐professional aides were asked to identify care situations that they found morally distressing, and to elaborate on how moral concerns regarding the care of patients were raised and resolved. In this paper, we describe the experience of (...) moral distress related by nurses working in mental healthcare settings who believed that lack of resources (such as time and staff) leads to dispiritedness, lack of respect, and absence of recognition (for both patients and staff) which severely diminished their ability to provide quality care. The metaphors of flashlight and hammer are used to elaborate nurses’ possible responses to intolerable situations. (shrink)

According to the proponents of Developmental Systems Theory and the Causal Parity Thesis, the privileging of the genome as “first among equals” with respect to the development of phenotypic traits is more a reflection of our own heuristic prejudice than of ontology - the underlying causal structures responsible for that specified development no more single out the genome as primary than they do other broadly “environmental” factors. Parting with the methodology of the popular responses to the Thesis, this paper offers (...) a novel criterion for ‘causal primacy’, one that is grounded in the ontology of the unique causal role of dispositional properties. This paper argues that, if the genome is conceptualised as realising dispositional properties that are “directed toward” phenotypic traits, the parity of ‘causal roles’ between genetic and extra-genetic factors is no longer apparent, and further, that the causal primacy of the genome is both plausible and defensible. (shrink)

Corporate and commercial values are inducing some healthcare organizations to prescribe a customer service model that reframes the provision of nursing care. In this paper it is argued that such a model is incommensurable with nursing conceived as a moral practice and ultimately places nurses at risk. Based upon understanding from ongoing research on compassion fatigue, it is proposed that compassion fatigue as currently experienced by nurses may not arise predominantly from too great a demand for compassion, but rather from (...) barriers to enacting compassionate care. These barriers are often systemic. The paradigm shift in which healthcare environments are viewed as marketplaces rather than moral communities has the potential to radically affect the evolution of nursing as a discipline. (shrink)

The moral distress of psychologists working in psychiatric and mental health care settings was explored in an interdisciplinary, hermeneutic phenomenological study situated at the University of Alberta, Canada. Moral distress is the state experienced when moral choices and actions are thwarted by constraints. Psychologists described specific incidents in which they felt their integrity had been compromised by such factors as institutional and interinstitutional demands, team conflicts, and interdisciplinary disputes. They described dealing with the resulting moral distress by such means as (...) silence, taking a stance, acting secretively, sustaining themselves through work with clients, seeking support from colleagues, and exiting. Recognizing moral distress can lead to a significant shift in the way we perceive moral choices and understand the moral context of practice. (shrink)

According to dispositionalism, de re modality is grounded in the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties. Those properties are able to serve as the ground of de re modal truths, it is said, because they bear a special relation to counterfactual conditionals, one of truthmaking. However, because dispositionalism purports to ground de re modality only on the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties, it had better be the case that they do not play that truthmaking role merely in virtue of their being (...) embedded in some particular, extrinsic causal context. This paper examines a recent argument against dispositionalism that purports to show that the intrinsicality of that relation cannot be maintained, due to the ceteris paribus nature of the counterfactuals that dispositions make-true. When two prominent responses are examined, both are found wanting: at best, they require unjustified special pleading, and at worst, they amount to little more than ad hoc conceptual trickery. (shrink)

La presente investigación tuvo como objetivo realizar un análisis del procedimiento abreviado contemplado en el Código Orgánico Integral Penal (COIP), partiendo del criterio de que ciertos aspectos de este procedimiento vulneran derechos fundamentales del investigado. Se destaca particularmente el requisito para el procesado de admitir los hechos que se le imputan para acceder a este procedimiento, lo cual, según la opinión mayoritaria de doctrinarios, compromete el principio de no autoincriminación, la presunción de inocencia y el derecho a un juicio con (...) todas sus fases. El objetivo de esta investigación fue analizar el procedimiento abreviado establecido en el Código Orgánico Integral Penal (COIP), con el propósito de identificar posibles vulneraciones de derechos fundamentales del investigado. Se buscó específicamente evaluar cómo el requisito de admitir los hechos imputados para acceder a este procedimiento podría afectar principios como el de no autoincriminación y la presunción de inocencia. A través de un enfoque cualitativo y utilizando diferentes métodos de análisis, se procuró determinar si el procedimiento abreviado, tal como está configurado, garantiza un debido proceso conforme a los estándares de derechos humanos y constitucionales. La metodología aplicada se sustentó en un enfoque cualitativo, utilizando los métodos inductivo, analítico, sintético y exegético. Se llevó a cabo un análisis documental de la bibliografía relacionada con el tema investigado, así como de instrumentos internacionales de Derechos Humanos, la Constitución de la República de Ecuador, el COIP y jurisprudencia vinculada a la materia. Los resultados de la investigación determinaron que el procedimiento abreviado tal como se encuentra regulado en el COIP beneficia al Estado y al sistema de justicia al agilizar ciertos procesos legales. Sin embargo, se evidenció que este procedimiento puede vulnerar derechos esenciales del procesado, como el principio de no autoincriminación y la presunción de inocencia. Por lo tanto, se concluye que el procedimiento abreviado afecta el debido proceso al comprometer garantías fundamentales. La investigación señala que el procedimiento abreviado regulado en el COIP, si bien puede ser beneficioso para la eficiencia del sistema de justicia, también conlleva riesgos significativos de vulnerar derechos fundamentales del procesado. Por lo tanto, se destaca la necesidad de revisar y modificar este procedimiento para garantizar el respeto absoluto al debido proceso y a las garantías individuales del investigado. (shrink)

Human rights may be the most globalized political value of our times. The rights paradigm has been criticized, however, for being theoretically unsound, legalistic, individualistic and based on the assumption that there is a given and universal humanness. Its use in the area of health is relatively new. Proponents point to its power to frame health as an entitlement rather than a commodity. The problems and the possibilities of a rights approach in addressing health ethics issues are explored in this (...) article. (shrink)

The movie, The terminal, is used to illustrate Mac Intyre's description of virtue ethics. The terminal is a mythical tale about a traveler, Viktor Navorski, who is stranded by circumstances in a New York airport. Viktor is a person who, without a strict reliance on duty or rules, has developed the disposition to act well despite variation in his circumstances. His character is revealed in contrast to that of three other characters: a cleaner, a flight attendant and the airport manager. (...) Stories like this one may be a good way to open dialogue among clinicians about being virtuous as a practitioner. Such dialogue may make striving to be virtuous an acceptable goal for practitioners and less like an idealistic, pseudo-goal for those aiming for sainthood. (shrink)

The doctrine of theosis is receiving increased attention from contemporary evangelicals. In this paper, I explore theosis and its importance for our understanding and practice of the Christian moral and spiritual life. I discuss the connection between theosis and how we understand the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer, and conclude with some practical applications related to this doctrine.

Historically, Judeo-Christian doctrine has been used to justify the mistreatment of nonhuman animals through the “dominion” view of human superiority. Linzey and others have questioned this perspective, suggesting that critical tenets of religion, and particularly Christianity, support the ethical treatment of other animals by defining dominion as stewardship. This article considers how framing and networks help explain the complex relationship between religion and support for animal rights. We offer ways in which social networks and framing might inform the beliefs and (...) behaviors of religious individuals who support animal rights as well as the strategies of the animal rights movement intended to appeal to such individuals. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Samkhya Karikas of Is'vara Krishna: With the Commentary of Gaudapada; Abstract of Thesis In a concise and comprehensive way, these sixty-nine me morial verses, each in turn, explain the several doctrines of the earlier and pure Samkhya school, as yet untouched by Vedantic colorings, and in their brevity and terseness they resemble, in every particular, except their metrical structure, the sutras of the remaining five orthodox systems of Hindu philosophy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of (...) thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Influence of Anxiety and Literature's Panglossian NoseMichael AustinIScheherazade may be the protagonist of The Thousand and One Nights, but her stories are the heroes. Her audience for these stories consists only of her sister and her husband, the great sultan Shahryar, who three years earlier had vowed to avenge his wife's infidelity by marrying a new woman each night and executing her the following morning. With the supply (...) of virgins in the kingdom running short, Scheherazade forces her father, the royal vizier, to allow her to marry the Sultan, assuring him that she has a plan to end his bloody practice. Her plan is simple: every night, Scheherazade tells Shahryar a piece of a story. Many of these stories are overtly didactic, and some are even thinly veiled allegories of Shahryar's own situation, but Scheherazade aims to do more than simply rehabilitate the sultan with pedagogically sound morality tales. She weaves her stories together, often using multiple frames and levels of embedded narrative, to make sure that the night always ends in the middle of at least one story, and, each morning, the Sultan postpones his sentence of death one day so he can hear the conclusion.Scheherazade's gambit succeeds—with the Sultan and with readers everywhere—because it taps into a very deep human need for literature, which, broadly defined, includes folk tales, songs, oral epics, and other forms of narrative expression. Stories have been a source of pleasure for human beings for a long time—much longer than there have been writing systems to record them. And, during all this time, as Paul Hernadi writes, "the pleasure of succumbing to literary seduction has long served as a psychological reward for what was once and perhaps still is [End Page 215] a biologically advantageous thing to do."1 Scheherazade's stories give Shahryar pleasure—more pleasure, arguably, than the sexual encounters that precede them. In more than a thousand marriages (assuming three full years since he began the practice), sexual pleasure never entices the sultan to suspend his vow. With an entire kingdom full of potential wives, of course, he need never fear an end to such pleasures. The pool of wives who can bring the pleasure of narrative to the marriage bed is much smaller indeed.But pleasure alone cannot explain Scheherazade's success; if it could, she would not have to end each night in the middle of a story. By doing so, she combines the pleasure of narrative with the anxiety of incompleteness. Scheherazade's cliffhangers work on Shahryar for the same reason that they work on us today: we expect to find out what happens in a story, and we experience anxiety when this expectation is frustrated. This anxiety is just as deeply rooted in biology and natural selection as the "pleasure of succumbing to literary seduction." Most of the things that produce great anxiety in people—such as snakes, spiders, fire, high places, large bodies of water, contaminated surfaces, and unknown social situations—constitute very real threats to our survival. Anxiety is nature's way of telling us to pay extra attention around potentially dangerous things or to take steps to avoid such things whenever possible. Pleasure and anxiety work hand in hand, as carrot and stick, to encourage, or discourage, the same fitness-enhancing behaviors. Eating when we are hungry gives us pleasure; wondering where our next meal is coming from gives us anxiety.The pleasure and anxiety that we experience in literature are neurologically indistinguishable from the same responses that we experience in the life-or-death situations for which they were designed. According to John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, "fictional worlds engage emotion systems while disengaging action systems.... An absorbing series of fictional events will draw out of our mental mechanisms a rich array of emotional responses—the same responses that would be appropriate to those same events and persons if they were real."2 The ability to respond in this way appears to be unique to human beings, but it also appears to be a universal element of human nature. People everywhere tell and respond to stories, and many people devote considerable... (shrink)

If the Bucolics as a whole ‘ look on us with dark enigmatical eyes,’ for long no more impenetrable darkness and no more compelling enigma could be found than that of the fourth poem in the collection. But Skutsch, the authors of Virgil's Messianic Eclogue, and more recently Mr. Royds in his Virgil and Isaiah, have done much to solve its many mysteries. Their efforts, however, were mainly directed towards the problems of fact contained in the Eclogue, and so far (...) little attention seems to have been given to an equally interesting point, that of its metrical arrangement. It is plain that we must consult the Sibyll for help: if it is not plain, that is not Virgil's fault. I hope to be able to show here that Virgil himself has left in this poem certain unmistakeable signs for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, besides his own rather casual reference to the Cumaeum carmen, and incidentally to dispose anew of the theory which reads in that expression an allusion not to the Sibyl but to Hesiod. (shrink)

The transparency of visual experience is a widely held and important thesis in the philosophy of perception. Critical discussion of transparency has focused on visual experiences, such as the experience of visual blur that are taken to be counter examples to transparency. Here, I consider a novel objection to transparency that does not depend on intuitions about examples. The objection is that if transparency is true then we cannot explain our ability to think about our visual experiences as such. In (...) response to this objection, I develop an account of how we are able to think about our own visual experiences as such that is compatible with transparency. (shrink)

The Christ and the Bodhisattva. Ed. by Donald Lopez and Steven Rockefeller. State University of New York Press, Albany 1987. viii, 274pp. Hbk $44.50, pbk $14.95.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Christian Moral Life: Faithful Discipleship for a Global Society by Patricia Lamoureux, Paul J. WadellVictor Lee AustinThe Christian Moral Life: Faithful Discipleship for a Global Society Patricia Lamoureux and Paul J. Wadell Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010. 306pp. $27.00In ten chapters, the authors provide what is in effect an introductory college textbook in Roman Catholic moral theology. They aim to ground their exposition in scripture and to (...) reach a broad audience by drawing on ecumenical and interfaith perspectives. Their organization is clear: they summarize each chapter in advance and then conclude it with a list of main points and questions for reflection. The index is extensive, the bibliography is large, and the table of contents is quite detailed. In short, the book aims to be accessible to undergraduates and helpful to more advanced students. (There is, unfortunately, no index of scriptural citations.) [End Page 201]The arc of their approach to moral theology is as follows. One should begin with discipleship and more specifically with its dynamic of call and response. Discipleship is a process in which one learns to see, particularly to see the reign of God. Sin and repentance are continually involved in discipleship. The development of the virtues is central because through them we learn to be good at being human. In the moral life, conscience is the central gift by which we learn to live by love in a Eucharistic life. Such life is informed by the resurrection as understood both “analogically and dialectically” (206), it is guided by the Spirit, and it is anchored in the shared resources and discernment of Christian community. Finally, the moral life is not private. Thus, the authors conclude with a chapter that draws out the implications for public discipleship.I venture three critiques that arise in part from my place as an Anglican moral theologian. The first deals with scripture. The authors are aware of the characteristic biases of preconciliar Roman Catholic moral theology. I am less certain that they are self-conscious of some of their own presuppositions. Commendably, they provide a verse of scripture at the head of each chapter, and they conceive of what they are doing as working from scripture throughout. Yet it is not clear to me that they present us with a moral theology that comes out of a prayerful wrestling with scripture. For example, their statement, “Jesus praises the [good] Samaritan” (46) is not strictly true. Rather, in telling that parable, Jesus holds back from stating a conclusion. Moreover, the authors are correct to say that parables are useful in transforming our vision. They make that point over eight pages (39–47), in which there are seventeen citations of secondary literature from six different authors. Yet, I would have preferred to see how the authors themselves digested, synthesized, and struggled with the parables, rather than simply discussing the conclusions of others.My second critique deals with conscience. When students start to think about how the moral life is grounded in scripture, they will at some point ask: What if my conscience tells me that something is right that scripture says is wrong (or vice versa)? This question, however, does not appear in this book. In their chapter on the centrality of conscience, it becomes clear that the authors see the primary challenge to the primacy of the conscience as coming from “church leaders.” This is, I think, a regrettable continuation of the tired struggle of Roman moral theologians with their church’s magisterium. At least to this outsider—who lives within an ecclesial context marked by extreme weakness of teaching—there seems to be a highly important and positive use of obedience, which is different from the “mystique of obedience” that these authors criticize (170–71). To be precise, “church leaders” can help us learn something about the relationship of conscience and scripture. This book does not show the place of obedience in the Christian moral life.My last point is a comment on textbooks. Although this book is quite long (I estimate it at 150,000 words), it has that textbook quality of passing lightly [End Page 202] from one thing to the next... (shrink)

This paper begins and ends with the observation that the Pārijātaharaṇa or theft of the magical Pārijāta tree appears to be the only scene from the adult biography of Kṛṣṇa to have enjoyed a popularity comparable to the scenes of his childhood and youth. Inquiring why this might be the case, the article treats the oldest source of the episode, namely the Critical Edition text of the Harivaṃśa, and its elaboration in two Harivaṃśa appendices (App. I 29 and 29A). Two (...) thematic elements characterize 29 and 29A’s enlargement upon the deed: the amplification of conflict over the tree and the ritual activities of women. While the first of these themes, developed in App. I 29, is a natural, if not predictable augmentation of the Kṛṣṇa narrative, understanding the rationale behind App. I 29A’s concerns with the ritual responsibilities of the pativratā or devoted wife requires a more sustained analysis. I argue here that 29A makes explicit a fundamental dynamic of the divine feminine and its role within the Kṛṣṇa biography which can be found at work in the earlier Critical text of the HV as well. This makes possible a final hypothesis on why the Pārijāta episode may have enjoyed a popularity in the Vaiṣṇava tradition unlike any other scene of Kṛṣṇa’s adult biography. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Necessity, Contingency, and My Very First Cup of Coffee Do We Need God to Justify Fair Trade ‐ and the Rest of Ethics? Coffee, God, and the Good Life.

In this Article I argue that the emerging public/private nexus of surveillance involves the augmentation of state power and calls for new models of constitutional constraint. The key phenomenon is the role played by communications intermediaries in collecting the information that the state subsequently accesses. These intermediaries are not just powerful companies engaged in collecting and analyzing the information of users and the information they hold are not just business records. The key feature of these companies is that, through their (...) information practices and architecture, they mediate other relationships. I argue that this mediating function, and its underlying technological form, interacts with legal and social norms in ways that can lead to the erosion of constraints on state power. This Article maps two stories of erosion, rooted in two kinds of community displacement. The first involves the displacement of community participation in law enforcement and the emergence of “technological tattletales” where intermediaries cooperate with the state. Unlike citizen cooperation, this practice augments state power and undermines more traditional informal modes of constraint on state power. The second involves the displacement of national legal and political community. Communications intermediaries are often large multinational companies that operate in multiple jurisdictions and move their data to various datacenters across the world even as the individual data subject remains in one geographical location. Laws that treat nonresident aliens differently from residents and citizens can create “constitutional black holes” where the communications data of an individual is not protected by any constitutional constraints. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:To Think Like God: Pythagoras and Parmenides: The Origins of PhilosophyScott AustinArnold Hermann. To Think Like God: Pythagoras and Parmenides: The Origins of Philosophy. Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing, 2004. Pp. xxx + 374. Cloth, $32.00.Mr. Arnold Hermann could presumably have used his connection with Parmenides Press to publish anything he wanted. Instead, he has put out a sober, bibliographically well aware, thesis about the origin, nature, and motivations (...) of Parmenides' thought, one evolved in dialogue with scholars such as Cordero, McKirahan, and Curd. The resulting monograph, to be the first of three on subjects connected with Parmenides and Plato's Parmenides, is a legitimate contribution to the field, to be taken very seriously as part of any scholarly bibliography. Best of all, in this reviewer's opinion, is the exploration of Parmenides' legal language and metaphors as they might affect the type of abstract object which can count as subject for the esti, the differences between or among routes and rules of inquiry, the necessity for a Doxa-section, the relationships with Xenophanes and Plato. Less successful, I think, is the attempt to put together a coherent picture out of the hazy evidence on Pythagoras and to distinguish levels of probability within that evidence. Nor, in spite of his praise for Mourelatos's book ("... truly one of the most indispensable works on the Eleatic," 214), does Hermann seem aware (see 189) that the possibility of a pluralistic Eleatic ontology was also present in that book, before it was followed by Curd's book.Hermann's thesis is that Parmenidean philosophy was an answer both to Xenophanes' challenge, to his indication of the limits of our human inquiry—our difference from the gods—and the problem of irrationals in Pythagoreanism. By setting out the rational limits which any purely theoretical inquiry must have, Parmenides intended to show that, in pursuing theory, we can, indeed, think like the gods. (Here excellent use is made of work by Mourelatos and Long.) But by distinguishing theoretical inquiry from empirical inquiry, Parmenides showed the limits of Pythagoreanism, which had been unable to make that distinction. (Units are theoretical entities, but points are empirical, so there are in reality no Pythagorean unit-points; rational numbers are theoretical while irrationals are empirical, and so on.) (Here there are affinities with the recent Popper book.) That is, the Doxa-section, according to Hermann, shows tragically that we do not always think like the gods, especially when we think empirically. Our contemporary science is continuing the inquiry that Parmenides began, but the original Parmenidean philosophy was a methodology about how to inquire into abstract objects, not necessarily a metaphysics, a theory about what those abstract objects are. Here Hermann differs from the standard portrait of Parmenides as theorist of an intelligible world; he thinks that it is Plato who is more responsible than Parmenides for theorizing about which objects correspond to the methodology. (Here he follows Mourelatos and Curd in viewing fragment 2 as setting up types of inquiry rather than types of entity.)One has no quarrel with the claim that Parmenides' originality is at least partly methodological. Yet a methodology whose strictures are this strong was thought, by Plato at least, to require absolute monism; is it an accident that I cannot have a pluralistic ontology without having non-identities between members of pairs of objects, non-identity being an example of saying what is not (fragment 8, lines 36–38)? Does not this particular methodology necessitate a very particular metaphysics? [End Page 481]And, if we do think like the gods, at least at times, are we not then thinking about what is ultimately real, i.e., about a certain type of object? If rules can be given which secure a kind of thought which is exempt from Xenophanean scepticism, do not these rules determine sorts of entities? And, if Pythagoreanism errs in confusing theoretical with empirical entities, must not we ourselves possess the perspective of a god or goddess in order to avoid the confusion?These are some of the questions provoked by this fresh book, which, untrammelled by much scholarly narrowness, is yet capable of contributing much to scholarly... (shrink)

The True Teaching, Practice and Realization of the Pure Land Way, A translation of Shinran's Kyogyoshinsho, Vol. 1. Shin Buddhism Translation Series, Hongwanji International Center, Kyoto 1983. 200 pp. N. P.