In the preface to the Yale edition of Samuel Johnson’s poems, the editors remark that “for a modern reader who can recreate the situation in which [“London”] was written, it may still be exciting enough. But to one with less imaginative capacity or historical knowledge, its appeal lies in Johnson’s skillful handling of the couplet.”2 To assist us in re-creating the milieu of 1738, the editors supply the usual notes identifying various historical personages and events which are no longer in (...) the domain of common knowledge. In this respect they follow Johnson’s lead. “London” is manifestly an occasional poem; and its occasion—in part, Walpole’s timidity abroad and corruption at home—like all occasions, passed.3 Indeed it passed so quickly that Johnson himself felt called upon in the fifth edition to annotate, for instance, his mention of “the Gazetteer”: “the paper which at that time contained apologies for the Court.” By 1750 Walpole was long out of court, the Gazetteer extinct, and “London” as outdated as yesterday’s newspaper.For poems like “London” whose contents are neither au courant nor immortal but rather historical or simply dead, the Yale editors suggest two avenues of resuscitation: the reader may either restore the background by means of historical imagination or, failing that, admire Johnson’s couplet art, which perhaps has a better chance at perennial appeal. Either content or form, either history or art—both options require a sacrifice on our part, and that sacrifice is our occasion, our need. Even assuming that the poem’s context could be exhumed and that we could participate once again in all the rage of the “patriot” opposition to Walpole, Why would we want to? The problem is that not only “London” but the Walpole regime itself is now defunct. Yet the same question must be asked of the poem’s art, even and especially if it is eternal. Why are we interested in the aesthetic knowledge of couplets that have been drained of all substance? Is understanding “London” in either case an end in itself? The pure content of the poem is too concrete, its pure form too abstract, to answer our occasions. Thus to understand the poem as either history or art demands a leisure that has no exigencies and is therefore free for the bygone and ethereal.42. E.L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne, eds., Poems, vol. 6, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson , p. xvii.3. For a detailed exposition of the social and political background of “London,” see Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson , pp. 88-92, and James Clifford, “London,” Young Sam Johnson , pp. 175-94.4. John Locke explains the infinite leisure we can take in understanding the obscurities of ancient authors in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. , 2:110:There being no writings we have any great concernment to be very solicitous about the meaning of, but those that contain either truths we are required to believe, or laws we are to obey, and draw inconveniences on us when we mistake or transgress, we may be less anxious about the sense of other authors; who, writing but their own opinions, we are under no greater necessity to know them, than they to know ours. Our good or evil depending not on their decrees, we may safely be ignorant of their notions: and therefore in the reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due clearness and perspicuity, we may lay them aside. (shrink)

The adoption of codes of ethics or values statements is intended to guide everyday decisions, as well as to influence the perceptions of external stakeholders. Questions have emerged in the literature about whether the effort to substantively direct decision-making in an organization is marginalized by the more obvious symbolic role of values statements. Here the perceived impact of values statements on decision-making in organizations is explored, and a number of positive effects observed. Respondents report that values statements create positive externalities (...) providing guidelines for decision-making, increasing accountability, and clarifying expectations. Yet, both cynicism and perceived management hypocrisy emerged in the survey, which together had strong negative effects on the perceived decision-making impact of values statements. Finally, positive external effects are almost never mentioned by respondents who give their firms high marks on the quality of values statement development, training, and implementation. Yet, such external effects get significantly greater representation in the comments of respondents who report less substance in their firms’ values statement development and implementation processes. In all, the results suggest that the substantive and symbolic roles of values statements are not independent and that external symbolism without internal legitimacy may in the long-run be problematic. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 76-78.

Rereading Renée C. Fox's “A Sociological Perspective on Organ Transplantation and Hemodialysis,” published in 1970, one is likely to be struck more by continuity than by change. The most pressing of the social, policy, and ethical concerns that Fox raised remain problematic fifty years later. We still struggle with scientific and clinical uncertainty, with the boundary between experimentation and therapy, and with the cost of organ replacement therapies and disparities in how they are allocated. We still have an imperfect understanding (...) of transplant immune responses. We still debate when a potential donor “actually” dies, and we still seem to think better empirical criteria could harmonize the diverse religious, cultural, and socioeconomic values of patients, providers, third‐party payers, and policy‐makers. Organ transplantation was for Fox both a particular case unfolding in time and an entryway for discussing the difficult moral questions presented by many new medical technologies in a context of high demand and limited resources. (shrink)

Previous papers on ethics consultation in medicine have taken a positivistic approach and lack critical scrutiny of the psychosocial, political, and moral contexts in which consultations occur. This paper discusses some of the contextual factors that require more careful research. We need to know more about what prompts and inhibits consultation, especially what factors effectively prevent house officers and nonphysicians from requesting consultation despite perceived moral conflict in cases. The attitudes and institutional power of attending medical staff seem important, especially (...) where innovative interventions raise ethical questions. Ethics consultants also need to address the thorny problems of the origin(s) of the consultant's authority, whistleblowing, conflicts of interest that affect the consultant, persistently poor communications in hospitals, systemic inequity in the availability or quality of services for some, and the standing of the consultant's recommendations, including their appearance in the patient's medical record. (shrink)

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Volume 19, Issue 7, July 2019, Page 69-71.

Although universal schooling has been adopted as a goal by international organizations, bilateral aid agencies, national governments, and non-profit organizations, little sustained international attention has been devoted to the purposes or goals of universal education. What is universal primary and secondary education intended to accomplish? This book, which grew out of a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, offers views from Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and South America on the purposes of universal education while considering diverse (...) cultures, religions, and professions. It is the first book in which renowned authors from around the world have proposed, considered, and debated goals of basic and secondary education, engaging in a constructive dialogue on one of the most pressing issues facing education today. (shrink)

The experiences of individuals with intersex conditions include considerable abuse at the hands of medical personnel. Despite changes in expert opinion about full disclosure of the nature of each patient’s condition and recommendations to defer cosmetic surgical interventions, we do not know how much actual practice has changed over several decades. Moreover, discrepancies continue between the views of who have these conditions and medical practitioners, especially about preventing cancer and retaining gonads for the purpose of providing “natural” hormone production. We (...) have insufficient data to resolve these different perspectives. (shrink)

In his Masterly Study of the Presocratic philosophers, Jonathan Barnes considers the refinements made by the early Greek sophists to the related concepts of cause and responsibility. Barnes judges Gorgias's Helen to have treated "in philosophical depth the issue of responsibility," in apparent contrast to Antiphon's second tetralogy, which, presumably, does not.1 The tetralogy itself comprises four speeches, two each by an imaginary plaintiff and a fictitious defendant. Certain facts are undisputed. In the course of an athletic contest among youths (...) of training age, the defendant threw his javelin with the intention of hitting the prescribed target. Instead, the javelin hit a young man charged with picking up .. (shrink)

This essay turns to ancient sources in order to rethink the relationship between political apathy and democracy. If modern democratic theorists place political apathy entirely outside of democracy – either as a destructive limit upon the full realization of a democratic polity, or, more sanguinely, as a pragmatic necessity which tempers democracy so that it may function in a workable yet watered-down form – the ancients conceived of political apathy as a peculiarly democratic phenomenon that was likely to flourish in (...) tandem with the expansion of egalitarian institutional structures and moral ideas. Evidence for the ancient recognition of political apathy as a uniquely democratic kind of affliction centers on, but is not limited to, three main sources. In literature, the Homeric epic, and specifically the story of Achilles, present apathy for politics and commitment to human equality as synonymous forces. In philosophy, one of the main reasons Plato opposes the democratic regime is precisely that it engenders apathy among the citizenry. And in history, Herodotus’ account of the first debate on constitutions as well as the ancient democratic practice of election by lot reveal an ancient egalitarian interest in using democracy to quell, rather than encourage, political behavior. (shrink)

Although the primary meaning of Max Weber’s concept of disenchantment is as a sociological condition (the retreat of magic and myth from social life through processes of secularization and rationalization), as Weber himself makes clear in his address, “Science as a Vocation,” disenchantment can also be a philosophical act: an unusual form of moral discourse that derives new ethical direction out of the very untenability of a previously robust moral tradition. The philosophical variant of disenchantment is significant both because it (...) contradicts numerous elements of the sociological version and because it suggests there are forms of cognition unique to moral philosophy (insofar as the derivation of a moral teaching from the very absence of one is foreign to both a religious and ascientific mindset). (shrink)

Empirical bioethics research has become an established field of study, with its own unique goals, vocabulary, and methods, and wi...

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

To localize wheat ESTs on chromosomes, 882 homoeologous group 6-specific ESTs were identified by physically mapping 7965 singletons from 37 cDNA libraries on 146 chromosome, arm, and sub-arm aneuploid and deletion stocks. The 882 ESTs were physically mapped to 25 regions flanked by 23 deletion breakpoints. Of the 5154 restriction fragments detected by 882 ESTs, 2043 were localized to group 6 chromosomes and 806 were mapped on other chromosome groups. The number of loci mapped was greatest on chromosome 6B and (...) least on 6D. The 264 ESTs that detected orthologous loci on all three homoeologs using one restriction enzyme were used to construct a consensus physical map. The physical distribution of ESTs was uneven on chromosomes with a tendency toward higher densities in the distal halves of chromosome arms. About 43% of the wheat group 6 ESTs identified rice homologs upon comparisons of genome sequences. Fifty-eight percent of these ESTs were present on rice chromosome 2 and the remaining were on other rice chromosomes. Even within the group 6 bins, rice chromosomal blocks identified by 1-6 wheat ESTs were homologous to up to 11 rice chromosomes. These rice-block contigs were used to resolve the order of wheat ESTs within each bin. (shrink)

At the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise.

HATRED IS A PHENOMENON OF TREMENDOUS ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE, YET it is poorly understood today. This essay explores some of the ways in which hatred is conceptualized and evaluated within different philosophical and religious traditions. Attention is focused on the Hebrew Bible and on the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Aquinas, and Buddhaghosa. Subtle differences mark various tradition-rooted accounts of the nature, causes, and effects of hatred. These differences yield different judgments about hatred's value and imply different methods for addressing the (...) problem of hatred. (shrink)