This edited volume illustrates the central importance of diversity of human values throughout healthcare. The readings are organised around the main stages of the clinical encounter from the patient's perspective. This introductory chapter opens up crucial issues of methodology and of practical application in this highly innovative approach to the role of ethics in healthcare.

This volume of articles, literature and case studies illustrates the central importance of human values throughout healthcare. The readings are structured around the main stages of the clinical encounter from the patient's perspective.

This paper traces the development of parental rights to accept or to refuse treatment for a defective newborn infant in the United Kingdom and in the United States of America; its main purpose is to explore the common trends from which an acceptable policy may be derived. It is probable that the British law on parental decision-making in respect of infants suffering from Down's syndrome is to be found in the civil case of In Re B rather than in the (...) criminal case of R v Arthur. United States court decisions are strongly influenced by constitutional law and reflect the right to personal privacy. The position on each side of the Atlantic seems very similar but this similarity includes a sense of uncertainty as to legal responsibility. There is a case for agreed guidelines and a suggested format is offered for consideration. (shrink)

Electronic communication and commerce facilitate the collection of information about individual use of the Internet. Focusing on the case of Comet Systems Inc. and its data gathering practices, this paper explores the technical details of gathering personal information in databases in general and the special character of the privacy issue raised by 'anonymous' information about individual behavior on the Internet. The case analysis suggests new insights for our understanding of privacy and frames a discussion of policy alternatives with respect to (...) the privacy of Internet communication. (shrink)

This work is a volume in the series Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, edited by Richard Sorabji. The aim of the series is to make the Greek commentaries available in English. Konstan does an admirable job of this. The translation is extremely careful, clear, and readable. Konstan succeeds in staying close to the text without sacrificing intelligibility. Whenever necessary, he inserts words or phrases in brackets to complete the sense of an accurately translated passage. Konstan also makes use of brackets to (...) give precise citations to fill out Simplicius' references. The footnotes, too, are excellent. There the reader finds information about deviations from Diels's text, about alternative readings, and explanations of renderings into English that might be controversial. In the introduction, Sorabji gives a thumbnail sketch of the philosophical issues raised by Physics 6. Several useful documents are appended to the commentary, namely, a list of all departures from Diels's text, an appendix written by the editor providing a brief survey of the ancient Greek commentators, and a list of the philosophers cited by Simplicius with a onesentence description of each. (shrink)

This book is a carefully crafted introduction to ancient Greek thought and philosophy. Irwin begins with Homer and ends with Augustine and along the way looks at all save one of the significant Greek philosophical traditions.

This book is a carefully crafted introduction to ancient Greek thought and philosophy. Irwin begins with Homer and ends with Augustine and along the way looks at all save one of the significant Greek philosophical traditions.

Compared to our understanding of positive prediction error signals occurring due to unexpected reward outcomes, less is known about the neural circuitry in humans that drives negative prediction errors during omission of expected rewards. While classical learning theories such as Rescorla–Wagner or temporal difference learning suggest that both types of prediction errors result from a simple subtraction, there has been recent evidence suggesting that different brain regions provide input to dopamine neurons which contributes to specific components of this prediction error (...) computation. Here, we focus on the brain regions responding to negative prediction error signals, which has been well-established in animal studies to involve a distinct pathway through the lateral habenula. We examine the activity of this pathway in humans, using a conditioned inhibition paradigm with high-resolution functional MRI. First, participants learned to associate a sensory stimulus with reward delivery. Then, reward delivery was omitted whenever this stimulus was presented simultaneously with a different sensory stimulus, the conditioned inhibitor. Both reward presentation and the reward-predictive cue activated midbrain dopamine regions, insula and orbitofrontal cortex. While we found significant activity at an uncorrected threshold for the CI in the habenula, consistent with our predictions, it did not survive correction for multiple comparisons and awaits further replication. Additionally, the pallidum and putamen regions of the basal ganglia showed modulations of activity for the inhibitor that did not survive the corrected threshold. (shrink)