Objectives—To study the attitudes of health care staff in four postcommunist countries towards taking gifts from their clients—and their confessed experience of actually taking such gifts.Design—Survey questionnaire administered to officials including health care staff, supplemented by focus-group discussions with the general public.Setting – Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.Participants—A quota sample of 1,307 officials including 292 health care staff, supplemented by stratified national random samples of 4,778 ordinary members of the public and in-depth interviews or focus-group discussions involving another (...) 323.Main measurements—Explicit justifications and willingness to accept offers, reported frequency of offers, and personal confessions to accepting “money and expensive presents” as well as smaller gifts.Results—Health care staff were far more inclined than the average official or public servant to accept “money or an expensive present” if offered, far more inclined to justify asking clients for “extra payments”, and far more inclined to confess that they had actually taken gifts from clients recently. Judged by their own confessions, hospital doctors were only rivalled by traffic police and customs officials for taking money or expensive gifts from their clients.Conclusions—Poor pay does not explain why doctors so often took large gifts from their clients. Moral self justification, opportunity, and bargaining power are much more effective explanations. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2022.

This study examined the relationship between individual differences in executive functions (EF; assessed by measures of working memory, Stroop, trail making, and verbal fluency) and ability to down-regulate and up-regulate responses to emotionally evocative film clips. To ensure a wide range of EF, 48 participants with diverse neurodegenerative disorders and 21 older neurologically normal ageing participants were included. Participants were exposed to three different movie clips that were designed to elicit a mix of disgust and amusement. While watching the films (...) they were either instructed to watch, down-regulate, and up-regulate their visible emotional responses. Heart rate and facial behaviours were monitored throughout. Emotion regulatory ability was operationalised as changes in heart rate and facial behaviour in the down- and up-regulation conditions, controlling for responses in the watch condition. Results indicated that higher verbal fluency scores were related to greater ability to regulate emotion in both the down-regulation and up-regulation conditions. This finding remained significant even after controlling for age and general cognitive functioning. No relationships were found between emotion regulation and the other EF measures. We believe these results derive from differences among EF measures, with verbal-fluency performance best capturing the complex sequence of controlled planning, activation, and monitoring required for successful emotion regulation. These findings contribute to our understanding of emotion–cognition interaction, suggesting a link between emotion-regulatory abilities and individual differences in complex executive functions. (shrink)

Introduction.--Biographical notes.--General analysis of knowledge and the act.--Perceptual and manipulatory phases of the act.--Cosmology.--Value and the act.--Supplementary essays.

Athens or Jerusalem? By Tertullian.--Philosophy the handmaid of theology, by Clement of Alexandria.--Faith in search of understanding, by St. Augustine.--Revelation and analogy, by St. Thomas Aquinas.--The mystic way, by M. Eckhart.--The darkened intellect, by J. Calvin.--The reasons of the heart, by B. Pascal.--Faith, reason, and enthusiasm, by J. Locke.--Miracles and the skeptic, by D. Hume.--The limits of reason, by I. Kant.--Truth and subjectivity, by S. Kierkegaard.--In justification of faith, by W. James.--Religion as poetry, by G. Santayana.--Faith and symbols, by P. (...) Tillich.--Three parables on falsification, by A. Flew, R. M. Hare, and B. Mitchell.--For further reading (p. 233-235). (shrink)

The Axiom of Projective Determinacy implies the existence of a universal $\utilde{\Pi}^{1}_{n}\setminus\utilde{\Delta}^{1}_{n}$ set for every $n \geq 1$. Assuming $\text{\upshape MA}(\aleph_{1})+\aleph_{1}=\aleph_{1}^{\mathbb{L}}$ there exists a universal $\utilde{\Pi}^{1}_{1}\setminus\utilde{\Delta}^{1}_{1}$ set. In ZFC there is a universal $\utilde{\Pi}^{0}_{\alpha}\setminus\utilde{\Delta}^{0}_{\alpha}$ set for every $\alpha$.

We study the preservation of selective covering properties, including classic ones introduced by Menger, Hurewicz, Rothberger, Gerlits and Nagy, and others, under products with some major families of concentrated sets of reals.Our methods include the projection method introduced by the authors in an earlier work, as well as several new methods. Some special consequences of our main results are : Every product of a concentrated space with a Hurewicz S1S1 space satisfies S1S1. On the other hand, assuming the Continuum Hypothesis, (...) for each Sierpiński set S there is a Luzin set L such that L×SL×S can be mapped onto the real line by a Borel function. Assuming Semifilter Trichotomy, every concentrated space is productively Menger and productively Rothberger. Every scale set is productively Hurewicz, productively Menger, productively Scheepers, and productively Gerlits–Nagy. Assuming d=ℵ1d=ℵ1, every productively Lindelöf space is productively Hurewicz, productively Menger, and productively Scheepers.A notorious open problem asks whether the additivity of Rothberger's property may be strictly greater than addadd, the additivity of the ideal of Lebesgue-null sets of reals. We obtain a positive answer, modulo the consistency of Semifilter Trichotomy >ℵ1.Our results improve upon and unify a number of results, established earlier by many authors. (shrink)

The professed aim is to make a Thomistic theory of knowledge relevant to contemporary analytic movements. Stress is laid on the dynamism of intellection, and on supraphysical esse as the only constituent of divine knowledge and as the essential feature of human knowledge. Miller also argues that knowledge through affective connaturality must be combined with intellection. Little concession is made to those not steeped in scholastic terminology. --W. L. M.

Moral philosophers agree that welfare matters. But they disagree about what it is, or how much it matters. In this vital new work, Wayne Sumner presents an original theory of welfare, investigating its nature and discussing its importance. He considers and rejects all notable theories of welfare, both objective and subjective, including hedonism and theories founded on desire or preference. His own theory connects welfare closely with happiness or life satisfaction. Reacting against the value pluralism that currently dominates moral philosophy, (...) he advances welfare as the only basic ethical value. He concludes by discussing the implications of this thesis for ethical and political theory. Written in clear, non-technical language, and including a definitive survey of other work in this area, Sumner's book is essential reading for moral philosophers, political theorists, and welfare economists. (shrink)

What does it mean for someone to have a moral right to something? What kinds of creatures can have rights, and which rights can they have? While rights are indispensable to our moral and political thinking, they are also mysterious and controversial; as long as these controversies remain unsolved, rights will remain vulnerable to skepticism. Here, Sumner constructs both a coherent concept of a moral right and a workable substantive theory of rights to provide the moral foundation necessary to dispel (...) such doubts. (shrink)

In this timely book L.W. Sumner addresses these issues within the wider context of palliative care for patients in the dying process.

This essay examines several recent philosophical attempts to define ‘disease’. Two prominent ones are considered in detail, an objective approach by Christopher Boorse and a normative approach by Caroline Whitbeck. Both are found to be inadequate for a variety of reasons, though Whitbeck's is superior because of her careful preliminary distinctions and because of its normative approach which is more nearly in accord with medical and lay usage. The paper concludes with a discussion of the nature of such efforts at (...) definition and suggests that their limitations are due both to the nature of our language and concepts in general, and to the nature of medicine in particular. It is the practical and changing character of medicine and its language that frustrates the efforts of philosophers to formulate such definitions. Keywords: disease, definition CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Richard Miller presents a bold new program for international justice. He argues for new standards of responsible conduct by governments, firms, and individuals in developed countries, to govern trade, investment, environmental policy, and the use of force. He offers an urgently needed strategy for moving humanity toward genuine global co-operation.

When medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was legalized in Canada in June 2016, the question of allowing decisionally capable persons to make advance requests in anticipation of later incapacity was reserved for further consideration during the mandatory parliamentary review originally scheduled to begin in June 2020 (but since delayed by COVID-19). In its current form the legislation does not permit such requests, since it stipulates that at the time at which the procedure is to be administered the patient must give (...) “express consent” to receiving it. Since express consent presupposes decisional capacity, this requirement rules out administering MAiD to a patient who has lost capacity. Amendments to the legislation passed by Parliament in March 2021 open the door slightly by allowing advance requests by patients after they have been approved for MAiD, if they fear losing capacity before the procedure can be administered. But this provision would apply only to patients whose natural death was deemed to be “reasonably foreseeable”, and would continue to exclude (a) requests made after diagnosis of a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” but in advance of approval for MAiD, and (b) requests made before such a diagnosis. My aim in this paper is twofold: to explore the ethical and legal issues concerning advance requests for MAiD, and to argue for expanding provision for such requests to include both of these further scenarios. (shrink)

Hate speech, understood broadly, is any form of expression intended to arouse hatred or contempt toward members of a particular social group. When university administrators have reason to believe that a planned speaking event on campus may feature hate speech (at least in the eyes of some), how should they respond? In this paper I address this question as it arises for Canadian universities. I argue that, where the regulation of campus speech is concerned, the right course of action for (...) university administrators is nearly always to do absolutely nothing. They will have reason to become actively involved only in order to ensure that a speaking event proceeds safely, or when it threatens to disrupt the functioning of the university, or when it is itself threatened with disruption by protesting groups. In those instances the justification for intervention will be to protect and facilitate speech, not to shut it down. (shrink)

Hegel is an immensely important yet difficult philosopher. His Philosophy of Mind is one of the main pillars of his thought. Michael Inwood, highly respected for his previous work on Hegel, presents this central work to the modern reader in an accurate new translation supported by a philosophically sophisticated editorial introduction and elucidating scholarly commentary.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.3 (2001) 57-66 [Access article in PDF] Literary Study Among the Ruins J. Hillis Miller It must be remembered and squarely faced, though it is difficult to do so for a lover of literature like me, that in spite of the lip service paid these days to literature's authority by politicians, the media, and educationists, fewer and fewer people, in Europe and America at least, actually spend (...) much time reading "literature" in the old-fashioned sense of canonical works—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and the rest, in English literature. Literature has been granted enormous authority in our culture, but though that authority may still be tacitly or even explicitly acknowledged, for example by the media, no candid observer can doubt that it is no longer so pragmatically operative. If the books just stay there on the shelves, their authority is only potential. They must be read to be performatively effective. The joke about how George W. Bush's presidential library has been destroyed, both books in it, has an uncannily plausible ring. He has better things to do than read literature.If you are watching a movie or television or playing a computer game or surfing the Internet, you cannot at the same time be reading Shakespeare. People spend, all the statistical evidence suggests, more and more time doing the former. Poetry, it might be argued, does little legislating these days, unacknowledged or otherwise. Fewer and fewer people are decisively influenced by such reading as they do. Radio, television, cinema, popular music, and now the Internet—these are more decisive in shaping citizens' ethos and values, as well as in filling their minds and feelings with imaginary worlds. It is these virtual realities rather than strictly literary ones that have most performative efficacy these days to generate people's feelings, behavior, and value judgments. To speak of literature's authority is already to speak, to some degree, of an historical epoch that began in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century in Europe with the rise of modern democracies and their concomitant print cultures. That epoch is now perhaps rapidly vanishing, whatever teachers of literature say, write, or do. Nevertheless, if someone happens for some reason to pick up Hamlet, or Middlemarch, or Yeats's poems, these works may still exert their magic power. Literature still has great authority over me and over no doubt many others. Just what effects are the globalization of the university and the new regime of telecommunications having on literary study and on the social role of literature itself?Jacques Derrida, in a striking passage written by one or another of the protagonists of La carte postale (The Post Card), says the following:... an entire epoch of so-called literature, if not all of it, cannot survive a certain technological regime of telecommunications (in this respect the political regime is secondary). Neither can philosophy, or psychoanalysis. Or love letters.... Refound here the American student with whom we had coffee last Saturday, the one who was looking for a thesis [End Page 57] subject (comparative literature), I suggested to her something on the telephone in the literature of the 20th century (and beyond), starting with, for example, the telephone lady in Proust or the figure of the American operator, and then asking the question of the effects of the most advanced telematics [la télématique la plus avancée] on whatever would still remain of literature. I spoke to her about microprocessors and computer terminals, she seemed somewhat disgusted [avait l'air un peu dégoutée]. She told me that she still loved literature (me too, I answered her, mais si, mais si). Curious to know what she understood by this. [Derrida, La carte postale 212, 219; Derrida Post Card 197, 204]What Derrida or rather his protagonist in La carte postale says in the citation I have made is truly frightening, at least to a lover of literature like me or like the protagonist's hapless interlocutor, the American graduate student in comparative literature who was looking for a dissertation topic... (shrink)

Michael McKinsey has argued that content externalism has the absurd consequence that one can know a priori that water exists. Richard W. Miller responds that when a prioricity is properly understood, McKinsey's argument should not be seen as a _reductio of externalism. This paper disputes Miller's understanding of a prioricity.