Physician-written “do not resuscitate” DNR orders elicit negative reactions from stakeholders that may decrease appropriate end-of-life care. The semantic significance of the phrase has led to a proposed replacement of DNR with “allow natural death” . Prior to this investigation, no scientific papers address the impact of such a change. Our results support this proposition due to increased likelihood of endorsement with the term AND.

We examined the attitudes of 600 students in large introductory algebra and psychology classes toward an actual or hypothetical cheating incident and the subsequent retake procedure. Overall, 57% of students in one class and 49Y0 in the other reported that they either cheated or would have cheated if given the opportunity. More men (59%) than women (53%) reported cheating or potential cheating. Students who had actually experienced a retake procedure to handle cheating were more satisfied with such a procedure than (...) others were about a hypothetical situation. Despite having a retake, cheaters were significantly more likely than noncheaters to predict that they would cheat again. Results suggest that instructors who require a retake following extensive cheating should devote class time to a discussion of the issue and all possible alternatives. (shrink)

As the expansion of the Internet and the digital formatting of all kinds of creative works move us further into the information age, intellectual property issues have become paramount. Computer programs costing thousands of research dollars are now copied in an instant. People who would recoil at the thought of stealing cars, computers, or VCRs regularly steal software or copy their favorite music from a friend's CD. Since the Web has no national boundaries, these issues are international concerns. The contributors-philosophers, (...) legal theorists, and business scholars, among others-address questions such as: Can abstract ideas be owned? How does the violation of intellectual property rights compare to the violation of physical property rights? Can computer software and other digital information be protected? And how should legal systems accommodate the ownership of intellectual property in an information age? Intellectual Property is a lively examination of these and other issues, and an invaluable resource for librarians, lawyers, businesspeople, and scholars. (shrink)

Clinical Ethics, Ahead of Print. This paper is a response to a recent BMJ Blog: ‘The duty to treat: where do the limits lie?’ Members of the Surrey Heartlands Integrated Care Service Clinical Ethics Group reflected on arguments in the Blog in relation to resuscitation during the COVID-19 pandemic.Clinicians have had to contend with ever-changing and conflicting guidance from the Resuscitation Council UK and Public Health England regarding personal protective equipment requirements in resuscitation situations. St John Ambulance had different guidance (...) for first responders.The situation regarding resuscitation led the CEG to consider ethical aspects of health care professionals’ responses to the need for resuscitation during COVID-19. Members agreed that professionals should, ideally, have the level of PPE required for an aerosol generating procedure. However, there was no consensus regarding professionals’ duty to care when this is not available. On the one hand, it was agreed that the casualty/patient’s interests regarding resuscitation should be prioritised due to professionals’ contract with the public and professional privilege. On the other hand, risk thresholds were considered relevant to individual decision-making and professionals’ duty to care. All agreed that decision-making should not be influenced by rewards or reprimands. It was agreed also that decisions to resuscitate should not be considered as moral heroism or supererogatory - regardless of PPE availability - but rather as ‘minimally decent’. We agreed that it may be acceptable for professionals, with good reasons, to opt out of resuscitation attempts and these should be reflected on and discussed before the event. (shrink)

If one sits in the stands for awhile at a local sporting contest, whether it is wrestling, soccer, baseball or particularly basketball, before long someone will exclaim toward a referee, ?That was a makeup call. You owe us one.? Everyone knows what this means but if an eight-year old beside you hears this screamed for the first time and asks, ?What does that mean?? An explanation given to her will be something like ?that's when an official makes a call and (...) immediately realizes it was a wrong call so at the first opportunity he can he makes a call against the team that has benefitted from the previous call; he is trying to even things out for his mistake.? The referee or umpire is attempting to be fair by ?giving back? the call with a ?makeup call.? A make-up call can be defined as the act of compensating for a questionable or bad officiating call by making a proportionally even call against the team that was aided by the first call. Usually these are immediate and obvious. They can also be conscious or subconscious, intentional or unintentional. The hope is that the two calls generally offset one another without either team being dramatically harmed. I will argue that the makeup call is prima facie immoral but if one were to attempt to find moral justification for it, this could best be done through a corrective theory of justice. But this presents a number of moral questions and ambiguities, most significantly, is a makeup call just and fair? Is it appropriate to understand the makeup call as an example of two wrongs making a right? A broader philosophic al question about officiating is whether each call in a contest should be viewed by as an independent single call with the goal of the official getting that one immediate call correct or should each call be understood as in a direct relationship with every other call in that game as a type of gestalt thus justifying makeup calls? This work will probe the depths of the highly suspect yet common moral puzzle, the makeup call. (shrink)

God vs. the Gavel challenges the pervasive assumption that all religious conduct deserves constitutional protection. While religious conduct provides many benefits to society, it is not always benign. The thesis of the book is that anyone who harms another person should be governed by the laws that govern everyone else - and truth be told, religion is capable of great harm. This may not sound like a radical proposition, but it has been under assault since the 1960s. The majority of (...) academics and many religious organizations would construct a fortress around religious conduct that would make it extremely difficult to prosecute child abuse by clergy, medical neglect of children by faith-healers, and other socially unacceptable behaviors. This book intends to change the course of the public debate over religion by bringing to the public's attention the tactics of religious entities to avoid the law and therefore harm others. (shrink)

This article explores a metaview of the many faces of homelessness. It analyzes an evolutionary meaning of home and suggests that ever-complexifying life conditions influence how societies enforce conformity to the status quo of homefulness. It goes on to describe how homelessness might be reframed as a complex adaptive form of survival for diversity generators who cannot or will not conform to the status quo. The article proposes an integral framework on which intervention strategies could be structured to provide evolutionary, (...) appropriate, and flexible approaches to homelessness. (shrink)

Abraham ibn Daud’s Exalted Faith adapts to rabbinic thought and Jewish tradition the Andalusi Aristotelian model that was the framework for understanding God, man, and man’s purpose in the universe. Ibn Daud defines Jewish belief for the perplexed scholar, arguably providing a genealogy and epistemological justification for the scholarly class—based on acquisition of knowledge of the (Aristotelian) universe and culminating in achieving prophethood. The Aristotelian universe presented in the Exalted Faith offers a version of the elitism Stroumsa argues if at (...) the heart of this Jewish and Muslim scholarly class, one based in Arabic Aristotelian thought. The prevalence of Aristotelian-Farabian (Platonic) philosophy, which held as a central tenet the individual’s ability to know God by developing his intellect through speculation, seemingly offered a religious/societal model in which Jewish traditions and commandments were no longer relevant. Ibn Daud adapts this theory to reassert the necessity for Jewish traditions and to privilege Jewish scholars. to express a vision of individual and social identity for Sephardi scholars in the Diaspora. (shrink)

The consequences of restricting or not restricting the right to freedom of assembly are potentially magnified in transitional societies. Yet determining whether such consequences are indeed ‘harmful’, and whether their cost should be borne despite the harms caused, requires the elaboration of criteria which define what are valid and relevant harms. While a human rights framework can perform this task, open-textured rights standards prescribe neither the threshold of legal intervention nor the goals of transition. By extension, the rule of law—underpinned (...) by this rights discourse—is silent about whether liberal or communitarian ideals should inform the reconstruction of public space in conflicted or nascent democracies. Illustrated by analysis of legal interventions in parade disputes in Northern Ireland, this article argues that the rule of law is necessarily orientated by ethical consensus about its scope. Furthermore, this consensus operates as a restraint upon the degree of normative discontinuity permitted during transitional compromises. The article frames the ethical options in terms of three liberty-limiting principles—the argument from democracy, the argument for toleration, and the argument for recognition. Each suggests different parameters for the transitional project and for the role of law within it. (shrink)

The following interview with Marvin Minsky took place at his home in Brookline, MA., on January 23rd, 1991. The interview is a conversation about music, its peculiar features as a human activity, the special problems it poses for the scientist, and the suitability of AI methods for clarifying and/or solving some of these problems. The conversation is open-ended, and should be read accordingly, as a discourse to be continued at another time.

A lexicon of Hebrew terms and their Romance equivalents from Maimónides’ treatise on logic and philosophy, al-Maqālah fi-ṣināʻat al-manṭiq, circulated in Hebrew aljamiado among Jews and conversos immersed in 15th-century humanism. This lexicon is one of several texts included in a manuscript which also includes literary works by converso authors such as Alfonso de la Torre’s Visión deleytable and Alfonso de Cartagena’s translation of sentenciae by Seneca, as well as three other philosophical lexicons. This collection of texts recorded in MS (...) Parma 2666 reveals that 15th-century Jews and/or conversos –the only people capable of reading the Hebrew aljamiado– read and interpreted De la Torre’s Visión in the context of the Judeo-Arabic philosophical tradition, which is also the basis for Maimónides’ Manṭiq, available in Hebrew and Latin translations. In this article I examine how the philosophic vocabulary developed in al-Manṭiq, accessible in Romance in the lexicons in MS Parma 2666, reflects the Maimonidean epistemology as it survived and developed among 15th-century Jewish and converso readers of the Visión deleytable. (shrink)

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, Illinois. This paper describes a proposed mobile platform, Transafe, that captures and analyses public perceptions of safety to deliver 'crowdsourced' collective intelligence about places in the City of Melbourne, Australia, and their affective states at various times of the day. Public perceptions of crime on public transport in Melbourne are often mismatched with actual crime statistics and (...) such perceptions thus can act as social barriers to visitors and locals traversing within and through the city. Using interactive mobile applications and social media, the visualization of this crowdsourced safety perception information will increase the commuter's awareness of various situations in the City of Melbourne. In addition, through social behavioral analysis and ethnographic research, the collective public intelligence will also help inform the stakeholders of the city for future policy-making and policing strategies for safety perception management. At the centre of the proposed platform is the design and development of a mobile phone application that can contribute to people feeling safer by supporting users to report crimes and misdemeanors that they witness, and provide information about transportation and emergency services around where the users are located. The proposed application can also act as a crime deterrent with one feature that enables user tracking by up to three nominated friends if the user opts to activate tracking when feeling unsafe while roaming the city. (shrink)

This paper argues for the utility of ANT as a philosophical and methodological approach to policy analysis. It introduces the key features of a recent educational policy reform initiative, Skills for Life and illustrates the argument by looking at three ‘moments’ (in Callon's 1986 terminology) in the life of this initiative, applying the theoretical tools of ANT to these. The analysis shows that even (and perhaps especially) within a strongly framed social policy initiative like the Skills for Life Strategy, things (...) constantly escape; that differences held in tension within the ‘successful’ project sow the seeds of failure and dissolution. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction and Overview: What's the Story? Concepts Useful for Policy Analysis The Skills for Life Strategy—A Panorama and Three ANT Stories Conclusions Notes References.

Just Ecological Integrity presents a collection of revised and expanded essays originating from the international conference "Connecting Environmental Ethics, Ecological Integrity, and Health in the New Millennium" held in San Jose, Costa Rica in June 2000. It is a cooperative venture of the Global Ecological Integrity Project and the Earth Charter Initiative.