In this article, we report the findings from a qualitative study that explored how relatives of terminally ill, alert and competent intensive care patients perceived their involvement in the end-of-life decision-making process. Eleven family members of six deceased patients were interviewed. Our findings reveal that relatives narrate about a strong intertwinement with the patient. They experienced the patients’ personal individuality as a fragile achievement. Therefore, they viewed their presence as crucial with their primary role to support and protect the patient, (...) thereby safeguarding his values and interests. However, their inclusion in decision making varied from active participation in the decision-making process to acceptance of the physicians’ decision or just receiving information. We conclude that models of informed shared decision making should be utilised and optimised in intensive care, where nurses and physicians work with both the patient and his or her family and regard the family as partners in the process. (shrink)

The emphasis on duly in Kant's ethics is widely held to constitute a defect. Marcia W. Baron develops and assesses the criticism, which she sees as comprising two objections: that duty plays too large a role, leaving no room for the supererogatory, and that Kant places too much value on acting from duty. Clearly written and cogently argued, Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology takes on the most philosophically intriguing objections to Kant's ethics and subjects them to a rigorous yet (...) sympathetic assessment. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on the role played by constructions of women's violence in the maintenance of male control over women. While actual women's violence tends to be denied, pathologized or minimized, cultural constructions (particularly in the media) of women's violence tend to demonize it. Both of these androcentric cultural processes fail to illuminate the actual sources of the gender gap in violent behavior and instead tend to normalize male aggression and to cultivate female passivity.

Gideon Rosen (2014) has drawn our attention to cases of duress of a particularly interesting sort: the person's ‘mind is not flooded with pain or fear’, she knows exactly what she is doing, and she makes a clear-headed choice to act in, as Rosen says, ‘awful ways’. The explanation of why we excuse such actions cannot be that the action was not voluntary. In addition, although some duress cases could also be viewed as necessity cases and thus as justified, Rosen (...) wisely sets aside that complicating factor by zeroing in on those cases where the action clearly is not justified. So why do we excuse in these cases, where the action is not justified and the agent acted voluntarily?Rosen thinks the key lies in the ‘ill will’ condition, ‘the idea that an act is blameworthy only if it manifests insufficient concern or regard for those affected’. He says this is relatively uncontroversial; much of my paper is taken up with calling the ‘ill will’ condition into question. I also take issue with Rosen on just how justifications and excuses differ. I argue in favour of understanding justifications (in a context where we are asking how justifications and excuses differ) as not requiring truth, but only reasonable belief. (shrink)

Few studies of gangs have explored both ethnic and gender variations in the experience of gang membership. Based on an analysis of interviews with 48 youth from a number of ethnic gangs in Hawaii, this article explores boys' and girls' reasons for joining gangs. The results suggest that although gang members face common problems, they deal with these in ways that are uniquely informed by gender and ethnicity. The interviews also confirm that extensive concern about violent criminal activities in boys' (...) gangs has distracted researchers from exploring the wide range of activities and experiences gangs provide their members. Girls and boys growing up in poor and violent neighborhoods turn to the gangs for many reasons, and the gangs themselves take on a variety of forms in response to the diverse challenges facing their members. Most important, the interviews reveal that girls and boys, even those in the same ethnic groups, inhabit worlds that are heavily influenced by gender. As a result, male and female gangs tend to provide different sets of experiences, skill, and opportunities to their members. (shrink)

1. Stoicism in classical Latin literature -- 2. Stoicism in Christian Latin thought through the sixth century.

Friends as well as foes of Kant have long been uneasy over his emphasis on duty, but lately the view that there is something morally repugnant about acting from duty seems to be gaining in popularity. More and more philosophers indicate their readiness to jettison duty and the moral 'ought' and to conceive of the perfectly moral person as someone who has all the right desires and acts accordingly without any notion that (s)he ought to act in this way. Elsewhere' (...) I have argued that such a picture of the perfectly moral person is flawed. In this paper I examine the claim that acting from duty is morally repugnant. There is some truth to this charge, but, I argue, the repugnance attaches not to acting from duty as such, but only to certain ways of acting from duty. In isolating the objectionable elements of acting from duty, I hope not only to vindicate the skeletal concept but also to offer illumination on the question of just how we should understand morally good conduct. (shrink)

During the past decade ethical theory has been in a lively state of development, and three basic approaches to ethics - Kantian ethics, consequentialism, and virtue ethics - have assumed positions of particular prominence.

American doctors in the 1990s are being asked to serve as "double agents," weighing competing allegiances to patients' medical needs against the monetary costs to society. This situation is a reaction to rapid cost increases for medical services, themselves the result of the haphazard development since the 1920s of an inherently inflationary, open-ended system for funding and delivering health care. The answer to an inefficient system, however, is not to stint on care, but rather to restructure the system to remove (...) the inflationary pressures. As long as we are spending enormous resources on an inherently inefficient and inflationary system we cannot justify asking doctors to withhold beneficial care to save money for third-party payers. Doing so serves a largely political agenda and endangers the patient-centered ethic that is central to medicine. (shrink)

This valuable and interesting book attempts to discern the essential Freudian theses about the mind and to give them a cogent philosophical defense. Like many philosophers Gardner sees psychoanalytic explanation as continuous with folk psychology, though he holds that the latter needs considerable expansion in order to accommodate irrationality of the “Freudian” sorts.

Jonathan Dancy works within almost all fields of philosophy but is best known as the leading proponent of moral particularism. Particularism challenges “traditional” moral theories, such as Contractualism, Kantianism and Utilitarianism, in that it denies that moral thought and judgement relies upon, or is made possible by, a set of more or less well-defined, hierarchical principles. During the summer of 2006, the Philosophy Departments of Lund University (Sweden) and the University of Reading (England) began a series of exchanges to take (...) place every other year, alternating between the departments. Andreas Lind and Johan Brännmark arranged to meet Dancy during the first meeting in Lund to talk about questions regarding particularism, moral theory and the shape of the analytical tradition. The major part of the conversation is printed below. (shrink)

The book presents a new conceptual framework and a set of research principles with which to study and interpret technology from a phenomenological perspective.

1024x768 Na sociedade da informação as Tecnologias da Informação e do Conhecimento podem contribuir para o aumento da distância social entre quem detém as informações e o domínio das tecnologias e, aqueles que estão a margem da sociedade tecnológica que são considerados os excluídos digitais, revelando a exclusão sociodigital. Por conseguinte, a eliminação da exclusão social encontra-se conectada a inclusão digital. Portanto, a importância dos programas de inclusão sociodigital, destacando-se o Programa Nacional de Tecnologias na Educação, enquanto política pública para (...) a inclusão sociodigital, que foi implantado em 1997 pelo governo federal em âmbito nacional, por meio da parceira União/Estado/Municípios. Neste contexto, o objetivo desta pesquisa foi investigar a implantação do Proinfo em Minas Gerais, especificamente na região metropolitana de Belo Horizonte onde estão localizados seis Núcleos de Tecnologias Educacionais, os quais têm a função de promover as capacitações dos agentes educacionais. Para tal, foi escolhida como metodologia a pesquisa descritiva tendo como estratégias adotadas as pesquisas bibliográfica e documental. Concluiu-se que mesmo enfrentando vários problemas, a capacitação dos agentes educacionais vem sendo realizada em todos os Núcleos Tecnológicos Educacionais, através de cursos sugeridos pelo Proinfo, que disponibiliza os materiais didáticos através da Secretaria de Educação Básica. São ofertadas, também, oficinas de curta duração sobre o uso de softwares na educação. Assim, a implantação do Proinfo em Minas Gerais constitui-se de um elemento gerador de mudanças educacionais e sociais, promotor da inclusão sociodigital, podendo ser considerada uma política pública inovadora, que tem nos NTEs e NTMs a sua garantia de desenvolvimento e execução. Palavras-chave: Inclusão sociodigital. Proinfo. Capacitação de agentes educacionais. Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE. (shrink)

This chapter describes Card's characterization as an idealization that captures why hate crime legislation seems (at least prima facie) to be a very good idea. The rationale for enhanced penalties is far more compelling if hate crimes are characterized as Card characterizes them. She focuses on hate crimes that are motivated by hatred. Hate crimes today should be viewed as part of an ongoing campaign of intimidation. Card is of course well aware of the position that the legal category of (...) hate crimes and enhanced penalties for hate crimes are called for to counter the message sent by hate crimes; in fact she notes that she was initially "attracted to the idea of penalty enhancement legislation for hate crimes as a way to send a strong social message against racism, sexism, anti‐Semitism, and homophobia". (shrink)

Balanço da produção científica em Educação Física em Estados do Nordeste, visando a identificar tendências, perspectivas e desafios que se apresentam à consolidação dessa produção. O estudo integra a pesquisa matricial do grupo LEPEL/UFBA.

O nexo entre biopolítica e soberania é de importância central em Michel Foucault e Giorgio Agamben, que possuem um entendimento distinto, porém complementar de tais conceitos. A relação entre essas ideias à luz dos 50 anos de publicação de A sociedade punitiva é abordada em alguns de seus pontos de contato, distanciamento e complementaridade. As interações entre poder soberano e vida humana apontam para um olhar crítico necessário sobre como os governos capturaram a vida como recurso administrável mas, também, passível (...) de inclusão e exclusão através do poder soberano, na figura do homo sacer. Palavras-Chave: Foucault. Agamben. Biopolítica. Soberania. Sociedade Punitiva. (shrink)

This volume is about moral judgment, especially its exercise in selected social settings.

...believe that his theory asks too much, demanding total devotion to morality and treating everything worth doing (and perhaps more) as a duty. But, despite their differences, the two sets of...

The distinction between justifications and excuses is a familiar one to most of us who work either in moral philosophy or legal philosophy. But exactly how it should be understood is a matter of considerable disagreement. My aim in this paper is, first, to sort out the differences and try to figure out what underlying disagreements account for them. I give particular attention to the following question: Does a person who acts on a reasonable but mistaken belief have a justification, (...) or only an excuse? One disagreement I highlight concerns the extent to which justification is primarily about agents rather than about actions. Those who think, as I do, of “His action, X, was justified” as “He was justified in doing X” are far more likely to allow that justification requires reasonable belief and does not require truth, than are those who think of “His action, X, was justified” as “Although actions of this type usually are prohibited, X is in these circumstances in fact permissible.” In addition to sorting out the differences and tracing them to some underlying disagreements, I defend the reasonable belief view of justification against some objections, and argue that, whether or not we continue to use the term “justified” in a way that does not require truth, we need the concept. Contrary to the claims of some who reject the reasonable belief view of justification, justification thus understood does not reduce to excuse. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that the top three Model Penal Code culpability levels suffice for criminal liability, but the fourth is controversial. And it isn’t just the particular MPC wording; that negligence should be on the list at all is controversial. My question is: What makes negligence so different? What is it about negligence that gives rise to the view that it should not suffice for criminal liability? In addressing it, I draw attention to how we conduct the debate, and (...) how our framing of the issues is shaping it. My hope is to prompt thought and discussion on just what we want the element of mens rea to provide, and to draw attention to background assumptions that shape our views of what it should take for negligence to count as a species of mens rea. (shrink)

What is the relation between shame and shamelessness? It may seem obvious: shamelessness is simply the absence of shame. But on reflection, it becomes clear that the story is considerably more complicated. Michelle Mason's intriguing "On Shamelessness" prompts such reflection. Mason argues that we should be mindful of the "moral importance of shame" and "unapologetic in its defense", and she does so via an examination of shamelessness and an argument to the effect that shamelessness is a moral fault. The tacit (...) assumption is that insofar as shamelessness is a moral fault, the value of shame is vindicated. I challenge that assumption. (shrink)