Since 1998, several attempts have been made to reform the existing mental health legislation - the Mental Health Act 1983. However, all efforts thus far have been resoundingly rejected by mental health charities, psychiatrists and related professions. Following the Government's decision to abandon the draft Mental Health Bill in March 2006, plans to introduce new legislation designed to amend the existing 1983 Act have been published. This shorter bill was introduced before Parliament in November 2006. The amendments focused on six (...) key policy areas including supervised community treatment, the nearest relative, the definition of mental disorder and detention criteria. It is also intended that the Mental Capacity Act 2005 will be amended to bridge the present 'Bournewood' gap. (shrink)

A negative image of community care prevails. This method of care is perceived to be a relatively novel phenomenon and has received mixed media coverage. The negative image of community care has led to the growing belief that this care method has failed. This failure has largely been ascribed to the lack of powers available to control patients in the community and to the method's relative novelty. However, this paper contends that there are two flaws to the above assertion: first, (...) community care is far from new, and second, the inherent problem is not the lack of powers available to control patients in the community, but, essentially, the absence of a secure and stable environment within the community. (shrink)

Ethics and Humanity pays to tribute to Jonathan Glover, a pioneering figure whose thought and personal influence have had a significant impact on applied ...

BackgroundDeveloping a comprehensive, reproducible literature search is the basis for a high-quality systematic review (SR). Librarians and information professionals, as expert searchers, can improve the quality of systematic review searches, methodology, and reporting. Likewise, journal editors and authors often seek to improve the quality of published SRs and other evidence syntheses through peer review. Health sciences librarians contribute to systematic review production but little is known about their involvement in peer reviewing SR manuscripts.MethodsThis survey aimed to assess how frequently librarians (...) are asked to peer review systematic review manuscripts and to determine characteristics associated with those invited to review. The survey was distributed to a purposive sample through three health sciences information professional listservs.ResultsThere were 291 complete survey responses. Results indicated that 22% (n = 63) of respondents had been asked by journal editors to peer review systematic review or meta-analysis manuscripts. Of the 78% (n = 228) of respondents who had not already been asked, 54% (n = 122) would peer review, and 41% (n = 93) might peer review. Only 4% (n = 9) would not review a manuscript. Respondents had peer reviewed manuscripts for 38 unique journals and believed they were asked because of their professional expertise. Of respondents who had declined to peer review (32%, n = 20), the most common explanation was “not enough time” (60%, n = 12) followed by “lack of expertise” (50%, n = 10).The vast majority of respondents (95%, n = 40) had “rejected or recommended a revision of a manuscript| after peer review. They based their decision on the “search methodology” (57%, n = 36), “search write-up” (46%, n = 29), or “entire article” (54%, n = 34). Those who selected “other” (37%, n = 23) listed a variety of reasons for rejection, including problems or errors in the PRISMA flow diagram; tables of included, excluded, and ongoing studies; data extraction; reporting; and pooling methods.ConclusionsDespite being experts in conducting literature searches and supporting SR teams through the review process, few librarians have been asked to review SR manuscripts, or even just search strategies; yet many are willing to provide this service. Editors should involve experienced librarians with peer review and we suggest some strategies to consider. (shrink)

In this book, Bruce Waller attacks two prevalent philosophical beliefs. First, he argues that moral responsibility must be rejected; there is no room for such a notion within our naturalist framework. Second, he denies the common assumption that moral responsibility is inseparably linked with individual freedom. Rejection of moral responsibility does not entail the demise of individual freedom; instead, individual freedom is enhanced by the rejection of moral responsibility. According to this theory of "no-fault naturalism," no one deserves either blame (...) or reward.In the course of arguing against moral responsibility, Waller critiques major compatibilist arguments-by Dennett, Frankfurt, Strawson, Bennett, Wolf, Hampshire, Glover, Rachels, Sher, and others. In addition, the implications of denying moral responsibility-for individual freedom, for moral judgments and moral behavior, and for social justice-are examined; the supposed dire consequences of the denial of moral responsibility are challenged; and the benefits of denying moral responsibility are described. Author note: Bruce N. Waller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio, is the author of Critical Thinking: Consider the Verdict. (shrink)

Si l’exigence de cohérence, entendue comme non-contradiction, semble traverser les domaines et être entendue aussi bien dans le champ théorique que dans la pratique, il n’en demeure pas moins que le passage de l’un à l’autre peut induire des distorsions sur lesquelles nous trouvons, dans la pensée pratique et appliquée de Jonathan Glover, des indications précieuses. Cela amène à reconsidérer le concept de décision au regard de celui de ligne de conduite et à interroger les liens qu’entretient la personnalité (...) de l’agent moral avec les actions qui sont les siennes. Ce parcours critique prend son sens à travers la confrontation entre les exigences éthiques kantiennes et les questions de Tolstoï dans Anna Karénine, que nous envisagerons ici en tenant compte de l’absence de solution de continuité, du moins pour Jonathan Glover, entre philosophie et littérature. (shrink)

'This is a book to which the attention of students of art theory and criticism, and all those interested in the important application of psychoanalysis to other ...

This book presents an analysis of masculinity construction in a large corpus of women’s magazines, adopting a feminist Critical Stylistic approach to reveal how men are talked about and ‘sold’ to women as part of a successful performance of hegemonic femininity. This novel approach identifies women’s magazines as sites of ‘lad culture’ that perpetuate ideologies more commonly associated with the ‘laddism’ of male-targeted media. It examines how stereotypical images of men as naturally aggressive and obsessed with sex are promoted, as (...) well as considering some of the ways in which women’s magazines contribute to the social construction of normative understandings of gender and sexuality more broadly. This engaging work will offer fresh insights to students and scholars of Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Stylistics, and Gender and Communication Studies. (shrink)

The case of a dying baby with is one of the most difficult in pediatric ethics. I have been involved in several such cases and they are extremely challenging for all parties, especially the parents. With the luxury of being an I will comment on this case from the perspective of when it first began and at the end point described in the narrative.

It is a terrible thing to let a child die against the deeply held and clearly expressed view of the child's parents. Yet it could be claimed that there are some conditions so burdensome that it may also be a terrible thing to deny a child the escape of death. The focus of this piece is on three ethical issues relating to withholding and withdrawal of treatment in a neonatal and paediatric context. The first is whether there are other interests (...) that should be considered as well as those of the child. The second is how we should think about the interests of the child. The third is a set of issues raised by cases where the medical team and the family reach different conclusions about what it is best to do. Reference is made to the recent cases of Charlotte Wyatt and Luke Winston-Jones. (shrink)

This is the earliest critical discussion in the context of modern/contemporary philosophy in the analytical tradition arguing that somebody with a reasonably stable character and the company of the right people would be able to enjoy eternity.

Renowned moral philosopher Jonathan Glover confronts the brutal history of the twentieth century to unravel the mystery of why so many atrocities occurred. In a new preface, Glover brings the book through the post-September 11 era and into our own time—and asks whether humankind can "weaken the grip war has on us." _Praise for the first edition:_ “It is hard to imagine a more important book. Glover makes an overwhelming case for the need to understand our own (...) inhumanity, and reduce or eliminate the ways in which it can express itself—and he then begins the task himself. _Humanity _is_ _an extraordinary achievement.”—Peter Singer, Princeton University “This is an extraordinary book: brilliant, haunting and uniquely important. Almost 40 years ago a president read a best seller and avoided a holocaust. I like to think that some of the leaders and followers of tomorrow will read _Humanity._”_—_Steven Pinker, _New York Times Book Review_. (shrink)

This study compares the neural substrate of moral decision making processes between Korean and American participants. By comparison with Americans, Korean participants showed increased activity in the right putamen associated with socio-intuitive processes and right superior frontal gyrus associated with cognitive control processes under a moral-personal condition, and in the right postcentral sulcus associated with mental calculation in familiar contexts under a moral-impersonal condition. On the other hand, American participants showed a significantly higher degree of activity in the bilateral anterior (...) cingulate cortex (ACC) associated with conflict resolution under the moral-personal condition, and in the right medial frontal gyrus (MFG) associated with simple cognitive branching in non-familiar contexts under the moral-impersonal condition when a more lenient threshold was applied, than Korean participants. These findings support the ideas of the interactions between the cultural background, education, and brain development, proposed in the field of cultural psychology and educational psychology. The study introduces educational implications relevant to moral psychologists and educators. (shrink)

Mamardašvili’s ‘classical’ paradigm of knowledge is seen to be minimally based on extrapolations from Descartes’ classical philosophy to which Mamardašvili attributes features that rather anticipate his own post-classical ontology. The latter is oriented towards the primacy of perception as a subjective process, in which the self-conscious subject constructs the world, not as illusion, but as a ‘picture’ or ‘model’ (Wittgenstein’s Bild). By examining Mamardašvili’s definition of the ‘phenomenon’ against the␣background of Husserl’s ‘reduction’, Wittgenstein’s ‘object’ and the Freudian and post-structuralist psychoanalytic (...) model of subjectivity, the paper arrives at the inference that Mamardašvili is essentially a post-Structuralist thinker who appropriates concepts from various critical and philosophical disciplines to construct his own multi-disciplinary theory of consciousness and perception. (shrink)

Progress in genetic and reproductive technology now offers us the possibility of choosing what kinds of children we do and don't have. Should we welcome this power, or should we fear its implications? There is no ethical question more urgent than this: we may be at a turning-point in the history of humanity. The renowned moral philosopher and best-selling author Jonathan Glover shows us how we might try to answer this question, and other provoking and disturbing questions to which (...) it leads. Surely parents owe it to their children to give them the best life they can? Increasingly we are able to reduce the number of babies born with disabilities and disorders. But there is a powerful new challenge to conventional thinking about the desirability of doing so: this comes from the voices of those who have these conditions. They call into question the very definition of disability. How do we justify trying to avoid bringing people like them into being? In 2002 a deaf couple used sperm donated by a friend with hereditary deafness to have a deaf baby: they took the view that deafness is not a disability, but a difference. Starting with the issues raised by this case, Jonathan Glover examines the emotive idea of 'eugenics', and the ethics of attempting to enhance people, for non-medical reasons, by means of genetic choices. Should parents be free, not only to have children free from disabilities, but to choose, for instance, the colour of their eyes or hair? This is no longer a distant prospect, but an existing power which we cannot wish away. What impact will such interventions have, both on the individuals concerned and on society as a whole? Should we try to make general improvements to the genetic make-up of human beings? Is there a central core of human nature with which we must not interfere? This beautifully clear book is written for anyone who cares about the rights and wrongs of parents' choices for their children, anyone who is concerned about our human future. Glover handles these uncomfortable questions in a controversial but always humane and sympathetic manner. (shrink)

This book relates work in neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry to questions about what a person is and the nature of a persons unity across a lifetime. The neuropsychiatry is now dated. The philosophy has three themes still perhaps of interest. The first is a response to Derek Parfits powerful and influential work on personal identity, which, like many other people, I discussed with him as he worked it out. I accept his view that there is no ego that owns the (...) stream of our experiences, and the unity of a person over time is constructed out of continuities in our mental life. But I argue against Parfits view that personal unity thereby becomes less deep or less morally important. The second theme is an emphasis on the importance of self-creation and an attempt to work out how far it is possible. The third theme is about the way self-creation is linked to recognition by other people, and the importance of this for understanding the role of tribalism in human life. "This book is about what it is to be a person, to think of oneself as an "I". It is about the ways people think of themselves, and how they use these ideas in shaping their own distinctive characteristics. It is about how far we create ourslves." "When a way of life does not fit with what you think you are really like, you can feel like a plant away from the light, distorted by having to twist and grope towards the sun. This analogy suggests that we might have a genetic programme to unfold, in the way plants do. But no doubt it is too simple to think that "the real me" is genetically laid down. These strong affinities we have for some kinds of life, and the sense of drowning that others give us, are likely to have been created by the interaction of our genetic make-up with thigs we have come across and responded to... We care a bit like trees would be, if they were conscious and could partly choose their direction of growth. Perhaps oaks could not become beeches, and stunted trees could not become giants, but they could influence the angle and direction of their branches. Trees thinking about determinism and free will might find it impossible to assess their own contribution to their final shape.". (shrink)

I THEORIES OF RESPONSIBILITY This book is concerned with attitudes to people and to what they do. In particular it concerns questions about when it is right ...

The philosophical works of Merab Mamardashvili are part of the emergence of phenomenological thought on the “margins” of the Eastern European sphere, appropriating and mediating a version of French poststructuralism in the “Soviet” 1980s, in which deconstruction constitutes both method and content. More specifically, Mamardashvili uses Descartes as the point de repère for his investigations into the phenomenology of the object of knowledge and the structure of consciousness, which come to model Mamardashvili's phenomenological Self, anticipating a modern, post-ideological Subject. Mamardashvili's (...) paradigm of the object constitutes the “linguistic” turn in late Soviet Georgian philosophy. Mamardashvili's phenomenon or “fact” makes its appearance in an ideologically determined regime, like a “Centaur,” as a melange of myth, belief and “physical” event, as something unseen, not as an unmediated experience of the world, yet neither as pure “thought from outside.”. (shrink)

The philosophical works of Merab Mamardashvili are part of the (re-)emergence of phenomenological thought on the “margins” of the Eastern European sphere, appropriating and mediating a version of French poststructuralism in the “Soviet” 1980s, in which deconstruction constitutes both method and content. More specifically, Mamardashvili uses Descartes as the point de repère for his investigations into the phenomenology of the object of knowledge and the structure of consciousness, which come to model Mamardashvili's phenomenological Self, anticipating a modern, post-ideological Subject. Mamardashvili's (...) paradigm of the object constitutes the “linguistic” turn in late Soviet Georgian philosophy. Mamardashvili's phenomenon or “fact” makes its appearance in an ideologically determined regime, like a “Centaur,” as a melange of myth, belief and “physical” event, as something unseen (in both senses of the word), not as an unmediated experience of the world, yet neither as pure “thought from outside.”. (shrink)

Amongst the most treated questions in Western research on the works of Svetlana Aleksievich is the question of the genre of Aleksievich’s prose works, followed closely by the question of the historical authenticity of her method of collecting oral information about the Soviet period of history from witnesses of that history. The questions treated, such as the problem of genre, aesthetic authenticity and the relationship of history and fiction, can be distilled into the question of the authority of the literary (...) text. If the Nobel Prize for literature is awarded on the assumption that Aleksievich’s work is literature—and no one, including the author, has questioned that assumption—then it is justifiable to pose the question of the authority of the literary text as an aesthetic message—as literary truth—using the tools of literary analysis, not of historiography or sociology. In this essay, the claim that Secondhand Time [Vremia second hend] is a novel will be examined in the context of the narratological model of the literary text of Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism and by applying the test of “artistic quality” (khudozhestvennost’), which validates the aesthetic value of texts of the literary canon. This examination will allow us to answer the question about what kind of text has been created using oral testimonies as material for a work of fiction. (shrink)

While the traditional boulevard novel of Eugène Sue wants to entertain and sell, Umberto Eco's boulevard novel wants to entertain and educate the contemporary reader in Italian history and in a form of modern semiotic theory. However, Eco's educational mission does not transform the low genre of the boulevard novel but remains bound by its limitations of “rhetoric and ideology.” Eco's reader is left with a representation of history as pastiche and a populist misconception about the potential of semiotics to (...) relativise the perception of reality. Both history and semiotics are ultimately used by Eco not as heuristic devices but as instruments of seduction directed at a modern middle-class reading public with intellectual aspirations. (shrink)

We have made huge progress in understanding the biology of mental illnesses, but comparatively little in interpreting them at the psychological level. The eminent philosopher Jonathan Glover believes that there is real hope of progress in the human interpretation of disordered minds. -/- The challenge is that the inner worlds of people with psychiatric disorders can seem strange, like alien landscapes, and this strangeness can deter attempts at understanding. Do people with disorders share enough psychology with other people to (...) make interpretation possible? To explore this question, Glover tackles the hard cases—the inner worlds of hospitalized violent criminals, of people with delusions, and of those diagnosed with autism or schizophrenia. Their first-person accounts offer glimpses of inner worlds behind apparently bizarre psychiatric conditions and allow us to begin to learn the “language” used to express psychiatric disturbance. Art by psychiatric patients, or by such complex figures as van Gogh and William Blake, give insight when interpreted from Glover’s unique perspective. He also draws on dark chapters in psychiatry’s past to show the importance of not medicalizing behavior that merely transgresses social norms. And finally, Glover suggests values, especially those linked with agency and identity, to guide how the boundaries of psychiatry should be drawn. -/- Seamlessly blending philosophy, science, literature, and art, Alien Landscapes? is both a sustained defense of humanistic psychological interpretation and a compelling example of the rich and generous approach to mental life for which it argues. (shrink)

Evidence for a dichotomy between the planning of an action and its on-line control in humans is reviewed. This evidence suggests that planning and control each serve a specialized purpose utilizing distinct visual representations. Evidence from behavioral studies suggests that planning is influenced by a large array of visual and cognitive information, whereas control is influenced solely by the spatial characteristics of the target, including such things as its size, shape, orientation, and so forth. Evidence from brain imaging and neuropsychology (...) suggests that planning and control are subserved by separate visual centers in the posterior parietal lobes, each constituting part of a larger network for planning and control. Planning appears to rely on phylogenetically newer regions in the inferior parietal lobe, along with the frontal lobes and basal ganglia, whereas control appears to rely on older regions in the superior parietal lobe, along with the cerebellum. Key Words: action; apraxia; control; illusions; optic ataxia; PET; planning; reaching;. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of five years of research involving three studies. The first two studies investigated the impact of the value honesty/integrity on the ethical decision choice an individual makes, as moderated by the individual personality traits of self-monitoring and private self-consciousness. The third study, which is the focus of this paper, expanded the two earlier studies by varying the level of moral intensity and including the influence of demographical factors and other workplace values: achievement, fairness, and concern (...) for others on the ethical decision process. These studies were designed using a laboratory format and a decision exercise that attempted to establish realistic business conflict situations through decision scenarios. Support is presented for the influence of gender and achievement on ethical choice. Recommendations for the future direction of this stream of research are given. (shrink)