Personalisation is the new mantra in social care; this article focuses on how personalisation can be achieved in practice, by presenting an analysis of data from people with learning disabilities and their personal assistants, where traditional care relationships have often been shown to be disempowering. The focus here is on the ways in which both parties use references to shared knowledge, joint experiences or personal-life information. These strategies can be used for various social goals, and instances are given where shared (...) references are used during non task-related talk. Both parties are seen on occasion to attempt to refer to shared information, and dense layers of inference can result, which move the interaction onto an ordinary, more symmetrical and friendly footing. The article concludes that shared knowledge referencing creates a way to shift between the personal and the professional, to blur the boundaries, and to create a new and more personalised relationship. (shrink)

Kantian moral concepts concerning respect for human dignity have played a central role in articulating ethical guidelines for medical practice and research, and for articulating some central positions within bioethical debates more generally. The most common of these Kantian moral concepts is the obligation to respect the dignity of patients and of human research subjects as autonomous, self-determining individuals. This article describes Kant’s conceptual distinction between dignity and autonomy as values, and draws on the work of several contemporary Kantian philosophers (...) who employ the distinction to make sense of some common moral intuitions, feelings, and norms. Drawing on this work, the article argues that the conceptual distinction between dignity and autonomy as values is indispensable in the context of considering our obligations to those who are dependent and vulnerable. (shrink)

Philippa Foot has for many years been one of the most distinctive and influential thinkers in moral philosophy. Long dissatisfied with the moral theories of her contemporaries, she has gradually evolved a theory of her own that is radically opposed not only to emotivism and prescriptivism but also to the whole subjectivist, anti-naturalist movement deriving from David Hume. Dissatisfied with both Kantian and utilitarian ethics, she claims to have isolated a special form of evaluation that predicates goodness and defect (...) only to living things considered as such; she finds this form of evaluation in moral judgements. Her vivid discussion covers topics such as practical rationality, erring conscience, and the relation between virtue and happiness, ending with a critique of Nietzsche's immoralism. This long-awaited book exposes a highly original approach to moral philosophy and represents a fundamental break from the assumptions of recent debates. Foot challenges many prominent philosophical arguments and attitudes; but hers is a work full of life and feeling, written for anyone intrigued by the deepest questions about goodness and human. (shrink)

This article explores how older adults negotiate and partially counter normative expectations of “health citizenship” that stress individual responsibility for maintaining health and preventing health problems. Based on interviews with 55 participants in Canada and the U.K. about what healthy living means to them in their everyday lives, we examine how the dominant discourse of personal responsibility in participants’ responses is counterpointed by a more muted, yet significant, alternative critical perspective on the relative roles and responsibilities of government and citizens (...) in making healthy living possible. Drawing on Hauser’s (1999) concept of vernacular rhetoric along with recent theories of environmental citizenship, we analyze how participants exercise their civic-political judgment by using a logic of dissociation to argue that what government says about the importance of healthy living is incompatible with what government does to support citizens’ abilities to eat healthily and live actively. By deploying this technique of argumentation to address structural-political-economic dimensions of healthy living, participants enact, in modest ways, an alternative, critical-collective mode of health citizenship that complicates and, at least partially, disrupts neoliberal constructions of the individually responsible, “good” health citizen. (shrink)

A Reply to Professor Frankena. Philippa Foot. Philosophy, Vol. 50, No. 194, 455-459. Oct., 1975. A Reply to Professor Frankena PHILIPPA FOOT Professor Frankena finds himself in a state of bewilderment.

One of the reasons why most of us feel puzzled about the problem of abortion is that we want, and do not want, to allow to the unborn child the rights that belong to adults and children. When we think of a baby about to be born it seems absurd to think that the next few minutes or even hours could make so radical a difference to its status; yet as we go back in the life of the fetus we (...) are more and more reluctant to say that this is a human being and must be treated as such. No doubt this is the deepest source of our dilemma, but it is not the only one. For we are also confused about the general question of what we may and may not do where the interests of human beings conflict. We have strong intuitions about certain cases; saying, for instance, that it is all right to raise the level of education in our country, though statistics allow us to predict that a rise in the suicide rate will follow, while it is not all right to kill the feeble-minded to aid cancer research. It is not easy, however, to see the principles involved, and one way of throwing light on the abortion issue will be by setting up parallels involving adults or children once born. So we will be able to isolate the “equal rights” issue and should be able to make some advance... (shrink)

'Foot stands out among contemporary ethical theorists because of her conviction that virtues and vices are more central ethical notions than rights, duties, justice, or consequences - the primary focus of most other contemporary theorists. This volume brings together a dozen essays published between 1957 and 1977, and includes two new ones as well. In the first, Foot argues explicitly for an ethic of virtue, and in the next five discusses abortion, euthanasia, free will/determination, and the ethics of Hume and (...) Nietzsche. The final eight essays chart her growing disenchantment with emotivism and prescriptivism and their account of moral arguments. All the essays embody to some extent her commitment to an ethics of virtue... Foot's style is straightforward and readable, her arguments subtle, ingenious, and some of them important.' Choice. (shrink)

We examined the hypothesis that a tendency to experience the world in terms of a sense of ‘special’ connection is responsible for the self-transcendent value dimension identified by multi-dimensional scaling and constitutes a common factor for different religious and non-religious interpretations of spirituality. Eight different groups were studied including: six different types of faith leaders in India and the UK, people who self-rated as spiritual but not religious, and those self-rating as neither spiritual nor religious. They completed a questionnaire that (...) assessed the strength of their spirituality irrespective of type and the experience of special connection to the following categories: people, nature, places and the universe, with and without using the term spiritual. For all eight samples the different types of connection were highly inter-correlated, and self-perceived spirituality correlated with the sum of connection items irrespective of whether items included the term spiritual or not. Variation between groups in the size of the latter correlation was consistent with different interpretations of spirituality in those groups. Although the meaning of spirituality is socially constructed, variability within faith leader groups suggests that its interpretation is also affected by personality. (shrink)

Within the historiography of early modern science, trust and credibility have become synonymous with genteel identity. While we should not overlook the cultural values attached to social hierarchy and how it shaped the credibility of knowledge claims, this has limitations when thinking about how contemporaries regarded the origins of that knowledge and its location in different types of workers and skillsets. Using the example of seamen in the circles of the Royal Society, this article employs the category of experience, and (...) by extension expertise, to illustrate how recognized forms of knowledge and skill acted as routes to credibility and authority in early modern science. It argues that, within the experimental community, the seaman’s authority derived from their direct experience of novel and remote phenomena and the cumulative effect of their wider experience. The accumulated experience they acquired from frequent practice, observation, and exposure translated into a form of “expertness” that rendered seamen trustworthy and credible observers and thinkers. The gentlemanly trust model does not accommodate nor acknowledge the ways the seaman’s direct and accumulated experience were recognized and valued in inquiry and discourse. The article therefore sets out a new model for understanding trust, credibility, and authority in early modern science that can take us beyond a restrictive mono-model that locates trust in one sociocultural category to highlight the multiple, and sometimes competing, claims to epistemological authority. (shrink)

In the heady days of 2011–2012, when Barack Obama was in his first term and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act heralded a golden future, medical anthropologists and activists had reason to be excited. Their country was about to take—so they believed—the greatest single step in the right direction since LBJ’s “Great Society” welfare spending program. It was in this climate that Inhorn and Wentzell’s collection of essays was published, and the optimism of the times shines through many of (...) the essays.The harsh reality is that at the end of 2012 Obama was re-elected, and after a painful deadlock the health insurance legislation known as “Obamacare” was pushed through. What followed has not turned out quite the way anyone expected and has driven an initial and unprecedented tidal wave of disapproval of the Obama presidency. Reading Medical Anthropology at the Intersections is therefore a sobering lesson in how a week can be a very long time in politics and a year a positive etern. (shrink)

This paper revisits Ronald Dworkin’s influential position that a person’s advance directive for future health care and medical treatment retains its moral authority beyond the onset of dementia, even when respecting this authority involves foreshortening the life of someone who is happy and content and who no longer remembers or identifies with instructions included within the advance directive. The analysis distils a eudaimonist perspective from Dworkin’s argument and traces variations of this perspective in further arguments for the moral authority of (...) advance directives by other authors. It then critiques a feature of the eudaimonist perspectives within these arguments—namely, the position that dementia has a retroactive negative impact on what a person has previously valued—and challenges the commonly held assumption underlying them that a person’s life and well-being have relatively low value beyond the onset of dementia. Although advance directives have moral authority as a means of guiding one’s future health care, accounts that dismiss the value of the lives and well-being of people living with dementia should be questioned to the extent that such accounts are used to support the moral authority of advance directives stipulating measures to foreshorten individuals’ lives. (shrink)

By illuminating the striking affinity between the most innovative aspects of postmodern thought and religious mystical discourse, Shadow of Spirit challenges the long established assumption that western thought is committed to nihilism. This collection of essays by internationally recognized scholars explores the implications of the fascination with the "sacred," "divine" or "infinite" which characterizes much contemporary thought. It shows how these concerns have surfaced in the work of Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Kristeva, Irigaray and others. Examining the connection between this postmodern (...) "turn" and the current search for a new discourse of ethics and politics, it also stresses the contribution made by feminist thought to this unexpected intellectual direction. (shrink)

L'un des principaux intérêts du matériel céramique recueilli lors des fouilles récentes dans l'habitat mésohelladique de l'Aspis d'Argos (1974-1990) tient au fait qu'il provient de dépôts d'habitat stratifiés couvrant presque toute la période, de ΓΗΜ Ι à ΓΗΜ IIIB. Parmi ce matériel, les céramiques à décor peint constituent un lot particulièrement intéressant, non seulement parce qu'elles représentent plus du tiers de l'ensemble mais aussi parce qu'elles se prêtent mieux, de par leurs caractères physiques (technologie, formes, décor), à l'étude de la (...) variabilité des céramiques. Or c'est à travers cette dernière que l'on peut le mieux tenter une approche des relations et des conceptions sociales et, d'une manière plus générale, de l'organisation socio-économique, domaines encore largement inexplorés pour cette période. Les céramiques mésohelladiques à décor peint se répartissent en deux grandes catégories : la céramique à peinture mate (Mattpainted ware), parmi les plus caractéristiques de la période, et la céramique à peinture lustrée (Lustrous Decorated ware), beaucoup plus rare et moins largement répandue. Le premier volet de cette étude, consacré à la céramique à peinture mate, présente un aperçu de ses diverses classes technologiques et de ses principaux types, ce qui permet de discerner plusieurs traits originaux de la production argienne mais aussi d'apprécier la part qu'y occupent des séries importées d'autres centres producteurs du bassin égéen. (shrink)

In this book Philippa Hoskin offers an account of the pastoral theory and practice of Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln 1235-1253, within his diocese. Grosseteste has been considered as an eminent medieval philosopher and theologian, and as a bishop focused on pastoral care, but there has been no attempt to consider how his scholarship influenced his pastoral practice. Making use of Grosseteste's own writings - philosophical and theological as well as pastoral and administrative - Hoskin demonstrates how Grosseteste's famous (...) interventions in his diocese grew from his own theory of personal obligation in pastoral care as well as how his personal involvement in his diocese could threaten well-developed clerical and lay networks. (shrink)

'Foot stands out among contemporary ethical theorists because of her conviction that virtues and vices are more central ethical notions than rights, duties, justice, or consequences - the primary focus of most other contemporary theorists. This volume brings together a dozen essays published between 1957 and 1977, and includes two new ones as well. In the first, Foot argues explicitly for an ethic of virtue, and in the next five discusses abortion, euthanasia, free will/determination, and the ethics of Hume and (...) Nietzsche. The final eight essays chart her growing disenchantment with emotivism and prescriptivism and their account of moral arguments. All the essays embody to some extent her commitment to an ethics of virtue... Foot's style is straightforward and readable, her arguments subtle, ingenious, and some of them important.' Choice. (shrink)

Στο πρώτο μέρος της μελέτης της κεραμικής με γραπτό διάκοσμο από τις πρόσφατες ανασκαφές του μεσοελλαδικού οικισμού της Ασπίδας του 'Αργούς, είχαμε αναφερθεί στην αμαυρόχρωμη κεραμική (Mattpainted Ware), τοπικής και αιγινήτικης παραγωγής. Στο δεύτερο αυτό μέρος του άρθρου παρουσιάζονται τα προκαταρκτικά αποτελέσματα της μελέτης της κεραμικής με στιλπνή βαφή {Lustrons Decorated Waré), πολύ σπανιότερης και προερχόμενης από κάποιο κέντρο παραγωγής που εντοπίζεται πιθανότατα στη ΝΑ Πελοπόννησο. Βασικό χαρακτηριστικό της αποτελούν οι ομοιότητες της με τη μινωική κεραμική (ΜΜ ΙΑ-ΜΜ ΙΠΒ/ΥΜ Ι), (...) ομοιότητες όχι μόνο μορφολογικές αλλά και τεχνολογικές, γεγονός που δηλώνει την εξοικείωση του εργαστηρίου παραγωγής της με τη μινωική τεχνογνωσία. Μέσα από τη μελέτη των φυσικών χαρακτηριστικών της (εξειδικευμένη τεχνολογία, περιορισμένο σχηματολόγιο, περίτεχνη διακόσμηση) διερευνάται η λειτουργία της κεραμικής αυτής (κατανάλωση υγρών τροφών) και ο κοινωνικός της ρόλος (ένδειξη κύρους), καθώς και τα χαρακτηριστικά του κέντρου παραγωγής της. Τέλος, μέσα από την κεραμική διαφοροποίηση και των δύο κατηγοριών με γραπτό διάκοσμο (αμαυρόχρωμης και με στιλπνή βαφή) γίνεται μια προσπάθεια να διερευνηθούν η κοινωνικοπολιτική οργάνωση του οικισμού και οι αλλαγές που σηματοδότησαν την πορεία του: η χωροταξική του αναδιάταξη στην αρχή της περιόδου των ταφικών κύκλων των Μυκηνών και η εγκατάλειψη του στα τέλη της ίδιας περιόδου. (shrink)

Foot criticizes G. E. Moore's anti‐naturalism and the subjectivist or non‐cognitivist theories influenced by Moore, such as emotivism, prescriptivism, and expressivism. Foot traces the roots of non‐cognitivism to a desire‐based, egoistic interpretation of David Hume's practicality requirement, i.e. that morality is necessarily practical. Foot eschews this interpretation of Hume's requirement for an alternative, cognitivist, notion of practical rationality that nevertheless still meets this requirement. Foot also denies that moral evaluation is opposed to descriptive statements, or matters of fact, as the (...) non‐cognitivists argue; it has to do rather with facts about a particular subject matter, i.e. human life. Her main argument, which she will pursue throughout the book, is that the grounding of a moral argument is ultimately in these facts, or in what Elizabeth Anscombe refers to as ‘Aristotelian necessities’, i.e. the moral virtues; and thus the evaluation of the human will should be determined by facts about the nature of human beings and of the life of our species. (shrink)

Le propre des grands œuvres est d’être une source infinie de réflexion pour les siècles qui la suivent. L’attraction de Platon se compte, comme un petit nombre d’autres auteurs, en millénaires. Ses dialogues n’en finissent pas d’émerveiller : hauteur de vue, atopie des analyses, diversité des thèmes, subtil congé donné à la vanité philosophique dans un mélange de jeu et de sérieux, mise en scène de personnages croqués rapidement ou peints lentement au fil du dialogue, ressorts infinis du styl...

Foot examines the moral theory known as ‘non‐cognitivism’. Her central thesis is that all non‐cognitivist moral theories are based on the same serious mistake. This mistake is traced to a distinction taken for granted by non‐cognitivist moral philosophers such as A. J. Ayer and R. M. Hare. Such philosophers wrongly believed that there is a logical gap between ‘descriptive language’ and ‘evaluative language’. Foot argues that this supposed gap between facts and values, which crucially gives a logical gap between a (...) moral judgement and its grounds, is a chimera. (shrink)

I have asked that this article should be reprinted in the volume dedicated to Elizabeth Anscombe because it in particular reflects throughout my great indebtedness to her. I remember, as long ago as the late 1940s confidently referring to ‘the difference between descriptive and evaluative reasoning’ in one of the many discussions that we began to have from that time on. She, genuinely puzzled, simply asked, ‘What do you mean?’.

In this article the background, development, therapeutical value and praxis of film therapy in Christian counselling will be addressed. The second part of the article shows what the scenery beyond film therapy may look like and how this form of therapy may extend to other areas of digital and electronic media in the current counselling and pastoral care praxis. Postmodernity, as the context within which the society finds itself, is discussed, as well as the place of films in postmodernity. The (...) important use and application of narratives in the postmodern era is discussed. Film therapy’s development as an outgrowth of bibliotherapy is explained. It is further shown how film therapy as a tool in the praxis of therapy may provide the ideal atmosphere for learning, enjoyment and edification. The scope of the article also reaches beyond the current use of film therapy by suggesting the use of other social and electronic media in a therapeutical way as an ever-increasing possibility. The article ends with some pointers in the use of film therapy. (shrink)

Abstract:The career of Gervase of Tilbury (c.1150–1220) opens a window into the complexity of the late twelfth-century intellectual world. Often dismissed as a mere compiler, Gervase was a scholastic thinker outside the schools who adapted complex theological arguments for an English prince, a Sicilian king, and a German emperor. His writing reveals the "portability" of scholastic thought. It also demonstrates how scholastic authors were molded by their experiences of royal courts. Gervase's time in the Norman Sicilian kingdom shaped his attitude (...) to political authority and his experience of royal hospitality allowed him to fashion a distinctive view of heavenly beatitude. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe increasing recognition of the negative impact of income inequality has highlighted the importance of taxation which can function as a redistributive mechanism. Previous critical social psychological research found that talk about restricting the welfare state, that is funded through tax, is formed of ideology that supports the maintenance of income inequality. Therefore, this research explores how speakers use talk about tax to justify income inequality during a UK BBC radio discussion, ‘Moral Maze: The moral purpose of tax’ which involved (...) public figures discussing the role of tax. This programme was analysed from a critical discursive psychological perspective. It was found that two contrasting constructions of tax were presented: tax as a collective responsibility or tax as an individual burden, whereby speakers drew on social justice and individualistic ideology respectively. Arguments for high tax rates are problematic due to the acceptability of inequality in a meritocracy. By presenting wealthy individuals as more deserving than the less affluent, arguments for higher tax come to be challenged. (shrink)

Considers the moral relevance of a distinction between killing and letting die, which distinction is sometimes morally critical, as shown in the difference between killing one to save five and leaving one to die while rescuing them A more basic distinction is, she thinks, between initiating a harmful sequence of events and not interfering to prevent it. The latter is sometimes permissible where the former would not be, because in general we have a stronger right not to be interfered with (...) than positively to be helped. (shrink)

The question may be asked why many workers are still being paid below subsistence wages and I believe the answer can be found in the confusion over what exactly constitutes a “living wage” and who has the duty to pay these wages. This article therefore clarifies what a living wage is and gives a concrete example of how a living wage can be calculated. To understand who has the obligation to pay living wages I look to the theory of Alan (...) Gewirth on individual and institutional responsibility and the account of Robert Mayer on structural exploitation to argue that all parts of the supply chain have the duty. The final part of this paper willoutline the inclusion of a living wage calculation into corporate codes of conduct to ensure that workers at the end of the supply chain receive living wages. (shrink)

Philosophers are often asked whether they can provide a defence against hostile theories which are said to be “undermining the foundations of morality,” and they often try to do so. But before anything of this kind is attempted we should surely ask whether morality could be threatened in this way. If what people have in mind is simply that the spread of certain doctrines leads to the growth of indifference about right and wrong there is no philosophical problem involved. So (...) long as we treat the matter as a case of cause and effect it will belong rather to the psychologist than the philosopher, and we have no reason for questioning that correlations of this kind may exist. But this is not the assumption, or not the only one, for people undoubtedly do think that if certain doctrines could be proved then moral judgment would have been shown to be “nonsensical,” “meaningless,” or “invalid,” so that thereafter it would be not merely difficult but positively irrational to formulate and attempt to follow moral principles. It would be simple enough if the attack was supposed to be against some particular moral code, for there are recognized ways of arguing that a thing is not right but wrong. But when it is morality in general which is to be disproved or discredited it is difficult to see what this means or how it could be done. What would have to be shown is not that this or that is not right, but that nothing is—or not in the old sense so that attacking moral judgment is not like attacking a theory but more like attacking theorizing itself, which shows where the difficulty lies. If something is stated it can be denied or disproved, but a moral judgment does not contain statements except about what in particular is right or wrong. Yet many people, though they would probably reject a request for a justification of morality in the form of some argument as to why we should do our duty, feel that morality would be in a positive sense unjustifiable if certain supporting truths were knocked away from the structure. This may indeed be so, but we are unable to show that it is, or to explain the matter by appealing to “presuppositions” of morality, which besides being far too vague would too easily include much that was linked merely psychologically to the recognition of obligation. I propose, therefore, to look at some specific arguments which are supposed by those who resist them to constitute a threat to morality, and to ask whether this supposition is justified. (shrink)

A recent paper in this journal argues that some cases of schizophrenia should be seen as cases of demon possession and treated by faith healers. A reply, also published in this journal, responds by raising concerns about the intellectual credibility and potentially harmful practical implications of demon possession beliefs. My paper contributes to the discussion, arguing that a critique of demon possession beliefs in the context of schizophrenia is needed, but suggesting an alternative basis for it. It also reflects on (...) important differences between demonic and other forms of spirit possession, and considers the implications of this for mental health care providers. (shrink)

Sophie and her sister, Jess, grow up knowing that a few little lies are necessary: You look great. It was only a joke. He's just stressed. It doesn't matter. Everything's fine. Everybody does it, don't they? But what about the big lies—about love, power and money? When Sophie discovers her father's secret, and Jess falls in love with the charismatic Jake, Sophie has to look at her own life again. Should she keep quiet or tear her family apart with the (...) truth? And if she tells, who will pay the ultimate price? (shrink)

This essay is a continuation of one Foot had written ten years earlier under the title ‘Moral Realism and Moral Dilemma’. Foot attacks Ruth Marcus’ notion that some moral dilemmas involve circumstances in which one is guilty whatever one does: being ‘damned if one does something and damned if one doesn’t’. Foot's opposition to Marcus’ thesis rests on the argument that the guilty feelings one may experience when coping with some serious moral dilemma do not imply that one is indeed (...) guilty. She expands this argument in order to attack Bernard Williams’ thesis that such feelings of guilt show that there are cases of ‘inescapable wrongness’. Re‐thinking the nature of moral dilemmas, Foot denies the existence of cases that involve inevitable wrongdoing. (shrink)

In what Arjun Appadurai has dubbed the ‘colonial imaginary’ issues of femininity, and who possessed it, were of prime importance. An orientalizing sociology sought to distinguish, and indeed to fix, differences between metropolitan and indigenous women as a rhetoric of hierarchy which secured proper and western femininity to white women. One critical route which colonial commentators and authorities took to produce that knowledge was to measure women's proximity to the practice of prostitution, a means which permitted discussion and judgement of (...) racialized sexualities as well as of proper models of feminine behaviour. This article will explore the ways in which the new sociology of the Victorian period, wielded in a colonial context, served to separate women through race-based ideas of sexual behaviour and sexual order. It will deal with British India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (shrink)

Les études de mobilier en vue de la publication des fouilles de l’Aspis se sont poursuivies activement au cours des campagnes de 2014 et 2015. Au cours de la seconde, elles se sont accompagnées de deux opérations de terrain également liées à la préparation de la publication : d’une part, le nettoyage partiel et le relevé des deux citernes hellénistiques de l’Aspis ; d’autre part, une série de carottages dans la plaine argienne dans le cadre de l’étude paléo‑environnementale du site. (...) Parallèle... (shrink)

Les années 2014 et 2015 ont été consacrées à la poursuite de l’étude du mobilier des tombes de la nécropole mycénienne de la Deiras fouillées par Vollgraff au début du xxe s., étude centrée sur le mobilier non céramique mais qui prend aussi en compte, de façon plus marginale, le mobilier céramique. Rappelons que l’essentiel de ce matériel (objets en or, pâte de verre, ivoire, pierre, bronze, argent) est actuellement conservé au Musée national d’Athènes, tandis que certains objets (vases fragm...

This essay is an expansion and refinement of the key ideas and distinctions that Foot advances in ‘Killing and Letting Die’. Here, she defends two morally relevant distinctions: firstly, that between ‘what we do’ and what ‘we allow to happen’ and secondly, what we aim at and what we only foresee as the result of what we do. Utilitarianism as a moral theory is, Foot claims, at fault in overlooking these important distinctions. She describes cases in which although it would (...) be thought permissible to let one person die if we could then save a greater number, we should be outraged by the idea that we could kill one person in order to save them. Moreover, the impermissibility of even allowing one person to die deliberately in order to use the body to save others shows that the distinction between doing and allowing must be supplemented by the distinction between direct and indirect intention. Foot therefore argues that Utilitarianism is a deficient moral theory in that it overlooks these complexities of agency. This mistake came from the attempt to ground all moral judgements in purely causal relationships to better or worse ‘states of affairs,’ and in the latter part of the essay Foot calls into question the whole idea of ‘good states of affairs from a moral point of view’ that Utilitarians suppose to stand as the one foundation of all moral judgements. (shrink)

In his Carus Lectures, given in 1974 and printed in this journal in January 1980, W. K. Frankena attacks a number of philosophers who belong, he says, to a recent ‘Movement’ in moral philosophy. As there are many of us in the Movement, as e.g., Elizabeth Anscombe, Geoffrey Warnock, Anthony Quinton and myself, I shall not try to unravel the complications of our similarities and differences. No doubt others will be answering for themselves, and I shall deal only with arguments (...) particularly directed against me. It goes without saying that I am grateful to Frankena for giving my work a good deal of attention. Moreover, at certain points I share his uneasiness about theses that I have put forward, and especially about some of the things that I said in an article called ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’ published in the Philosophical Review in 1972. I am sure that there is something wrong with that article, and my only doubt is as to whether Frankena’s own moral theories can help us to put it right. (shrink)

Examines various definitions of moral relativism, first discussing the views of Charles Stevenson and Walter Stace and suggesting that neither of these two authors deals with the most troubling form that relativism can take. The important question is whether societies with widely differing moral codes may ultimately simply face each other without there being any common standard to which both must answer. Bernard Williams has argued in favour of the possibility of this ultimate confrontation and so supports a radical form (...) of moral relativism. Foot, however, challenges it, suggesting that the use of the concept of morality brings with it the relevance of more or less determinate considerations of human goods and evils. During the discussion of Stace's views, there is also consideration of the important relativistic idea that rightness and wrongness is relative to each person's conscience. This too is denied, in agreement with Aquinas’ argument that even an erring conscience binds but cannot excuse. It is always wrong to go against one's conscience, but when conscience errs, it may also be wrong to do what one thinks one should do. (shrink)

This article investigates the uneasy process of integrating midwifery’s alternative, women-centered model of childbirth care within the medically-dominated healthcare system in Canada. It analyses the impure processes of rhetorical identification and differentiation that characterized the debate about how to regulate midwifery in Ontario by examining a selection of submissions from diverse health care groups with vested interest in the debate’s outcome. In divergent ways, these groups strategically appeal to the value of the “public interest” in order to advance professional concerns. (...) The study considers the implications of this rhetorical process for re-defining midwifery’s distinctive professional identity in relation to other health professions, to the state, and to the women for whom midwives care. Likewise, it suggests the relevance of rhetorical analysis for understanding the discursive formation and re-formation of health models, values, and professions in Western culture. (shrink)

This paper is about the rationality of moral action, and so about a problem that is as old as Plato but which still haunts moral philosophy today. It is about the rationality of following morality; of refraining from murder or robbery for instance, and being faithful in keeping contracts and promises, even where this seems to be against our interest and contrary to what we most desire. The problem of the rationality of morality arises most obviously over such actions and (...) therefore has to do particularly with the virtue of justice, because it is here that self-interest and morality often seem to clash. Then reason may represent itself as on the side of self-interest and the fulfilment of present desire; so unless it can be shown that acting justly is a necessary part of practical rationality, cynics like Thrasymachus will always say that there is no good reason to pass up an advantage for the sake of acting justly, and plenty of reason not to pass it up. (shrink)