Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 95-99.

This study examines the issues associated with the disinvestment of U.S. interests from South Africa that took place in the mid-80s from the perspective of three dominant moral theories: utility, rights, and justice. By examining the issues in light of these three theories, the paper attempts to establish a decision framework from which managers and investors can evaluate similar decisions they are facing around the world today. Similarly, the reading may prove useful to educators who incorporate discussions of ethical decision (...) making into the classroom.Training in business ethics too often takes a strictly utilitarian perspective, or worse, a relativistic one. This study attempts to illustrate how utilitarian theory and related rights and justice issues can he interwoven into the heuristics associated with the contemporary concepts of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

During an initial palliative care assessment, a dying man discloses that he had killed several people whilst a young man. The junior doctor, to whom he revealed his story, consulted with senior palliative care colleagues. It was agreed that legal advice would be sought on the issue of breaching the man’s confidentiality. Two legal opinions conflicted with each other. A decision was made by the clinical team not to inform the police.In this article the junior doctor, the palliative medicine specialist, (...) a medical ethicist, and a lawyer consider the case from their various perspectives. (shrink)

In New Zealand an advance directive can be either an oral statement or a written document. Such directives give individuals the opportunity to make choices about future medical treatment in the event they are cognitively impaired or otherwise unable to make their preferences known. All consumers of health care have the right to make an advance directive in accordance with the common law. When we consider New Zealand's rapidly ageing population, the fact that more people now live with and die (...) of chronic rather than acute conditions, the importance given to respecting autonomous decision-making, increasing numbers of individuals who require long-term residential care, and financial pressures in the allocation of medical resources, there would seem to be a number of compelling reasons to encourage individuals to write or verbalise an advance directive. Indeed the promotion of advance directives is encouraged. However, caution should be exercised in promoting advance directives to older people, especially in light of several factors: ageist attitudes and stereotypes towards them, challenges in the primary healthcare setting, and the way in which advance directives are currently focused and formulated. This paper considers some of the specific challenges that need to be addressed if the promotion of advance directives are to improve outcomes of patient treatment and care near the end of life. (shrink)

Edward O. Wilson's sociobiology, as advocated in On Human Nature, is often criticized for its sensationalism and its anthropomorphisms. Critics have not recognized, however, that the so?called anthropomorphisms are essential to sociobiology, in so far as it seeks to address the humanities, and that the sensationalism derives from them. They are not just the sloppiness usually found in popularizations. Section I reviews the grounds for these criticisms and then ends by demonstrating that it is no less a confusion to label (...) these misuses of language ?anthropomorphisms?. Section II analyzes the style of reasoning, characteristic of scientism in general and sociobiology in particular, that sanctions misuses of language such as Wilson's. The flaw in this reasoning is that it depends upon the very language it sets out to debunk, in a way that renders its own arguments unintelligible. (shrink)

This case concerns aspects of the treatment of a post-surgical patient in a major public hospital in New Zealand during the author's experiences as a fourth year medical student. This case is used to consider the interlinked ethical issues of sympathy, moral virtue, dignity and how the medical environment can realign these values.

:This article describes the well-developed and long-standing medical ethics teaching programs in both of New Zealand’s medical schools at the University of Otago and the University of Auckland. The programs reflect the awareness that has been increasing as to the important role that ethics education plays in contributing to the “professionalism” and “professional development” in medical curricula.

One of the key learning objectives in any health professional course is to develop ethical and judicious practice. Therefore, it is important to address how medical and pharmacy students respond to, and deal with, ethical dilemmas in their clinical environments. In this paper, we examined how students communicated their resolution of ethical dilemmas and the alignment between these communications and the four principles developed by Beauchamp and Childress. Three hundred and fifty-seven pharmacy and medical students (overall response rate=63%) completed a (...) questionnaire containing four clinical case scenarios with an ethical dilemma. Data were analysed using multiple methods. The findings revealed that 73% of the qualitative responses could be exclusively coded to one of the ‘four principles’ determined by the Beauchamp and Childress' framework. Additionally, 14% of responses overlapped between the four principles (multiple codes) and 13% of responses could not be coded using the framework. The subsequent subgroup analysis revealed different response patterns depending on the case being reviewed. The findings showed that when students are faced with challenging ethical dilemmas their responses can be aligned with the Beauchamp and Childress framework, although more contentious dilemmas involving issues of law are less easily categorised. The differences between year and discipline groups show students are developing ethical frames of reference that may be linked with their teaching environments and their levels of understanding. Analysis of these response patterns provides insight into the way students will likely respond in ‘real’ settings and this information may help educators prepare students for these clinical ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

It has been over two decades since Miranda Fricker labeled epistemic injustice, in which an agent is wronged in their capacity as a knower. The philosophical literature has proliferated with variants and related concepts. By considering cases in popular music, we argue that it is worth distinguishing a parallel phenomenon of art-interpretive injustice, in which an agent is wronged in their creative capacity as a possible artist. In section 1, we consider the prosecutorial use of rap lyrics in court as (...) a central case of this injustice. In section 2, we distinguish art-interpretive injustice from other categories already discussed in recent literature. In section 3, we discuss the relationship between genre discourse and identity prejudice. The case for recognizing the category of art-interpretive injustice is that it allows one to recognize a class of harms as being importantly related in ways that one would otherwise overlook. (shrink)

Many legal arguments pertaining to equal rights for gay and lesbian families have relied upon empirical research on the `healthy' childraising environment of these families. While neither disputing recent legal gains nor diminishing their importance, this article looks at some of the conceptual categories that drive this research. The limitations of such research, as salutary as it is, are typically understood in terms of their obvious political context. Such research avoids highlighting any differences between gay/lesbian families and traditional families because (...) an emphasis on such differences feeds cultural stereotypes that are damaging to non-traditional families. This article takes a different tack, looking at how the concepts that frame research are based in binaries and fantasies about families and sex that we argue are too limiting. It assumes that the elision of sexuality within such studies is symptomatic of a broader repression of a variety of meanings of family. In response, the article brings in queer theory and psychoanalysis to broaden our approach to understanding new forms of family and kinship initiated by gay and lesbian families. The article addresses single household lesbian families that are most frequently the object of empirical research. (shrink)

In the small but growing literature on the philosophy of country music, the question of how we ought to understand the genre’s notion of authenticity has emerged as one of the central questions. Many country music scholars argue that authenticity claims track attributions of cultural standing or artistic self-expression. However, careful attention to the history of the genre reveals that these claims are simply factually wrong. On the basis of this, we have grounds for dismissing these attributions. Here, I argue (...) for an alternative model of authenticity in which we take claims about the relative authenticity of country music to be evidence of ‘country’ being a dual character concept in the same way that it has been suggested of punk rock and hip-hop. Authentic country music is country music that embodies the core value commitments of the genre. These values form the basis of country artists’ and audiences’ practical identities. Part of country music’s aesthetic practice is that audiences reconnect with, reify, and revise this common practical identity through identification with artists and works that manifest these values. We should then think of authenticity discourse within country music as a kind of game within the genre’s practice of shaping and maintaining this practical identity. (shrink)

Reviews the book, Enjoy your symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out by Slavoi Zizek. The following reviews one of Slavoi Zizek's books, Enjoy your symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. Zizek's book and this review aim to address the relevance of Lacan for many of the ethical questions that arise when psychology begins to envision its own concepts and practices as culturally embedded. The matrix of discourse, power, and subject is most often articulated in psychology through the ideas (...) of Foucault, but Lacan illuminates the same field of effects with closer attention given to the specifics of language, the body, the individual, and intersubjectivity. Lacan most obviously addresses the role of speech in a clinical setting. But the implications reach further and Slavoi Zizek takes the Lacanian intervention into the social order. At present Zizek represents the most explicit and uncompromising Lacanian reader of contemporary culture. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Digitalisation of health and the use of health data in artificial intelligence, and machine learning (ML), including for applications that will then in turn be used in healthcare are major themes permeating current UK and other countries’ healthcare systems and policies. Obtaining rich and representative data is key for robust ML development, and UK health data sets are particularly attractive sources for this. However, ensuring that such research and development is in the public interest, produces public benefit and preserves privacy (...) are key challenges. Trusted research environments (TREs) are positioned as a way of balancing the diverging interests in healthcare data research with privacy and public benefit. Using TRE data to train ML models presents various challenges to the balance previously struck between these societal interests, which have hitherto not been discussed in the literature. These challenges include the possibility of personal data being disclosed in ML models, the dynamic nature of ML models and how public benefit may be (re)conceived in this context. For ML research to be facilitated using UK health data, TREs and others involved in the UK health data policy ecosystem need to be aware of these issues and work to address them in order to continue to ensure a ‘safe’ health and care data environment that truly serves the public. (shrink)

Medical trainees should learn from the actions of Nazi physicians to inform a more just contemporary practice by examining the subtle assumptions, or moral orientations, that led to such heinous actions. One important moral orientation that still informs contemporary medical practice is the moral orientation of elimination in response to suffering patients. We propose that the moral orientation of presence, described by theologian Stanley Hauerwas, provides a more fitting response to suffering patients, in spite of the significant barriers to enacting (...) such a moral orientation for contemporary trainees. (shrink)

Objectives To characterize the prevalence and content of pediatric triage policies.Methods We surveyed and solicited policies from U.S. hospitals with pediatric intensive care units. Policies were analyzed using qualitative methods and coded by 2 investigators.Results Thirty-four of 120 institutions (28%) responded. Twenty-five (74%) were freestanding children’s hospitals and 9 (26%) were hospitals within a hospital. Nine (26%) had approved policies, 9 (26%) had draft policies, 5 (14%) were developing policies, and 7 (20%) did not have policies. Nineteen (68%) institutions shared (...) their approved or draft policy. Eight (42%) of those policies included neonates. The polices identified 0 to 5 (median 2) factors to prioritize patients. The most common factors were short- (17, 90%) and long- (14, 74%) term predicted mortality. Pediatric scoring systems included Pediatric Logistic Organ Dysfunction-2 (12, 63%) and Score for Neonatal Acute Physiology and Perinatal Extensions-II (4, 21%). Thirteen (68%) policies described a formal algorithm. The most common tiebreakers were random/lottery (10, 71%) and life cycles (9, 64%). The majority (15, 79%) of policies specified the roles of triage team members and 13 (68%) precluded those participating in patient care from making triage decisions.Conclusions While many institutions still do not have pediatric triage policies, there appears to be a trend among those with policies to utilize a formal algorithm that focuses on short- and long-term predicted mortality and that incorporates age-appropriate scoring systems. Additional work is needed to expand access to pediatric-specific policies, to validate scoring systems, and to address health disparities. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has inquired into the socio-historical, discursive genesis of trauma. Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject, however, seeks what has not been actualized in trauma studies - that is, how the necessity and unassailable intensity of trauma is fastened to its historical emergence. We must ask not only what trauma means for the individual person's biography, but also what it means to be the historical subject of trauma. In other words, how does being human in this current (...) period of history implicate one's lived possibilities that are threatened, and perhaps framed, through trauma? Foucauldian sensibilities inform a critical and structural analysis that is hermeneutically grounded. Drawing on the history of ideas and on Lacan's work in particular, John L. Roberts argues that what we mean by trauma has developed over time, and that it is intimately tied with an ontology of the subject; that is to say, what it is to be, and means to be human. He argues that modern subjectivity - as articulated by Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan - is structurally traumatic, founded in its finitude as self-withdrawal in time, its temporal self-absence becoming the very conditions for agency, truth and knowledge. The book also argues that this fractured temporal horizon - as an effect of an interrupting Otherness or alterity - is obscured through the discourses and technologies of the psy-disciplines (psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy). Consideration is given to social, political, and economic consequences of this concealment. Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject will be of enduring interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as scholars of philosophy and cultural studies. (shrink)

Increasingly through the 1990s, tobacco control advocates questioned the practice of public institutions investing in tobacco company stocks. The questioning was framed in at least three ways. First, is it ethical to fund public expenditures with profits from a product that causes addiction and disease? Second, is it sound social policy to derive public income from a product that increases healthcare costs and reduces worker productivity? Finally, is it sound fiscal policy to invest in an historically profitable industry facing multiplying (...) legal and regulatory challenges? While the tobacco industry preferred to restrict discussion to the fiscal question, and offered an affirmative answer, its position was weakened by depressed stock prices brought on by actions of the industry as much as by tobacco control activism. As part of a campaign to restore its credibility as an investment vehicle with public fund managers, Philip Morris (PM) commissioned a report from the influential investment managers/advisors Wilshire Associates. However, Wilshire had only recently conducted such a study for the Washington State Investment Board (WSIB), assuring the board that the value tobacco stocks added to an investment portfolio – if any – was too small to be measured. Nonetheless, within a year, Wilshire produced a report for PM which appeared to laud the investment value of tobacco and to dismiss tobacco-excluded investment alternatives. This paper examines how Wilshire produced apparently diametrically opposed reports for clients with different interests. It reveals a pattern of potential conflicts of interest among tobacco companies, financial analysis firms, investment authorities, and institutional fund managers. It demonstrates substantial violations of two generally accepted ethical principles of business consulting: veracity and transparency. (shrink)

Genres inform our appreciative practices. What it takes for a work to be a good work of comedy is different than what it takes for a work to be a good work of horror, and a failure to recognize this will lead to a failure to appreciate comedies or works of horror particularly well. Likewise, it is not uncommon to hear people say that a film or novel is a good work, but not a good work of x (where x (...) is the genre of that work). A work can be good all things considered, but genre membership provides us with an additional set of evaluative criteria over and above those of the medium, which colors how we interpret and appreciate the work. Given this importance, it is not surprising that philosophers of art have been interested in providing an account of what, exactly, a genre is. Despite this interest, there is not widespread agreement about what it takes for something to be a genre, nor what kinds of considerations are relevant in determining whether a work is a member of that genre. Beyond this, we might also want to know to what degree we ought to consider genre in evaluating a work of art and why it should matter at all. Here, I explore the variety of recent theories that philosophers have taken up on the topic of genre and why we should ultimately think of genres as artistic practices rather than the alternatives. (shrink)

Genre discourse is widespread in appreciative practice, whether that is about hip-hop music, romance novels, or film noir. It should be no surprise then, that philosophers of art have also been interested in genres. Whether they are giving accounts of genres as such or of particular genres, genre talk abounds in philosophy as much as it does the popular discourse. As a result, theories of genre proliferate as well. However, in their accounts, philosophers have so far focused on capturing all (...) of the categories of art that we think of as genres and have focused less on ensuring that only the categories we think are genres are captured by those theories. Each of these theories populates the world with far too many genres because they call a wide class of mere categories of art genres. I call this the problem of genre explosion. In this paper, I survey the existing accounts of genre and describe the kinds of considerations they employ in determining whether a work is a work of a given genre. After this, I demonstrate the ways in which the problem of genre explosion arises for all of these theories and discuss some solutions those theories could adopt that will ultimately not work. Finally, I argue that the problem of genre explosion is best solved by adopting a social view of genres, which can capture the difference between genres and mere categories of art. (shrink)

Groove, as a musical quality, is an important part of jazz and pop music appreciative practices. Groove talk is widespread among musicians and audiences, and considerable importance is placed on generating and appreciating grooves in music. However, musicians, musicologists, and audiences use groove attributions in a variety of ways that do not track one consistent underlying concept. I argue that that there are at least two distinct concepts of groove. On one account, groove is ‘the feel of the music’ and, (...) on the other, groove is the psychological feeling (induced by music) of wanting to move one’s body. Further, I argue that recent work in music psychology shows that these two concepts do not converge on a unified set of musical features. Finally, I also argue that these two concepts play different functional roles in the appreciative practices of jazz and popular music. This should cause us to further consider the mediating role genre plays for aesthetic concepts and provides us with reason for adopting a more communitarian approach to aesthetics which is attentive to the ways in which aesthetic discourse serves the practices of different audiences. (shrink)

It has been argued that an adequate feminist response to sexist pornography demands not just efforts to eradicate sexist beliefs, but also aesthetic counter-intervention at the level of taste. This view motivates support for feminist pornography. This paper takes the feminist pornography suggestion seriously by unpacking difficulties for the project. I begin by spelling out two views about what makes feminist pornography feminist: the ‘content view,’ and the ‘context view,’ and discuss what I take to be existing arguments for the (...) latter. I then present two objections to the context view: the first focuses on how we characteristically interact with pornography (as a masturbatory aid), the second challenges the value of authenticity upon which much feminist pornography rests. If these arguments are correct, then there are serious flaws with feminist pornography as it is commonly conceived. I close with a brief suggestion of an alternative approach rooted in feminist solidarity. (shrink)