The key objective of this paper is to emphasize the importance of acknowledging breastfeeding as an embodied social practice within interventions related to breastfeeding and lactation and illustrate how this recognition holds implications for public health ethics debates. Recent scholarship has shown that breastfeeding and lactation support interventions undermine women’s autonomy. However, substantial discourse is required to determine how to align with public health goals while also recognizing the embodied experiences of breastfeeding and lactating individuals. Presently, interventions in this realm (...) predominantly revolve around health-related messaging and the promotion of individual behaviors, often neglecting the systemic and structural factors that influence choices and practices. I closely examine breastfeeding interventions in India, in particular Mothers’ Absolute Affection health promotion program, along with breastfeeding narratives. I argue that for such interventions to evolve, they must acknowledge the intrinsic embodied social nature of breastfeeding during their design and implementation. Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that achieving equity and justice objectives necessitates moving beyond the confines of both conventional public health frameworks and frameworks solely centered on private choices. Instead, a more encompassing approach that embraces the concept of embodiment should be adopted. (shrink)

In everyday conversations, professional codes, policy debates, and academic literature, the concept of respect is referred to frequently. Bioethical arguments in recent decades equate the idea of respect for persons with individuals who are capable of autonomous decision-making, with the focus being explicitly on ‘autonomy,’ ‘capacity,’ or ‘capability.’ In much of bioethics literature, respect for persons is replaced by respect for autonomy. Though the unconditional respect for persons and their autonomy (irrespective of actual decision-making capacity) is established in Kantian bioethics, (...) current argument and debates often revolve around a thin concept of autonomy, focusing on capacity and capability: persons are owed respect because they are ‘rational beings’ or with a focus on ‘agency’ and ‘decision-making abilities.’ However, these aspects alone are insufficient while engaging the concept of respect for persons, particularly in healthcare settings. This paper sets out to explore if the concept of respect for persons—as opposed to a thin concept of autonomy—could help us engage better in healthcare practices. We shall probe the practical value of the experiential aspect of respect—understood as the recognition of persons as respect-worthy through certain dispositions and deliberative acts—by reflecting on instances in clinical practice that tend to be dismissed as negligible or even unavoidable in a stressful environment such as a busy hospital. We shall argue that these instances are far from trivial but carry moral significance and express an unacceptable—disrespectful—attitude that can compromise the moral habitus in hospital settings. In our conclusion, we call for practicing recognition respect in the health professional–patient encounter by focussing on manners, attitudes, and behaviors. Furthermore, we call for continuous medical ethics education programs to address the moral significance of disrespectful behaviors and their manifestations in particular socio-cultural contexts. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:Serageldin, Ismail and Martin‐Brown, Joan Ethics and Values: A Global Perspective.

The desirability of creating norms within the framework of law has been a challenging process in a free market economy. The principles of antitrust law enunciated by courts in abuse of dominant cases has led to ‘refusal to deal’ as a contested doctrine. When dominance is treated as legitimate aspiration and free market choices are the medium to achieve the aspirations of free market enterprises, any duty or obligation cast on the firm is considered antithetical to the spirit of free (...) market unless it eclipses the anticompetitive effect. Where an economic analysis of antitrust law has non-economic impacts with ethical and moral issues, it calls for an alternative economic thought which also considers plural values of society. This also reflects a conflict arising out of lack of norms and respect for property rights. This paper attempts to analyze the cases and framework which is currently employed by the courts and the challenges it puts forth in creating a norm that is universal. The author by drawing on the principles of Gandhian economic thought and its essential features of trusteeship, non-possession and non-violence creates space for resolution of conflicts promoting ethical and moral considerations. Resolution of conflict through ethical and moral norms also assimilates the varied goals of antitrust regulation, including non-economic goals when the goals of antitrust require a broader consideration that accommodates the wider spectrum of market participants. (shrink)

Developing World Bioethics, Volume 22, Issue 2, Page 94-104, June 2022.

This article illustrates the less-acknowledged social construction of the concept of ‘incompetency’ and draws attention to the moral concerns it raises in health care encounters in the south Indian city of Chennai. Based on data drawn from qualitative research, this study suggests that surgeons subjectively construct the idea of incompetency through their understanding of the perceived circumstantial characteristics of the patients and family members they serve. The findings indicate that surgeons often underestimate patients and family members’ capacity based on constructed (...) assessments, which leads to paternalistic practice. In this article, I illustrate how these assessments influence the surgeons’ practices and provide the moral and practical justifications for their actions. The constructed knowledge becomes a source for drawing normative justification for surgeons’ actions and, in conjunction with socially enforced power relationships, results in patients and family members to be on the receiving end of disrespectful attitudes. Based on the data analysis and by drawing on philosophical analysis, I emphasize the need to focus on ‘respect for persons,’ to rethink the framework of ‘capacity,’ and to practice respect in hospital settings. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the rhetoric employed by court judgements, with a particular emphasis on the narrative construct of the ‘passive patient’. This construction advances and reinforces paternalistic values, which have scant regard for the patients’ preferences, values, or choices within the legal context. Further, I critique the rhetoric employed and argue that the use of this rhetoric is the basis for a precedent that limits the understanding and respect of patients. Through this paper, I present the contemporary use (...) of the ‘passive patient’ construct in the context of the Indian legal system and describe how such constructions have become a source of normative justification for legal reasoning that jeopardizes the patient’s agency. I argue for the primacy of ‘respect for persons’ within Indian law and the need to treat each patient as a person who has agency, preferences, and values during clinical interactions. I conclude by suggesting that laws that adopt narratives that acknowledging the significance of patient engagement and the relevance of effective communication during clinical encounters would help cultivate a culture of patient-centred care, by moving beyond the rhetoric of ‘passive patient’ and the ‘health/choice’ dichotomy. (shrink)

We investigated how motor agency in the voluntary control of body movement influences body awareness. In the Rubber Hand Illusion , synchronous tactile stimulation of a rubber hand and the participant’s hand leads to a feeling of the rubber hand being incorporated in the participant’s own body. One quantifiable behavioural correlate of the illusion is an induced shift in the perceived location of the participant’s hand towards the rubber hand. Previous studies showed that the induced changes in body awareness are (...) local and fragmented: the proprioceptive drift is largely restricted to the stimulated finger. In the present study, we investigated whether active and passive movements, rather than tactile stimulation, would lead to similarly fragmented body awareness. Participants watched a projected image of their hand under three conditions: active finger movement, passive finger movement, and tactile stimulation. Visual feedback was either synchronous or asynchronous with respect to stimulation of the hand. A significant overall RHI, defined as greater drifts following synchronous than asynchronous stimulation, was found in all cases. However, the distribution of the RHI across stimulated and non-stimulated fingers depended on the kind of stimulation. Localised proprioceptive drifts, specific to the stimulated finger, were found for tactile and passive stimulation. Conversely, during active movement of a single digit, the proprioceptive drifts were not localised to that digit, but were spread across the whole hand. Whereas a purely proprioceptive sense of body-ownership is local and fragmented, the motor sense of agency integrates distinct body-parts into a coherent, unified awareness of the body. (shrink)

Computer ethics, or more broadly, Information Technology (IT) ethics, is often concerned with issues about privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility and framing of policies and rules on the features. While ethical issues on these topics are important, issues about IT ethics apply more broadly. The purpose of ethics is not just to draft new policies or legal codes. Ethics also aims to probe and bring into limelight for ethical deliberations those issues, which have escaped policy formulations or human introspection. This (...) paper tries to address one such ethical issue. This paper concerns with email ethics and with one of the features of emailing - ‘forwarding’. As an applied ethics domain, I have tried to use some samples of forwarded mails. Through the analysis of the given sample mails, I claim that (1) this issue of ‘forwarding’ falls well outside the domain of framing ethical policies and (2) it is a matter of ethical concern. I have addressed this ethical concern by drawing a criterion to judge if one’s act of ‘forwarding’ a mail is ethical act or not. (shrink)

Peter Singer in his Practical Ethics and in other works as well gives importance to reason in making an ethical decision. Thinkers question Singer’s consistency and employment of reason in his ethical decisions. Jacqueline A Laing talks about Singer’s inconsistency in her article 'Inconsistency and Consequentialism'. With reference to animal rights and abortion, she claims that Singer uses different yardstick, thus Singer is inconsistent. She remarks that Singer uses the notion of ‘sentientism’ for the defense of animal rights, whereas he (...) comes up with ‘personism’ for human centered ethics. She claims that if Singer is consistent why can’t he use the same notion of ‘sentientism’ for animal rights as well as issues on humans like disabled human beings? According to her, this suggests there is an inconsistency in Singer’s work on ethical issues concerning animals and ethical issues concerning humans. As a corollary conclusion, she claims that Singer is biased towards animals. In this paper, the authors try to show that there is no such inconsistency. Contrary to her claims, the authors like to show that Singer uses personism in the discussions related to animals and similarly he uses sentientism in his discussion related to abortion and other human centered ethical issues. Therefore, Laing’s claims about Singer’s inconsistency and her following claim that Singer is biased towards animals need to be reconsidered. (shrink)

Em questões ambientais, a relação dos seres humanos com a natureza é vista como um problema ético importante. Isso gerou várias posições éticas como antropocentrismo, biocentrismo, ecocentrismo e similares. Sobre a relação do homem com o animal, B. G. Nortor menciona que animais em “contexto” devem ter prioridade em relação a animais em “conteúdo”. Norton nomeia animais domesticados e animais selvagens mantidos em cativeiros como animais em “contexto”. Ele sustenta que devemos cuidar dos animais domesticados na medida em que temos (...) um contrato hipotético com eles (Norton, 2003). Ao mesmo tempo em que concordamos com a posição de Norton de cuidar dos animais domesticados, defendemos que sua compreensão do contrato e sua subsequente compreensão de “cuidado” como derivando de um valor instrumental dos animais reflete sua posição de um antropocentrismo fraco. Neste artigo, defendemos que uma ética do “cuidado” é mais significativa quando emerge de uma perspectiva não-antropocêntrica que trate o outro como valioso intrinsecamente.: In environment related issues, the relationship of human beings to nature is seen as an important ethical issue. This issue has resulted in various ethical positions like anthropocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism and like. On man’s relationship with animal beings, Bryan G. Norton mentions that animals in ‘context’ should be given priority over animals in ‘content’. Norton brings the domesticated animals and captive bred wild animals under the ‘context’ animals. Norton maintains that we should take care of the domesticated animals as we have a hypothetical contract with them. (Norton, Searching for Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Philosophy of Conservation Biology, 2003) While we agree to Norton’s position of taking care of the domesticated animals, we maintain that his understanding of contract and his subsequent understanding of ‘care’ as stemming from an instrumental value of animals reflects his position of weak-anthropocentrism. In this paper, we claim that a ‘care’ based ethics is more meaningful when it emerges from a non-anthropocentric perspective that treat the other as intrinsically valued. Keywords : Content, Context, Intrinsic Value, Instrumental value, Pragmatism, Animal Care. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE In _The Reveries of a Solitary Walker_, Rousseau keeps a record of the thoughts, ideas, and reveries that freely run through his mind during his solitary walks. He finds that it is only when he is alone and not being disturbed that he is able to exist just for himself, and can “truly claim to be what nature willed”. Rousseau goes on these solitary walks in the countryside on the outskirts of Paris. (...) But if solitude is what he requires, why travel all the way to the countryside, which he says is very far from his residence in the middle of Paris? Put another way, why does he feel the need to be amidst nature in order to engage in these reveries? What do his reveries tell us about the role that nature has played in his life? This article will examine the role of nature in Rousseau’s solitary walks, as well as its presence in his life as revealed through his reveries. In particular, we will see that nature has played a central role in shaping Rousseau’s soul both during his adolescence and his adulthood. It is an essential ingredient to helping Rousseau realize his project of examining and ordering his soul, and in his attempt to understand what kind of man he is, given his deracination from mainstream society. Throughout his life nature has served as his mirror for self-examination; it acts as a trigger for various memories, it provides a harmonious setting for delving into the more painful of these memories, and allows him to extract insights that enable him to face his mortality. (shrink)

Nicholas Makins argues persuasively that medical decisions should be made with consideration for patients’ higher order risk attitudes.1 I will argue that an understanding of risk attitudes in medical decision-making is incomplete without critical engagement with emotions and affects (feelings associated with something good or bad). The primary aim of this commentary is to emphasise that clinical decisions are often emotionally charged, and it is crucial to engage closely with emotions and affects that shape these decisions, particularly when navigating complex (...) and uncertain situations. In the face of uncertainty, emotions such as fear, sadness or anxiety play a significant role in risk attitudes and medical decisions. I contend that recognising risk as a feeling is crucial to respecting patients’ values, preferences and decisions in light of the substantial body of research on risk perception and attitudes that suggests individuals make decisions based not only on what they think, but also on how they feel. In recent years, scholars have begun to acknowledge the value of emotions in understanding medical decisions and healthcare decision-making processes,2 especially under uncertainty. Furthermore, some philosophers and social scientists in field of risk research acknowledge emotions as both affective and cognitive in nature, and influence risk perceptions and attitudes.3 Risk …. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with techniques for identifying simple and quantified lattice points in 2SAT polytopes. 2SAT polytopes generalize the polyhedra corresponding to Boolean 2SAT formulas, Vertex-Packing and Network flow problems; they find wide application in the domains of Program verification and State-Space search . Our techniques are based on the symbolic elimination strategy called the Fourier-Motzkin elimination procedure and thus have the advantages of being extremely simple and incremental. We also provide a characterization of a 2SAT polytope in terms (...) of its extreme points and derive some interesting hardness results for associated optimization problems. Finally, we provide a brief discussion on the maximum size of a subdeterminant of the linear system representing a 2SAT polytope; this parameter plays a vital role in deriving analytical bounds on the size of the search space for checking whether the polyhedron includes a lattice point. (shrink)

Being Two Addresses Delivered In The University Of Toronto At The Philosophical Conference, 1922.

"De la dmocratie en Amrique" (published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840) is a classic French text by Alexis de Tocqueville on the ...

Fred Catherwood, The Creation of Wealth: Recovering a Christian Understanding of Money, Work, and Ethics. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2002. 208 pages, ISBN 1581343523, $14.99.

Fred Catherwood, The Creation of Wealth: Recovering a Christian Understanding of Money, Work, and Ethics. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2002. 208 pages, ISBN 1581343523, $14.99.

Indian ethics is one of the great traditions of moral thought in world philosophy whose insights have influenced thinkers in early Greece, Europe, Asia, and the New World. This is the first systematic study of the spectrum of moral reflections from India.

Rorty has been criticized for his pragmatic rationality by different thinkers like Stout, Steven carter. Here in this article our main focus is Novoa's criticism of Rorty's solution to the challenges of evidentialism (Novoa in Rorty’s Demands on Religious Belief: Looking for a Pragmatic Rationality. Retrieved October 20, 2019, from Researchgate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321729830_rorty's_demands_on_religious_belief_looking_for_a _pragmatic_rationality, 2017). Novoa feels that religion needs not be conversation stopper as long as it does not compromise on capabilities (Novoa, 2017). This is what he calls pragmatic rationality. He (...) takes pragmatic rationality based on capabilities. So in this article we argue against Novoa saying that capabilities are not clearly defined and hence the criteria set forth by Novoa have to be revised. The criteria set forth by him are too general, for instance world relationships, etc. The reasons for revising the criteria are too general, no unanimity in what are capabilities and even the specified capabilities are not precise. (shrink)

The community of scholars in Asian and Comparative Philosophy recently lost one of its leading lights. Gerald James Larson, known more widely as Gerry Larson, passed away suddenly on April 27, 2019 at the age of 81. His death was unexpected because he was just getting ready to leave for India in connection with a meeting centered on his recently published magnum opus Classical Yoga Philosophy and the Legacy of Sāṁkhya. Sadly, he experienced some sharp abdominal pain and passed away (...) two weeks later.Larson's academic, institutional, and organizational contributions were many. While mentioning some of them, I will, in the context of this journal, focus more on his contributions to his field of academic specialization... (shrink)

This essay attempts to present Hegel as a secular theologian and to argue that the theological dimension of Hegel’s thought is central to his entire philosophy and is, in fact, the leitmotif that draws together all of his work. The task of overcoming the dualism between the sacred and the secular provides the driving spirit of all Hegel’s endeavors, from his juvenilia to the mature thought of his Heidelberg and Berlin periods. A secular theology demonstrates its commitment to secularity through (...) three main affirmations: (1) the full reality and significance of this world, (2) the autonomy of the different fields of culture and knowledge besides that of religion, and (3) the epistemological authority of reason and shared experience in determining the real and the true. Hegel’s secular theology, however, has an ambiguous relationship with most forms of theism, including panentheism. (shrink)

In this essay, the author presents the Martinican intellectual Edouard Glissant's Poétique de la Relation in a new frame by reading his text as it accomplishes a type of grand-scale theorizing. The notion of Relation in Glissant is followed in its various connections to a Marxian notion of dynamic totality. The Marxian/Hegelian subtext of Poétique is seen as productively revealing for reading Glissant both historically and theoretically. Glissant's theorizing of difference is shown to be an important contribution to contemporary revisions (...) of Marxian-informed thought. (shrink)

Cross-fertilizing roots and routes calls for new practices of seeking, being, and Self-realization. Raimon Panikkar embodied such a vocation and praxis of being and becoming. Panikkar taught and lived in the United States from 1966–1987 and was known to generations of students here and around the world through both his lectures and his many books. What they heard and read were the arresting reflections of a multi-dimensional person, who was simultaneously a philosopher, theologian, mystic, priest, and poet. It was also (...) that combination of personae that made him at times difficult to understand. He was a formidable scholar with doctorates in philosophy, theology, and chemistry and an acquaintance with the worlds of learning and religious reflection in more than a dozen languages. This stupendous productivity, sustained over some sixty-five years, was made possible by great discipline, dedication, and focus. He was a classic Jnana Yogi. (shrink)

The half-century, which is the time that has elapsed since the publication of Wretched of the Earth , seems such a short period when one imagines its author in all his intellectual magnificence, his anguish, and the many details we all know of his short-lived reality. Dare one say, after the concept has long been declared “dead” that we imagine him as having been a live “author”? As I write this, the idea of various notable intellectuals and revolutionary movements could (...) come to mind in order for them to serve as interesting comparisons as we discuss and remember Fanon, his analyses of the colonial aftermath, and his many predictions, both explicit and implicit. However, the “death” of the author is, in fact, as Barthes’ polemical essay showed, a premise that empowers the text in its full potentiality well beyond the deism by which the identity of the author becomes the authority. Here, the liberation of the text joins up the enunciation with its “content” so to speak, or in Barthes’ words, reveals how Fanon “made of his very life a work for which his book was a model.” It is from this idea that I wish to see Fanon as incomparable. The reason to do so does not stem from some esoteric form of admiration, but rather a conviction that Fanon’s narration itself is both indicative and exemplary of a process of thinking that, for me, remains unparalleled in theorizing the role of the intellectual. Such a conviction requires us to read beyond the content of Wretched and be “reborn” in the Barthesian sense as readers. In essence, it is to simply follow the way Fanon himself allows us to actually trace how he dreams of “the native” or “the people” and thus accomplishes an affective leap, arguably, more completely than any other intellectual. This reading is, thus, an invitation to dream – even momentarily – of Fanon. (shrink)