Background: Recently, a singular survey titled “Measure of Moral Distress—Healthcare Professionals,” which addresses shortcomings of previous instruments, has been validated. Aim: To determine how moral distress affects nurses and physicians differently across the various wards of a community hospital. Participant and research context: We distributed a self-administered, validated survey titled “Measure of Moral Distress—Healthcare Professionals” to all nurses and physicians in the medical/surgical ward, telemetry ward, intensive care units, and emergency rooms of a community hospital. Findings: A total of 101 (...) surveys were included in the study. The mean Measure of Moral Distress—Healthcare Professionals score for all respondents was 143.0. The mean Measure of Moral Distress—Healthcare Professionals score was 1.75 greater for nurses than for physicians, and nurses were 2.52 times more likely to consider leaving their position due to moral distress. The mean Measure of Moral Distress—Healthcare Professionals score for moral distress was least prevalent in the medical/surgical ward and highest in the telemetry ward. The intensive care unit ward had a mean Measure of Moral Distress—Healthcare Professionals score mildly greater than the emergency room. Ethical considerations: No participant identifying information or information connecting a survey response to an individual was collected. This study was approved by the Raritan Bay Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board. Discussion: This study provides insight into the level of moral distress in the community hospital setting. Telemetry nurses experience significantly more than nurses in other wards. Telemetry nurses typically manage patients sicker than medical/surgical wards, however do not have the resources of the critical care units. This scenario presents challenges for telemetry nurses and may explain their elevated moral distress. Conclusion: In community hospitals, telemetry nurses experience a considerably greater amount of moral distress compared to their colleagues in other wards. As measured by the Measure of Moral Distress—Healthcare Professionals questionnaire, moral distress continues to be higher among nurses compared to physicians. (shrink)

I am most grateful to Elizabeth Anderson (2000), Philip Pettit (2000) and Thomas Scanlon (2000) for making such insightful and penetrating comments on my work and the related literature. I have reason enough to be happy, having been powerfully defended in some respects and engagingly challenged in others. I must also take this opportunity of thanking Martha Nussbaum, for not only chairing the session in which these papers were presented followed by a splendid discussion (which she led), but also for (...) taking the initiative, in the first place, to arrange the session. (shrink)

And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political ...

Illustrations: 1 B/w Illustration Description: Pranab Kumar Sen, Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University in whose honour this volume has been prepared was one of the leading philosophers of our country and a highly respected teacher. It carries thirty-five articles which deal with different branches of philosophy,viz., philosophical logic, philosophy of language, ontology, theory of knowledge, Kant exegesis, moral philosophy, social philosophy, philosophy of art. As Sen's philosophical interests and expertise were wide the authors had ample freedom in their choice of topics. (...) This volume will be of interest to those who are acquainted with sophisticated literature in analytic philosophy, scholars working in different branches of philosophy and also general readers of modern philosophy. (shrink)

This book develops some of the most important themes of Sen's works over the last decade. He argues in a rich and subtle approach that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than their resources or welfare.

This paper is about three distinct but interrelated problems: (1) the role 0f rights in moral theory, (2) thc characterization 0f agent relative values and their admissibility in consequ<—:ncc—bascd evaluation, and ( 3) the nature 0f moral evaluation 0f states 0f aihirs.

Commodities and Capabilities presents a set of inter-related theses concerning the foundations of welfare economics, and in particular about the assessment of personal well-being and advantage. The argument presented focuses on the capability to function, i.e. what a person can do or can be, questioning in the process the more standard emphasis on opulence or on utility. In fact, a person's motivation behind choice is treated here as a parametric variable which may or may not coincide with the pursuit of (...) self-interest. Given the large number of practical problems arising from the roles and limitations of different concepts of interest and the judgement of advantage and well-being, this scholarly investigation is both of theoretical interest and practical import. (shrink)

Suitable for students and scholars, this title challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.

Amartya Sen; XII*—Plural Utility, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 81, Issue 1, 1 June 1981, Pages 193–216, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/.

Drawing on cognitive moral development and moral identity theories, this study empirically examines the moral antecedents and consequences of authentic leadership. Machiavellianism, an individual difference variable relating to the use of the ‘end justifies the means’ principle, is predicted to affect the link between morality and leadership. Analyses of multi-source, multi-method data comprised case studies, simulations, role-playing exercises, and survey questionnaires were completed by 70 managers in a large public agency, and provide support for our hypotheses. Our findings reveal that (...) Machiavellianism offsets the positive relationship between moral reasoning and authentic leadership. Specifically, we show that when Machiavellianism is high, both the positive relationship between moral reasoning and authentic leadership, and the positive relationship between authentic leadership and moral actions, are reversed. This study offers new insights on the underlying processes contributing to the emergence of leaders’ authentic behavior and moral action. Implications for the moral development of leaders, and directions for improved leadership training are provided. (shrink)

Based on the 1972 Radcliffe Lectures, this book presents a systematic treatment of the conceptual framework as well as the practical problems of measurement of inequality.

Amartya Sen; XII*—Plural Utility, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 81, Issue 1, 1 June 1981, Pages 193–216, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/.

Sen’s essay concerns the existence of extensive hunger amidst unprecedented global prosperity in the contemporary world, but he argues that the problem would be decisively solvable if our response were no longer shaped by Malthusian pessimism. Effective famine prevention does not turn on food supply per head and the automatic mechanism of the market: there can be plenty of food while large sections of the population lack the means to obtain it. Effective famine prevention thus requires “entitlements.” Economically, governments can (...) and should provide public employment programs so that those threatened by famine can be empowered to command food. Politically, democratic participation and a free press can work to ensure government accountability for famine prevention. The choice that Sen urges, however, is not for the state over the market—the experience of the Indian state of Kerala demonstrates that a voluntaristic approach can work as well or better than China’s compulsory “one child policy” in limiting the rapid population growth that contributes to world hunger. Rather, a reasoned solution to the problem of hunger must acknowledge the complementary importance of both well-functioning markets and open and democratic public action. (shrink)

In the summer of 1997, I was asked by a leading Japanese newspaper what I thought was the most important thing that had happened in the twentieth century. I found this to be an unusually thought-provoking question, since so many things of gravity have happened over the last hundred years. The European empires, especially the British and French ones that had so dominated the nineteenth century, came to an end. We witnessed two world wars. We saw the rise and fall (...) of fascism and Nazism. The century witnessed the rise of communism, and its fall (as in the former Soviet bloc) or radical transformation (as in China). We also saw a shift from the economic dominance of the West to a new economic balance much more dominated by Japan and East and Southeast Asia. Even though that region is going through some financial and economic problems right now, this is not going to nullify the shift in the balance of the world economy that has occurred over many decades (in the case of Japan, through nearly the entire century). The past hundred years are not lacking in important events. (shrink)

I am embarrassed at being placed in the dizzying company of one of the truly great thinkers in the world. The similarities between Mill's ideas and mine partly reflect, of course, his influence on my thinking. But I also discuss some difficulties in taking Mill's whole theory without modification, since there are internal tensions within it. In a paper I published in 1967, I tried to discuss how Mill's willingness to hold on to some contrary positions depended on the nature (...) of his empirical reading of the world. I draw on that diagnosis in commenting on some of the articles here. There are some serious issues of misinterpretation in one of the articles, which I try to clarify. I also comment on Arrow's interpretation of what is involved in the idea of autonomy and on his own way of assessing freedom, and acknowledge the seriousness of the questions he raises about the value of freedom in normative political philosophy. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1992, given by Amartya Sen, an Indian philosopher.

How valuable is the market mechanism for practical morality? What is its moral standing? We can scarcely doubt that as individuals we do value tremendously the opportunity of using markets. Indeed, without access to markets most of us would perish, since we don't typically produce the things that we need to survive. If we could somehow survive without using markets at all, our quality of life would be rather abysmal. It is natural to feel that an institution that is so (...) crucial to our well-being must be valuable. And since moral evaluation can hardly be indifferent to our interests and their fulfillment, it might appear that there is nothing much to discuss here. The market's moral standing “has to be” high. (shrink)

Gary Becker and others have done important work to broaden the content of self interest, but have not departed from seeing rationality in terms of the exclusive pursuit of self-interest. One reason why committed behavior is important is that a person can have good reason to pursue objectives other than self interest maximization (no matter how broadly it is construed). Indeed, one can also follow rules of behavior that go beyond the pursuit of one's own goals, even if the goals (...) include non-self-interested concerns. By living in a society, one develops possible reasons for considering other people's goals as well, which takes one beyond an exclusive concentration on one's own goals, not to mention the single-minded pursuit of one's own self interest. The recognition of other people's goals may be a part of rational thought. If rational behavior may depart from the relentless pursuit of one's own goals, commitment has to be important in a theory of rationality. Furthermore, seeing the role of commitment in human behavior can have explanatory importance in allowing us to understand behavior patterns that are hard to fit into the narrow format of contemporary rational choice theory. Commitment is, thus, important both for practical reason and for causal explanation. (shrink)

The importance of business ethics is not contrdicted in any way by Adam Smith’s pointer to the fact that our “regards to our own interests” provide adequate motivation tor exchange. There are many important economic relationships other than exchange, such as the institution of production and arrangements of distribution. Here business ethics can playa major part. Even as far as exchange is concerned, business ethics can be crucially important in terms of organization and behavior, going weil beyond basic motivation.

Colloquially, episodic memory is described as “the memory of personally experienced events”. Even though episodic memory has been studied in psychology and neuroscience for about six decades, there is still great uncertainty as to what episodic memory is. Here we ask how episodic memory should be characterized in order to be validated as a natural kind. We propose to conceive of episodic memory as a knowledge-like state that is identified with an experientially based mnemonic representation of an episode that allows (...) for a mnemonic simulation thereof. We call our analysis the Sequence Analysis of Episodic Memory since episodes will be analyzed in terms of sequences of events. Our philosophical analysis of episodic memory is driven and supported by experimental results from psychology and neuroscience. We discuss selected experimental results that provide exemplary evidence for uniform causal mechanisms underlying the properties of episodic memory and argue that episodic memory is a natural kind. The argumentation proceeds along three cornerstones: First, psychological evidence suggests that a violation of any of the proposed conditions for episodic memory amounts to a deficiency of episodic memory and no form of memory or cognitive process but episodic memory fulfills them. Second, empirical results support a claim that the principal anatomical substrate of episodic memory is the hippocampus. Finally, we can pin down causal mechanisms onto neural activities in the hippocampus to explain the psychological states and processes constituting episodic memory. (shrink)

Without denying the importance of the postmodernist approach to the narrative form and rhetorical strategies of historiography, the author, one of Germany's ...