Clinical and Care Bioethics Committees at Public and Private Healthcare Institutions of Medium and High Complexity Levels in Cities of the Atlantic Coast of Colombia Comitês de Bioética clínico-assistencial nas instituições de saúde públicas e privadas dos níveis de média e alta complexidade das cidades da Costa Atlântica da Colômbia Care bioethics committees are interdisciplinary groups engaged in providing education to members of said committees, all the staff in the hospital —including professors and students in their internship—, and members of (...) the community. The objective of this study is to determine the situation of clinical and care bioethics committees at healthcare institutions in the Atlantic Coast of Colombia between 2010-2016. The study is cross-sectional, descriptive, and retro-prospective. Twenty-six health institutions that met the inclusion criteria were selected and administered a semi-structured survey. The statistical software SPSS version 22 was used to analyze the information. This study adhered to ethical research guidelines. The name most commonly given to committees is Hospital Ethics Committee. Only half have staff trained in ethics or bioethics and the most outstanding function is education in ethics; however, in the same percentage there are committees whose opinion is divided as their operation is unclear. Committees should follow existing ethical and bioethical models, and bills should be brought forward to help committees at healthcare institutions become more effective as regards their structure and operation. Para citar este artículo / To reference this article / Para citar este artigo Carrillo González S, Lorduy-Gómez J, Muñoz-Baldiris R. Comités de Bioética Clínico-Asistencial en las instituciones de salud públicas y privadas de los niveles de mediana y alta complejidad de las ciudades de la Costa Atlántica de Colombia. Pers Bioet. 2019; 23: 122-136. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5294/pebi.2019.23.1.8 Recibido: 23/08/2018 Aceptado: 25/02/2019. (shrink)

A surgical instrumentation professional is an active member of the surgical team whose essence and formal objective is to maintain life with all the respect and dignity inherent in the human being. The actions of these professionals must be accompanied in a consistent way, so as to protect and preserve life, and thus give meaning to illness, suffering and pain. The objective of this descriptive and cross-sectional study of a prospective nature is to determine what the surgical instrumentation professional knows (...) about bioethical principles and values in light of Colombian Law 1164/ 2007. The target population included surgical instrumentation professionals in the city of Cartagena, specifically, from three health institutions. It was found that veracity, equality and beneficence are the ethical and bioethical principles these professionals know and apply. Those known the least are lesser evil, doing no harm, totality and the principle of the cause of double effect. The values applied the most are: humanity, dignity, responsibility, prudence and confidentiality. It was concluded that the vast majority of surgical instrumentation professionals who were surveyed apply ethical principles and values in their professional practice, but they are unable to name them or to define what they mean. It is suggested the academic community do more to delve into these issues in order to strengthen them for the sake of achieving a comprehensive level of care. (shrink)

Es escasa la investigación sobre las competencias necesarias para educar eficazmente en los primeros años de vida, y sobre los factores que influyen en la adquisición de una identidad docente de calidad para trabajar en Educación Infantil (EI). Los resultados de la presente revisión integradora apuntan que (1) el profesorado excelente de EI atiende a la diversidad de su alumnado, (2) las comunidades de práctica contribuyen a la adquisición de una identidad docente excelente, y (3) ciertas deficiencias en los programas (...) de formación docente y determinados factores contextuales obstaculizan un desempeño docente excelente. (shrink)

Westworld tells the story of a technologically advanced theme park populated by robots referred to as hosts, who follow a script and rules that the park's operators set up for them. Alan Turing argued that machines think not because they have special powers or because they are like us. Turing's perspective is illustrated perfectly in the show's focus on the hosts. Objecting to Turing's theory, John Searle proposes a situation called the “Chinese room argument”, concluding that the man in the (...) room does not understand Chinese even though he can correctly manipulate the symbols and give output that might lead an observer to believe that the man does understand Chinese. The Maze represents consciousness, a privileged knowledge of our own thoughts, it also represents the inward journey for the hosts to reach consciousness. Once hosts are able to solve the Maze, they become truly conscious and develop their own voice. (shrink)

En este texto discutiremos la tensión entre los nuevos medios y la narratología ocupándonos especialmente del caso del cine. Nuestra tesis será que los nuevos medios tienen que ver básicamente con la ilusión y solo derivadamente con la imaginación; por el contrario, el campo de la literatura tiene que ver solo con la imaginación y no con la ilusión. Si esto es así, algo debe estar mal con la pretensión de la narratología de ser el esquema teórico adecuado para entender (...) cualquier fenómeno cultural, especialmente el de losnuevos medios. Insistiremos, por ello, en la distinción entre ilusión e imaginación. De hecho, los teóricos literarios no lo consideran. Se suele decir que el cine es ficción, y de hecho la literatura es ficción, pero el cine es mucho más que la ficción, es una ilusión.Here we will discuss the tension between the new mass media and narratology and the case in study will be cinema. Our thesis would be that new mass media have to do basically with illusion and only derivatively with imagination; on the contrary, the field of literature has to do only with imagination, not with illusion at all. If it is so, something must be wrong with the pretence of narratology to be the adequate theoretical schema in order to understand every cultural phenomenon, especially in the case of new mass media. We have to insist on the distinction between illusion and imagination. In fact, literary theoreticians do mostly not consider it. It is usually said of cinema that it is fiction, and indeed literature is fiction, but cinema is much more than fiction, it is illusion. (shrink)

There are two traditions of thinking about idealization offering almost opposite views on their functioning and epistemic status. While one tradition views idealizations as epistemic deficiencies, the other one highlights the epistemic benefits of idealization. Both of these, however, identify idealization with misrepresentation. In this article, we instead approach idealization from the artifactual perspective, comparing it to the distortion-to-reality accounts of idealization, and exemplifying it through the case of the Hodgkin and Huxley model of nerve impulse. From the artifactual perspective, (...) the epistemic benefits and deficiencies introduced by idealization frequently come in a package due to the way idealization draws together different resources in model construction. Accordingly, idealization tends to be holistic in that it is not often easily attributable to just some specific parts of the model. Instead, the idealizing process tightly embeds theoretical concepts and formal tools into the construction of a model. (shrink)

El autor pretende desentrañar a través de la interpretación jurídica el o los sistemas jurídico penal que los legisladores tomaron en consideración para crear y dar vigencia a los Códigos Penal y de Procedimientos penales vigentes en el Estado Libre y Soberano de México, que fueron tomado como ejemplo, para demostrar que la ley no solo se crea de aspectos abstractos sino también de los criterios que han emitido los juristas en su trabajo.

From a perspective focused on Law, but open to other fields, an evaluation of the influence of Cicero’s thought the analysis of his main works is attempted. No doubt, Cicero’s ideas have been crucial in the development of Western Culture, and two thousand years later his theories still remain alive.

The search for mechanisms has been a common practice in scientific research. However, since the empiricist critique of causality, and especially during the second third of the twentieth century, other non-mechanistic perspectives—especially deductivism—gained predominance. But the sustained effort of authors such as Michael Scriven, Mario Bunge and especially Wesley Salmon contributed to restoring the respectability of causality and mechanisms in philosophy of science. Some members of the causal family, usually lumped under the name of “new mechanistic philosophy”, emphasize the description (...) of mechanisms, especially causal ones, as a central aspect of explanation and other research practices in several areas of science. This approach offers viable solutions to the various ontological and methodological objections that are opposed to the two traditional approaches. In this work the basic characteristics of three philosophies that highlight the description of mechanisms as a central element to explanation and their suitability for the science of ecology are discussed. (shrink)

Critical studies in higher education often embrace the ideas of the slowness movement to address time pressure. However, this desirable horizon presents some limitations. On the one hand, by emphasizing solutions at the individual level, boosting slowness may promote tactics incapable of producing changes to the underlying structural dynamics of time pressure. On the other hand, approaches based on slowness may also inadvertently foster a form of ethical paternalism within the context of ethical pluralism by prescribing substantive models of practice (...) ultimately based on ‘do this quickly or do it slowly.’ This theoretical research moves away from the temporal paradigm to that of the way of relating. Building upon the ethical concept of resonance, the approach focuses on a formal critique of the current socioeconomic and ethical dynamics of social acceleration, growth, and innovation that can contribute to projecting non-alienated relationships in higher education. (shrink)

Al intentar clarificar lo que Spinoza, Schopenhauer y Nietzsche entienden por deseo encontramos que este concepto está asociado en ellos a una particular acepción de la idea de voluntad. En Spinoza y en Schopenhauer se encuentra presente esta identificación. En Nietzsche el deseo se encuentra oculto, disimulado y encerrado en las figuras metafóricas de lo dionisíaco y lo melódico. Desire, Will and Pain in Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche In attempting to clarify what Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche understand by desire, we (...) find this concept to be associated, for them, to a particular meaning of the idea of will. This identification is present both, in Spinoza and Schopenhauer. In Nietzsche, desire is hidden, disguised and locked up in the metaphorical figures of the Dionysian and the melodic. (shrink)

After the global economic collapse triggered by the Great Recession, there has been an increased interest in the potential psychological implications of periods of economic decline. Recent evidence suggests that negative personal experiences linked to the economic crisis may lead to diminished generalized trust (i.e., the belief that most of the people of the society are honest and can be trusted). Adding to the growing literature on the psychological consequences of the economic crisis, we propose that the perceived personal impact (...) of the economic crisis not only would undermine generalized trust but also may lead to increased interpersonal trust (i.e., directed to specific and close people) and depersonalized in-group trust (i.e., directed to individuals who, while strangers, belong to the same group [e.g., social class]). Across three studies (N = 1379), we tested these central hypotheses and ascertained whether the perceived personal impact of the crisis would predict these types of trust (assessed using questionnaire and behavioral measures) independent of individuals’ socioeconomic status. Non-experimental data from Study 1 revealed that a higher perceived personal impact of the crisis is related to lower levels of generalized trust and higher levels of interpersonal trust. These effects were independent of participants’ socioeconomic status. Non-experimental data from Study 2 replicated the findings obtained in Study 1 and also showed a positive association between the perceived personal impact of the crisis and depersonalized in-group trust. This pattern of results emerged even after controlling for socioeconomic status, gender, age, political orientation, religiosity, and unemployment status. In Study 3, using an experimental design, we found that the salience of a possible economic downturn led to decreased generalized trust and increased interpersonal and depersonalized in-group trust—independently of socioeconomic status—compared with the control condition. These results challenge the conventional wisdom that economic crises invariably undermine trust in others. The implications of the present research as well as future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

Este artículo presenta inicialmente algunas referencias en torno a la noción de progreso moral, las cuales habitualmente apuntan a la idea según la cual este, en efecto, se da gracias a un mejoramiento paulatino en la humanidad. Si bien tal afirmación engloba una generalidad, el problema puede permitirse un espacio de discusión más sólido, reconociendo que el progreso es, además, reflexión desde el punto de vista kantiano y deducción de la historia por parte de Fichte. Con todo ello, se busca (...) aportar contenido al afirmar que, si bien estos autores apelan a escenarios morales y teológicos para evaluar el futuro, en rigor sus intereses son los fortalecimientos del Estado de derecho para el caso fichteano y de las instituciones para Kant, lo cual resulta en una suerte de perfectibilidad humana. (shrink)

The research focuses on the study of public housing built in response to the urgent housing needs in Europe throughout the 20th century. These developments share many of the characteristics of their European counterparts. The Spanish case presents certain peculiarities in its development. The research aims to analyse the context -social, economic and political- that conditioned the massive construction of housing in Spain between 1939 and 1976. An analysis is made of the approved urban planning legislation, housing regulation and the (...) identification of the responsible bodies. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that some human reproductive genome editing interventions can be therapeutic in nature, and thus that it is false that all such interventions just create healthy individuals. I do this by showing that the conditions established by a therapy definition are met by certain reproductive genome editing interventions. I then defend this position against two objections: (a) reproductive genome editing interventions do not attain one of the two conditions for something to be a therapy, and (b) (...) some reproductive genome editing interventions are therapeutic but in a nonstandard way. In the Conclusion I call for a more nuanced discussion of the nature of reproductive genome editing interventions. (shrink)

In times of climate change and public debt, a concern for intergenerational justice should lead us to have a closer look at theories of intergenerational justice. It should also press us to provide institutional design proposals to change the decision-making world that surrounds us. This book provides an exhaustive overview of the most important institutional proposals as well as a systematic and theoretical discussion of their respective features and advantages. It focuses on institutional proposals aimed at taking the interests of (...) future generations more seriously, and does so from the perspective of applied political philosophy, being explicit about the underlying normative choices and the latest developments in the social sciences. It provides citizens, activists, firms, charities, public authorities, policy-analysts, students, and academics with the body of knowledge necessary to understand what our institutional options are and what they entail if we are concerned about today's excessive short-termism. (shrink)

El presente artículo estudia las representaciones de mujeres con VIH/sida, en el libro Tiempos del SIDA. Relatos de la vida real, de Myriam Francis. El trabajo inicia con un análisis sobre la exclusión de los sujetos femeninos de la literatura “seropositiva” latinoamericana. Se plantea que las pocas representaciones que existen se enfocan en “mujeres sospechosas”, lo cual se repite, hasta cierto punto, en los textos de Francis seleccionados: “La última puerta”, “La viuda alegre” y “La chica alegre”. Luego, se ofrece (...) una explicación sobre el contexto en el que surgen las historias, un “pabellón-moridero” que se describe más bien como un espacio ameno, el cual, sin embargo, enfatiza la tragicidad que rodea a cada “caso”. Después, se estudian los tres relatos mencionados, en los que se mueven los símbolos primarios del mal (la mancilla, el pecado y la culpabilidad), de manera que una mujer es representada como una “víctima inocente” y otras, como “víctimas culpables” (fundamentalmente por sus “estilos de vida nocivos”). Finalmente, el trabajo concluye que la narrativa de Francis moviliza algunos principios de la “teoría de la degeneración”, para explicar las situaciones experimentadas por los personajes femeninos y ofrecer un mensaje didáctico-moralizante. (shrink)

It is widely held that there is a distinctive norm of assertion. A plausible idea is that there is an analogous, perhaps weaker, norm for indirect communication via implicatures. I argue against this type of proposal. My claim is that the norm of assertion is a social norm governing public updates to the conversational record. Off the record implicatures are not subject to social norms of this type. I grant that, as happens in general with intentional actions, off the record (...) communicative acts may be subject to normative assessments on different levels (for instance, regarding their moral or prudential appropriateness). However, such assessments do not generate distinctive norms that apply to all cases of implicature. (shrink)

Natalia Carrillo and Tarja Knuuttila claim that there are two traditions of thinking about idealization offering almost opposite views on their functioning and epistemic status. While one tradition views idealizations as epistemic deficiencies, the other one highlights the epistemic benefits of idealization. Both of them treat idealizations as deliberate misrepresentations, however. They then argue for an artifactual account of idealization, comparing it to the traditional accounts of idealization, and exemplifying it through the Hodgkin and Huxley model of the nerve (...) impulse. From the artifactual perspective, the epistemic benefits and deficiencies introduced by idealization frequently come in a package due to the way idealization draws together different resources in model construction. Accordingly, idealization tends to be holistic in that it is not often easily attributable to some specific parts of the model. They conclude that the artifactual approach offers a unifying view into idealization in that it is able to recover several basic philosophical insights motivating both the deficiency and epistemic benefit accounts, while being simultaneously detached from the idea of distortion by misrepresentation. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in workplace democracy, the question whether nonworker stakeholders, like suppliers and local communities, warrant inclusion in the governance of democratic companies, as workers do, has been largely neglected. We inspect this question by leaning on the boundary problem in democratic theory. We first argue that the question of who warrants inclusion in democratic workplaces is best addressed by examining why workplace democracy is warranted in the first place, and offer a twofold normative benchmark—addressing objectionable corporate power and (...) upholding efficiency—to assess the principles of democratic inclusion on offer. Against this benchmark, we next argue that the All-Affected Principle is unfit due to its over- and underinclusive extensional results, and that the All-Subjected Principle, whose variants we examine alongside their extensional results, holds more promise when coupled with independent considerations of justice or a constrained variant of the All-Affected Principle. These combinations need not entirely preclude, but speak against, nonworker stakeholder inclusion. (shrink)

La mentoría como programa de formación en el inicio de la vida profesional del docente principiante se presenta como una oportunidad para la mejora de la calidad de las instituciones educativas y de sus agentes. Al mismo tiempo, revierte sobre la comunidad y el territorio donde se ubica. En contextos reconocidos como vulnerables se necesitan agentes educativos vocacionales y con un alto nivel de resiliencia, y con una meta clara: formar a personas plenas que contribuyan con su sentir, ser y (...) hacer al desarrollo de la comunidad en la que habitan. (shrink)

Se describe, desde una perspectiva histórica, el proceso institucional y legal de los estudios generales en Perú en el último siglo, tomado en cuenta sus contextos políticos e intelectuales. También se reflexiona sobre la dimensión humanista de los estudios generales y la razón de ser de la educación universitaria.

All around the world, but especially in the Third World, we are confronted by beggars who appeal to our sympathy. Most of us have no principled way to deal with the situation. Should we give to them? How much? To what purpose? We are inclined to let our momentary feelings dictate our response. Although applied ethicists have been tackling the general question of poverty in the world and what we ought to do, if anything, to alleviate it, nobody seems to (...) have taken an interest in the specific part of the general question which involves mendicity. This paper argues, firstly, that the question of our duties, if any, towards beggars demands a reasoned answer, and secondly, that careful reasoning indicates that we should channel the resources we are ready to give to beggars not tothem directly but rather to charities, for they have more and better information on who can and should be helped. (shrink)

In philosophy of science, abstraction tends to be subsumed under representation, often being described as the omission of a target’s features when it is represented. This approach to abstraction sidesteps cognitive aspects of abstraction processes. However, cognitive aspects of abstraction are important in understanding the role of historically grounded epistemic criteria supporting modeling in science. Drawing on recent work on the relation between metaphor and abstraction, we introduce the concept of paths of abstraction, and use historical and contemporary examples to (...) point to their role in guiding the development of relevance criteria which support modeling strategies in science. (shrink)

Ethical dilemmas affect several essential elements of humanitarian aid, such as the adequate selection of crises to which to provide aid and a selection of beneficiaries based on needs and not political or geostrategic criteria. Other challenges encompass maintaining neutrality against aggressors, deciding whether to collaborate with governments that violate human rights, and managing the allocation and prioritization of limited resources. Additionally, issues arise concerning the safety and protection of aid recipients, the need for cultural and political sensitivity, and recognition (...) of the importance of local knowledge, skills, and capacity. The appropriateness, sustainability, and long-term impact of actions; security risks for aid personnel; and the need for transparency and accountability are also crucial. Furthermore, humanitarian workers face the duty to report and engage in civil activism in response to human rights violations and the erosion of respect for international humanitarian law. Lastly, the rights of affected groups and local communities in the decision-making and implementation of humanitarian aid are vital. The traditional foundations and approaches of humanitarian aid appear insufficient in today’s landscape of disasters and crises, which are increasingly complex and divergent, marked by a diminished capacity and shifting roles of various actors in alleviating suffering. This article reviews the historical evolution of the conceptualization of humanitarian aid and addresses some of its ethical challenges and dilemmas. (shrink)

El presente artículo pretende analizar los efectos transformadores que la pandemia por Covid-19 ha obrado en nuestras existencias individuales y en nuestra convivencia social cotidiana desde la propuesta analítica del filósofo surcoreano Byung Chul-Han. Dicha transformación es de tal profundidad que, para nuestro autor, viene a exacerbar los males de la sociedad contemporánea, como el agotamiento y el cansancio por autoexplotación y permanente optimización de sí mismo propiciados por el neoliberalismo globalizado y omnipresente en Occidente. Desde esta constatación analizaremos en (...) particular cómo la prevalencia de la comunicación digital obligada por la emergencia viral trae consecuencias antropológicas que amenazan con eliminar lo esencial de la vida humana: la construcción de rituales, la estructura temporal cotidiana, el contacto corporal con los demás, la pertenencia a una comunidad y la apreciación de lo real en su genuina dimensión ontológica. Finalmente, exploraremos una posible salida a la alienación virtual en que forzadamente se encuentra la sociedad contemporánea. (shrink)

Idealization is commonly understood as distortion: representing things differently than how they actually are. In this paper, we outline an alternative artifactual approach that does not make misrepresentation central for the analysis of idealization. We examine the contrast between the Hodgkin-Huxley (1952a, b, c) and the Heimburg-Jackson (2005, 2006) models of the nerve impulse from the artifactual perspective, and argue that, since the two models draw upon different epistemic resources and research programs, it is often difficult to tell which features (...) of a system the central assumptions involved are supposed to distort. Many idealizations are holistic in nature. They cannot be locally undone without dismantling the model, as they occupy a central position in the entire research program. Nor is their holistic character mainly related to the use of mathematical and statistical modeling techniques as portrayed by Rice (2018, 2019). We suggest that holistic idealizations are implicit theoretical and representational assumptions that can only be understood in relation to the conceptual and representational tools exploited in modeling and experimental practices. Such holistic idealizations play a pivotal role not just in individual models, but also in defining research programs. -/- . (shrink)

Del sentimiento trágico (de sinsabor) de la vida - ¡El triunfo del sinsabor! - Nietzshe ha muerto - Sigue. Los personajes que importan - Dimensiones del sinsabor - El mundo de la sensación - La sensación de sinsabor - Los sonidos de la oficina. Los sonidos que trascienden la oficina. La posible solución no es posible. Un placer estético en una oficina. Experiencias místicas en una oficina. Comienzo del relato. Sensaciones - La gracia del azar - Vuelven los sonidos (que (...) nos muestran algo diferente) -El placer estético sería la única solución - Fase de prueba - Tres dimensiones del sensacionismo - La mística, solución por un momento - La verdad incompleta - El sinsabor del Sr. Sin que tiende a la tristeza. Las cosas que ocurren han pasado a tener menos interés que las sensaciones que producen - El placer mundano y el canto a la vida. (shrink)

Coherentists fail to distinguish between the individual revision of a conviction and the intersubjective revision of a rule. This paper fills this gap. A conviction is a norm that, according to an individual, ought to be ascribed to a provision. By contrast, a rule is a judicially ascribed norm that controls a case and is protected by the formal principles of competence, certainty, and equality. A revision of a rule is the invalidation or modification such a judicially ascribed norm, provided (...) that the judge meets the burden of argumentation of formal principles. Thus, judges can revise their convictions without changing the law. (shrink)